Bryan Caplan on the Myth of the Rational Voter

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🗓️ 25 June 2007

⏱️ 81 minutes

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Summary

Bryan Caplan, of George Mason University and blogger at EconLog, talks about his book, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. Caplan argues that democracies work well in giving voters what they want but unfortunately, what voters want isn't particularly wise, especially when it comes to economic policy. He outlines a series of systematic biases we often have on economic topics and explains why we have little or no incentive to improve our understanding of the world and vote wisely. So, it's not special interests that are messing things up but the very incentives that lie at the heart of a vote-based system. This is a disturbing and provocative lens for viewing political outcomes.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:12.5	I'm your host Russ Roberts of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover
0:17.3	Institution.
0:18.7	Our website is econtalk.org, where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast,
0:25.8	and find links to other information related to today's conversation.
0:29.9	Our email address is mail at econtalk.org, we'd love to hear from you.
0:37.5	My guest today is Brian Kaplan, my colleague here at the Department of Economics at George
0:41.6	Mason University.
0:43.3	He blogs with Arnold Kling at Econ Log, and he is the author of the myth of the rational
0:48.7	voter, why democracies choose bad policies.
0:53.0	Brian, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:54.6	Thank you very much Russ.
0:56.2	Brian, good to be back.
0:57.5	Well, yeah, this is a return appearance for you.
1:00.4	Today we're going to talk about your book, The Myth of the Rational Voter.
1:05.6	Democracies often pursue some pretty bad policies.
1:08.6	When economists and political scientists try and explain bad policies, they usually argue
1:12.7	that special interests hijack and subvert the political process.
1:18.0	So steel tariffs occur because the benefits to the steel producers are concentrated and
1:23.0	the losses to any individual consumer of a refrigerator are so small.
1:28.2	So the public at large doesn't really have an incentive to get too worked up over this
1:32.1	may not know all the details.
	...

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