Rational Voters

I haven't read the whole book, but I read through Bryan Caplan's Cato policy analysis essay based on The Myth of the Rational Voter, and I have to say I'm a bit puzzled. The conclusion is that the solution to voter irrationality is libertarianism -- "A better understanding of voter irrationality advises us to rely less on democracy and more on the market." So far so good. But the argument that voters are irrational turns out to substantially turn on the claims that voters are irrationally averse to adopting libertarian policies.

I don't really get it. What about my political views is supposed to change in response to this insight? There doesn't seem to be anything here that would count as an independent reason to favor more libertarian policies than the ones I already favor.

Comments

I guess they don't buy the heterodox economics thread either, since that would require acknowledgment that markets are made of groups of people too, and that people in a group seem not to be "rational" in the sociopath Randian classical economics me me me efficiency-seeking robot sense.

My personal theory:

Libtertarianism is mild autism recast as political philosophy so that its proponents have someone to hang out with.

Posted by Underlying Patterns | June 2, 2007 6:13 PM

I like your theory Patterns.

I think you should update the Libertarian wikipedia entry ASAP.

Posted by DJ | June 2, 2007 6:49 PM

I think this is an argument for an oligarchy of the libertarians:

Libertarian policies are good and non-libertarian policies are bad. A rational person who is informed can recognize which policies are good and which ones are bad. Someone who recognizes which policies are good should be a libertarian. So if you aren’t a libertarian, you must be irrational, uninformed, or both. If you’re irrational, uninformed, or both, you shouldn’t have any say in the decision making process. Thus only libertarians should have a say in the decision making process.

Posted by Libertarian Oligarchy | June 2, 2007 6:58 PM

I haven't read the book, or even the entire paper, though I did read a few sections and skim the rest. I'm as puzzled as Matt, though for a different reason. For example, Caplan writes, By itself, though, the psychological literature does not get us very far. The link between general cognition and particular political decisions is too loose. Voters might be bad statisticians but perceptive judges of wise policy. Thus, we should refine our question: Are voter errors systematic on questions of direct political relevance?

He makes some very specific claims about the kinds of biases voters have, and yet the evidence he musters seems to be mainly anecdotes, vaguely related surveys, and a lot of handwaving. (Gotta love Figures 1 and 2: bell-shaped but non-Gaussian curves, with no numbers on the axes.) These biases are the kinds of things that Tversky and Kahneman went to great efforts to explore, model, and test. How can an economist just skip all the science?

Posted by RSA | June 2, 2007 7:41 PM

i found bits of it annoying myself ( for example on immigration they tackled some dubious economics but just ignoe mutlies of toher reasons eg welfare , electorla and cultural) however the point semed sound.

Take basic neo-classical econoics- economics so broad that say matt agrees with it. The public simply doe bleive that. Hence statism infomed by economics (matt style statism, krugman style statism ect) will in fact be distroed by the viewpoints of non economists.

So just because you can belive a statist solution sto say interntiaon trade might be better than a non statist one- does not necessarily mean you should side with statism. Because poltiical dynamics may well mean that your "intfant industry" or " welfare programme" is designed, or changes under political pressue in such an ecoomically stupid way that you yourslef would prefer the non statist side.

it's a poltiical economy argmebt for limiting the role of the state basically

Posted by edmund | June 2, 2007 8:42 PM

Why am I wasting my time on the silliness of libertarianism? Sigh...

If Caplan wants to "rely" on democracy less, what does he want to rely on more? The one thing we know for sure is that he isn't saying. Is this dishonest? Maybe, but maybe not. In reality property rights, contracts, commercial law, police, all the things that keep us free from the depradations of others, come from government, and ultimately from the barrel of a gun. Libertarians like these things, but what kind of government does Caplan want to have as the source of them? Well, he wouldn't be a libertarian if he weren't caught up in a fantasy world where this question doesn't need an answer.

Posted by Andy McLennan | June 2, 2007 8:59 PM

Matt's error was to watse time reading anything
from Cato, or any of the other right-wing think
tanks. They all know what the answer is before they
even hear the question, so why bother?

Posted by jimbo | June 2, 2007 9:32 PM

"The Myth of the Rational Economist" would be a more appropirate title.

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 2, 2007 9:44 PM

Ha! Steve delivers a zinger.

Posted by mq | June 3, 2007 12:51 AM

Those guys are retarded: this is an age-old problem with a number of tried solutions.

It starts with the proletariats that does not understand its class interests. Solution: vanguard of the proletariat organizes a revolutionary party and then proceeds to rule after a succesful revolution.

I guess libertarians have to do something similar. Judging on the electoral success (or the lack of it) of libertarians, ca. 97% of the population are idiots. But in this case, why market will help? Market will not force political changes that will force the populace to rely more on the market. Libertarians need a tightly knit secretive organization (of the libertarian vanguard) to push their ideas, say, Federalist Society.

Posted by piotr | June 3, 2007 1:00 AM

Yes, because economists have NEVER been wrong about anything.

Posted by Andrew | June 3, 2007 1:21 AM

Caplan is offering a slight twist on a classic argument against government intervention. Let's say that good government policy -- say, a gasoline tax to reduce pollution -- could improve some situation. A "public choice" economist might agree but still oppose a gasoline tax on the grounds that the government will screw things up in some way. Perhaps self-interested bureaucrats will make the tax too complicated, so as to ensure the employment of lots of bureaucrats. Caplan is adding another reason why government will screw things up: because government is controlled by voters, and the voters are idiots.

Posted by Ragout | June 3, 2007 2:48 AM

I don't see what's so hard to understand. The argument goes:

People do not have incentives to vote wisely, rather they are systematically biased towards political opinions that make them feel good. We should expect that democratic control of government will be systematically lead to sub-optimal policy outcomes. On the other hand, when making private decisions people have more incentives to figure out the best option.

This provides a reason to limit the scope of government power, and to be skeptical of schemes that would use this power to improve outcomes.

I think that's all there is to the argument.

Posted by ed | June 3, 2007 4:31 AM

How is this any different from liberal reasoning in "What's the Matter with Kansas"? You assume you know better than somebody else what's in their own interest, and then treat the fact that they disagree with you as evidence that they have problems...

Unless you want to creat an infinite regress, it's silly to require somebody to prove their premises are right every single time they begin to reason from them.

Posted by Brett Bellmore | June 3, 2007 7:06 AM

You've pretty much nailed it-- Caplan interprets anything as irrational that doesn't conform to his own political beliefs as irrational.

In the latest bloggingheads Caplan and Wil Wilkerson also talk about how an oligarchy of philosopher-kings would be superior to democracy. Of course, this would only be a good thing to them if the expert-ocracy enacted policies in line with Caplan and Wilkerson's personal political views. The solipsism here is amazing.

Posted by Freddie | June 3, 2007 8:11 AM

"We should expect that democratic control of government will be systematically lead to sub-optimal policy outcomes."

Define 'sub-optimal'.

I think Economist's View is the best and certainly the most open Econoblog out there, and that Professor Thoma is a great guy, but until recently it seemed that we were talking right past each other. Then he explained that Economics was fundamentally the study of Efficiency and not Equity. The light dawned. Libertarians are not fundamentally evil, they are just asking a different question. If you pose everything in the light of Efficiency, of maximizing overall output, and assume Equity just takes care of itself, then arguments against regulation, for markets, against minimum wage, and for carbon taxes on end users all fall into place, almost too obvious to even merit argumentation. It helps to be willfully blind of where the actual distribution of the production land, but not entirely necessary.

You just have to focus on the Size of the Pie and ignore the Slice of the Pie and even more the Pie Slicer. Libertarians and Free Marketers generally tend to look around in mute incomprehension. Don't those people realize this is Pie! A bigger and juicier Pie than any seen in History! Well sure they are locked outside the Pie Shop with noses pressed up against the window and I am sitting here with a huge Pie Slice but don't they understand Pie?!

Well yes we do. We also understand that the Invisible Pie Slicer is not handing around equitable Slices. In fact we might even accept a slightly smaller Pie in exchange for a bigger Slice.

That is once you define 'optimal' as Pie then it may well be true that "democratic control of government will be systematically lead to sub-optimal policy outcomes". Which still leaves the problem of why a democratic majority should vote for outcomes that are not in fact in their own self interest. Pie is nice and American Pie may be the best in the world, but from at least 1932 to 1980 we built this country on fair Pie Slices. That has broken down since.

Posted by Bruce Webb | June 3, 2007 1:02 PM

The great BBC documentary film maker Adam Curtis's latest work is called The Trap. It really is a must see and you can down load a bittorent almost anywhere

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(television_documentary_series)

In it Curtis details the search by radical libertarians for a "Perfect Automatic System" based on the theories of the economist Hayek and the conservative philosopher John Buchanan of course, that only strict adherence to the Free Market can insure real freedom since humans can only be trusted to be motivated by self interest.

The search for this "Perfect Rational Automatic System" lead hard core free marketers to attempt to ground their economic and political concepts in the mathematical theories by espoused by the Nobel Prize winning discover of Game Theory, John Nash, the inspiration for the movie a "Beautiful Mind" and a undiagnosed and untreated paranoid schizophrenic.

John Nash called his Game Theory - "F**K YOU BUDDY".

Tells you all you need to know about the Libertarian mind doesn't it?

Well that and the fact that most Libertarians experienced their first orgasms wanking to either THE FOUNTAINHEAD or ATLAS SHRUGGED. Nothing like having your first memorable wank over some semi-literate bondage porn.

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