The Myth of the Rational Voter Quotes

“Good intentions are ubiquitous in politics; what is scarce is accurate beliefs.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“Both bad driving and bad voting are dangerous not merely to the individual who practices them, but to innocent bystanders.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“What happens if fully rational politicians compete for the support of irrational voters — specifically, voters with irrational beliefs about the effects of various policies? It is a recipe for mendacity.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“Market fundamentalism is a harsh accusation. Christian fundamentalists are notorious for their strict biblical literalism, their unlimited willingness to ignore or twist the facts of geology and biology to match their prejudices. For the analogy to be apt, the typical economist would have to believe in the superiority of markets virtually without exception, regardless of the evidence, and dissenters would have to fear excommunication. From this standpoint, the charge of “market fundamentalism” is silly, failing even as a caricature. If you ask the typical economist to name areas where markets work poorly, he gives you a list on the spot: Public goods, externalities, monopoly, imperfect information, and so on. More importantly, almost everything on the list can be traced back to other economists. Market failure is not a concept that has been forced upon a reluctant economics profession from the outside. It is an internal outgrowth of economists’ self-criticism. After stating that markets usually work well, economists feel an urge to identify important counterexamples. Far from facing excommunication for sin against the sanctity of the market, discoverers of novel market failures reap professional rewards. Flip through the leading journals. A high fraction of their articles present theoretical or empirical evidence of market failure.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“take the opposite approach: Voters’ lack of decisiveness changes everything. Voting is not a slight variation on shopping. Shoppers have incentives to be rational. Voters do not. The naive view of democracy, which paints it as a public forum for solving social problems, ignores more than a few frictions. It overlooks the big story inches beneath the surface. When voters talk about solving social problems, they primary aim is to boost their self-worth by casting off the workaday shackles of objectivity.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“Both Mises and Rothbard have passed away, but their outlook—including Ph.D.s who subscribe to it—lives on in the Ludwig von Mises Institute. But groups like these have basically given up on mainstream economics; members mostly talk to each other and publish in their own journals. The closest thing to market fundamentalists are not merely outside the mainstream of the economics profession. They are way outside.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“If voters are systematically mistaken about what policies work, there is a striking implication: They will not be satisfied by the politicians they elect. A politician who ignores the public’s policy preferences looks like a corrupt tool of special interests. A politician who implements the public’s policy preferences looks incompetent because of the bad consequences.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“Since well-educated people are better voters, another tempting way to improve democracy is to give voters more education. Maybe it would work. But it would be expensive, and as mentioned in the previous chapter, education may be a proxy for intelligence or curiosity. A cheaper strategy, and one where a causal effect is more credible, is changing the curriculum. Steven Pinker argues that schools should try to “provide students with the cognitive skills that are most important for grasping the modern world and that are most unlike the cognitive tools they are born with,” by emphasizing “economics, evolutionary biology, and probability and statistics.”60 Pinker essentially wants to give schools a new mission: rooting out the biased beliefs that students arrive with, especially beliefs that impinge on government policy.61 What should be cut to make room for the new material? There are only twenty-four hours in a day, and a decision to teach one subject is also a decision not to teach another one. The question is not whether trigonometry is important, but whether it is more important than statistics; not whether an educated person should know the classics, but whether it is more important for an educated person to know the classics than elementary economics.62”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“First, there is a large body of empirical evidence on the predictive accuracy of speculative markets, on everything from horse-racing to elections to invasions. “Put your money where your mouth is” turns out to be a great way to get the well informed to reveal what they know, and the poorly informed to quiet down. No system is perfect, but betting markets outperform other methods of prediction in a wide variety of circumstances. The PAM was inspired not by ivory tower theorizing, but by the proven success of betting markets in other areas.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“A person who said, “All the ills of markets can be cured by more markets” would be lampooned as the worst sort of market fundamentalist. Why the double standard? Because unlike market fundamentalism, democratic fundamentalism is widespread. In polite company, you can make fun of the worshippers of Zeus, but not Christians or Jews. Similarly, it is socially acceptable to make fun of market fundamentalism, but not democratic fundamentalism, because market fundamentalists are scarce, and democratic fundamentalists are all around us.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“True market fundamentalists in the economics profession are few and far between. Not only are they absent from the center of the profession; they are rare at the “right-wing” extreme. Milton Friedman, a legendary libertarian, makes numerous exceptions, on everything from money to welfare to antitrust: Our principles offer no hard and fast line how far it is appropriate to use government to accomplish jointly what is difficult or impossible for us to accomplish separately through strictly voluntary exchange. In any particular case of proposed intervention, we must make up a balance sheet, listing separately the advantages and disadvantages.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“Summing up: Correctly interpreted, the simple economic model specifically predicts that people will be less selfish as voters than as consumers. Indeed, like diners at an all-you-can-eat buffet, we should expect voters to “stuff themselves” with moral rectitude. Once again, analogies between voting and shopping are deeply misleading.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“First, altruism and morality generally are consumption goods like any other, so we should expect people to buy more altruism when the price is low.34 Second, due to the low probability of decisiveness, the price of altruism is drastically cheaper in politics than in markets.35 Voting to raise your taxes by a thousand dollars when your probability of decisiveness is 1 in 100,000 has an expected cost of a penny.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“Brennan and Lomasky point to the expressive function of voting. Fans at a football game cheer not to help the home team win, but to express their loyalty. Similarly, citizens might vote not to help policies win, but to express their patriotism, their compassion, or their devotion to the environment. This is not hair-splitting. One implication is that inefficient policies like tariffs or the minimum wage might win because expressing support for them makes people feel good about themselves.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“In the minds of many, one of Winston’s Churchill’s most famous aphorisms cuts the conversation short: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”10 But this saying overlooks the fact that the governments vary in scope as well as form. In democracies the main alternative to majority rule is not dictatorship, but markets.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“It is no accident that both of the substitutes for religion that Hoffer names—nationalism and social revolution—are political. Political/economic ideology is the religion of modernity. Like the adherents of traditional religion, many people find comfort in their political worldview, and greet critical questions with pious hostility.50 Instead of crusades or inquisitions, the twentieth century had its notorious totalitarian movements.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“Remarkably, until the passage of the Representation of the People Act of 1949, Britain retained plural voting for graduates of elite universities and business owners.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“Would we still have a "democracy" if you needed to pass a test of economic literacy to vote? If you needed a college degree? Both of these measures raise the economic understanding of the median voter, leading to more sensible policies. Franchise restrictions were historically used for discriminatory ends, but that hardly implies that they should never be used again for any reason. A test of voter competence is no more objectionable than a driving test.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“Fervent partisans of democracy often grant that democracy and the market are substitutes. As Kuttner puts it, “The democratic state remains the prime counterweight to the market.”45 Their complaint is that the public has less and less say over its destiny because corporations have more and more say over theirs. To “save democracy,” the people must reassert its authority. Fair enough. Though their opponents greatly overstate the extent of privatization and deregulation, these policies take decisions out of the hands of majorities and put them into the hands of business owners. But the critics rarely wonder if this transfer might be desirable. They treat less reliance on democracy as automatically objectionable. This is another symptom of democratic fundamentalism. If all that an economist had to say against a government program were, “That’s government intervention. Government is supplanting markets!” he would be pigeonholed, then marginalized, as a market fundamentalist. But when an equally simplistic cry goes up in the name of democracy, there is a sympathetic audience. It is logically possible that clear-eyed business greed makes better decisions than confused voter altruism. Why not at least compare their performance, instead of prejudging?”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“Still, one should not ignore the upside of political faith: its ability to neutralize the public’s irrationality. A leader who understands the benefits of free trade might ignore the public’s protectionism if he knows that the public will stand behind whatever decision he makes. Since politicians are well educated, and education makes people think more like economists, there is a reason for hope. Blind faith does not create an incentive to choose wisely, but it can eliminate the disincentive to do so. Whether this outweighs the dangers of political faith is an open question.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“If education causes better economic understanding, there is an argument for education subsidies—albeit not necessarily higher subsidies than we have now.62 If the connection is not causal, however, throwing money at education treats a symptom of economic illiteracy, not the disease. You would get more bang for your buck by defunding efforts to “get out the vote.”63 One intriguing piece of evidence against the causal theory is that educational attainment rose substantially in the postwar era, but political knowledge stayed about the same.64”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“Most voters disown selfish motives. They personally back the policies that are best for the country, ethically right, and consistent with social justice. At the same time, they see other voters—not just their opponents, but often their allies too—as deeply selfish. The typical liberal Democrat says he votes his conscience, and”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“After all their investigations, though, economists typically conclude that the man in the street—and the intellectual without economic training—underestimates how well markets work.12 I maintain that something quite different holds for democracy: it is widely over-rated not only by the public but by most economists too. Thus, while the general public underestimates how well markets work, even economists underestimate markets’ virtues relative to the democratic alternative.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“[T]he superstitions to be feared in the present day are much less religious than political; and of all the forms of idolatry I know none more irrational and ignoble than this blind worship of mere numbers. —William Lecky, Democracy and Liberty”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“The serious fact is that the bulk of the really important things economics has to teach are things that people would see for themselves if they were willing to see. —Frank Knight, “The Role of Principles in Economics and Politics”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“Irrationality in politics is not a puzzle. It is precisely what an economic theory of irrationality predicts.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“My findings may not be watertight, but they are more than seaworthy.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“If you do not grasp the difference between orange juice and detergent, brand names will at best help you drink the finest detergent on the market, and wash your dishes with the right amount of pulp.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“the ineradicable prejudice that every action intended to serve the profit interest must be anti-social by this fact alone.”27”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

“Capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. They are going to pass it, whatever the defense they may hear; the only success victorious defense can possibly produce is a change in the indictment.”
― Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies