I particularly like some of the psychological armchair theorizing in your book. One of the examples you give along these lines is how when you're debating someone, say about the effects of the minimum wage or trade policy,. You work hard to be civil and pleasant. Why do you have to? I think it's a key point. They vote for that worldview, even though it's going to turn out to be not so productive for the world.
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.