| sebastian_dangerfield |
05-18-2007 12:55 PM |
Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
This is interesting:
- I would like to join David Bernstein in commending Bryan Caplan's new book, The Myth of the Rational Voter. It is the most important work on political ignorance in at least a decade, and possibly longer.
Previous scholars, including myself (e.g. here and here), have explored the deleterious consequences of the average citizen's massive ignorance about politics and public policy. Since the 1950s, economists and political scientists have known that it is actually rational for voters to be ignorant, because the chance that any one voter will have a significant impact on the outcome of an election is infinitesmally small. There is little incentive to spend time and effort acquiring knowledge about politics that won't make any difference to political outcomes anyway.
Bryan, however, goes beyond the standard rational ignorance analysis. He emphasizes that it is rational for voters to not only learn very little about politics, but to do a poor job of evaluating the information they do have. Good analysis of political information - like learning the information in the first place - requires considerable time and effort that rationally ignorant voters are have little incentive to undertake. Instead, voters are likely to fall prey to systematic errors in considering political information. As Bryan shows in detail, this helps explain why the majority of voters routinely fall prey to gross fallacies in their analysis of public policy - such as the belief that protectionism helps the overall economy; that the rise of modern technology is a major cause of longterm unemployment; and that foreigners are beggaring the American economy (all of these are actual examples from the book).
Because there is so little incentive to acquire and analyze political information to become a "better" voter, most of those citizens who do invest in political knowledge are likely to do so for other reasons. These include reinforcing their preexisting biases and prejudices, using politics as "entertainment" (much in the same way that sports fans acquire knowledge about their favorite teams for similar reasons), and signaling membership in a social group. As Bryan's work suggests (and I discuss in some detail in this article), such motives for acquiring information are extremely conducive to biased and irrational evaluation of the knowledge gained. Bryan calls this kind of systematically biased thinking "rational irrationality." The title of the book is actually slightly misleading. Bryan is not arguing that voters are stupid or irrational. Rather, he contends that it is actually rational for the individual voter to engage in biased and severely flawed evaluation of public policy. Unfortunately, behavior that is rational for individuals can lead to very harmful collective outcomes.
I do have a few disagreements with Bryan's analysis. In particular, I am skeptical of his argument that transferring more political power to knowledgeable experts is a good solution to the ignorance of the average voter. Ironically, the libertarian Caplan here makes the same kind of argument for increasing the power of experts as liberal Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer in his 1993 book Breaking the Vicious Circle. Anticipating Caplan, Breyer argued that the ignorance and bias of voters justifies transferring power over regulatory policy to "nonpolitical" expert bureaucrats. I have serious doubts about both Bryan's and Breyer's paeans to expertise.
Be that as it may, Bryan's book is a must-read for anyone even remotely interested in democratic theory and political participation.
Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy
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Jesus, that's revelatory? I've said that maybe 900 times here. I think it was last described by someone as pointless cynicism.
Busted system full of solely self interested egomaniacs/congenital liars which omits by design any "real" person who dares speak honestly or has serious skeletons in his closet.
What does anyone expect? Most of us vote all year, in little mechanisms we employ to lessen the impact of the only policy that means anything to any of us anymore - taxes.
I think Carlin described the relationship of the voter and the candidate pretty well when he said "Garbage input, garbage result." Those of us with brains vote for who we think might do what we want, but not really expecting anything to change. Most of us prefer gridlock out of fear we'll get what we've had for the last six years again, or some Left wing idiot like Hillary fucking up the economy with pseudo-socialist policies.
This month's Vanity Fair has a great article on privatization of the govt. It describes perfectly why no rational person who doesn't have a direct, immediate business interest in it bothers worrying about the govt any more. Whether it's entirely public in character or partly privatized, it's generally a waste of money save the basic necessities it provides (which I'll never be convinced wouldn't be better distributed privately).
I do may patriotic duty every April 14, trying my damndest to avoid giving the thing a nickel more than the most liberal reading of the sections of the tax code pertaining to deductions and exemptions allow. |
