Review of The Myth of the Rational Voter
Continuing my summer streak of reading excellent books, I recently finished Bryan Caplan’s fantastic The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.
I really like Bryan’s posts over at EconLog, so I’ve been eager to read this book for a long time, and I was not disappointed. Even if you don’t care to get The Myth of the Rational Voter, I highly recommend reading Caplan’s insightful posts at EconLog.
The book is a case for how and why standard rational voter models in public choice fail and what the implications are for democracy. I don’t think I’m particularly well-qualified to criticize the empirical work (in the sense that I haven’t exactly pored over it), but even if the book were framed as a counter-factual, I would still find it fascinating. He lays out in excellent detail what factors are at play in democratic systems with and without various assumptions of voter rationality and eviscerates a number of common misperceptions about the mechanisms of politics. For example, Caplan argues that interest groups do not and cannot change policies that voters care about, but rather they are most effective by pushing policy on the margins of indifference. A huge lobbying campaign could never get murder legalized, for example, because any politician who implemented such an unpopular policy would be immediately ousted from office. If, however, voters want protectionist policies in general, but don’t care about the specifics, a lobbying group has some slack to choose which industry is protected. This sort of, “I never thought of it that way, but now that you mention it…”-style insight is a common and extremely enjoyable occurrence in the book.
I was also happy to see that Caplan addressed and elaborated a few of the concerns I’ve been thinking about in his section on the four common biases – anti-market bias, anti-foreign bias, pessimistic bias and make-work bias and in his chapter on “rational irrationality.” Specifically, I’ve blogged here about my nascent ideas on what Caplan calls make-work bias and rational irrationality, and while the section on biases is far too short for my tastes, it has already given me something to think about. There’s also a brief section towards the end about discourse and the role of rhetoric has to play in an irrational world that leads me to believe that Caplan wrote this book specifically for me – who else would like a book about the details of economics, rationality, bias, politics and discourse? (Oh, right.)
The one negative thing I have to say about the book is that it was a bit too practical for my tastes. By this I mean that Caplan places more weight on forming coherent counter-arguments to pro-democracy advocates than he places on just forming a coherent, generalized argument. For example, there is an entire chapter on “Market Fundamentalism” vs. “Democractic Fundamentalism”, wherein he makes a fairly strong case that while the popular perception is that economists are “market fundamentalists”, the opposite is in fact true and, to take it one step further, those leveling the accusation are often guilty of actually being “fundamentalists” when it comes to democracy. While I understand why he would want to discredit the idea that economists are “market fundamentalists”, it seems like a minor point to examine the hypocrisy of those making the accusation – and one that I doubt Caplan would have included if it were not for practical concerns.
I hate to have ended this review with a paragraph about this one minor quibble, because I don’t want to leave the impression that I was anything but satisfied with my experience. Overall, the book is fantastic and worth reading for anyone interested in politics, discourse or rationality. Hell, even if you aren’t interested but you do like to vote I suggest reading it (or at least listening to the EconTalk podcast).
Rating: 10 of 10
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