{"id":185,"date":"2006-11-07T12:57:14","date_gmt":"2006-11-07T17:57:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/wordpress\/?p=185"},"modified":"2006-11-07T12:57:14","modified_gmt":"2006-11-07T17:57:14","slug":"ignorant-and-irrational-voters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/2006\/11\/07\/ignorant-and-irrational-voters\/","title":{"rendered":"Ignorant and irrational voters"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nIn an interesting essay, The Myth of the Rational Voter<\/a><\/i>, Bryan Caplan argues that the average voter holds erroneous beliefs about issues they vote on. (Found via Arts & Letters Daily<\/a>, an excellent daily roundup of thoughtful and interesting writings from all sorts of places.)\n<\/p>\n

\n

\n…if you know what a voter thinks is best for society, you can count on him to support it.\n<\/p>\n

\nBefore we can infer that the policies that are best for society will actually prevail, however, we have to add the very assumption I am challenging: that the beliefs of the average voter are true. If his beliefs are false, his good intentions lead him to support policies that are less than optimal, and possibly just plain bad.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

\nHow can the public keep making costly policy mistakes, year after year, century after century?\n<\/p>\n

\nPublic choice economists are used to blaming what they call “rational ignorance.” In elections with millions of voters, the personal benefits of learning more about policy are negligible, because one vote is so unlikely to change the outcome. So why bother learning?\n<\/p>\n

\nIn my book, however, I argue that rational ignorance has been oversold. Rational ignorance cannot explain why people gravitate toward false beliefs, rather than simply being agnostic. Neither can it explain why people who have barely scratched the surface of a subject are so confident in their judgments – and even get angry when you contradict them.\n<\/p>\n

\nMy view is that these are symptoms not of ignorance, but of irrationality. In politics as in religion, some beliefs are more emotionally appealing than others. For example, it feels a lot better to blame sneaky foreigners for our economic problems than it does to blame ourselves. This creates a temptation to relax normal intellectual standards and insulate cherished beliefs from criticism – in short, to be irrational.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nI have to admit that I agree with his proposed remedy of limiting voter power regarding some areas of society. On some topics, opinions are not enough – knowledge is also required to make sensible decisions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an interesting essay, The Myth of the Rational Voter, Bryan Caplan argues that the average voter holds erroneous beliefs about issues they vote on. (Found via Arts & Letters Daily, an excellent daily roundup of thoughtful and interesting writings from all sorts of places.) …if you know what a voter thinks is best for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current_affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}