I once met a government-employed economist who believed that, because democracy is the most perfect form of government, any decision made by a democracy is automatically the best possible decision. Apparently, some people still believe that, or George Mason University economist Brian Caplan would not have had to write The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.
Winston Churchill once said, “democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” Henry David Thoreau was even more skeptical, saying, “A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.”
Why doesn’t democracy work? Public-choice economists suggest that voters are rationally ignorant because the price of thoroughly understanding the issues is high and the cost of making a mistake when voting can be shared with all over voters or taxpayers. That satisfied some people for a time.
But then a book titled The Wisdom of Crowds suggested that we don’t have to be so skeptical of democracy. If you ask 1,000 people to estimate the weight of a horse or the number of beans in a jar, author James Surowiecke pointed out, their average estimate will be very close to the truth. “We’ve been programmed to be collectively smart,” Surowiecke concluded.
More particularly, Surowiecke argued that many people might be rationally ignorant, but their ignorance is random and thus cancels each other out. This means that the decision will be tipped by the few who have the expertise to know the best answer.
It occurs in response to touch, smell, auditory and visual stimuli that strike acheter viagra pfizer pathways in the brain and strengthen existing ones. If you know any such locksmiths, the situations becomes easy cialis price canada in a lock out circumstances, but one problem with not so known local locksmiths is you may not find him at your side, at the middle of the highway? Sooner or later, every driver runs into car trouble on the road. Understanding the effects of the tablet is important to avoid cheap cialis http://davidfraymusic.com/david-fray-returns-to-nyc-recital-stage-rapturously-received/ erectile problems in men. Reduced testosterone is one of the reasons for sexual weakness in men include diabetes, reduced blood flow, old age, hypertension, nervous system disorders, davidfraymusic.com buy sildenafil online multiple sclerosis, enlarged prostate gland, pelvic surgery, psychological problems, depression, obesity, mumps, hormonal problems, excessive hand practice, cigarette smoking and Peyronie ‘s disease. The Antiplanner’s response would be that estimating the weight of a horse is qualitatively very different from questions of macroeconomics (should the fed reduce the discount rate?), microeconomics (should we build a highway or light rail?), or foreign policy (should we go to war in Iraq?). First, we can accurately measure the horse’s weight, while the other questions contain such huge unknowns about the future that even the experts can’t agree. Second, an object’s weight or the number of beans in a jar are numbers on a continuum, so a bell curve of answers can quite probably center over the correct answer. In contrast, policy issues are often yes-no questions, so bell curves don’t apply.
Brian Caplan, however, take a different approach. He argues that the original explanation of rational ignorance is wrong. Voters, he contends, are irrationally ignorant. This irrationality skews their answers, so that those who are really expert enough to understand the issues cannot sway the balance.
In particular, Caplan mentions four kinds of voter irrationality:
“People do not understand the ‘invisible hand’ of the market, its ability to harmonize private greed with the public interest. I call this antimarket bias. People underestimate the benefits of interaction with foreigners. I call this antiforeign. People equate prosperity not with production, but with employment. I call this make-work bias. Lastly, people are overly prone to thinking that economic conditions are bad and getting worse. I call this pessimistic bias.”
You may not agree with Caplan’s economic views on the benefits of markets, interactions with foreigners, or production, but you can substitute your own estimates of other people’s biases and still agree with Caplan’s basic argument. Personally, the Antiplanner would focus on people overestimating the value of a few big things (such as urban monuments that accomplish little except to generate a sense of pride) and underestimating the value of many small things (such as the taxes required to pay for the big things), which leads to what I call the megaproject bias.
Thoreau’s solution was to keep government as small as possible, educate the people about potential government failures, and rely on democracy only to keep government in check, not to turn government into Santa Claus. That’s an approach the Antiplanner can support.
You can get a preview of Caplan’s book from this Cato Institute paper, which is excerpted from chapters 1 and 3 of the book. I recommend the book itself for its detailed analyses and extensive policy recommendations.
This sounds like an excuse for every failed politician and barrister. “They didn’t vote for me because they’re like sheep”. “They found him innocent when he was obviously guilty”.
Perhaps if they tried a little harder to think through their policies/arguments, and tried harder to get their message over to the jury/voters they would do better.
People who are well informed act very rationally.
Some would argue that the concept of “rationality” is itself a myth.
Who gets to decide what’s rational and what isn’t?
Antiplanner,
I have wanted to purchase and read Caplan’s book, but have yet to get around to finishing the piles of books I’m already working through.
Last year, I had the privilege to meet Jeffrey Friedman, editor and publisher of Critical Review. Much of Friedman’s journal in recent years has been dedicated to scholarly arguments involving information and decision making in the world of politics.
There isn’t a whole lot that political scientists can say with near absolute certainty, but one thing the research is 100% consistently rock solid on is that the vast majority of people are extraordinarily ignorant of what goes on in politics. Walter Lippman had supposed this as early as the 1920’s, as did Jospeh Schumpeter in 1950 in his book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. However the classic paper on which the foundation of public ignorance literature is based on is Philip Converse’s text called The Nature and Belief Systems of Mass Publics. Researchers asking questions of the public since the late 1950’s have shown over and over and over again that most people are clueless as to what’s going on in politics and questions of policy. This includes asking simple questions like, “Who’s your congressman?” One of the classic examples of this ignorance was that in the mid-1960’s, only some 40+ percent of Americans correctly answered that the U.S. was engaged in a Cold War with the former Soviet Union and had been so for nearly 20 years.
I used to think a long time ago that people were well informed. They just absolutely had to be, right? Newspapers are everywhere, radio, and TV were available, and now we have the Internet. Not anymore. Discovering this reality of public ignorance, which exists no matter how much formal education the public goes through, was enough to turn me into a complete pessimist when it came to politics. There will always be hordes of interest groups who will be more than happy to take advantage of the ignornant hoi polloi, who generally will not find it worth their time to fight back against all of those groups.
Sigh…
Antiplanners like to criticize the notion of planners assuming what’s best for the public and then planning accordingly. In other words, Antiplanners believe that individual citizens are best qualified to identify and pursue their own best interests, and that “elites” (such as planners) shouldn’t presume to know what’s best for other people.
Yet, here we have a post from the Antiplanner in which he claims that people overestimate “the value of a few big things (such as urban monuments that accomplish little except to generate a sense of pride)” and underestimate “the value of many small things (such as the taxes required to pay for the big things)”.
Who is the Antiplanner to presume to know better than “the people” what the respetive values of big things and small things are? Is he some kind of paternalistic elite who is smarter than the public? Would he presume to substitute his own judgment for how valuable big and small things are for that of other people?
I think it would be important to split the discussion into two parts. One is voting in a representative democracy and two is direct democracy through ballot measures.
When we vote for a representative we can be fooled by campaign claims and misdirection. If we look at voters as consumers we could say they do not exactly know what they are buying so it’s hard to judge them as irrational.
Direct democracy should show a much more rational electorate that votes closely to it’s own interests.
Since people are irrationally ignorant about all those important economic issues, what we need is an Economic Dictator to tell us what is right for the stupid masses? Whether we prefer democratic choice or market choice they both involve an imposition or restriction of choices. People are irrational whether it is through market or democratic choice.
No sustainlibertarian,
We do not need an Economic Dictator. The wealthy and poor alike are fully cognizant of what their personal and family budget constraints are and make their decisions accordingly. What the public ignornace literature says is that the vast majority of the public possess little in depth knowledge of politics, policy issues, and the outcomes that result therein.
The rationally ignorant voter argument at least in part goes that people are rationally ignorant because it isn’t worth their time to become highly educated on a vast array of issues. They are better off in their utility bundles simply working to improve their lives via making more money, spending time with family and friends, pursing personal hobbies and past times, and so forth. The irrationally ignorant voter argument is harder on people, saying (at least in part) that even if the rationally ignorant voter argument is true, then for the reasons stated above they are still going to act irrationally when they step into the voting booth.
As for urban monuments that result from the outcomes of the political process (light rail lines, sports temples, beautiful and expensive courthouse palaces dedicated to the gods of law, etc), the argument here is that there are plenty of examples of where many urban monuments were constructed privately and whose creators did not resort to fobbing their politcal demands off on the public. Rail and streetcar lines used to exist in plenty of towns and cities in America in the early 20th century, before their heavy capital costs caused most of them to be shutdown in favor of employing cheaper buses. Likewise with sports facilities. Quite a few stadiums used to be built by the wealthy, but its an almost non-existent thing in the modern day world for a sports temple to be built solely out of private funds.
The argument here is that critically thinking minds often come to the conclusion that benefits that are claimed on behalf of urban monuments by their supporters are often of a dubious nature. Hence an imaginative mind begins to wonder about the rationality of the political process.
The plannophiles here are showing blindness to their own arrogance. They see they matter as a penis contest over who is smart enough to tell people how they MUST behave.
The primary failure of planners and government is not their necessarily-flawed plans and policies (flawed due to substantial gaps in information), but the assumption of an authority to command others. Where there is a gap between choice and consequence, the harmed have no recourse to recover from the inflictors of that harm. Government allows planners to foist their mutual schemes with effective impunity.
I am not aligned with AP because I think he has a better vision for the next model city. We are aligned along a recognition that no matter the perfection of our ideas, we have no standing to make anyone live in them.
Does anyone else think that the U.S. model is actually decent and admirable? I’ll admit it was probably better when U.S. Senators were still elected by state legislatures, but still… it’s a good compromise between direct democracy, representative democracy, representative republic, and constant (theoretically apolitical) bureaucracy. We don’t necessary implement our system how it was intended, but the language and intent is fairly well laid out through the Constitution and various documented arguments from our founding fathers (such as the Federalist papers and the Anti-Federalist papers).
The primary failure of planners and government is not their necessarily-flawed plans and policies (flawed due to substantial gaps in information), but the assumption of an authority to command others
This kind of statement is only logically consistent if it applies to all laws, not just planning laws. I can only assume you oppose laws that ban murder, rape, driving too fast, etc.
You are wrong D4P,
A criminal law, whose purpose is to prevent one individual from harming another through murder, robbery etc is very different from a law dictating an individual’s personal choices in such things as what kind of a house he should live in. I have no problem being told I can’t murder my neighbor. I have huge problem being told I can’t live in a detached single family home.
A criminal law, whose purpose is to prevent one individual from harming another through murder, robbery etc is very different from a law dictating an individual’s personal choices in such things as what kind of a house he should live in
Setting aside your implicit contention that criminal laws prevent individuals from harming each other while planning laws don’t, the point is that both types of laws involve the “authority to command others”, which foxmarks appears to oppose. If foxmarks opposes the authority to command others, as foxmarks appears to do, then foxmarks opposes all laws, not just planning laws.
Wow with a title like “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies”.
When is the A.P going to write a book along the lines of “The Myth of the Rational Consumer: Why Markets Can Fail”?
I would recommend this book to all who comment here, on both sides of the issues.
There seem to be a few specific misconceptions. Based on my reading of the book, here are my thoughts.
“Some would aruge that the concept of ‘rationality’ is a myth. Who gets to decide what is rational and what isn’t?”
I dont’ believe rationality is a myth. As in many other cases, there are standards of objectivity that ideas can be held up to. Caplan does this explicity in his book in order to prove his point. Specifically on questions of knowledge of economic policy, he draws on evidence from the Survey of Americans and Economist on the Economy. The consensus opinions of the panel of economists surveyed serve as the benchmark of objectivity in this case. While there might be no such thing as absolute knowledge in the social sciences, this is about as close as you can come. After all, this is the same system we use to manage peer-reviewed, academic publications, which are among the most reliable sources of knowledge in many fields.
“People are irrational whether through market or democractic choice.”
One of caplan’s fundamental arguments in the book is that voters consume irrationality when they vote. That is, they may vote for policies they know to be harmful or counterproductive if voting for those policies will soothe their conscience or convince them that they are doing the ‘right’ thing. Irrationality has a price though, and if the cost is too high, individuals will stop indulging.
The problem with voting is that voters make decisions based on the expected costs of the policies. Since the individual voter’s contribution to tilting an election is in most cases very, very small, the expected cost of choosing an ineffective policy is very small. The expected cost is the total cost of the policy mulitplied by the probability of casting the decisive vote. Thus of cost of consuming irrationality is small, since the costs of a bad policy must be borne by many others. This is an externality problem.
Consumers might also be irrational in certain instances of private consumption, but here the costs must be borne by the consumer alone. He or she cannot simply spread the cost of their decision across all others. This internalization mechanism drastically influences decision making.
“When is the A.P. going to write a book along the lines of “The Myth of the Rational: Why Markets Can Fail”?”
First, the Antiplanner didn’t write this book. Bryan Caplan did. Second, see the previous response.
Lastly, I don’t agree that the U.S. model is decent and admirable. The Churchill statement might be partly correct but, as Caplan notes, this sets the bar far too low.
The growth of governments at all levels over the past 50 years, combined with their reduced efficiency and general decline in quality of services indicate that they are no longer acting for the mutual benefit of all citizens. There are ways to improve performance, but it just so happens that many of these involve reducing the scope of government activities, particularly at the federal level.
Among the three major candidates for president this year, there are none that are serious about reducing the size and scope of the federal government. Obama and Clinton have the usual Democratic social welfare bent, while McCain has more of a Big Military flavor. By voting for any one of these three, we will be essentially endorsing the status quo. Rational ignorance is alive and well.