There’s an election tomorrow. Do voters know what they’re doing? According to the typical economist — and many political scientists — the answer is “No, but it doesn’t matter.” How could it not matter? The main argument is that the public’s errors cancel out.[1] For example, some people underestimate the benefits of immigration, and others overestimate the benefits. But as long as the average voter’s belief is true, politicians win by promoting immigration policies based on the facts.

This story is clearly comforting, but is it correct? Are the average voter’s beliefs true? In The Myth of the Rational Voter, my forthcoming book with Princeton University Press, I review a large body of evidence and conclude that the answer is definitely no. Like moths to the flame, voters gravitate to the same mistakes. They do not cancel each other out; they compound.

In my book, and in this essay, I focus on the public’s mistaken beliefs about economics. Partly, this is because I am an economist, but mainly it is because economics is such a clear example of a subject that is politically important (“It’s the economy, stupid,”) yet poorly understood. I suspect that the public’s errors extend far beyond economics. There is convincing evidence that the public holds systematically biased beliefs about toxicology and cancer.[2] In foreign policy, similarly, we have the “rally round the flag” effect, the public’s tendency to support wars as soon as they have been declared. But even if the average voter perfectly understood every non-economic subject, misconceptions about economics by themselves would pose a serious problem for democracy.

Identifying Misconceptions

Suppose that one scholar maintains that the average voter’s belief about X is true, and another denies it. For their debate to make sense, both sides have to claim knowledge about (a) what the average voter believes, and (b) which belief is true. How can we get to the bottom of this sort of dispute?

It is fairly easy to figure out what the average voter believes. High-quality surveys abound. The hard thing is figuring out how to “grade” the beliefs of the average voter — to find a yardstick against which his beliefs can be measured.

The most straightforward is to compare voter beliefs to known fact. We can ask voters to tell us the fraction of the federal budget that goes to foreign aid, and compare their average answer to the actual number. Studies that use this approach find that the average voter has some truly bizarre beliefs. The National Survey of Public Knowledge of Welfare Reform and the Federal Budget finds, for example, that 41% of Americans believe that foreign aid is one of the two biggest areas in the federal budget — versus 14% for Social Security.

The main drawback of this approach is that many interesting questions are too complex to resolve with an almanac. But there is another mirror to hold up to public opinion. We can track down people who are unusually likely to know the right answer, see what they think, then check whether the public agrees. Who might these unusually-likely-to-know people be? The most obvious candidates are experts.[3]

To see if the average voter’s beliefs about the economic effects of immigration are right, for example, you can ask the general public and professional economists, and see if, on average, they agree. Is this an infallible test? No; experts have been wrong before. But it is hard to get around the strong presumption that if experts and laymen disagree, the experts are probably right, and the laymen are probably wrong. More importantly, if you have some specific reason to doubt the objectivity of the experts, you can control for it. If you think that economists’ high income biases their beliefs, for example, you can check whether laymen and experts agree after statistically adjusting for income.

This was precisely the approach that I used to analyze the best available data set on economic beliefs, the Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy. The overarching finding: Economists and the public hold radically different beliefs about the economy.[4] Compared to the experts, laymen are much more skeptical of markets, especially international and labor markets, and much more pessimistic about the past, present, and future of the economy. When laymen see business conspiracies, economists see supply-and-demand. When laymen see ruinous competition from foreigners, economists see the wonder of comparative advantage. When laymen see dangerous downsizing, economists see wealth-enhancing reallocation of labor. When laymen see decline, economists see progress.[5]

While critics of the economics profession like to attribute these patterns to economists’ affluence, job security, and/or right-wing ideology, the facts are not with them. Controlling for income, income growth, job security, gender, and race only mildly reduces the size of the lay-expert belief gap. And, since the typical economist is actually a moderate Democrat, controlling for party identification and ideology makes the lay-expert belief gap get a little bigger. Economists think that markets work well not because of their extreme right-wing ideology, but despite their mild left-wing ideology.

From one perspective, we should have expected these findings all along. From the time of Adam Smith, if not earlier, economists have complained that economic policy was based on misconceptions, and tried to make a difference by correcting their students’ prejudices against markets, international trade, and so on. Economists preserve this tradition to this day when they teach undergraduates, write for popular audiences, or talk amongst themselves. In recent decades, however, economic research has built on the contrary assumption that the beliefs of the average voter are true. What is surprising about my results is that I race long-standing economic tradition against recent economic research, and the traditional view wins.[6]

What Misconceptions Do

Political scientists have often criticized economists for assuming that voters are selfish. The data — along with personal experience — have convinced me that the political scientists are right — no matter how much you know about a voter’s material interests, it is hard to predict how he is going to vote.[7] In contrast, if you know what a voter thinks is best for society, you can count on him to support it.

Before 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.[8]

Consider the case of immigration policy. Economists are vastly more optimistic about its economic effects than the general public. The Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy asks respondents to say whether “too many immigrants” is a major, minor, or non-reason why the economy is not doing better than it is. 47% of non-economists think it is a major reason; 80% of economists think it is not a reason at all. Economists have many reasons for their contrarian position: they know that specialization and trade enrich Americans and immigrants alike; there is little evidence that immigration noticeably reduces even the wages of low-skilled Americans; and, since immigrants are largely young males, and most government programs support the old, women, and children, immigrants wind up paying more in taxes than they take in benefits.[9]

Given what the average voter thinks about the effects of immigration, it is easy to understand why virtually every survey finds that a solid majority of Americans wants to reduce immigration, and almost no one wants to increase immigration. Unfortunately for both Americans and potential immigrants, there is ample reason to believe that the average voter is mistaken. If policy were based on the facts, we would be debating how much to increase immigration, rather than trying to “get tough” on immigrants who are already here.

Needless to say, I do not expect any prominent politicians to read this and publicly change their position on immigration. Democracy is a popularity contest. If the average voter believes that less immigration is best for society, democracy rewards politicians who oppose immigration. This does not necessarily mean that elected officials cynically pander to the prejudices of the public. Our leaders might have gotten to the top of the political game because they sincerely share popular prejudices. Regardless of what is going on in politicians’ hearts and minds, though, we can expect democracy to listen to the average voter, even when he is wrong. The empirical evidence indicates that he often is.

How Misconceptions Are Possible

Most of the economic misconceptions that we see today were already well-known in the time of Adam Smith. How can the public keep making costly policy mistakes, year after year, century after century?

Public 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?

In 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. Why, to return to the case of immigration, do people leap to the conclusion that immigration is disastrous, and have trouble holding a civil conversation with someone who disagrees?

My 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.

But why are there some areas — like politics and religion — where irrationality seems especially pronounced? My answer is that irrationality, like ignorance, is sensitive to price, and false beliefs about politics and religion are cheap.[10] If you underestimate the costs of excessive drinking, you can ruin your life. In contrast, if you underestimate the benefits of immigration, or the evidence in favor of the theory of evolution, what happens to you? In all probability, the same thing that would have happened to you if you knew the whole truth.

In a sense, then, there is a method to the average voter’s madness. Even when his views are completely wrong, he gets the psychological benefit of emotionally appealing political beliefs at a bargain price. No wonder he buys in bulk.

What’s Wrong With Democracy — and What’s Better

Unfortunately, the social cost of irrationality can be high even though it is individually beneficial. If one person pollutes the air, we barely notice; but if millions of people pollute the air, life can be very unpleasant indeed. Similarly, if one person holds irrational views about immigration, we barely notice; but if millions of people share these irrational views, socially harmful policies prevail by popular demand.

When individual choices in markets have harmful social side effects, most people want to do something to about it. In the case of pollution, for example, economists usually want to tax emissions, and non-economists want to set emission standards. Few people just shrug their shoulders and say, “The solution to the problems of markets is more markets.”

When individual choices in democracy have harmful social side effects, however, many people really do just shrug their shoulders and say, “The solution to the problems of democracy is more democracy.” If they wish to sound more hard-headed, they may instead quote Churchill: “[D]emocracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”[11]

On reflection, though, quoting Churchill in the face of democratic failure makes about as much sense as seeing rampant air pollution, and saying, “The free market is the worst form of economic organization, except all the others.” One can criticize markets or democracy — and propose remedies — without advocating socialism or dictatorship. Democracy, like the free market, can be limited, regulated, or overruled.

So what remedies for voter irrationality would I propose? Above all, relying less on democracy and more on private choice and free markets.[12] By and large, we don’t even ask voters whether we should allow unpopular speech or religion, and this “elitist” practice has saved us a world of trouble. Why not take more issues off the agenda? Even if the free market does a mediocre job, the relevant question is not whether smart, well-meaning regulation would be better. The relevant question is whether the kind of regulation that appeals to the majority would be better.

Another way to deal with voter irrationality is institutional reform. Imagine, for example, if the Council of Economic Advisers, in the spirit of the Supreme Court, had the power to invalidate legislation as “uneconomical.” Similarly, since the data show that well-educated voters hold more sensible policy views[13], we could emulate pre-1949 Great Britain by giving college graduates an extra vote.[14]

I suspect that these — and other! — eccentric institutional reforms would be helpful if tried. Unfortunately, there is a catch-22: The majority is unlikely to vote to reduce the power of the majority. Still, milder versions of these reforms might slip through the cracks. The public has largely ceded control of monetary policy to professional economists; perhaps the public would be willing to defer to expert judgment on some other areas as well. In a similar vein, although the majority is unlikely to approve plural votes for college graduates, it does allow the well-educated to exert extra influence by virtue of their higher turnout rate. It might be politically possible to further increase the de facto influence of educated voters by spending less money to increase turnout.

In the end, though, the catch-22 means that institutional reform is unlikely to be a very effective check on voter irrationality. What else is there? Even in the most democratic countries, political actors have a degree of slack or “wiggle room.” It is usually possible for officials to deviate moderately from voter preferences without being removed from power. And to be blunt, if the average voter holds irrational beliefs that lead him to support bad policies, using political slack to mitigate the damage seems like the right thing to do. If the average voter is wrong about immigration, and you have the political slack to push through an amnesty, go for it.

The Supreme Court may be the best example of a political body with a lot of slack. Justices serve for life, and it takes a constitutional amendment to overturn their decisions. This suggests — and history confirms — that they have significant power to improve upon democratic outcomes. If the Court has the chance to rule on the constitutionality of legislation inspired by anti-market misconceptions, why not overturn it for violating due process, or the Ninth Amendment, or the Tenth Amendment?[15] This was the essence of so-called “Lochner era jurisprudence.” Given what we know about the public’s economic biases, however, I think we owe those stodgy old judges an apology.

Of course, I do not expect the Supreme Court to revive Lochner anytime soon. At least as far as economics is concerned, the current justices basically accept the idea that they should defer to majoritarian wisdom. And obviously, they are not alone. The prevailing view even among the well-educated is that it is unseemly to question the competence of the average voter. Many elites go further by praising the insight of the average voter, no matter how silly his views seem.

As long as elites persist in unmerited deference to and flattery of the majority, containing the dangers of voter irrationality will be very hard. Someone has to tell the emperor when he is naked. He may not listen, but if no one speaks up, he will almost surely continue embarrassing himself and traumatizing spectators.

My final remedy for voter irrationality, then, is for people who know more than the average voter to stop being so modest. When experts and those who heed them address a broader audience — in the media, in their writings, or in a classroom — they need to focus on the questions where experts and the public disagree, and clearly explain why the experts are right and the public is wrong. Thus, when economists get the public’s ear, they should not bore them with the details of national income statistics, or quibble with each other about marginal issues. They should challenge the public’s misconceptions about markets, foreigners, saving labor, and progress.

But if the public is as irrational as I say, will this work? It might. Irrationality does not rule out persuasion, but it does change what people find persuasive. If people accept beliefs, in part, because they feel good, it is important to wrap your message in the right emotional packaging. “I’m right, you’re wrong, change,” falls flat. But in my experience, “I’m right, the people outside this classroom are wrong, and you don’t want to be like them, do you?” is fairly persuasive. Frederic Bastiat, arguably the greatest economic educator in history, should be our role model. Who else could make a critique of popular economic prejudices not just charming, but funny?

Conclusion

I suspect that many readers will just view me as “tone-deaf” to democracy. Whether or not the people know what they are doing, don’t they have a right to choose?

I can understand when people make this argument about self-regarding choice. Even if an individual does not know his own best interest, I normally think that he should be free to make his own mistakes. The problem with irrational voting, unfortunately, is that people who do it are not “just hurting themselves.” If the average voter is irrational, we all have to live with the consequences.

Every parent eventually asks his child, “If all your friends jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you?” I have an even more loaded question for those who refuse to second-guess the wisdom of the average voter: “If the majority said we all had to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you push people who refused to jump?”

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Notes

[1] See e.g. Wittman, Donald. 1995. The Myth of Democratic Failure: Why Political Institutions Are Efficient. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Persson, Torsten, and Guido Tabellini. 2000. Political Economics: Explaining Economic Policy. Cambridge: MIT Press; Drazen, Allan. 2000. Political Economy in Macroeconomics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; and Page, Benjamin, and Robert Shapiro. 1992. The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans’ Policy Preferences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

[2] See Kraus, Nancy, Torbjörn Malmfors, and Paul Slovic. 1992. “Intuitive Toxicology: Expert and Lay Judgments of Chemical Risks.” Risk Analysis 12(2): 215-32; and Lichter, S. Robert, and Stanley Rothman. 1999. Environmental Cancer – A Political Disease? New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

[3] Another possibility is to compare the views of laymen who score well on tests of political knowledge to those of demographically similar laymen who score poorly. This is the standard approach in the political science literature on “enlightened preferences.” The findings of this literature are quite compatible with my own; for a comprehensive survey, see Althaus, Scott. 2003. Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics: Opinion Surveys and the Will of the People. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[4] See here for a readable overview. For more academic treatments, see e.g. Caplan, Bryan. 2002. “Systematically Biased Beliefs About Economics: Robust Evidence of Judgemental Anomalies from the Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy.” Economic Journal 112(479): 433-58; Caplan, Bryan. 2002. “Sociotropes, Systematic Bias, and Political Failure: Reflections on the Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy.” Social Science Quarterly 83(2): 416-435; and Caplan, Bryan. 2001. “What Makes People Think Like Economists? Evidence on Economic Cognition from the Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy.” Journal of Law and Economics 44(2): 395-426.

[5] How can these patterns be so clear-cut, given economists’ legendary tendency to disagree with each other? The answer, quite simply, is that there is much more consensus than meets the eye. Popular culture creates a false impression because it is more entertaining to watch experts debate than it is to watch them agree; and in any case, once economists reach a common understanding, they move on to new topics.

[6] For a two-round debate between myself and a leading defender of the rationality of the average voter, see here [pdf] and here [pdf].

[7] For overviews, see Sears, David, and Carolyn Funk. 1990. “Self-Interest in Americans’ Political Opinions.” In Mansbridge, Jane, ed. 1990. Beyond Self-Interest. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 147-70; Citrin, Jack, and Donald Green. 1990. “The Self-Interest Motive in American Public Opinion.” Research in Micropolitics 3: 1-28; and Caplan, Bryan. 2001. “Libertarianism Against Economism: How Economists Misunderstand Voters and Why Libertarians Should Care.” [pdf] Independent Review 5(4): 539-63.

[8] For further discussion, see Caplan, Bryan. 2003. “The Logic of Collective Belief.” Rationality and Society 15(2): 218-42; and Caplan, Bryan. 2001. “Rational Irrationality and the Microfoundations of Political Failure.” Public Choice 107 (3/4): 311-31.

[9] On the fiscal effects of immigration, see Lee, Ronald, and Timothy Miller. 2000. “Immigration, Social Security, and Broader Fiscal Impacts.” American Economic Review 90(2): 350-4; and Simon, Julian. 1999. The Economic Consequences of Immigration. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

[10] For further discussion, see Caplan, Bryan. 2001. “Rational Ignorance versus Rational Irrationality.” Kyklos 54(1): 3-26.

[11] Eigen, Lewis, and Jonathan Siegel, eds. 1993. The Macmillan Dictionary of Political Quotations. NY: Macmillan Publishing Co.: 109.

[12] Commentator Ian Shapiro has repeatedly denied that this is a coherent option. See Shapiro, Ian, and Casiano Hacker-Cordón. 1999. “Reconsidering Democracy’s Value.” In Shapiro, Ian, and Casiano Hacker-Cordón, eds. Democracy’s Value. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1-19; Shapiro, Ian. 1999. Democratic Justice. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; and Shapiro, Ian. 1996. Democracy’s Place. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. I critique Shapiro’s arguments at length in my forthcoming book. If he would like to pursue this issue, I would be happy to do so during the discussion phase.

[13] In “What Makes People Think Like Economists?,” I estimate that each step of education on a 1-7 scale has 9.3% as much effect on economic beliefs as a Ph.D. in economics.

[14] As Speck explains, “[G]raduates had been able to vote for candidates in twelve universities in addition to those in their own constituencies, and businessmen with premises in a constituency other than their own domicile could vote in both.” (Speck, W.A. 1993. A Concise History of Britain, 1707-1975. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 175).

[15] See e.g. Barnett, Randy. 2004. Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; and Macedo, Stephen. 1987. The New Right v. the Constitution. Washington, DC: Cato Institute.

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Bryan Caplan is associate professor of economics at George Mason University where he is also affiliated with the Center for Study of Public Choice and the Mercatus Center.

American politics is always concerned with the proper scope of economic markets. It is refreshing to see Bryan Caplan acknowledge that typically the alternative to markets, in a democratic country, is democracy. It is provocative, then, that his own frank preference tends toward more markets and less democracy.

Caplan builds on a long line of research documenting how poorly people understand political issues, dissenting only in being even more pessimistic than most. He also agrees with previous authors that voters have no reason to do better. Since an individual’s vote, by itself, won’t make any difference, it isn’t rational to invest much effort in being informed. So people will often believe what feels good regardless of the evidence, and then vote accordingly. Caplan frames these findings as a general indictment of democracy (See his section title: “What’s Wrong With Democracy and What’s Better?”). Caplan really sketches two alternatives to democracy: experts (especially economists) and markets. Surely they both have a place, but I doubt that there’s a strong case here for the new shrinkage of democratic prerogatives that Caplan appears to favor.

The main reason Caplan gives for substituting markets for democracy is that economists are fond of them. So, first, some thoughts about experts. Consider two unabashed proposals of Caplan’s. First, he proposes giving more votes to those with college degrees (“The data show that well-educated voters hold more sensible policy views.” The supporting citation: Caplan’s article, “What Makes People Think Like Economists?”). Second, he suggests giving a panel of economists a veto power over legislation.

If we know which survey questions measure voter competence, then we could presumably devise an exam to determine how many votes each person will be allowed. So why not improve on the literacy tests of old, and on the diploma requirement, in a more discriminating exam? We would want questions about such things as economics, history, and science. Here are some further pertinent questions, this time of a different and partly moral kind:

1. When is it appropriate to risk American lives in a military effort overseas?
2. How much intermingling of religious organizations with government organizations is appropriate?
3. How much individual liberty (in, say, marriage law, freedom of speech, sexual liberty, etc.) should be compromised in order to protect a traditional family structure?

On the factual and technical parts of the test economists and others with university degrees would do better than many others. But would they do better on the whole test? Surely it is the whole test that matters. How to slow inflation, or to mobilize people for war, or to raise taxes for social programs is one sort of thing; when these should be done is another.

So how would college graduates and economists do? Consider the demographics of the economics profession, and of college education in America in, say, the decades just before 1949 (the year Caplan reports that Great Britain did away with extra votes for college graduates). To take one example, the need for racial justice was urgent, and the idea that an even smaller, whiter, more male, more Protestant electorate would have performed better on the morally most important matters is far from obvious. It’s not that their education or economic expertise damages their competence. Rather, the demographics of expertise do not necessarily mirror the population in all other respects while simply adding on the benefits of factual and technical expertise. Those kinds of expertise often travel with other differences, such as race, class, gender, and religion, and the resulting differences (i.e. sampling errors) might well do more harm than the supposed experts’ particular kind and amount of extra education does good. Sometimes we know which demographic differences to worry about, other times we do not. In the 1930′s many did not. In present times, how can we know whether we do or not?

I don’t doubt (as many readers will) Caplan’s assumption that some people are wiser than others on the (always partly moral) questions of politics. I do doubt that there is a publicly available criterion for identifying them. I agree with Caplan (against many) that the quality of political decisions matters, not just the process. So democracy can be fairly challenged on that score. But it has an answer. The question isn’t whether democracy will perform the best. Maybe Caplan is right that economists would perform better than democracy, and maybe I’m right that 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. Democracy, on the other hand, can effectively bring intelligence to bear on public problems in a way that avoids these controversial invidious comparisons. That, I think, is its claim to authority.

So much for experts. But what about markets? They have well-known advantages in many contexts, and, like democracy, they don’t presume to separate the wise from the ignorant. Obviously, many decisions are already under the control of markets rather than politics. But Caplan recommends removing many new things from voters’ hands. How many new things? Since we aren’t given any specific proposals that could be judged on the merits, I interpret Caplan as pressing the superiority of markets over democracy in a general, and potentially radical way. He writes, “So what remedies for voter irrationality would I propose? Above all, relying less on democracy and more on private choice and free markets.”

Caplan mentions that voters are not very smart about toxicology and cancer. I don’t know if he means that this is a reason to shrink democratically authorized regulation of medication trials, medical licensing, hospital certification, or what. If so, we’d want some support for thinking that a regime of caveat emptor would produce better outcomes. He mentions foreign policy as a broad area in which voters have irrational biases. But what would it mean to let foreign policy itself be determined by markets (as opposed to a pro-market foreign policy, which might be democratically determined)?

Caplan’s favorite example of voter ignorance in this piece is immigration. We could relax limits on immigration, but this would be a legal step, and it would require a political decision, democratic or otherwise. How could markets take the place of the political decision whether or not to open the borders? If you’re pro-market you might like the idea of open borders, I get that. But that isn’t responsive to the question: should immigration policy be made politically or (somehow) by markets? Which decisions about immigration (if any) does Caplan think should be moved from democratic to market control? (Perhaps his preference here is not markets but the sort of expert rule of economists I have questioned above.)

I also wonder if there isn’t a double standard at work. 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. For example, as Caplan says, people are tempted to believe some things against the evidence because believing them is emotionally satisfying. But this must be true in market life as well. We might think Guinness is good for us because, well, that would be nice. Maybe the difference is that mistakes are less troubling in markets. Perhaps irrational market agents only hurt themselves. Caplan points out that, “If the average voter is irrational we all have to live with the consequences.” But surely there are consequences if the average consumer is irrational too. Suppose the safety of medicines were left to the market rather than a regulatory agency. If many consumers thought that peach pits cure cancer better than chemotherapy, then we would all suffer from the lost lives that result. Or suppose all schools were privatized. If many parents and school board members thought that evolution is “just a theory” alongside creationism, and they designed the curriculum accordingly, then the progress of science would be slowed, the entanglement of religion with government would increase, and there would be broad consequences for all of us. If consumers underestimate the dangers of man-made global warming they might destroy the planet. In the aggregate many market mistakes, like voting mistakes, affect everyone.

Perhaps in these areas Caplan would not wish to substitute markets for democracy. But then Caplan must agree that the fact that voters are not very well informed about these issues, or many others, does not provide any strong case for taking things out of their hands and turning them over to experts or markets. Of course it’s possible that some new areas should be turned over to experts or market mechanisms, and Caplan might well propose some good candidates in his reply. But there are probably areas where experts and markets should be democratically better reigned in as well. Do we know which of these predominates from knowing that voters are not very well informed? For the reasons I’ve given, I don’t think we do.

It’s a harsh assessment of ordinary citizen-voters. We’re told that when they are confronted with important matters of public policy, over and over again they show themselves to be clueless. Experts say one thing; citizens in their benighted splendor say another. The problem is not merely the ignorance that might be expected of amateurs wandering into territory where seasoned professionals tread warily. Rather, voters routinely are irrational. That is, they are easily manipulated by conniving demagogues, jolted into action by emotion rather than evidence, and display levels of confidence inversely proportional to the depth of their knowledge. Whatever one thinks of the ordinary man or woman’s capacity to conduct private affairs, political decision-making is altogether beyond them.

The preceding paragraph could be a synopsis of Bryan Caplan’s “The Myth of the Rational Voter,” but in fact it is a restatement of the indictment offered 24 centuries ago by Plato in The Republic. This work is the seminal political treatise of our civilization, and it is as critical of the workings of democratic governance as any public choice economist’s screed. Plato proposed to overcome endemic citizen irrationality by taking affairs of state from their hands and instead lodging them with the experts. These he dubbed “philosopher-kings.” The association of surpassing expertise with the practice of philosophy has, alas, waned over the years, but Caplan’s proposal is identical in spirit if not in language. Because voters so regularly get things wrong, Caplan wants to transfer policy determinations into other hands, elite hands. The Supreme Court is his paradigm of a body that combines aptitude for deliberative rationality with a high degree of immunity from popular frenzies. Perhaps whimsically – perhaps not – Caplan contemplates a Council of Economic Advisers empowered to invalidate legislation as “uneconomic.” Best of all would be to substitute markets for politics, but where collective decision-making is unavoidable, it should be kept away from the hoi polloi.

Although I am in some sympathy with Caplan’s argument, I must confess that I find it less persuasive than Plato’s. Democratic Athens was a regime in which citizens voted early and often. Sometimes they cast ballots to elect office holders, but more often they voted on specific matters of policy: war or peace with Sparta, life or death for the convicted miscreant Socrates. In American federal elections, ordinary voters are asked only to choose among candidates, never among policies. Thus, even if they are every bit as misinformed as Caplan alleges, this has no direct effect on, say, whether more or fewer immigrants are admitted across borders. These determinations are the province of members of Congress, one and all full-time professionals with abundant access to informational and evaluational resources. If the problem is rule by ordinary voters, then it is a problem for Athens, not for Washington, D.C. (Individual states that put referenda on ballots are an intermediate case.)

Caplan, I am sure, will respond that this is to give short shrift to the dynamics of representative democracy. Legislators cast the final vote on contested policy issues, but their constituents choose who those representatives will be. That puts Congress on a short leash. A senator or representative who votes her considered judgment rather than the interests of electors may be noble in Edmund Burke fashion but, like Burke, she will soon be unemployed. Accordingly, economistically-inclined analysts of politics routinely identify election candidates with packages of policies for which they stand. Voters pull levers next to candidates’ names, but in so doing they are endorsing or rejecting specific policy stances. According to this account, elected officials have little latitude to do other than comply with the passions of their masters, the sovereign citizens. As far as they are concerned, the voice of the median voter is the voice of God.

This equation squares uneasily, however, with the economists’ ascription to voters of rational ignorance or, as in Caplan’s essay, irrationality. A significant percentage of Americans cannot name their congressional representative. What is the likelihood, then, that they can tell you what this anonymous individual’s positions are on immigration, ethanol subsidies, Swiss cheese importation, aircraft carrier construction, or 1001 other matters on which legislatures pronounce? If voters are as intellectually maladroit as Caplan suggests, then they are incapable of mastery of their elected representatives. Moreover, only the most naive voters will labor under the illusion that the politicians who plead for their votes can be counted on once in office to do as they had pledged. Woodrow Wilson ran on the platform “He kept us out of war,” George Bush Sr. vowed “No new taxes!” and his son decried the futility of nation-building. The rest, as they say, is history.

Am I maintaining, then, that politicians do not pander to voters? Not exactly. In order to enjoy the exquisite pleasure of hearing people address you as “Mr. Senator,” you need to receive more votes than the other guy who craves that status. Average citizens are not sober-minded assessors of evidence bearing on policy determinations. As Caplan observes, they vent their prejudices. Given the mechanics of electoral dynamics, this so-called irrationality makes good sense. The chance that any individual vote will swing an outcome is minuscule. If one’s primary concern is to “make a difference,” there’s not much point in going off to vote at all, let alone to studying in depth the crucial and semi-crucial issues. Rather, elections are opportunities to express emotionally redolent attitudes. Accordingly, the secret to electoral success is to position oneself to be the beneficiary of these expressions.

Citizen passions are, then, incentives to pandering. But they also are a gateway to accountability. Voters have precious little control over any particular political platform. What they can do, though, is “throw the rascals out.” And, indeed, on Nov. 7, 2006, a large regiment of rascals was shown the door. To be sure, many who are taking over their seats will soon reveal themselves to be rascals. Eventually they, too, will be tossed out. This is far from an ideal way to exercise governance: rule by philosopher-kings it’s not. For Caplan, as for Plato, that is a damning indictment of democracy. I’m not so sure. Give me an airtight guarantee that those advertised as the Best and the Brightest are the genuine article and that, in addition, they are indelibly committed to serving the public good, and I’ll sign up with the Plato/Caplan antidemocrats. But this is a tune we have heard spun before. Early in the 20th century, it was the mantra of the Progressive movement. It is not obvious to me that the resultant efflorescence of regulatory commissions and bureaucratic technocracies constitutes a triumph either of political wisdom or liberty. Plato, I think, was too enamored of philosophers. Because he was one, he should have known better. Caplan is partial to the policy judgments of economists. Because he himself is one, he should know better. Replacing one set of rascals with another set doesn’t amount to much. It is, though, something. Call me unambitious, but I’m willing to settle.

Bryan Caplan’s essay reminded me of an April, 2004 conference commemorating the late, great development economist Peter Bauer. All weekend long, the assembled economists reiterated that Bauer was right in teaching, among other things, that foreign aid is disastrously counterproductive. At the final session, the conferees turned to the question of why, despite Bauer’s teachings, rivers of foreign aid continue to flow to the Third World, particularly from Scandinavian countries. All sorts of unsavory motives were adduced, including one very much like the explanation Caplan offers for voters’ misconceptions of economics: namely, that it makes people (especially Scandinavians, I guess) feel good to favor foreign aid, even though they know that foreign aid is disastrous.

As the lone philosopher in the room, my role was to ask an epistemological question: Has Bauer’s work even been translated into Finnish, Norwegian, or Swedish? If it hasn’t (and, of course, even if it has), isn’t it possible that foreign aid continues to flow simply because Scandinavian voters and politicians, like voters and politicians in other Western countries, haven’t read the works of Peter Bauer, and thus have never even thought about whether foreign aid might backfire? Is the perversity of foreign aid really so obvious that anyone in the world who favors foreign aid must, at some level, know that it is a disaster (in that case, why did we have to wait for Peter Bauer to discover this knowledge?), yet choose to ignore this knowledge for self-interested or emotional reasons? Isn’t it more likely that people back foreign aid because they are flat-out ignorant of arguments like Bauer’s?

To these questions, the most prominent economist present retorted that he “preferred to invoke ignorance as an explanation for irrational behavior only as a last resort.” I don’t see the merit in such an uncharitable approach to the behavior of fallible human beings. The economist’s approach reduces human error to the merely so-called “errors” of people who actually know that they are wrong, but prefer to be wrong—either because (1) they have some sinister interest in supporting what they know is wrong; or (2) because they get some sort of emotional gratification from being wrong, which is Caplan’s view. Like the Bauer conferees, Caplan seems to think that economic arguments are so well known and intuitively plausible that some act of will—or of irrationality—must be responsible for the public’s failure to agree with Caplan and his fellow economists. Wouldn’t it be more plausible to allow that most people have never even heard the economists’ arguments; and that these arguments are, in any event, counterintuitive—which is why we needed Adam Smith, and Peter Bauer, and so forth, to produce them in the first place?

Caplan believes (as I understand him) that people “normally” have high intellectual standards that include the open-minded consideration of counterarguments to their beliefs, but that they “relax” these standards in order to reach conclusions that make them feel good. That relaxation, of course, would be irrational. But I’ve been editing scholars in all disciplines for two decades, and talking to non-scholars about politics for three decades, and I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve encountered for whom open-mindedness of this sort is the rule, or even the exception. So I don’t think most people have intellectual standards in place that they need to relax in order to make mistakes. Moreover, even people who incline toward open-minded self-criticism, and are good at weighing evidence and following arguments (another rarity among the people I know, including myself; but this is a defect in people’s logical faculties, not a triumph of emotion over reason), need to actually hear and understand arguments against their beliefs if they are to take them into account. But how many members of a public as inattentive to politics as Caplan’s own data suggest are likely to have encountered arguments against their economic misconceptions? If they haven’t read Smith, or Bauer, or Mises, or Hayek, or Milton Friedman, they can be as open minded and logical as we could ask for, and they would still be prone to (what an adept of such economists might consider to be) economic errors.

Caplan has such a heroic view of human perceptiveness that he even wonders “How Misconceptions Are Possible.” As an extremely mistake-prone member of the human race, I tend to wonder instead how accurate conceptions are possible. But I don’t think Caplan is really talking about Homo sapiens. I think he is talking about Homo economicus.

Here is what I speculate is going on. According to the assumptions of standard-issue (non-Austrian) neoclassical economics, capitalism works by approximating the equilibrium model of “perfect markets.” One of the assumptions of this model is that market participants have complete knowledge of supply and demand conditions.[1] It is all too easy for economists theorizing about politics to extend this assumption from economic actors to political actors, and this is what Caplan may be doing. Only voters who approximate perfect knowledge of economic theory—or who could do so, if they just put their minds to it—but who nonetheless refuse to do so, can be accused of “irrationality,” rather than of simply being mistaken about economic theory. The readiest explanation for being simply mistaken about economic theory, however, is that the voters just haven’t read any economic theory. Voters 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.

For decades, political scientists have probed the implications of public ignorance.[2] Efforts like Caplan’s are the obvious next step in such research, since most political scientists, like most members of the general public, are clueless about economics, and thus have not thought to interrogate the public about its own economic cluelessness. Some of the most important knowledge that voters need is knowledge of economic theory—at least if voters are to elect a government that has the power to regulate the economy. If the voters don’t have that knowledge, maybe the government shouldn’t have that power.

Just such a thought was, I believe, the actual basis of the modern libertarian movement, which began to take shape after World War II—when the direction of economic policy was truly frightening to anyone with a grounding in free-market economics. If the postwar free marketeers had included any political scientists, they might have been able to develop a better argument for libertarian conclusions than the philosophical arguments to which they eventually turned.[3] I agree with Caplan, then, that the ultimate implication of findings like his is that we should rely a lot less on politics, and a lot more on markets. That depends, as Caplan recognizes, on whether we have reasons to think that errors are less likely to occur, or are more likely to be corrected, in the economic than in the political realm. I differ with Caplan on what those reasons are, but that is a different story; I do agree with him that such reasons exist.[4] It may therefore seem quarrelsome for me to focus on my disagreements with Caplan, but I do so because I think it’s important that, having unwittingly discarded the pivotal public-ignorance argument against an omnipotent democratic state 60 years ago, we get it right this time around. And I think that there is one glaring respect in which Caplan has not only gotten it wrong, but has done so in a manner that renders the study of public ignorance vulnerable to caricature and dismissal.

Since Caplan has received the same training as most of his colleagues, he agrees with most of their views; and since he agrees with most of their views, he takes findings of public disagreement with those views to constitute reasons for elite rule. Loren Lomasky and David Estlund have pointed out the similarities between Caplan’s view and easily rebutted Platonism (Who guards the Guardians? Or, better, how do we tell the real experts from the charlatans?). I’d like to offer a suggestion about just how Caplan could have gone astray in such an obvious way.

Caplan is right to think that what the public lacks is expertise in economics. He is wrong to think that expertise should be conflated with educational credentials, even for heuristic purposes; or, as a corollary, that public wisdom should be equated to public agreement with credentialed “experts.” If Caplan were in a discipline (such as any of the other social sciences) in which he did not happen to agree with his colleagues, or if he found himself writing about the views of economists trained in the Soviet Union or the Islamic Republic of Iran, he would not so readily overlook the fact that when an educational institution credentials an “expert,” it is merely certifying that this person has been indoctrinated with whatever is thought by the faculty of the institution to be the truth—which has no necessary correlation with what is actually the truth.

One need not flatter the public’s wisdom, therefore, in order to resist rule by putative experts. Indeed, one of the most important findings of the political-science and political-psychology literature on public ignorance is that there is a perverse tradeoff between ignorance and ideology: less of the first leads to more of the second.[5] So if I had to choose, I’d pick rule by the masses over rule by elites. That’s not because I entertain illusions about “the wisdom of crowds.” It’s because I’d rather be ruled by open-minded ignoramuses than by doctrinaire ideologues.

The deeper lesson of the tradeoff between ignorance and ideology, though, is that the political world is far harder for people to grasp than is implicit in Caplan’s economistic view. Even people who accumulate lots of information about the world tend to accumulate only the information that fits their mental models of it—their ideologies. That’s the function of ideologies: they simplify the world by screening most of it out (even while making the world far more legible to the ideologue than it is to people who lack such a filter). Thus, most of the political ideologies in which very intelligent and rational people have believed in the modern era have been as deficient in economic wisdom as are the casual economic beliefs held by members of the general public.

All of this stands to reason. The human mind evolved in hunter-gatherer settings that were far less complex than societies like ours. No reproductive advantage would have flowed to a hunter-gatherer with a knack for economic theorizing, since there weren’t any economies for hunter-gatherers to theorize about. If one seeks to understand the pattern of people’s errors about economics, evolutionary psychology is probably a good place to start.

Economic theory, unlike evolutionary psychology, will probably have little to contribute to the enterprise of understanding why economic theory is, itself, so hard for people to understand. Economics is very important, and economic ignorance is both rampant and dangerous. But economics is not the only tool we have for understanding economic ignorance, and that’s very fortunate.

Notes

[1] Peter J. Boettke, “Where Did Economics Go Wrong? Equilibrium as a Flight from Reality.” Critical Review vol. 11 (1997), no. 1.

[2] The seminal documents are Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: The Free Press, [1922] 1949); and Philip E. Converse, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” in David E. Apter, ed., Ideology and Discontent (New York: The Free Press, 1964).

[3] Or so I argue in “What’s Wrong with Libertarianism,” Critical Review vol. 11 (1997), no. 3.

[4] Jeffrey Friedman, “Popper, Weber, and Hayek: The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance.” Critical Review vol. 17 (2005), nos. 1-2.

[5] E.g., Charles Lord et al., “Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37(11): 2098-2109; Jeffrey Friedman, “Public Competence in Normative and Positive Theory: Neglected Implications of ‘The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.’” Critical Review 18 (2006), Appendix.

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 the four of us don’t agree about anything either. Before I take issue with any of my commentators’ criticisms, then, I would like to take the time to point out important issues where we appear to be on the same page.

All of us agree that voters in modern democracies have a lot of false beliefs. More importantly, no one has taken refuge in the claim that these errors harmlessly cancel each other out. By implication, everyone on the panel seems to accept my claim—controversial with most economists and many political scientists—that the electorate suffers from systematically biased beliefs, and not merely random error.

Furthermore, with the possible exception of Estlund, no one on the panel disputes my substantive claims about the particular biases that the public has. I claimed that the public seriously underestimates the social benefits of the market mechanism, especially in international and labor markets, and is overly pessimistic about the past, present, and future of the economy. These are strong, controversial claims, so if any of the panelists dissented, I would have expected them to say so. (Of course, their next posts may do just that!)

If we can agree to this extent, I think we have made more progress than 95% of academic exchanges. Do I overestimate the extent of our consensus? If so, I’d like to hear about it during the next week. Let’s figure out how much we already agree before we try to show each other how wrong we are.

With that out of the way…

Reply to David Estlund

Estlund’s most important objection to my approach is that the right answers to political questions depend on a mixture of factual and moral beliefs. Economists and the well-educated may know more about economic policy, but their moral vision is narrow and unrepresentative. As Estlund explains:

It’s not that their education or economic expertise damages their competence. Rather, the demographics of expertise do not necessarily mirror the population in all other respects while simply adding on the benefits of factual and technical expertise. Those kinds of expertise often travel with other differences, such as race, class, gender, and religion…

It is precisely because of such concerns that—with the exception of religion[1]— my statistical work controls for all of these factors. I do not naively compare the beliefs of the average economist to those of the average member of the general public. Instead, I compare average beliefs controlling for race, gender, income, job security, income growth, and more. It turns out that the raw differences are robust. Economists do not just disagree with the average American; they are almost as likely to disagree with rich, white male Americans. Scott Althaus similarly finds that political awareness generally pushes all demographic groups in the same direction.[2] For example, he reports that better-informed individuals in all income brackets are more supportive of free-market policies.[3]

Estlund wonders what the effect of a more restricted franchise would have been for racial justice in the 1950′s, but his doubts are ill-placed. It has long been clear to public opinion researchers that the well-educated are more tolerant than the rest of the population. Seymour Martin Lipset’s ground-breaking work on “working-class authoritarianism,” documented this by 1960.[4] The finding that the educated are more tolerant has been amply confirmed by later research.[5] If it were up to educated citizens, equal rights for non-whites would probably have come years earlier.

Given the time budget of this discussion, I hardly think it possible to completely change Estlund’s mind about democracy. But I am still shooting for a marginal effect. After all, Estlund tells us that “I agree with Caplan (against many) that the quality of political decisions matters, not just the process.” What additional evidence would it take to convince Estlund that he has been overestimating the quality of democratic political decisions, and underestimating the quality of the alternatives?

Reply to Loren Lomasky

Lomasky is quite right to point out the parallels between my analysis and Plato’s. But he understates how much modern social science has built on the shoulders of this—and many other—giants. To the best of my knowledge, Plato did not anticipate the most compelling objection to his whole story: the Miracle of Aggregation.[6] No matter how low the quality of the electorate, unrestricted democracy will choose the same policies as a land governed by Philosopher-Kings as long as voter errors are random. In my work, I am not just repeating Plato’s argument. I am responding to modern social science’s more sophisticated defense of the democratic process. My focus is not on evidence that voters make mistakes, but on evidence that the Miracle of Aggregation fails because voters’ mistakes are systematic.

Of course, I do not show that all of voters’ mistakes are systematic. There are plenty of areas where the Miracle of Aggregation probably works as advertised. I point this out because Lomasky is too quick to infer that voter ignorance seriously relaxes politicians’ incentive to conform to public opinion:

A significant percentage of Americans cannot name their congressional representative. What is the likelihood, then, that they can tell you what this anonymous individual’s positions are on immigration, ethanol subsidies, Swiss cheese importation, aircraft carrier construction, or 1001 other matters on which legislatures pronounce? If voters are as intellectually maladroit as Caplan suggests, then they are incapable of mastery of their elected representatives.

It doesn’t have to work this way. In fact, it probably doesn’t. Put yourself in the shoes of a politician weighing whether to support further restrictions on immigration. You know most of the electorate has never heard of you, much less your position on immigration. But you still have a strong incentive to take the popular view, because it will make the minority of people who are paying attention more likely to vote for you. Yes, it’s just one issue. But winners don’t get to the top by saying “It’s just one issue.” They get to the top by saying “I need every vote I can get.” Unless the public is so “intellectually maladroit” that taking popular positions actually costs votes, we should expect politicians to pander.

To those who are not convinced, I present the following challenge: What existing policies are unpopular?[7] If you test your guesses against a canonical source like the General Social Survey, it is striking how regularly the median respondent favors the policy status quo.[8] Even in the rare cases where a majority seems to favor a reform, its preferred alternative often turns out to be simply impossible. Since no politician is able to deliver lower taxes, more spending, and a smaller deficit, for example, the system’s failure to deliver this contradictory package hardly shows that democracy is unresponsive.

In conclusion, I am puzzled that Lomasky wants “an airtight guarantee that those advertised as the Best and the Brightest are the genuine article and that, in addition, they are indelibly committed to serving the public good” before he’ll “sign up with the Plato/Caplan antidemocrats.” In real life, there are no airtight guarantees, just options that are more likely to be better than others. If economists ran trade policy, for example, there is no guarantee that we would become less protectionist. But given abundant evidence that economists are less protectionist than the general public, a less protectionist outcome is very likely. The same holds for a host of other foolish economic policies.

You can ask for more, but you won’t get it.

Reply to Jeffrey Friedman

Friedman faults me for mistaking mere voter ignorance for outright voter irrationality. It might surprise him to learn, then, that when I explain my work, most of my fellow economists initially offer his very objection. Like Friedman, the typical economist believes that ignorance is the root of all error, and resists my claim that irrationality is an important part of the story.

Fair question: Why do I make such a big deal out of this seemingly semantic issue?

To make my answer as clear as possible, let me start with the extreme case of religion.

You could say that people around the world accept the religion they were raised in simply because they are ignorant of the alternatives. You might be a Christian because you’ve never heard that there’s anything else to be.

But this is far too charitable. People know that other religions exist. But they generally dismiss the competition without consideration. Even though they make little or no effort to “comparison shop,” people tend to be highly certain that their religion is true. Most strikingly of all, if you present evidence that a person’s religion is false, he usually gets angry.

These are all symptoms of irrationality, not ignorance. If people were merely ignorant about religion, they would be agnostic, keeping an open mind until more information came in. They would not hastily conclude that the first story they heard was certainly true. And if someone gave them free information inconsistent with their current beliefs, they would be grateful, not angry.

Of course, religion isn’t the only subject that people are “religious” about. And in my experience as a teacher of economics, economics is another fine example. Most people haven’t studied economics, but that does not stop them from dogmatically embracing extreme views, and getting upset at people who question them. People who know nothing about international economics are rarely agnostic about trade policy. Instead, they confidently leap to the protectionist conclusion, and lash out at those who suggest that they might be mistaken.

Sometimes, of course, Friedman is right. Sometimes, when you explain an economic argument to a student, he says “I hadn’t thought of it that way before,” and changes his mind. But all too often, teaching economics to non-economists is like teaching evolution to Christian fundamentalists. The problem isn’t what they don’t know, but that what they know that ain’t so.

To turn Friedman’s argument around, I think that he’s the one with an unrealistic, stilted psychology that’s “vulnerable to caricature and dismissal.” Friedman seems to think that everyone wants to get the right answer—and given enough information, everyone would get the right answer. In contrast, I maintain that cognitive motives are more complex. People want more than just the truth. They also want beliefs that give meaning to their lives, and cement relationships with friends and family.

It’s not surprising, then, that people practice cognitive nepotism to shield their emotionally-charged beliefs from the facts. Of course, just as a businessman may fire his favorite nephew if he is sufficiently incompetent, people tend to become more reasonable if error is sufficiently costly.[9]

Here is a final question for Friedman. He emphasizes that he’d “rather be ruled by open-minded ignoramuses than by doctrinaire ideologues.” If I were him, I’d like more information about how the beliefs of the ignoramuses and the ideologues differ. If we’re comparing rule by the median Russian voter in 1917 to a Bolshevik dictatorship, of course I’d prefer the former. But what if we’re comparing rule by the median American voter in 2006 to rule by a body that is markedly friendlier towards Friedman’s (and my) view that “we should rely a lot less on politics, and a lot more on markets”? The empirical evidence strongly indicates that educated Americans are one such group, and economists are another. I think that more influence for either would be an improvement. Why doesn’t Friedman agree?

Notes

[1] The main data set my research builds upon – the Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy – does not contain a measure of religion. However, my colleague Lawrence Iannaccone has studied the connection between theological conservatism and support for the free market in detail, and found little evidence of a connection. [pdf] Thus, the omission of religion as a control variable is probably unimportant.

[2] Althaus, Scott. 2003. Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics: Opinion Surveys and the Will of the People. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[3] Althaus (2003: 111).

[4] Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1960. Political Man. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

[5] Nie, Norman, Jane Junn, and Kenneth Stehlik-Barry. 1996. Education and Democratic Citizenship in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

[6] This phrase was coined in Converse, Philip. 1990. “Popular Representation and the Distribution of Information.” In Ferejohn, John, and James Kuklinski, eds. Information and Democratic Processes. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press: 369-88. See Hoffman, Tom. 1998. “Rationality Reconceived: The Mass Electorate and Democratic Theory.” Critical Review 12(4): 459-80, for an excellent discussion of the Miracle of Aggregation, Surowiecki, James. 2004. The Wisdom of Crowds. NY: Doubleday, for a high-quality popularization, and here for my class notes on the topic.

[7] Here’s how one of my students responded to this challenge.

[8] See e.g. Caplan, Bryan, and Edward Stringham. 2005. “Mises, Bastiat, Public Opinion, and Public Choice: What’s Wrong With Democracy.” Review of Political Economy 17(1): 79-105.

[9] I share Friedman’s view that evolutionary psychology can help advance our understanding of the patterns of economic errors. (See Rubin, Paul. 2003. “Folk Economics.” Southern Economic Journal 70(1): 157-71 for a first step in this direction). At the same time, I see no reason why an evolutionary psychologist would object to my claim that people are more likely to be rational as the private cost of error goes up.

I argued that since political decisions are usually also moral, it’s not clear that the better educated (or the economically educated) will, as a group, be especially qualified. The reason is that it’s far from clear that the class of the (economically) educated won’t also have other traits that might narrow and damage their moral vision. I gave the examples of race, class, gender, and religion, knowing full well that Caplan, as he points out in his reply, wisely controlled for those in his research. The point I made was that we now know to control for those particular factors, but it’s often hasty to suppose that history is over. It would not be unreasonable to worry that there might well yet be other factors that travel with higher education that skew the sample enough to outweigh the beneficial effects of the extra education.

I don’t say whether or not there is strong reason to have those doubts, but only that it would not be unreasonable to have them given the history of these matters. So whether or not I have the doubts, some reasonable citizens could. That alone is enough to make it unjustified to expect all citizens to see the fact that decisions were made by college graduates or economists as a justification for the authority or legitimate enforcement of the decisions.

Caplan might think: “look, whatever other reasonable people might think, you and I know the economists know best. So they should get more votes.” But I believe this is a fallacy—the expert/boss fallacy, as I call it. It’s the same kind of reasoning as the patent non sequitur: “I’m right about what the law should be. Therefore I should rule.” You might be correct, but what makes you boss?

What’s missing is some premise or principle that ties expertise to authority in that way. How about this: whoever actually knows best what should be done is permitted to make and coercively enforce laws accordingly? That isn’t very plausible. In order to know whether the Catholics had a right to rule, we’d just need to decide whether they were correct. Or, if they were powerful enough, only they would have to decide, and we would be spared the trouble. This doesn’t seem to come out right. But substitute “economists” for “Catholics” and the form of the argument doesn’t change, and doesn’t improve.

I think that your moral/political expertise is only a justification for your political authority if your claim of expertise is generally acceptable. Not to everyone, however crazy or vicious, but to some wide range of divergent views that are neither crazy nor vicious even though many will be incorrect (call these the “reasonable” views or something, and work would need to go into defining its boundaries, of course). This would explain why even if Catholics are right about what the laws should be, that doesn’t make them legitimate bosses over the rest of us. Same for economists. I conjecture that no invidious comparisons between the supposed political knowers and the non-knowers would pass the test of general acceptability. And yet, I don’t think this ruins the whole concern with making substantively good political decisions, a concern I share with Caplan. But I’ll keep this post short(-ish), and come back to that.

I thought you might say that, David. Here’s a question for you. In your reaction essay, you wrote “I agree with Caplan (against many) that the quality of political decisions matters, not just the process.” But even if someone knows how to substantially improve the quality of political decisions, you don’t think they should overrule the majority.

Ultimately, then, it seems like you support the democratic process regardless of the quality of its decisions. Do you? If not, when would you be willing to overrule the majority?

Unrelated point: It’s interesting that Estlund appeals to the quasi-libertarian idea that even though the majority may not know what it’s doing, we shouldn’t boss it around.

The problem is that very often what the majority wants to do is boss people around. If a panel of economists prevents the majority from imposing a tariff, for example, they aren’t so much bossing the majority around as preventing the majority from bossing consumers around.

In any case, if you think that it’s arrogant for people to boss others around just because they know better, how much more arrogant is it for people to boss others around even though they don’t know better?

Bryan, you sensibly ask whether I can really maintain (as I claim to) that the quality of the decisions is important, even though I don’t think you are entitled to overrule the majority even when you know what decisions would be better. Do I support the democratic process regardless of the quality of the decisions?

Just before I answer that, remember I tried to put the view you flirt with here into an uncomfortable corner. So there’s still a question for you hanging out there: Do you think that “I know best” is a fully sufficient basis for “I should rule?” So, the only reason the Catholics aren’t entitled to rule the rest of us is because their views are actually wrong? Yikes. And does that mean that the advocates of the true world view get to rule the rest of us? The inference from experts to bosses doesn’t seem to hold up.

Now, I agree with you that democracy cannot be defended without any attention to how well it can be expected to perform on substantive grounds. The question that motivates my thinking about democracy is precisely whether this epistemic dimension can be incorporated into our account of political authority without being led to “epistocracy,” or rule of the knowers, a la Plato (and Caplan?). I think non-epistemic defenses of democracy can be shown to be deeply inadequate. (Maybe more on this later.)

So let me just very briefly telegraph the structure of the view I defend at great length elsewhere in order to indicate that I do indeed think that quality of decisions matters AND that you don’t get to rule just by knowing best. We can fill in the blanks as we go on if you like.

As I said in my previous post, I think political justification requires a kind of general acceptability. I argue that it is unlikely that any proposed identification of the epistocrats (those better qualified to rule) can meet that test. (The most formidable candidate is probably the one you propose: the educated. So I devote a chapter to it in my book… oops I was going to try not to plug the book.) If epistocracy can’t meet the test, can any epistemic strategy meet it? Well, notice that the idea (bear with me) that multiple people talking and thinking together can apply intelligence to political problems in such a way as to perform at least better than random, has the following salient feature: it doesn’t rely on any invidious comparisons between the knowers and the non-knowers, and yet proposes an epistemic engine rather than a merely procedural standard. OK, that raises tons of questions, but we don’t want long posts, so I’ll pause. But the answer to your question is that I do agree we need the epistemic dimension, and I don’t agree that this leads in an epistocratic direction.

In his most recent post, “The Bossy Majority,” Caplan rightly says that when a majority rules, it bosses people around every bit as much as a panel of economic experts with the power of review would be bossing people around. (Well, let’s just say in both cases they boss people. “Bossing around” connotes something extra, a kind of limitless power to boss arbitrarily. I don’t mean the majority or the panel would be doing that.) He seems to suggest that there might be some tension in my view then, since I don’t want the people bossed around by experts. In reply, I should be clear that I don’t for a moment think that there can’t ever be legitimate bosses. “What makes you boss?” is not meant to be rhetorical. I think in some cases there can be a satisfactory answer. My argument was that “because I know best” isn’t a satisfactory answer. It wouldn’t justify the rule of economists or college graduates, any more than it would justify the rule of the Pope or my mother, even if they do know best.

A tiny thing: Caplan calls my concern about the majority being illegitimately bossed around “quasi-libertarian.” I just don’t want terminology to confuse us. If he means that this is close to, or a version of, or a concession to political libertarianism, I think that’s not right. (And he must have meant that. If he just meant “having something to do with liberty,” then there would have been no point in saying “quasi.”) Every modern political philosophy is centrally concerned with locating the proper limits of state authority. There’s nothing libertarian about it. It would be a little like saying that when Caplan grants that state authority can be appropriately used to regulate markets in some cases where things are going badly wrong, he is being quasi-socialist. But as I say, this is not about the main point Caplan was making, which I address in the paragraph just above.

David writes:

“What makes you boss?” is not meant to be rhetorical. I think in some cases there can be a satisfactory answer. My argument was that “because I know best” isn’t a satisfactory answer.

Frankly, if you can accurately say “because I know best,” it seems a lot more satisfactory than if you can accurately say “because there are more of us.” Let me hasten to add that David tries to offer a more sophisticated account based on what he calls “general acceptability,” but this seems very close to a circular defense of democracy.

Or is it? David explains that:

I think that your moral/political expertise is only a justification for your political authority if your claim of expertise is generally acceptable. Not to everyone, however crazy or vicious, but to some wide range of divergent views that are neither crazy nor vicious even though many will be incorrect (call these the “reasonable” views or something, and work would need to go into defining its boundaries, of course).

To be honest, I view e.g. the economic views of the average American as at least moderately crazy and vicious. So perhaps I can recast my argument in David’s terms. Unless we’re going to take the circular route and make popularity the standard of what’s “reasonable,” then my claim is many of the public’s views simply aren’t reasonable.

I don’t expect David to agree, but I would like to know how incorrect the majority can get before he’s willing to say it’s too unreasonable to be the boss.

A number of people who read my original essay interpreted it as a defense of experts’ right to tell individuals how to live their lives. This is a good time to set the record straight. Here goes…

In one of my all-time favorite songs, Morrissey says:

So…the life I have made

May seem wrong to you

But, I’ve never been surer

It’s my life to ruin

My own way

If I were giving expert advice to an individual about how to run his life, I’d heed this reply—even if I knew for sure what was best for the individual in question.

But when the majority asks for the same latitude, it’s a very different story. The majority isn’t just asking for the freedom to makes its own mistakes. It’s ordering all of us to pay for its mistakes. If the majority supports price controls on gasoline, for example, we all have to live with the shortages, the lines, and the other inefficiencies.

You can say that it’s arrogant for experts to try to overrule the majority on this basis. But would it be fairer to say that the majority was arrogant to impose its folly in the first place?

Thanks to Bryan for engaging my comments so energetically. In his post “The Circularity of General Acceptability, ” Bryan wonders whether the general acceptability approach to political justification that I sketch in a previous post might be a circular justification for democracy and against rule of experts.

A circular argument would be one that assumes the truth of its conclusion amongst its premises. The general acceptability approach assumes nothing either way about whether political authority must be democratic. There are two parts to the answer. First, you might think it presupposes democracy because general acceptability is itself a democratic test. The name alone might easily suggest this, but the actual criterion dispels the suggestion. To see this we need to stipulate that democracy, whatever else it involves, must involve the actual collective authorization of the laws by the people subject to them. The general acceptability condition isn’t a test of actual acceptance, but acceptability, which is hypothetical. So for example, we ask whether the alleged moral/political wisdom of economists is acceptable to the wide range of reasonable points of view, counting many mistaken views as nevertheless reasonable. Not whether it is or has been actually accepted. So it is not a democratic principle.

It might still seem akin to democracy in seeking a kind of “popularity,” to use another way Caplan puts his worry. But the question of acceptability to all reasonable points of view has nothing to do with how many people it is acceptable to. I agree with him that the mere fact that more people do or could approve of an arrangement is so far not saying much to justify it. By contrast, saying that no reasonable objection to it is possible is saying something more signficant.

Quickly, a second way to see that the general acceptability approach does not beg the question in favor of democracy is to see that on this view if the superior moral/political wisdom of the economists were generally acceptable in this sense, then that would, I believe justify their rule (within limits of course, just as there are limits on democratic authority).

Bryan raises another point in that post about how badly the majority has to go wrong before I would desist. I hope to come back to that. Here I am just responding to the charge of circularity. And recall why it matters to Bryan’s original argument. He claims that economists and college graduates ought to have more votes because they know best. I say knowing best doesn’t establish a right to rule unless the claims to expertise are generally acceptable in a certain way. I argue they are not, but if they had been then democracy would have lost. So we have not begged the question in favor of democracy.

One thing this conversation has brought out is how uncomfortable people are at the idea of overruling the majority. Even if it’s clearly making a mistake, shouldn’t the majority be free to choose?

This line of reasoning makes libertarians uncomfortable, but for no good reason. After all, when the majority votes for protectionism, it isn’t just hurting itself. To over-rule the majority on an issue like this is to prevent them from imposing their misguided will on the minority.

More interestingly, there isn’t even a superficially plausible reason for non-libertarians to object to overruling popular but socially harmful policies. Who but a libertarian has any principled objection to stopping people from hurting themselves? Paternalism provides the rationale for everything from Social Security (if you don’t force people to save for their retirement, they might end up on the streets) to drug prohibition (if you let people ruin their lives with drugs, they might). If you’re willing to embrace this line of thinking—as practically every non-libertarian is—you have at least as much reason to try to stop the majority from adopting policies that impoverish it.

Whatever your philosophical starting point, then, defending the majority’s right to be wrong doesn’t make a lot of sense.

In his post “Overruling the Majority,” Caplan says that this conversation shows “how uncomfortable people are at the idea of overruling the majority.”

Few believe that majority rule ought to be unlimited; I certainly don’t. Some think the limits can all be explained by the goal of protecting democracy itself, but I doubt that could explain why a majority may not boil anyone in oil, for one example. So I think there are limits to democratic authority, even though it is hard to say where they are and why. If there is someone who is uncomfortable with ever overruling the majority, I don’t know who they are, but I agree with Caplan that they are wrong. If he means me (and, as I write, no one else contributed anything yet) I have only argued here that the majority cannot always be overruled simply because they are mistaken. If there’s discomfort on my part, it would be because I suspect that Caplan might think that the majority may always be overruled when it is mistaken.

In Caplan’s initial essay, interference with majority decisions was supported by pointing out that voters’ decisions don’t just affect themselves but they affect others. Now, in “Overruling the Majority” he supports overruling the majority when, and because, they harm themselves. There seem to be two cases where Caplan thinks the majority’s mistakes may be overruled: when they affect others, and when they don’t. He is very comfortable indeed with the idea of overruling the majority when they are wrong.

In case there’s still any question about the reaches of this comfort, in his reply to Lomasky, Caplan cheerfully (comfortably) allows that his analysis is much like Plato’s, the main difference being that his own is better defended. The consistent message from Caplan, so far, is that there is nothing to be said for democracy’s authority unless democracy happens to be better than any expert at getting the right answers–something he finds very unlikely. College grads and economists can, he thinks, do better. So much for democratic authority. I’m very happy to see the grounds of democratic authority questioned, since that’s how we come to understand things. At the moment, I just want it to be quite clear where the Plato/Caplan inference from expertise to authority leads. He accepts Lomasky’s label: “the Plato/Caplan antidemocrats.”

So, virtually all modern democratic thinkers agree that the majority’s authority has limits, and often the reason for the limits is to prevent the majority from marching off a cliff. That unprovocative boilerplate isn’t what Caplan argues for. He thinks that whoever knows best is thereby entitled to rule, and that it is not usually the voters. So what needs to be engaged (as I have tried to do in previous posts) is this ancient theory of authority.

Caplan and I agree that markets are better than democracy. The reason I support markets is that they don’t rely on anyone having sound theoretical knowledge of the sort that seems to be so scarce among both the economically illiterate masses and the highly educated elites. Caplan and I disagree, then, about whether rule by the highly educated is preferable to democracy—a real Hobson’s choice. The highly educated are, like everyone else, ignorant and mistake-prone human beings and, as I pointed out, they tend to “compensate” with dogmatism for their greater store of information. It’s their dogmas that allow them to assimilate more information in the first place, by means of (usually spurious) theories about the way the world works that tend to screen in ideology-friendly data, but that, unfortunately, tend to screen out discrepant data.[1]

Caplan asks whether I wouldn’t rather be ruled by an economically literate elite than by the economically illiterate masses. Sure I would. If I were king, I’d choose the most economically literate advisers I could find (“It’s good to be king!”). But while that may be an argument—in my mind, at least—for making me king, it’s hardly an argument for giving more votes to people with bachelor’s degrees, or to councils of economics Ph.D.s. It so happens that at this particular point in history, American economists agree with me (and Caplan) on a few basic issues, such as free trade. But from the 1930s through the 1970s, economics was, from a free-market perspective, a disaster area, as it is in many other countries right now. So the temporary agreement of Caplan’s moderately Democratic colleagues with more pro-market views than are held by the general public doesn’t mean that we should institutionalize the rule of economist-kings, or the rule of the more educated slice of the public that (presumably through having majored in business or economics) seems to have picked up unusually pro-market views.

Before giving more votes to the better educated, I’d like to get from Caplan, if not the “guarantee” that Lomasky demands, at least some reason to think that there’s a general tendency for economists, and thus for their students, to escape the delusional ideologies that have captured other social sciences, ruined the minds of their students, and captured the minds of economists, too, in many times and places. Need it be said that human beings, even smart and well-educated ones, and even economists, aren’t implanted with some laissez-faire chip that would ensure their tendency to believe in what free-marketeers think is true? The only equipment with which people are equipped are their defective reasoning powers and the historically variable doctrines into which they have been educated, which may well include doctrines that Caplan deplores.

It’s when I try to figure out how Caplan could miss such an obvious objection to his elitist institutional proposals that I’m led to speculate that he thinks that there’s something self-evident about economic truth that will magnetically draw people toward it—if only “irrational” barriers to this progress are removed. That’s the heroic epistemic assumption to which I object, and which I suspect stems from Caplan’s embrace of the orthodox economist’s assumption that Homo economicus is—or would be, given the right incentives—perfectly well informed. Caplan’s comments about religion reinforce my suspicion.

Caplan points out that people are emotionally attached to their religious ideas (like their economic ideas). True enough. But such attachments aren’t “irrational” if the religious ideas are true. To call people’s emotional attachment to religious beliefs irrational, then Caplan has to assume that these beliefs are incorrect—and that the religious believers know that they’re incorrect. Likewise, in discussing people’s attachment to anti-free-market economic ideas, Caplan assumes that these ideas are wrong and that everyone knows it.

I’m willing to stipulate that anti-free-market ideas are wrong, for the sake of argument. But I won’t stipulate that people who believe in anti-free-market ideas know that they’re wrong. Caplan has the burden of proof here, and he has not even begun to discharge it. Instead, he simply assumes that somebody operating with “normal” intellectual standards, unclouded by emotion, would agree with free-market ideas. As with the supposed tendency of professional economists to converge on the truth, Caplan this assumption treats people’s default position as full knowledge of, and agreement with, free-market ideas. So when people display an emotional attachment to other ideas—which Caplan thinks are self-evidently false—it must be because people are irrational. (Isn’t it more plausible that people get emotionally attached to their beliefs because they think those beliefs are true?) Therefore, Caplan infers—as orthodox economists are wont to do—that people’s mistakes must be due to deficient incentives, not to simple human fallibility.

Thus, when it comes to public-policy issues involving economic theory, the incentive to hold correct beliefs must be lacking—as Caplan blithely asserts is true when it comes to religious issues. “If you underestimate … the evidence in favor of the theory of evolution,” he writes, “what happens to you? In all probability, the same thing that would have happened to you if you knew the whole truth.” Well, yes—if the theory of evolution is true! But if it’s false, as the religious believers in question think, then believing in evolution could lead to eternal damnation. If that’s not sufficient incentive to find the truth, what would be?

Caplan seems to be unfamiliar with (i.e., ignorant of) the doctrines of salvation taught by the religions in which most people believe. If people’s salvation is at stake, nothing could be more important to them than getting religion right. Yet it’s true that, by virtue of the sheer arithmetic of religious disagreement, most (if not all) people have evidently gotten religion wrong. How can this be explained if not through an appeal to most people’s ignorance of the correct religious doctrine, whatever it is? Caplan wants to explain religious errors, like all errors, without allowing that people might go astray inadvertently (as by being born into a family or a culture that taught them an erroneous religion). But since the “incentives” explanation for why people would believe (to be true!) what they know to be false cannot apply to religion, where the incentives for arriving at the truth couldn’t be higher, Caplan’s position amounts to saying that when it comes to religion, people are just nuts. This is an explanation that explains nothing.

Caplan begs the question against religion by assuming that any given religion is so manifestly dubious that religious adherents are irrational if they don’t indefinitely (i.e., for all practical purposes, permanently) defer the conclusions to which they (not Caplan) think the evidence points; and for not seriously investigating other religions that, according to what they think they know about those religions, contradict the evidence. Could these believers be missing out on the truth by not investigating alternative religious viewpoints? Certainly. But that would make them wrong because they’re ignorant—not wrong because they know it, but emotionally refuse to do anything about it. Similarly, Caplan begs the question against non-orthodox economic conclusions by assuming that nobody could agree with them out of simple, inadvertent error.

The premise of all this question begging seems to be that the world is so pellucid that people’s misconceptions about it constitute anomalies—paradoxes that can be explained only if people know that their ideas are misconceptions, but believe in them anyway for emotional reasons. But if the world is a complicated place about which people can easily be uninformed, misinformed, or otherwise mistaken, it’s no paradox for people to genuinely, even passionately, believe in the truth of what is in fact false.

Caplan suggests that there’s something naïve about my view that people’s beliefs about what is true motivate their opinions (about what is true), and hence their emotional attachment to those opinions. I’d like to hear a cogent argument for what’s naïve about that view. In fact, I’d like to hear a cogent account of whatever the alternative view would be. What could it possibly mean for people to “believe” (whether passionately or not) in ideas that they knew were untrue?

After all, even if one suspects that a truth will be unpleasant, and therefore tortures the facts to avoid facing that unpleasantness, one wouldn’t need to torture the facts if it were possible to believe in something that one knows is contrary to the facts. The problem with the orthodox economist’s skepticism that people can be inadvertently wrong, then, isn’t just that this skepticism entails absurdly unrealistic assumptions about how easy it is to be right. Nor is the problem that it’s cynical to think that people believe in whatever serves their interests (whether their rational interests or, in Caplan’s account, their emotional interests), rather than accepting that people believe in what they think is true. The problem with the economist’s view isn’t its cynicism, but its incoherence. Nobody needs an incentive to believe in what he thinks is true; believing in what one thinks is true is simply coextensive with believing anything, period. Conversely, even perverse incentives can’t explain perverse beliefs, because the very notion of “perverse beliefs” is self-contradictory, despite its popularity (and the popularity of the twin notion of “willful ignorance”). There are plenty of false beliefs, but nobody can “believe” to be true what he knows is false. Therefore, false beliefs must be unwittingly false.

Contrary to Caplan’s interpretation of my view, however, I am not saying that “with enough information,” people would reach correct conclusions. Even if people had all the relevant information (an impossibility, of course; and it’s in the information-gathering process that people’s ideological lenses distort their perceptions), they would still need to be able to think about the information logically in order to reach the right conclusions about it. In suggesting that economic theory is “counterintuitive,” and in speculating that this is because our hunter-gatherer brains weren’t designed to reason about complex modern economies, I was saying that people are, in fact, unlikely to engage in logical economic reasoning. That doesn’t make people irrational, any more than their ignorance of economic theory does; it just makes them mistake-prone. (Someone who fails to understand The Wealth of Nations because he has read it but is mentally retarded is no more irrational than is someone who fails to understand it because he’s never read it.)

Given that either Caplan or I seem to have fallen into grievous logical errors, I rest my case about the possibility that people can be mistaken because of failures in their reasoning. And if it’s Caplan who has made the mistakes, I hope to have suggested that the neoclassical orthodoxy which, nowadays, happens to have led to a professional consensus around certain free-market conclusions is nonetheless an illogical ideology that is believed to be true by some of the most intelligent and well-educated people in the world—like Caplan. So we shouldn’t entrust our fate to the “experts,” if we have any alternative, because they, too, being human, can be mistaken.

Between the economic illiteracy of the general public, the illogic to which all human reasoning is prone, the special difficulties that people seem to have with economic reasoning, and the tendency of even the most illogical doctrines to screen out falsifying evidence, I think that we have a powerful argument against modern social-democratic governments like ours—which, if they are to produce beneficial public policies, require policy makers—whether voters, legislators, or bureaucrats—who reason lucidly about pertinent information. But the problem with such governments isn’t that they empower people who indulge their emotions by doing what they know is wrong. The problem is that they empower people who don’t know what is right.

Inadvertent ignorance—including ignorance of economics, and of logic itself—is neither rational nor irrational unless it is intentional; and “intentional mistake” is a contradiction in terms. The only alternative to such incoherent notions, I think, is to allow that belief in the truth of whatever one “believes” is the same thing as believing it, such that if one believes what is false, one must have aimed at the truth but unintentionally missed the mark—even if one has every incentive to be accurate. Is it really so difficult to accept, in short, that to err is human?

Notes

[1] Appendix B to Jeffrey Friedman, “Democratic Competence in Normative and Positive Theory,” Critical Review 18 (2006), nos. 1-3.

In his original reply, Jeff faulted me for failing to pay attention to how people actually form beliefs and fall into error. But now he’s switched to the much stronger claim that the very idea of irrationality is somehow philosophically incoherent:

To call people’s emotional attachment to religious beliefs irrational, then Caplan has to assume that these beliefs are incorrect—and that the religious believers know that they’re incorrect.

[…]

Nobody needs an incentive to believe in what he thinks is true; believing in what one thinks is true is simply coextensive with believing anything, period. Conversely, even perverse incentives can’t explain perverse beliefs, because the very notion of “perverse beliefs” is self-contradictory, despite its popularity (and the popularity of the twin notion of “willful ignorance”). There are plenty of false beliefs, but nobody can “believe” to be true what he knows is false. Therefore, false beliefs must be unwittingly false.

So, Jeff, how would you classify the beliefs of someone who hastily and uncritically accepts conclusions that he would like to be true, but skeptically resists conclusions that he would like to be false? This isn’t literally a case of believing what you know to be false. But it is a case of relaxing intellectual discipline to get to the beliefs you’d like to have. I think that’s enough to qualify as “perverse belief,” “willful ignorance,” or “irrationality.” Why don’t you?

Jeff writes:

But while that may be an argument—in my mind, at least—for making me king, it’s hardly an argument for giving more votes to people with bachelor’s degrees, or to councils of economics Ph.D.s. It so happens that at this particular point in history, American economists agree with me (and Caplan) on a few basic issues, such as free trade. But from the 1930s through the 1970s, economics was, from a free-market perspective, a disaster area, as it is in many other countries right now. So the temporary agreement of Caplan’s moderately Democratic colleagues with more pro-market views than are held by the general public doesn’t mean that we should institutionalize the rule of economist-kings, or the rule of the more educated slice of the public that (presumably through having majored in business or economics) seems to have picked up unusually pro-market views.

I agree that economists were less pro-market from the 30s to the 70s than they are today. Almost everyone was less pro-market back then. While we don’t have good data, I see no reason to doubt that economists and the well-educated were – compared to the general population – relatively more pro-market throughout the 20th century. In a similar vein, economists in the U.S. are more pro-market than economists in most other countries. Nevertheless, economists around the world usually seem quite pro-market relative to public opinion in their home countries.

So what do I have to do to convince you, Jeff? Would you be satisfied if my data spanned the century and the world? Or would that still be too “temporary” for you?

I have mainly argued against Bryan’s inference from the supposed superior expertise of economists and college grads to their having political authority. But Bryan is partly concerned just to show that voters are ignorant and irrational to a disturbing degree, and that would be important whether or not it directly supports the authority of experts. What, then, might its importance be? (Thanks to Will Wilkinson for pressing this.)

One set of questions concern how we are to conceptualize the idea of voter competence so that we know what we mean when we say they don’t have it. There are some puzzles about this. We have already discussed the wrinkle introduced by the fact that political decisions are also typically moral. That means there is no generally accepted answer key by which to grade performance. But I put that aside here.

Here’s a second puzzle about the idea of voter competence: Suppose we set the wisdom-checkers loose on parents rather than voters. We ask them questions about child development, nutritional science, educational techniques, effective discipline strategies, medications, household safety, etc. How well do you think they would do? There are some studies of this kind, and of course parents can be shown not to know very much about these ostensibly important topics. This doesn’t begin to convince me that parents generally do a lousy job. So I’m not sure why we should take the very same kind of data about voters to be so disheartening. Certainly, in both cases it makes sense to bring this kind of information to people, but that’s different. What should we make of this analogy?

A third puzzle about voter competence is this: How do we know we have not already taken a lot of competence for granted before framing the questions that purport to demonstrate ignorance? If I want to know whether you know how your car works, it might seem silly to ask you what the tires are made of, or what fuel it runs on. Silly, only because OF COURSE you know that. But if I ask you how the clutch works, or whether your car has a fuel injector, you might look pretty ignorant pretty fast (I would). But if we assumed that most people knew those things too, we could still easily find questions to separate the real car knowers from the rest of us. But which set of data should we use to conclude that people are woefully ignorant or irrational in their views about how cars work? You might say that the analogy doesn’t work because we entrust our cars to experts after all. But we do that by choice, and we choose our experts. Some of the experts are chosen democratically, like those who set the inspection standards, safety standards, efficiency standards, etc. Others are chosen in the market, such as your favorite mechanic. The analogy isn’t perfect, but I think it displays this puzzle: what counts as seriously defective knowledge, given that we can always find difference between some who know more and some who know less.

A second whole set of questions concern what should be done if voters are indeed grievously incompetent. My own view of democratic legitimacy and authority does depend on some level of competence: aggregate performance better than a random device. It’s a long story why that’s the criterion, but I just note that I share Bryan’s view that voter competence matters. If the best theory of legitimacy and authority requires some level, and that level is not met, we ought to either see if we had the wrong theory, or conclude that democracy does not provide legitimacy or authority (or, perhaps, not yet). I take no stand on whether we are in that situation, partly because I don’t have a firm view about how to measure voter competence beyond the wisdom-checking that yields results of uncertain use.

One thing Bryan and I certainly agree about is that since voter competence matters, it would be good to work toward improving it. I join him in encouraging economists to work to educate the public for their political role. To economists I add lawyers, doctors, teachers, nurses, programmers, secretaries, journalists, retailers, students, police, etc. It is natural to ask whether there is an appropriate role for the state in this kind of citizen education. I believe there is, although I would be quite careful about how specific public teachings should be. A view’s being true would not be enough to get it on the curriculum. We might be right, but what makes us boss?

David raises some great questions – questions that could take a book to answer. Fortunately, that book is coming out in the spring: Look for The Myth of the Rational Voter forthcoming from Princeton University Press.

P.S. If you’re feeling bored with conversation around the dinner table tomorrow, don’t forget that Thanksgiving is a golden opportunity to fight economic illiteracy!

The editor of Cato Unbound has asked for a “summing up.”

In my opinion, Bryan Caplan has his finger on the most important, and neglected, issue in political theory. But he has misconstrued what is revealed by his own data, and has therefore concluded that the problem he’s analyzing is democracy.

His data, like a wealth of data compiled by political scientists, demonstrates not “irrationality,” but ignorance: in this case, ignorance of economics. But simple, ubiquitous, politically disastrous human ignorance doesn’t constitute an argument against democracy unless the alternative is rule by elites. And despite my request for one, Caplan has provided no reason to think that ignorance will not afflict elites as well as the mass public.

Some of the best-educated people I know are among the most economically illiterate. And from the perspective of any given school of economics (or any other discipline), even the consensus of “experts” in that field may be woefully ignorant. Moreover, since political psychology has shown that the better informed someone is, the more dogmatic he tends to be, the ignorance so often displayed by “experts” is particularly incorrigible and thus very dangerous, unless the experts in question happen to be dogmatists of the truth—which, in any given case, is unlikely.

The problem, then, is not democracy, but any system of government in which political decision makers are expected to master the complexities of modern civilization—which human brains were not equipped to grasp. It’s not democratic decision making, but political decision making of any kind, that will tend to be an exercise in “stumbling in the dark” (as Ludwig von Mises characterized what economic decision making would look like under communism).

The answer, then, may be to maximize the “rule” of markets.

Markets place far lower cognitive demands on people than do attempts to regulate markets. The key to markets’ epistemic advantage is that consumers can migrate from one product to another based on the feedback they get from consuming the products. This process of experimentation doesn’t require particularly well-informed or logical theorizing on the consumers’ part.

If I don’t like ice cream Brand A, I don’t need to have a theory about why it tastes bad. I just need to be able to try Brand B. But if the government tries to improve on Brand A, the political decision maker—whether the voter or an “expert” legislator or bureaucrat—has to have the right theory about how to make the best ice cream. This is too much to ask of any given human being. Markets throw fallible entrepreneurs’ different theories of what makes for the best products open to a process of competition in which the consumers is king—but in which consumers don’t have to be knowledgeable or logical kings in order to rule well.

However, consumers still need to have some information (namely, about which brand pleases them), and some logical abilities (so they can judge whether their displeasure with Brand A was caused by the product itself or by some other circumstance). Those are pretty easy requirements for consumers to fulfill, but a greater difficulty is that as private decisions get less repeatable than are purchases of ice cream (for example, when people choose which career to embark upon, how much to save for retirement, or which house to buy), the advantage of experimentation will diminish, because there will be fewer opportunities to experiment. Also, there may be systematic psychological biases, such as those discovered by “behavioral economics” (which is really psychology applied to economic decisions), that to some degree nullify the advantage of experimentation.

I state these qualifications because, too often, arguments for markets are made dogmatically, and I don’t want that to happen to the ignorance-based argument. That said, the ignorance-based argument[1] seems to be very strong—and precisely because of the point that Caplan gets wrong.

Despite the fact that individuals make many terrible mistakes in their private decisions, there’s no group of decision-making “experts” whom we could trust to improve on these mistakes. Rule by psychologist-kings would be no more desirable than rule by economist-kings. So as long as we have reason to think that in their private decision making, people’s reliance on the feedback from their decisions will be less cognitively taxing than political decision making tends to be, then I think we have a supremely realistic case for libertarianism.

Notes

[1] Presented more fully in my “The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance,” Critical Review vol. 17, nos. 1-2.