Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, wherever you are. And welcome to the politics guys with your host, Jay Carson and Michael Baranowski.

Welcome to the politics guys. I'm Michael Baranowski, a political scientist at Northern Kentucky University.

My guest today is Brian Kaplan, Professor of Economics at George Mason University.

Professor Kaplan is the author of multiple books, including The Myth of the Rational Voter,

named The Best Political Book of the Year by the New York Times,

as well as selfish reasons to have

more kids and the case against education forthcoming in 2017 from Princeton University Press.

He's also a blogger at Econ Law.

Professor Kaplan, welcome to the show.

Thanks very much for having me.

You know, given the electoral spectacle that we've just been through, it seems

like a perfect time to talk about the rationality of voters. And you, of course, literally wrote

the book, or well, at least a book on this, the myth of a rational voter, which I liked so much,

I've actually used it in a number of my classes. Well, bless your heart, you know, it's a provocative title. And you certainly don't pull in a number of my classes. Bless your heart.

You know, it's a provocative title, and you certainly don't pull any punches in the book.

Right off, you state that the central idea is that voters are worse than ignorant.

They are, in a word, irrational, and vote accordingly.

And a couple of questions come to mind, for me at least, right at this point. First off, why do you think it's worse to be irrational than ignorant? And second, how did

you reach the conclusion that voters are in fact irrational? Right. So why it's worse to be

rational than ignorance? It just comes down to this. If you're ignorant, you can use common sense to protect yourself from most of the bad consequences. So for example, if someone sends you a spam email and says, give me a million dollars, an ignorant person can just use common sense and say, well, I don't know who this person is. Seems unlikely that this is, that this person's giving me a pile of free money.

So until they convince me otherwise, no.

Or if you're walking by use car lot, it's someone who's ignorant of the quality of the cars,

...