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A handsome sum of money, but it's distributed over a lot of people. As a crude US-scale example, imagine that a hundred million people vote about the allocatio

A handsome sum of money, but it's distributed over a lot of people. As a crude US-scale example, imagine that a hundred million people vote about the allocation of a trillion dollars. Each vote allocates 1e12 / 1e8 = $10,000. So voting is clearly worth it. But that $10,000 doesn't end up with the voter, it ends up diffused across all of society. $10,000 is the society-wide payoff of your vote. Your individual payoff of your own vote is only 1e4 / 1e8 = $0.0001. Your vote barely affects yourself. So there's an altruistic payoff to voting, but not any egoistic payoff to speak of. And we're specifically talking about individual reward here.

js8 6y ago
> And we're specifically talking about individual reward here. No we are not. Altruistic payoff is also part of it, you're calculating it wrong by dividing it twice. Your total payoff is also the contribution that other voters pay to you, and they pay to you because you pay to them. In democracy, you're effectively deciding of the fate of certain amount money. Yes, it is distributed, but it doesn't matter, it is still lot of money. It's not really that different from your money on your bank account if you think about it, only small amount of daily spending gets immediately back to you as "reward" for the decisions you made.
- duckerude 6y ago
  > Your total payoff is also the contribution that other voters pay to you, and they pay to you because you pay to them. That's too indirect. It's a tragedy of the commons style situation: if nobody votes then everybody is much worse off, but if any one person doesn't vote that barely hurts them individually. The concrete incentive to vote is social. If you don't vote then people will consider you a freeloader. That changes the equation: while there's still barely any individual election result payoff of your individual vote, there's a social cost of not voting that's higher than the cost of voting, so voting is worth it even for purely selfish reasons. And that takes it into crony belief territory. You're doing it for social reasons, not just because you think it's correct, but because your social group thinks it's correct. (That doesn't make it wrong, or bad. It's a useful mechanism.) > It's not really that different from your money on your bank account if you think about it, only small amount of daily spending gets immediately back to you as "reward" for the decisions you made. The difference is that coordinating with myself is much easier than coordinating with other people. There's no way to freeload off myself in the long term, but freeloading off other people is a real possibility with all kinds of countermeasures. Social pressure is one such countermeasure.

js8 6y ago

> And we're specifically talking about individual reward here. No we are not. Altruistic payoff is also part of it, you're calculating it wrong by dividing it twice. Your total payoff is also the contribution that other voters pay to you, and they pay to you because you pay to them. In democracy, you're effectively deciding of the fate of certain amount money. Yes, it is distributed, but it doesn't matter, it is still lot of money. It's not really that different from your money on your bank account if you think about it, only small amount of daily spending gets immediately back to you as "reward" for the decisions you made.

duckerude 6y ago
> Your total payoff is also the contribution that other voters pay to you, and they pay to you because you pay to them. That's too indirect. It's a tragedy of the commons style situation: if nobody votes then everybody is much worse off, but if any one person doesn't vote that barely hurts them individually. The concrete incentive to vote is social. If you don't vote then people will consider you a freeloader. That changes the equation: while there's still barely any individual election result payoff of your individual vote, there's a social cost of not voting that's higher than the cost of voting, so voting is worth it even for purely selfish reasons. And that takes it into crony belief territory. You're doing it for social reasons, not just because you think it's correct, but because your social group thinks it's correct. (That doesn't make it wrong, or bad. It's a useful mechanism.) > It's not really that different from your money on your bank account if you think about it, only small amount of daily spending gets immediately back to you as "reward" for the decisions you made. The difference is that coordinating with myself is much easier than coordinating with other people. There's no way to freeload off myself in the long term, but freeloading off other people is a real possibility with all kinds of countermeasures. Social pressure is one such countermeasure.