The Psychological Cost of Voting for a Society You Don't Want to Live In

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

In Mexico, if a politician proposes to make the country more like the U.S., no one would vote for it because they don't want to live in that kind of society. The question then is whether people are doing that blindly or knowingly. There's a contradiction there of sorts, not a literal contradiction, but there's a contradictions there of sorts. That basically would require a person to turn his back on one of the things that makes his country distinct.

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.