November, 2006

Reply to My Critics

On a superficial reading, my critics and I have found little or no common ground. Public debates between economists have created the false impression that economists don’t agree about anything. In a similar vein, I believe that my debate with David Estlund, Loren Lomasky, and Jeffrey Friedman may create the false impression that […]

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Irrationality, or Just Plain Ignorance?

Jeffrey Friedman argues that Caplan’s charge of voter irrationality relies on the unrealistic idealizations of economic theory and that “[v]oters who don’t understand economics because they haven’t been exposed to it, or because they’ve been exposed to it but have found it tough going, aren’t irrational; they’re just ignorant.” While agreeing that Caplan’s findings support more markets and less democracy, Friedman fears Caplan’s “economistic” formulation of the problem makes the deep implications of voter fallibility too easy to dismiss. Economics, Friedman argues, is not the key to understanding economic ignorance.

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Lineup Change

Unfortunately, Ian Shapiro has had to bow out of this month’s discussion. Fortunately, Jeffrey Friedman, editor of Critical Review, has agreed to step into the breach. Friedman has taught poltical theory at Yale, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Barnard College, Columbia University, and is editor of The Rational Choice Controversy: Economic Models of Politics Reconsidered. His reply […]

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Caplan’s Republic

University of Virginia political philosopher Loren Lomasky compares Caplan’s criticism of democracy and defense of expertise with Plato’s argument in The Republic, while noting that in a modern system of representative democracy, voters choose among candidates, not policies. “If voters are as intellectually maladroit as Caplan suggests,” Lomasky writes, “then they are incapable of mastery of their elected representatives,” who are thus left with a fairly free hand to set policy. “What [voters] can do, though, is ‘throw the rascals out,’” and that, Lomasky argues, is good enough.

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Outsmarting Democracy?

In his reply to Bryan Caplan’s lead essay, Brown University political philosopher David Estlund argues that neither of Caplan’s proposed alternatives to democracy, markets and experts, satisfactorily correct for the problem of voter irrationality. With respect to experts, Estlund observes that political questions are moral as well as empirical: “[M]aybe . . . my morally wise mother would perform better overall than the economists. That settles nothing, since there is no entitlement to rule others based simply on the fact that you know what is best.” As far as markets go, Estlund says “Voters and market actors are the same people, so we should expect the charges of ignorance and irrationality to be leveled against people in both guises. . . . In the aggregate many market mistakes, like voting mistakes, affect everyone.”

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The Myth of the Rational Voter

In this month’s lead essay, George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan argues that voters are not just ignorant, they’re irrational. According to Caplan, when the cost of holding irrational beliefs is low—as it is in religion and politics—we should expect a lot of irrational belief. “Even when his views are completely wrong,” Caplan writes, “[the voter] gets the psychological benefit of emotionally appealing political beliefs at a bargain price.” But the low personal cost of irrationality has a high social cost. Caplan provides statistical evidence of voters’ “systematically biased beliefs” in economics, and argues this undermines the electorate’s ability to implement good policy. Caplan suggests we should rely “less on democracy and more on private choice and free markets,” in addition to several other provocative reforms sure to make civics teachers blanch.

Read: The Myth of the Rational Voter