speaks about how rationality could help us all build a better democracy—an ironic defense, given what he had just told us about how the mythological mindset can interact with our politics.
Tho this feels to me like it needs to grapple with The Myth of the Rational Voter. That is, Caplan claims voters are ‘rationally irrational’, where they correctly determine that voting calls for the mythological mindset instead of the reality mindset.
In order for people to vote in reality mindset, something needs to be structurally different, because if you just get people to drop the mythological mindset, they’ll probably rationally decide not to vote (because the expected benefit of their vote, under most reality-based analyses, will be less than the cost of voting).
[I am optimistic about some ways to make voting more conducive to reality mindset, but I think it doesn’t look very much like “more informed voters”. Also, I think most “well, educate people more” approaches look like “replace mythology A with mythology B”, which I’m in favor of!]
Tho this feels to me like it needs to grapple with The Myth of the Rational Voter. That is, Caplan claims voters are ‘rationally irrational’, where they correctly determine that voting calls for the mythological mindset instead of the reality mindset.
In order for people to vote in reality mindset, something needs to be structurally different, because if you just get people to drop the mythological mindset, they’ll probably rationally decide not to vote (because the expected benefit of their vote, under most reality-based analyses, will be less than the cost of voting).
[I am optimistic about some ways to make voting more conducive to reality mindset, but I think it doesn’t look very much like “more informed voters”. Also, I think most “well, educate people more” approaches look like “replace mythology A with mythology B”, which I’m in favor of!]