Contemporary western democracies, such the United States, Great Britain, and The Netherlands have become diploma democracies. They are ruled by the well educated, whereas the least educated, even though they still comprise about half of the population, have virtually vanished from most political arenas. Of course, the well educated have always been more politically active than the less educated, but in the past decades this gap has widened substantially. Well-educated citizens are more inclined to vote, to write letters to the editor, or to visit consultative or deliberative meetings than citizens with a low level of education; and most, if not all, members of parliament, all the political officials, and almost all of the political advocates and lobbyists, have college or graduate degrees. The paper substantiates the rise of diploma democracy in The Netherlands, discusses what is problematic about such an educational meritocracy in the context of democracy, and looks at what could be done to mitigate or remedy some of its negative effects.

Fraud seems to be on the rise. That feeds a demand for controls. This paper sketches the diversity of supply in reaction to this demand: public regulators of course, but also commercial information providers and benchmarkers, self-regulating associations, hallmark producers, certification and accreditation bodies, and internal business management control systems, whereby ever more levels of control are piled on top of each other. More than a million Dutchmen earn a living in this booming control-industry, or 14% of the working population. In addition to fraud, other causes of this trend are being discussed, among them, paradoxically, neo-liberalist deregulation policies. All these causes contribute to a sense of risk and uncertainty. Although this trend has a number of negative consequences, it has a major benefit: jobs! Economists may have long thought that transaction costs are there for the transactions. But it looks as if transactions exist to produce transaction costs.