The greatest obstacle to sound economic policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters. This is economist Bryan Caplan's sobering assessment in this provocative and eye-opening book.
Caplan argues that voters continually elect politicians who either share their biases or else pretend to, resulting in bad policies winning again and again by popular demand. Boldly calling into question our most basic assumptions about American politics, Caplan contends that democracy fails precisely because it does what voters want. Through an analysis of Americans' voting behavior and opinions on a range of economic issues, he makes the convincing case that noneconomists suffer from four prevailing biases: they underestimate the wisdom of the market mechanism, distrust foreigners, undervalue the benefits of conserving labor, and pessimistically believe the economy is going from bad to worse. Caplan lays out several bold ways to make democratic government work better - for example, urging economic educators to focus on correcting popular misconceptions and reccomending that democracies do less and let markets take up the slack.
The Myth of the Rational Voter takes an unflinching look at how people who vote under the influence of false beliefs ultimately end up with government that delivers lousy results. With the upcoming presidential election season drawing nearer, this thought-provoking book is sure to spark a long-overdue reappraisal of our elective system.
This book is published by Princeton University Press.
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"This was a fairly quick read- only 200 pages with a fair number of charts, tables and other data presentations, so it was pretty easy going. The argument is interesting- Caplan essentially claims that voters are systemically biased against policies that pretty much all economists, of whatever political stripe, agree are best (the most obvious example being free trade, which economists have known for centuries makes society better off, but still gets a bad rap from the majority of voters). He notes that higher educational attainment is the primary determinant of "rational" voting (not specifically economics education, though) and that voters are not apt to be self-interested in their choices(in other words, they will choose candidates who espouse policies they believe to be best for society, irrespective of whether they believe those policies make them personally better off). Caplan's argument, though concise, is methodical, empirical and thorough, though he makes liberal use of citations rather than presenting every supporting study in the book.
Ultimately, Caplan concludes that the combination of several systemic biases among the voting populace and the tendency of voters not to be self-interested actually results in a political class that does not generally act in society's best interests, which we all pretty much suspect. Of course, Caplan believes, along wit most economists, that markets are better suited to serve society's interests than is government, even a democratically elected one, so his conclusions are likely annoy all but economic libertarians. Which is fair, but it's worth reading the book even if you're inclined to disagree, because he explores every objection along the way, and doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room for convenient arguments. His main opponents, in his view, are those who take the approach that the electorate is "rational" in some sense, and he draws quite a bit on behavorial economists like Thaler. However, I suspect that Caplan takes Thaler's points even further than Thaler would like, claiming that while biases might occur in markets, they also occur in government, where they can do more damage due to the concentrated power government wields. It was also enjoyably written for the layman, with very little jargon and no need to understand any higher math."
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Jim (4 out of 5 stars)