Even knowing that one's own vote will not decide the election, a "socially intelligent" person will take the time to vote according to his desires; because democracy has a chance of working if, and only if, everybody does that.
Only a minority of voters are socially intelligent, and I include you in that group and you know almost nothing about economics. So let's assume half the voters are socially responsible and half vote selfishly in their own special or short term interest. Let's also assume roughly half are smart and half are dumb. You have four voting groups: smart and good, smart and selfish, dumb and good, dumb and selfish. How do you get a majority of beneficial election outcomes from that?
Economically, the State is an engine for concentrating benefits and distributing costs. Reformers bear the full cost of reforms on themselves and when they are successful, the benefit is distributed to everybody. The end result is that most reformers go broke before meaningful reforms get implemented, but lobbyists for special interests get rich. This is the same for every government everywhere. Governments concentrate benefits and distribute costs. it's what they do. it's not a bug, it's a feature.
My experience is that even the poorly educated people can vote much better than the elites claim. When democracy fails, it is often because it is not given a fair chance, or not used often enough. (Here in Brazil the main Executive and Legislative posts are elected, but the Judiciary is totally self-selected and indepednent. As a result, while the first two branches barely work, and are highly corrupt, the latter does not work at all, and is totally corrupt...)
My experience is that even poorly educated people can make good economic decisions much more often than elites such as yourself claim. The problem is that they are faced with perverse incentives such as working less to maintain welfare benefit eligibility.
Democracy is BY DEFINITION the domination of the minority by the majority. Politics is merely the art of convincing enough people to agree with you so that you can FORCIBLY impose your will on those who don't.
That is true, but the alternative is, inevitably, domination of the majority by some minority. Methinks that, by and large, the latter is much worse.
You are locked in the statist paradigm. Maybe power shouldn't be concentrated in the minority OR the majority. Maybe power shouldn't be concentrated. Such a society would still have poverty, crime, and violence, but it wouldn't be locked into some zero-sum winner-loser one-size-fits-all solution to every problem. If you want to get out of a hole, the first thing you should do is stop digging. If you want a prosperous peaceful society, perhaps eliminating the wealth-consuming violence monolopoly in the middle of it is a good start.