Until You Consider the Alternatives ...

Courtesy of Arnold Kling, I learn of two thought-provoking quotations provided by Peter Klein:

Thus the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again. (Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 3rd edition, pp. 262-63.)

The probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tender-hearted person would get the job of whipping master in a slave plantation. (Frank H. Knight (1938), quoted in F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, p. 152.)

The quotations have stimulated some interesting comments on Klein's website, which you can read by scrolling down to the end of his web-page.

Kling's collaborator Bryan Caplan is probably the leading current ideologue of what seems to be a strongly anti-democratic tendency among an influential coterie of economists in the United States. (See, for example, this). I must get around to reading his "Myth of the Rational Voter" soon.

Perhaps his book will answer the questions for me, but I have been reading (to my great enjoyment) Caplan on the Web for a couple of years now, and I find it difficult to believe that his view of politics can really be so limited. He is certainly not a limited person: his views are always intelligent and well-informed, and I'd bet that he is a wonderful human being.

I'd also make a small bet that his Myth is a straw-man. As an observer of politics in several jurisdictions for several decades now, I have never heard it suggested that voters were rational, except in the broadest sense. By the latter, I refer to the notion, which I tend to share, that in choosing between the alternatives on offer, the electorate generally successfully selects the "lesser evil", which qualifies as rational behaviour in my view.

I am guessing that Caplan will object that one cannot reliably reach a rational conclusion by using irrational criteria. That is where I am forced to the idea that his thinking is limited, because he seems to insist that rationality is reducible to the idealised situation where one is choosing between readily reckonable probable outcomes to the options being made available.

That is never, and can never, be the situation facing even the best-informed voter. As, if my memory serves me well, Arnold Kling himself has confessed, your gut is often more reliable than your brain in the real world.