For 30 years of working as a reporter, I am steeped in disappointing facts about self-government. These experiences have not undermined my childhood faith in democratic possibilities but rather tended to confirm it. How could a lifetime of experience with how miserable the political process effectively changes the world for the better? For a lifetime observing its horrors, how could you not just become agnostic at best, but more democracy is the answer? It's a strange view. Yes, it's very similar to cults that predict the end of the world and then find out they were wrong.
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.