The Myth Of The Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies available on February 14 2024 from BiggerBooks for 12.85
The Myth Of The Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies available on February 07 2017 from NeweggBusiness for itemprop="offers" target="_external" title="" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Offer">43.63
The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (New Edition) available on February 04 2015 from Amazon for 14.00
ISBN bar code 9780691138732 ξ1 registered February 14 2024
ISBN bar code 9780691138732 ξ2 registered February 07 2017
ISBN bar code 9780691138732 ξ3 registered February 04 2015
The greatest obstacle to sound economic policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters. This is economist Bryan Caplan's sobering assessment in this provocative and eye-opening book. Caplan argues that voters continually elect politicians who either share their biases or else pretend to, resulting in bad policies winning again and again by popular demand.Boldly calling into question our most basic assumptions about American politics, Caplan contends that democracy fails precisely because it does what voters want. Through an analysis of Americans' voting behavior and opinions on a range of economic issues, he makes the convincing case that noneconomists suffer from four prevailing biases: they underestimate the wisdom of the market mechanism, distrust foreigners, undervalue the benefits of conserving labor, and pessimistically believe the economy is going from bad to worse. Caplan lays out several bold ways to make democratic government work better--for example, urging economic educators to focus on correcting popular misconceptions and recommending that democracies do less and let markets take up the slack.The Myth of the Rational Voter takes an unflinching look at how people who vote under the influence of false beliefs ultimately end up with government that delivers lousy results. With the upcoming presidential election season drawing nearer, this thought-provoking book is sure to spark a long-overdue reappraisal of our elective system.
^The Myth Of The Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, Princeton Univ Pr. NeweggBusiness. ISBN 9780691138732 (revised Feb 2017)
^Bryan CaplanThe Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (New Edition), Princeton University Press. Amazon. ISBN 9780691138732 (revised Feb 2015)
Caplan's take on democracy can by summarized as follows: first, he accepts two arguments FOR democracy by democratic enthusiasts, 1. voters are largely unselfish; 2. politicians usually comply with public opinion. He then adds his point: 3. voters are irrational (they have "systematically biased beliefs", or in layman's terms, they have false beliefs). Caplan develops a theoretical framework to prove that it is in fact rational for voters to be irrational because the "price" of their irrationality is low in..
This book is a very interesting read, describing a utility-based model of why voters vote as they do. The author proposes that voters are naturally biased against their own interests. The concept is that the probability of any one voter changing the result of a vote is vanishingly small, and therefore each voter votes for what makes them feel better about themselves, even if the policies go against their own interest and the interests of the economy. For example, voters vote for higher taxes, large ineff..
Many people have noted that democracy seems not to work - policies are implemented that often are not in the best interest of voters, and when voters are surveyed they routinely lack even the most basic civic knowledge. The way people have typically answered this problem is to say that voters are uninformed, and that if they simply had more access to good information, they would use that information to make better choices. But even so, the tiny informed minority will sway elections because the uninformed ma..
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