Roughly two-thirds of Americans believe the country is going in the "wrong direction," and Tuesday the country will vote for two of the least popular presidential candidates of all time. Both the left and the right say that the United States' government is ineffective.

One potential reason for this? Human society is simply too complex for representative democracy to work. The United States probably shouldn't have a president at all, according to an analysis by mathematicians at the New England Complex Systems Institute.

NECSI is a research organization that uses math cribbed from the study of physical and chemical systems—bear with me for a moment—and newly available giant data sets to explain how events in one part of the world might affect something seemingly unrelated in another part of the world.

Most famously, the institute's director, Yaneer Bar-Yam, predicted the Arab Spring several weeks before it happened. He found that seemingly unrelated policy decisions—ethanol subsidies in the US and the deregulation of commodity markets worldwide—led to skyrocketing food prices in 2008 and 2011. It turns out that there is a very neat correlation between the United Nations food price index and unrest and rioting worldwide that no one but Bar-Yam had picked up.

The countries listed are where food-related rioting occurred. Numbers in parentheses are number of deaths related to the violence. Image: Yaneer Bar-Yam

When considering our system of government, the link between these policies and unexpected global violence is an illustrative but hardly unique one: Bar-Yam was able to describe these cause-and-effect relationships in detail because he looking at very specific inputs and very specific outputs. He was zooming in on specific parts of the "system" that is human civilization in an attempt to explain one small but important part of the world.

It is absurd, then, to believe that the concentration of power in one or a few individuals at the top of a hierarchical representative democracy will be able to make optimal decisions on a vast array of connected and complex issues that will certainly have sweeping and unintended ramifications on other parts of human civilization.