Needed: better voters
Or, we don't need philosopher kings, we need economist kings.I finally found out why I still had a July 16 copy of The New Yorker on my pile of things to read. Louis Menand wrote a snarky review of Bryan Caplan's book, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. I'll be snarky enough to note that Menand and his editors got a word in the book's title wrong in the review, even though I'm probably more sympathetic to Menand's biases than to Caplan's.
This is one of those topics that will get students talking and thinking (well, at least talking). Manand's New Yorker article would be a good beginning, but if you search for alternatives on the web, they are plentiful.
Fractured Franchise: Are the wrong people voting?
"Why should anyone bother to vote? The chance that one vote will change the outcome of an election is virtually nil, and going to the polls involves a significant cost in time and opportunity. Presidential elections, in which more than a hundred million people vote, never turn on a single ballot. The lesson of the 2000 Presidential election was not 'Your vote can make the difference'; it was more like 'If you’re taking the trouble to vote, at least fill in the ballot correctly.' Yet many people do bother to vote. We praise these people, and we encourage non-voting citizens to follow their example. We tend to feel that political participation is an unmixed good, a symptom of civic health and virtue.
"Bryan Caplan, an economist who teaches at George Mason University, thinks that increasing voter participation is a bad thing...
"[E]conomists and political scientists have misunderstood the problem. They think that most voters are ignorant about political issues; Caplan thinks that most voters are wrong about the issues... [T]he system isn’t working properly—and it isn’t working properly because voters are poorly informed, or they’re subject to demagoguery, or special interests thwart the public’s interest. Caplan thinks that these conditions are endemic to democracy. They are not distortions of the process; they are what you would expect to find in a system designed to serve the wishes of the people. 'Democracy fails,' he says, 'because it does what voters want.' It is sometimes said that the best cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. Caplan thinks that the best cure is less democracy...
"Even apart from ignorance of the basic facts, most people simply do not think politically...
"For fifty years, it has been standard to explain voter ignorance in economic terms...
"Caplan thinks that democracy as it is now practiced cannot be salvaged, and his position is based on a simple observation: 'Democracy is a commons, not a market.'...
"Caplan insists that he is not a market fundamentalist, but he does think that most economists peg the optimal level of government involvement in the economy too high, because they overestimate the virtues of democracy. He offers some suggestions for fixing the evils of universal democratic participation (though he does not spend much time elaborating on them, for reasons that may suggest themselves to you when you read them): require voters to pass a test for economic competence; give extra votes to people with greater economic literacy; reduce or eliminate efforts to increase voter turnout; require more economics courses in school, even if this means eliminating courses in other subjects, such as classics; teach people introductory economics without making the usual qualifications about the limits of market solutions. His general feeling is that if the country were run according to the beliefs of professional economists everyone would be better off... He wants to raise the price of voting..."
See also:
- The Cato Institute on Caplan's book
- Steven White, writing in The American Prospect on Caplan's ideas:
The Myth of Bryan Caplan's Seriousness -- Libertarians gather to hear the case against letting the ignorant, irrational masses decide the direction of society.
"[Caplan's] argument is basically that the general public is not simply ignorant, but irrational. Rather than making random errors in political judgment, its errors are systematically biased against libertarian economics. To make up for this supposedly harmful situation, Caplan suggests limiting the scope of democratic involvement in economic decision making because economics experts would make better policies for society at large..."
posted by Ken Wedding @ 6:04 AM
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