The Myth of the Rational Voter is partially a book explaining economist Bryan Caplan’s economic model for voting, and partially it’s a polemic arguing for elitist views regarding the intelligence of the average U.S. citizen. As a super-smart citizen with just enough information to be dangerous, I’m partial to the argument. Caplan’s model and argument are internally consistent, but I don’t think he’s founded his erector set theory on as firm a ground as he describes. Whether it’s all true or not can only be seen by further research or events.
The model that Caplan espouses is fairly simple actually. Belief should be considered economically like any good such as leisure time or oranges. Belief, or irrationality, is the acceptance of suppositions as fact without reasonable evidence for so doing. Beliefs may be correct (e.g., one should not defy the law of gravity), or immaterial economically (e.g., god is a trinity). As the cost of being irrational goes up, people will consume less irrationality. If the cost of oranges goes up, I’ll buy fewer oranges. Since one vote has so little chance of affecting an election, a voter will consume as much irrationality as makes him comfortable with his view of the world. Because so much of a person’s beliefs aren’t true, particularly economically, we are getting economic programs that run contrary to established economic theory. In other words, we have shitty government because we vote stupidly, and we vote stupidly because a vote has little chance of affecting the outcome.
The polemic is a typical elitist libertarian one. Economists are smarter than your average bear. People vote anti-economist. We get bad economic policies because we don’t follow what the economists tell us to. Therefore we should take power out of the hands of people to some degree. Institute a poll tax. Institute education requirements. Reduce voter turnout. Or at the very least, remove as much of business and economic policy from political control as is possible. Let people’s individual choices be paramount and the market will move us to a socially optimal outcome.
As much as I like the ideas, there’s a lot of picking apart to do. First off, the premise that people are voting irrationally is not necessarily true. Caplan’s evidence is that the general public disagrees with economists on economic policies such as trade, foreign aid, and the like. For the general public to be irrational, the economists have to be right. Caplan’s evidence that the economists are right is a large chapter highlighting data from a survey. Caplan manipulates the data to remove the bias from such things as economic class from economists positions. After adjustment, the position is closer to the economist position rather than the position of the general public. Therefore, the economists must be more right than the public. Ta-da!
What’s obviously missing is whether or not the economists are right. The problem is that a lot of economics isn’t testable or at least not tested with the rigor that one would find in physics. Merely removing bias does not prove correctness. I can think of at least one recent item where the economic profession generally got it wrong: the existence of a housing bubble in the United States from 1998 through 2006/2007. So pardon me if I’m not convinced that that because economists say that protectionism is bad that it is bad. I’m generally pro-free-trade, but I need better convincing than that logic.
Secondly, I’m confused about his model. His model explanation is essentially that people’s irrationality during voting when graphed looks like a demand curve. In other words, if it costs someone money to be irrational they are likely to be more rational. We can treat a person’s preferences over his beliefs as if they were his preferences over consumption goods. The graphs look alike, so the underlying functions are the same. And because there’s no cost in voting, we’re really irrational. What bothers me about this analysis is that these aren’t scarce goods. When using scarce goods (or things like entertainment that can be translated into the scarce good time), the individuals must economize because they only have so much. The costs are a function of scarcity. But there’s an infinite supply of belief. The costs in this case are not a function of scarcity. I’m not sure this makes a difference, but it could. The known plotted points in the two graphs resemble each other, but because I’m not sure the underlying cost functions are the same, I’m not sure things hold at the edges. Like where the cost is zero as in voting.
There’s also no data to back up this model. It occurs to me that some implications of this idea ought to be testable. Closer elections have higher cost should result in better economic policies because the chances of having an effect are greater. Also, places where education (corresponding to rationality) is greater should have better economic policies. Randomly, there should be places where there is more rational voting and thus better policies. Caplan presents no such data. So I have to assume he didn’t find it at the time he wrote this book. Without empirical data, implementing his policy prescriptions in the hopes that it will improve things seems premature.
The thing that bothers me most about the whole book is it really feels to me like Caplan latched onto the model because it supported his libertarian tendency. Not consciously of course. It could easily be something that he believes because it fits his comfortable worldview, much as he accuses his irrational voters of the same thing. I have no idea where that meta road could take this and it hurts my head to go that way.
All that nit-picking aside, I have no evidence to counter any of this. I just have questions. The model seems cogent to me. One of the things that I glom onto is using prices as indicators, which this does with regard to voting. I understand things like determining how scarce drugs are by watching whether street prices for drugs are going up or down. Attaching a cost to voting and using that to evaluate resonates with me.
As for Caplan’s writing, I am not really sure what his intended audience is. Occasionally he drops into a wonkish mode where I got glassy-eyed. In plenty of spots he seems to be targeting other economists, admonishing them that they are irrationally assuming voting rationality. He writes non-technically enough that I can follow most of he argument. This is not the latest in the popular economics genre, however. Political economy is squarely within the realm of established economics.
Other blogged reviews:
- Obstinate Observations
- Walter Block (from the
Caplan isn’t libertarian enough
camp) - Marginal Revolution (from a colleague of Caplan, so take it with some salt)
- Bibliographing
Title: The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies
Author: Bryan Caplan
Cover creator: Frank Mahood
Imprint / publisher: Princeton University Press
Format: Hardcover
Length: 276 p. (includes 70 pages of endnotes, references and index)
Publication date: 2007
ISBN-10: 0-691-12942-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12942-6
Subject: Economic policy
Subject: Democracy
Subject: Political sociology
Subject: Representative government and representation
Subject: Rationalism
LC classification: HD87.C36 2006
