6 ms·

But are the voters any better? The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies is a 2007 book written by Bryan Caplan challenging the noti

But are the voters any better? The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies is a 2007 book written by Bryan Caplan challenging the notion that voters are reasonable people that society can trust to make laws. Rather, Caplan contends that voters are irrational in the political sphere and have systematically biased ideas concerning economics. ... The book is notable in use of irrationality, a rare assumption in economics. Yet the work is also a challenge to conventional public choice, where voters are seen as rationally ignorant. Conventional public choice either emphasizes the efficiency of democracy (as in the case of Donald Wittman) or, more commonly, democratic failure due to the interaction between self-interested politicians or bureaucrats, well-organized, rent-seeking minority interests and a largely indifferent general public (as in the work of Gordon Tullock, James M. Buchanan, and many others). Caplan, however, emphasizes that democratic failure does exist and places the blame for it squarely on the general public. He makes special emphasis that politicians are often caught between a rock and a hard place: thanks to advisors, they know what policies would be generally beneficial, but they also know that those policies are not what people want. Thus they are balancing good economic policy (so they don’t get voted out of office due to slow growth) and bad economic policy (so they don’t get voted out of office due to unpopular policies). https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter%3A_Why_Democracies_Choose_Bad_Policies#Rational_irrationality https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/The_Myth_of_t...

cabalamat 16y ago
> But are the voters any better? The voters have the voters' interests at heart. Businesses have their own interests at heart. But you're right: voters are often stupid, irrational, misinformed, etc. I'll leave the last word to Churchill: democracy is the worst possible system for running a country, except for all the others.
- mmaro 16y ago
  > democracy is the worst possible system for running a country, except for all the others. This is one of those chants that everyone keeps repeating for fear of looking at the alternatives, or to excuse the horrors. Keep repeating the chant, and you don't have to take a close look at the problem.
  - jessriedel 16y ago
    Yea. I agree with Churchill (at least for the correct quote: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."), but I think these glib slogans are non-constructive or worse.
    - shasta 16y ago
      The version of the quote I've heard has "from time to time" at the end of it. With more context: > Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
  - cabalamat 16y ago
    I disagree. If you actually look at existing and historical states, those that are democracies generally do better.
    - lzw 16y ago
      I think this depends on what you define as "better". Certainly totalitarian regimes have lower economic growth. But if you measure economic growth as your measure of "better" then it seems that democracy is not as much a determinant as the economic system (eg: the more capitalist the faster the growth, higher the standard of living, the more powerful the central government and thus the more socialist, the lower the standard of living and the slower the growth.) I wouldn't call China a democracy, but they have given up a lot of central power and are growing fast. Certainly there are also example of successful societies that have lasted for very long periods of time that are not democracies, such as tribal communities. They don't exhibit significant economic growth, but they also are far less likely to make war, which would be a good candidate for being "Better" (it is bad to lose a generation of men every couple of generations.) Their lower economic growth may also be a result of their lower war making, but their higher standards of living of the populace relative to the overall standard of living, when compared to democracies, argues again for their form of government being superior. My point being that it is very common for a culture to reinforce in its members a perception that the cultures way of doing things is "right" and that it produces a better outcome-- and it does it in such a way that people presume that this to be a fact, rather than a bias.
yummyfajitas 16y ago
To put hard numbers to it: Suppose your personal stake in a presidential election is $50,000 (e.g., you make $500k/year, and Candidate 1 will raise or lower your taxes by 2.5%/year.) Your odds of swinging the election with your vote are 1 in 100 million (assuming 100 million voters). Your expected gain from voting is $0.0005. Therefore, you will not rationally be willing to spend more than $0.0005 determining which candidate is best. Further, you might deliberately vote for the wrong candidate for expressive reasons. I.e., if you assign $0.25 worth of utility to supporting the guy you want to share a beer with [1], or to proving you aren't racist, you will vote for the worse candidate. [1] Because the stakes are so low, most people didn't even bother learning that this candidate doesn't drink. That would take more than $0.25 worth of effort.
- mr_luc 16y ago
  Maybe I'm looking at this analogy too hard, but ... If I actually did have $50k riding on the election, I'd spend more than $0.0005 cents determining which candidate is best, because assessing risk is necessary to plan for the future.
  - jessriedel 16y ago
    Fine, but this doesn't change the main point. Even if you figured it was worth your time to determine the effect of each candidate on your future, it still wouldn't compel you to vote for the candidate which helps you most; the expected value would still only be a tiny fraction of a penny, and you'd be better off using your vote to signal allegiance, assuage your conscience, etc. ...unless you are alturistic, and you value the impact on the other 300 million citizens (and the rest of the world). Then it can make sense to vote for who you think is best.
    - moxiemk1 16y ago
      I think assuming that the only value you derive from voting being tax rate is the major flaw here. Altruistic value is usually very high in the issues that people seem to vote based on: gay marriage, government health care, military operations, etc. Many people do value these things much higher than their tax rate. The problem arises when we treat dollars as the unit of value. Value is not possible to practically quantify, and using money as the common denominator pushes things that actually are money to the fore, and fails to expose the things that do matter to people.
chris_l 16y ago
At least the voters are entitled to choose a government and the government should write the laws themselves. Lobbyists have no constitutional basis.
- tbrownaw 16y ago
  Freedom of speech (for the lobbyists) and freedom of association (for the congresscritters)?
DeusExMachina 16y ago
As Winston Churchill said: "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."
- jpwagner 16y ago
  In democracy, the job of the "average voter" is to represent himself. Expecting the "average voter" to have an understanding of issues at the level of the person running for office is a misinterpretation of their role. What a jerk I would be if I said: "The best argument against industrialization is a five-minute conversation with the average construction worker" or something similar.
  - TheEzEzz 16y ago
    Unfortunately "representing yourself" also ends up being "representing how you want others to be mistreated".
    - akkartik 16y ago
      Yes, that's inevitable. You can't help take away from others. Even if you're a Jain, sweeping the floor before you to avoid killing insects. Perfection is unattainable, but I dream of a system that takes people's motivations (both selfish and altruistic) into account. Nice turn of phrase. (Source?)
mindslight 16y ago
> Caplan, however, emphasizes that democratic failure does exist and places the blame for it squarely on the general public. He makes special emphasis that politicians are often caught between a rock and a hard place: thanks to advisors, they know what policies would be generally beneficial, but they also know that those policies are not what people want These three sources of failure (voters, politicians, lobbyists) don't have to be mutually exclusive. I'd say they're all broken, with the real problem resting in the idea that government is upwardly scalable. The inability of most people to understand actions and motivations other than their own (a requisite for computer security) leads them to thinking that affecting larger groups somehow solves more people's problems (while in fact the opposite is true).
narrator 16y ago
The real problem with democracy is Parkinson's law of triviality, otherwise known as BikeShedding. Every executive on the board knows what color they want to paint the office bike shed. They argue about it for hours. How to build the plant or do something complicated is left to overpaid consultants or specialists who are given the hands-off treatment. Same thing with legislation. Take an issue like gay marriage. Everyone can understand it at some level, so everyone has an opinion on it and it becomes a popular subject to talk about when discussing politics. Now take something like financial regulation. The future of the country is riding on it, but it's too complicated for most people and thus people fall asleep after 5 minutes of talking about it, so it's handed off to specialists and consultants who work for the finance industry.
- jbooth 16y ago
  Totally right - the other astonishing thing is just how cheaply regulators and congress can be bought. A congressional race costs between 1-5 million for all but the most expensive media markets. That's all they need to raise, total. If you're a multi-billion industry player, what's a few million to set up a PAC? It's nothing, compared to the return you get. Run a few ads claiming that the non-bought person in the race is going to restrict your freedom or let terrorists into the country or some bombastic nonsense. Huge ROI.
- mattmaroon 16y ago
  I don't think that's true at all. Not knowing much about economics does not cause people to have less strongly held opinions on it, it often causes them to have more. There are millions of people who don't even understand basic economic concepts who are vehemently opposed or in favor of government bailouts.
  - pavs 16y ago
    I think mostly its because of ideological difference (small government, national debt, non-republican government) over actual rational opinion on economics (This is not to say I support or disapprove of the bailout). If this was a non-ideological/political position we would be having a civil war over bushes spending during his term.
kiba 16y ago
I am not sure why people wants to burden the voters with the hard decisions in life. Nobody in the world knows how to make all parts of the pencil. The graphite have to be mined. Somebody have to make coffee for the miners. Somebody have to truck the graphite to pencil making factory. Somebody have to chop down the wood. Even programmers specialized. There's somebody who work on deploy tools, and there are some who are trying to make ruby faster. Voters now have to decide between a wide range of policy stance that they probably don't know anything about. There are foreign policies, economic problems, etc. All of which are subjects that probably required lot of studying to get right. Than, those politicians, as generalist probably don't know these issue as well as they need to, or they are compromised by their own interests. Programmers, doctors, etc are busy with their own profession trying to keep themselves competitive on the market and make decisions for their own lives. Sometime, they got it wrong. If a lot of people can't make the right decisions for themselves, why do they expect them to make decisions concerning the leadership of a nation?
- SkyMarshal 16y ago
  Better to have ignorant voters trying to make the decisions in the interests of the country, than a small group of rent-seeking special interests making decisions that benefit themselves to the detriment of the country. When you're deciding about wars, financial crisies, decimation of the middle class, increasingly extreme wealth distribution, etc., the former probably is the lesser of two evils.
- narag 16y ago
  I believe that the main function of voting isn't putting politics in the government, but kicking them from it. "Candidates" is derived from "clean" in Latin. Time will make them dirty, people will end perceiving it and choosing the lesser evil. The rules that prevent a president from too many reelections are similarly befeficial, and a lot cheaper even if not enough.
  - genieyclo 16y ago
    Actually, it's meant as "brilliant" or "brilliantly white", since candidates during the elections to public offices in Rome walked around with their different levels of entourage wearing togas that had been whitened to the extreme with chalk.

cabalamat 16y ago

> But are the voters any better? The voters have the voters' interests at heart. Businesses have their own interests at heart. But you're right: voters are often stupid, irrational, misinformed, etc. I'll leave the last word to Churchill: democracy is the worst possible system for running a country, except for all the others.

mmaro 16y ago
> democracy is the worst possible system for running a country, except for all the others. This is one of those chants that everyone keeps repeating for fear of looking at the alternatives, or to excuse the horrors. Keep repeating the chant, and you don't have to take a close look at the problem.
- jessriedel 16y ago
  Yea. I agree with Churchill (at least for the correct quote: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."), but I think these glib slogans are non-constructive or worse.
  - shasta 16y ago
    The version of the quote I've heard has "from time to time" at the end of it. With more context: > Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
- cabalamat 16y ago
  I disagree. If you actually look at existing and historical states, those that are democracies generally do better.
  - lzw 16y ago
    I think this depends on what you define as "better". Certainly totalitarian regimes have lower economic growth. But if you measure economic growth as your measure of "better" then it seems that democracy is not as much a determinant as the economic system (eg: the more capitalist the faster the growth, higher the standard of living, the more powerful the central government and thus the more socialist, the lower the standard of living and the slower the growth.) I wouldn't call China a democracy, but they have given up a lot of central power and are growing fast. Certainly there are also example of successful societies that have lasted for very long periods of time that are not democracies, such as tribal communities. They don't exhibit significant economic growth, but they also are far less likely to make war, which would be a good candidate for being "Better" (it is bad to lose a generation of men every couple of generations.) Their lower economic growth may also be a result of their lower war making, but their higher standards of living of the populace relative to the overall standard of living, when compared to democracies, argues again for their form of government being superior. My point being that it is very common for a culture to reinforce in its members a perception that the cultures way of doing things is "right" and that it produces a better outcome-- and it does it in such a way that people presume that this to be a fact, rather than a bias.

yummyfajitas 16y ago

To put hard numbers to it: Suppose your personal stake in a presidential election is $50,000 (e.g., you make $500k/year, and Candidate 1 will raise or lower your taxes by 2.5%/year.) Your odds of swinging the election with your vote are 1 in 100 million (assuming 100 million voters). Your expected gain from voting is $0.0005. Therefore, you will not rationally be willing to spend more than $0.0005 determining which candidate is best. Further, you might deliberately vote for the wrong candidate for expressive reasons. I.e., if you assign $0.25 worth of utility to supporting the guy you want to share a beer with [1], or to proving you aren't racist, you will vote for the worse candidate. [1] Because the stakes are so low, most people didn't even bother learning that this candidate doesn't drink. That would take more than $0.25 worth of effort.

mr_luc 16y ago
Maybe I'm looking at this analogy too hard, but ... If I actually did have $50k riding on the election, I'd spend more than $0.0005 cents determining which candidate is best, because assessing risk is necessary to plan for the future.
- jessriedel 16y ago
  Fine, but this doesn't change the main point. Even if you figured it was worth your time to determine the effect of each candidate on your future, it still wouldn't compel you to vote for the candidate which helps you most; the expected value would still only be a tiny fraction of a penny, and you'd be better off using your vote to signal allegiance, assuage your conscience, etc. ...unless you are alturistic, and you value the impact on the other 300 million citizens (and the rest of the world). Then it can make sense to vote for who you think is best.
  - moxiemk1 16y ago
    I think assuming that the only value you derive from voting being tax rate is the major flaw here. Altruistic value is usually very high in the issues that people seem to vote based on: gay marriage, government health care, military operations, etc. Many people do value these things much higher than their tax rate. The problem arises when we treat dollars as the unit of value. Value is not possible to practically quantify, and using money as the common denominator pushes things that actually are money to the fore, and fails to expose the things that do matter to people.

chris_l 16y ago

At least the voters are entitled to choose a government and the government should write the laws themselves. Lobbyists have no constitutional basis.

tbrownaw 16y ago
Freedom of speech (for the lobbyists) and freedom of association (for the congresscritters)?

DeusExMachina 16y ago

As Winston Churchill said: "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."

jpwagner 16y ago
In democracy, the job of the "average voter" is to represent himself. Expecting the "average voter" to have an understanding of issues at the level of the person running for office is a misinterpretation of their role. What a jerk I would be if I said: "The best argument against industrialization is a five-minute conversation with the average construction worker" or something similar.
- TheEzEzz 16y ago
  Unfortunately "representing yourself" also ends up being "representing how you want others to be mistreated".
  - akkartik 16y ago
    Yes, that's inevitable. You can't help take away from others. Even if you're a Jain, sweeping the floor before you to avoid killing insects. Perfection is unattainable, but I dream of a system that takes people's motivations (both selfish and altruistic) into account. Nice turn of phrase. (Source?)

mindslight 16y ago

> Caplan, however, emphasizes that democratic failure does exist and places the blame for it squarely on the general public. He makes special emphasis that politicians are often caught between a rock and a hard place: thanks to advisors, they know what policies would be generally beneficial, but they also know that those policies are not what people want These three sources of failure (voters, politicians, lobbyists) don't have to be mutually exclusive. I'd say they're all broken, with the real problem resting in the idea that government is upwardly scalable. The inability of most people to understand actions and motivations other than their own (a requisite for computer security) leads them to thinking that affecting larger groups somehow solves more people's problems (while in fact the opposite is true).

narrator 16y ago

The real problem with democracy is Parkinson's law of triviality, otherwise known as BikeShedding. Every executive on the board knows what color they want to paint the office bike shed. They argue about it for hours. How to build the plant or do something complicated is left to overpaid consultants or specialists who are given the hands-off treatment. Same thing with legislation. Take an issue like gay marriage. Everyone can understand it at some level, so everyone has an opinion on it and it becomes a popular subject to talk about when discussing politics. Now take something like financial regulation. The future of the country is riding on it, but it's too complicated for most people and thus people fall asleep after 5 minutes of talking about it, so it's handed off to specialists and consultants who work for the finance industry.

jbooth 16y ago
Totally right - the other astonishing thing is just how cheaply regulators and congress can be bought. A congressional race costs between 1-5 million for all but the most expensive media markets. That's all they need to raise, total. If you're a multi-billion industry player, what's a few million to set up a PAC? It's nothing, compared to the return you get. Run a few ads claiming that the non-bought person in the race is going to restrict your freedom or let terrorists into the country or some bombastic nonsense. Huge ROI.
mattmaroon 16y ago
I don't think that's true at all. Not knowing much about economics does not cause people to have less strongly held opinions on it, it often causes them to have more. There are millions of people who don't even understand basic economic concepts who are vehemently opposed or in favor of government bailouts.
- pavs 16y ago
  I think mostly its because of ideological difference (small government, national debt, non-republican government) over actual rational opinion on economics (This is not to say I support or disapprove of the bailout). If this was a non-ideological/political position we would be having a civil war over bushes spending during his term.

kiba 16y ago

I am not sure why people wants to burden the voters with the hard decisions in life. Nobody in the world knows how to make all parts of the pencil. The graphite have to be mined. Somebody have to make coffee for the miners. Somebody have to truck the graphite to pencil making factory. Somebody have to chop down the wood. Even programmers specialized. There's somebody who work on deploy tools, and there are some who are trying to make ruby faster. Voters now have to decide between a wide range of policy stance that they probably don't know anything about. There are foreign policies, economic problems, etc. All of which are subjects that probably required lot of studying to get right. Than, those politicians, as generalist probably don't know these issue as well as they need to, or they are compromised by their own interests. Programmers, doctors, etc are busy with their own profession trying to keep themselves competitive on the market and make decisions for their own lives. Sometime, they got it wrong. If a lot of people can't make the right decisions for themselves, why do they expect them to make decisions concerning the leadership of a nation?

SkyMarshal 16y ago
Better to have ignorant voters trying to make the decisions in the interests of the country, than a small group of rent-seeking special interests making decisions that benefit themselves to the detriment of the country. When you're deciding about wars, financial crisies, decimation of the middle class, increasingly extreme wealth distribution, etc., the former probably is the lesser of two evils.
narag 16y ago
I believe that the main function of voting isn't putting politics in the government, but kicking them from it. "Candidates" is derived from "clean" in Latin. Time will make them dirty, people will end perceiving it and choosing the lesser evil. The rules that prevent a president from too many reelections are similarly befeficial, and a lot cheaper even if not enough.
- genieyclo 16y ago
  Actually, it's meant as "brilliant" or "brilliantly white", since candidates during the elections to public offices in Rome walked around with their different levels of entourage wearing togas that had been whitened to the extreme with chalk.