[FRIAM] Clueless: NYTimes 5/27/07 - "systematic folly of voters"

[Bill Eldridge]

As Bob Somersby (www.dailyhowler.com) would say, "Ha ha ha".

A long article in the New York Times reviewing how the public and 
politicians
aren't doing their jobs, but alas, what about the press? Wasn't it the 
NY Times
that let Judith Miller be used as an uncritical spigot for the White House,
deceiving "informed" Americans into thinking they were actually informed?
Isn't it the Times' "well respected" Thomas Friedman who's been saying 
the war
will turn around in 6 months, saying it for about 3 1/2 years now so 
that the
Netroots has now created the "F.U." - Friedman Unit - in his honor?
And that's what the supposed respected objective press was doing -
for the percentage getting their "information" from Fox News, 
fuhgeddaboudit.

Democracy can't be separated from social factors, nor can it be very 
developed
without reasonably free flow of information. If you're pushing for 
democracy in
Soviet Russia, you have relatively low access to information except for 
issues
you witness first hand, so primarily you're lobbying for generic 
improvements in
democracy and freedom of information, but shooting in the dark on a 
variety of
specific choices. You're still likely to take a pro-Russian view of 
foreign affairs
say in Chechnya and Serbia though - even if educated, we're not all 
enlightened
and without biased. If left up to the "informed" intelligentsia of 1917, 
however,
they would quite likely have chosen the Marxist system by election 
anyway, perhaps
preferring the Whites over the Reds if it got that far.

Caplan gives way too much credit to the farsightedness of educated, informed
people, however. In WWI, the "informed" way of fighting wars was sending 
waves
of bodies across the lines to get massacred (even in Iraq-Iran for that 
matter).
Malaysia ignored the "informed" advice of the IMF/World Bank in the 90's and
saved their economy, while other Asian Tigers got blasted by doing what 
economists
thought the appropriate thing.

The throwaway line "they also exaggerate the potential economic harms of 
immigration 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/immigration_and_refugees/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>"
ignores the possibility that maybe the public is observing on a local 
level what politicians
and academics treat abstractly on a global level. 2 days ago, a guy I 
met from Georgia
who worked in airport immigration and was noting how one suburb of 
Atlanta had very obviously
become filled with African Muslims since 9/11 (everyone pushing to get 
their relatives in because
they're worried immigration will get cut off now). I was amazed by how 
quickly suburbs of
Washington were changing in the last 10 years. Pim Fortuyn gained 
prominence by noting the
very real issues and effects involved with immigration and related jobs 
and overcrowding issues
that the politicians were ignoring.

On both an economic and a social level, it's local changes that local 
people voting locally are
likely to take into consideration, and it's not irrational to say, "I 
don't like how my neighborhood's
changing", especially if the change includes increased crime, worse 
schools, decreased house values
and clogged roads. We're talking about an aggregation of localized 
optimums, not a system tuned nationally
or globally. Is that the "best" possible way? Hard for me to say, but in 
some ways, I think uninformed pragmatic
people will often make as reasonable local choices as super-informed 
not-very-clever people.
Whether the country will be better of or the world will approve is 
another issue. I once wrote an
angry letter to Barbara Mikulski complaining about her voting against 
improved CAFE standards
because she was worried about the soccer moms. It's doubtful that the 
soccer moms did the same,
even though they might feel a little bit a guilty about their choice. My 
guess is that they were all
quite well "informed". Buckminster Fuller expressed very well the need 
for solutions to take into
account and use the greed or desires of real people, otherwise it wasn't 
a viable solution.

Last point in what's already way too long is that economists need to 
learn to advertise and market.
Greenspan's worries about paying down the debt too quickly certainly got 
used to gut Social Security
and the surplus. Worries about offshoring computer jobs were met with 
unsatisfying, "It's healthy for the global economy".
Name a well-known columnist or economist who pointed out that 
computer-related fields occupied something
like 5 of the 12 fastest job growers in the US Bureau of Labor 
Statistics 10 year projection, rather than the misleading
doom and gloom from Lou Dobbs. If Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan can get 
millions of people to pay attention
to black holes and basic physics, someone ought to be able to do 
something popular and informative with useful
basic economics that's changing our lives. A $20 Barbie leaves 35 cents 
in China where it's made. Who do you
think keeps the rest of the money? Why won't Lou Dobbs tell us that?

Okay, one other "last" point is that the article ignores issues of 
reactiveness in a system - it can be that we
put up with certain short-term negative effects of democracy while 
having improved long-term stability.
Real situations require real responses and implemented policies, not 
just the abstractness of "less isolationist
but more dovish". Troops along the Maginot Line might seem an acceptable 
compromise, but it takes just
one day to prove you wrong. Debates over security/intrusion vs. 
individual freedom/right to privacy will
persist forever, and there's no magical exact right amount. We'll 
continue to adjust the system based on
threats, technology, attitudes, political changes, etc. And we can't 
ever really prove we're doing it "right" or
in good proportions - we only tend to be able to show we've done it 
without incident or catastrophically.

Steve Kurtz wrote:
> a good case in point on how 'the story' has a fantasy life of its own, 
> and how people really are quite clueless about natural network systems 
> and what happens when you interfere with them..  ph
>
> .... from Steve Kurtz   "Bravo for the NYT publishing this."
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> *May 27, 2007***
>
> *Idea Lab*
>
>
>   Clueless
>
> *By GARY J. BASS*
>
> Of all the people who deserve some blame for the debacle in Iraq, 
> don't forget the American public. Today, about two-thirds of Americans 
> oppose the war. But back in March 2003, when United States troops 
> stormed into Iraq, nearly three out of four Americans supported the 
> invasion. Doves say that the public was suckered into war by a 
> deceitful White House, and hawks say that the press has since led the 
> public to lose its nerve --- but the two sides implicitly agree that 
> the public has been dangerously unsure, or easily propagandized, or 
> ignorant.
>
> The disaster in Iraq has also fed a contradiction in American thinking 
> about democracy. On the one hand, Americans continue to share the 
> triumphalist, post-Soviet conviction that no other system of 
> government has any real legitimacy. On the other hand, there is a 
> deepening despair about whether and how the United States should 
> spread democracy, prompted not just by Iraq but also by the endurance 
> of authoritarianism in booming China and Vietnam and the disheartening 
> Palestinian and Lebanese experiments in democratization.
>
> Now Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University, has 
> attracted notice for raising a pointed question: Do voters have any 
> idea what they are doing? In his provocative new book, "The Myth of 
> the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies," Caplan 
> argues that "voters are worse than ignorant; they are, in a word, 
> irrational --- and vote accordingly." Caplan's complaint is not that 
> special-interest groups might subvert the will of the people, or that 
> government might ignore the will of the people. He objects to the will 
> of the people itself.
>
> In defending democracy, theorists of public choice sometimes invoke 
> what they call "the miracle of aggregation." It might seem obvious 
> that few voters fully understand the intricacies of, say, single-payer 
> universal health care. (I certainly don't.) But imagine, Caplan 
> writes, that just 1 percent of voters are fully informed and the other 
> 99 percent are so ignorant that they vote at random. In a campaign 
> between two candidates, one of whom has an excellent health care plan 
> and the other a horrible plan, the candidates evenly split the 
> ignorant voters' ballots. Since all the well-informed voters opt for 
> the candidate with the good health care plan, she wins. Thus, even in 
> a democracy composed almost exclusively of the ignorant, we achieve 
> first-rate health care.
>
> The hitch, as Caplan points out, is that this miracle of aggregation 
> works only if the errors are random. When that's the case, the 
> thousands of ill-informed votes in favor of the bad health plan are 
> canceled out by thousands of equally ignorant votes in favor of the 
> good plan. But Caplan argues that in the real world, voters make 
> systematic mistakes about economic policy --- and probably other 
> policy issues too.
>
> Caplan's own evidence for the systematic folly of voters comes from a 
> 1996 survey comparing the views of Ph.D. economists and the general 
> public. To the exasperation of the libertarian-minded Caplan, most 
> Americans do not think like economists. They are biased against free 
> markets and against trade with foreigners. Absurdly, they think that 
> the American economy is being hurt by too much spending on foreign 
> aid; they also exaggerate the potential economic harms of immigration 
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/immigration_and_refugees/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>. 
> In a similar vein, Scott L. Althaus, a University of Illinois 
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_illinois/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 
> political scientist, finds that if the public were better informed, it 
> would overcome its ingrained biases and make different political 
> decisions. According to his studies, such a public would be more 
> progressive on social issues like abortion 
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/a/abortion/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> 
> and gay rights, more ideologically conservative in preferring markets 
> to government intervention and less isolationist but more dovish in 
> foreign policy.
>
> If the public doesn't know how to think, is there a solution? Caplan 
> has some radical medicine in mind. To encourage greater economic 
> literacy, he suggests tests of voter competence, or "giving extra 
> votes to individuals or groups with greater economic literacy." Until 
> 1949, he points out, Britain gave extra votes to some business owners 
> and graduates of elite universities. (Since worse-educated citizens 
> are less likely to vote, Caplan dislikes efforts to increase voter 
> turnout.) Most provocatively, perhaps, in an online essay Caplan has 
> suggested a curious twist on the tradition of judicial review: If the 
> Supreme Court can strike down laws as unconstitutional, why shouldn't 
> the Council of Economic Advisers 
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/w/white_house_council_of_economic_advisers/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 
> be able to strike down laws as "uneconomical"? (Caplan's book has been 
> warmly recommended by N. Gregory Mankiw, the former chairman of 
> President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, although Mankiw did not 
> allude to this particular proposal.) Caplan also suggests changing the 
> educational curriculum to stamp out biased beliefs in voters and 
> policy makers alike --- a suggestion as old as Plato's wish that a 
> city's ruling guardians be schooled in the "royal science" of 
> governance, which has seemingly been reincarnated as economics.
>
> Caplan's argument has kicked off some stormy Internet debates. The 
> liberal blogger Ezra Klein wrote: "Obviously I, like most coastal-bred 
> elitists, don't think voters make terribly good decisions. But I also 
> don't think economic actors are particularly rational." He might have 
> added that many policy issues cannot be decided on the basis of 
> avowedly rational expert judgment alone. Take immigration, where 
> governments weigh not just economic costs and benefits but also 
> demands of national identity and cosmopolitanism. Or war: it's very 
> complicated, so should we abandon military planning to the 
> professional generals?
>
> Caplan's view of democracy is all about efficiency, not legitimacy. 
> But some time ago, the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington 
> pointed out the weakness of dictatorships that justify their rule by 
> only the quality of their job performance: as soon as something goes 
> wrong --- a war is lost or inflation skyrockets --- the public has no 
> further reason to put up with a despot. If the public asked Caplan's 
> Council of Economic Advisers by what authority it struck down a law, 
> the council members could point only to their diplomas and 
> peer-reviewed articles. A democratic public may not always like --- or 
> understand --- the government's policy, but the consent of the 
> governed gives the citizens a reason not to reject the whole system.
>
> Caplan recognizes that politicians, like voters, are prone to error. 
> In his zeal to question the public's judgment, however, he may 
> underplay the role of political elites in shaping that judgment. Would 
> the public choose badly if it had better guidance? John R. Zaller, a 
> U.C.L.A. political scientist, argues that even the more politically 
> aware citizens are driven largely by partisanship and by the cues they 
> take from political leaders. That sounds like George W. Bush 
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/george_w_bush/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 
> leading the country into war in Iraq or, more happily, Bill Clinton 
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/bill_clinton/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 
> tirelessly explaining how deficit reduction would reduce long-term 
> interest rates and thus strengthen the economy --- quite a complex 
> argument. Maybe the public doesn't measure up because the politicians 
> are not doing their job properly, not the other way around.
>
> /Gary J. Bass, an associate professor of politics and international 
> affairs at Princeton, is writing a book on humanitarian intervention./
>
> Home <http://www.nytimes.com/>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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