Why the Glasses Have Full Display

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Even though we have lots of regulation and government is much larger than many economists not all, but many economists would like, economy works pretty well. So what I do later in the book is try to figure out why are we actually overachieving? Why are we doing better than you'd expect a democracy to do given what most people are like? And go through a series of answers. Now one answer, which again, is not likely to make me a lot of friends, but you don't care about friends, do you?"

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.