 Libertarianism is the theory that advocates very strict limits on government power. In past eras, many of the opponents of limited government advocated monarchy or dictatorship. Certainly that's what Nazis argued for, fascists, communists, many others, obviously in an earlier era, the defenders of the divine right of kings. Today, however, very few people promote either dictatorship or monarchy, or even a small, tight oligarchy. Everybody last year loved the royal wedding, but part of the reason why people love the British royal family so much is because they actually don't have much in the way of real political power. If they were actual absolute monarchs, maybe they wouldn't be as popular as they actually are. Today, most of the opponents of limited government instead argue for democracy. That is, they claim that we can afford to concentrate enormous powers in the hands of government, so long as it's democratic. Why? Because democratic government ultimately answers to the people. If the bastards in power do a bad job, or they harm the public in some way, then we can vote them out, elect a different set of bastards who hopefully will do a better job. However, this argument for democracy, while it certainly has a lot of validity, does omit a very serious problem, and that is the problem of political ignorance. In order for the public to hold the government accountable in an effective way through a democratic process, they need to have at least some reasonable knowledge of what the government is doing, and what the likely effects of the government's actions are going to be. If, in fact, much of the population, most of the voters, have only very limited political knowledge and don't have enough to impose effective democratic accountability, then we have a serious problem, and the case for limiting government power is strengthened. As I'm going to suggest in this presentation, that is in fact the case. I'm going to start off talking briefly about why political ignorance matters and why we should care about it. Next, I'll talk about the astounding extent of ignorance, how it turns out that a very high proportion of public often has little or no knowledge of politics, often even of very basic political issues. I'll also don't go on to discuss how this is not just a matter of people being stupid or poorly educated or information not being available for some reason, rather for most of the public, it is actually rational behavior to be politically ignorant. But unfortunately, what is individually rational often leads to bad collective outcomes for the population as a whole. Now, some scholars argue we don't need to worry very much about political ignorance that in reality people, even if they don't know very much, can use information and shortcuts to offset their ignorance. I'm going to suggest that while these shortcuts do have some utility, it's often overstated that in many cases it's actually counterproductive to try to use them. Finally, I'll talk about the implications for limited government. I'll explain how what we know about political ignorance strengthens the case for imposing tight constraints on the power of government and also for decentralizing the government that we do have that for whatever reason it's unavoidable that we need to have at least some significant government power. All of these issues I cover in more detail in a book I'm about to finish called Democracy and Political Ignorance, so I hope that if you're interested in knowing more about these matters that you will read my book and perhaps even buy it when it comes out. So first, why does political ignorance matter? One obvious reason is that democracy is ruled by the people. It's supposed to be a government that's accountable to the public and if that accountability is to work, the public needs to have some understanding of what the government is doing, what the effects are and perhaps also what the alternatives are and that way they can at least have some rationality in deciding which set of bastards they actually want to have in power, the Democrats or the Republicans or whatever other party that they might prefer. Moreover, even if you don't care about accountability for its own sake, there is still the reality that in democracies public opinion does have a real influence on public policy. It's not the only thing that has an influence, obviously there's interest groups, there's other factors, however many studies show that it does have a substantial effect and therefore if that public opinion is poorly informed or is based on ignorance or irrationality that might lead to the adoption of bad policies and that's the second reason why political ignorance might matter. Now many people feel well, voters have the right to decide on the basis of whatever they want, they decide on the basis of ignorance, well that's just their individual right to do what they want. As Robert Bork, the famous judge and legal theorist puts it, in some areas the majority has the right to rule just because it is a majority. I think there's a major problem with this perspective that argues, well this is just an exercise of the individual rights of voters and that is that when the voters make bad decisions it's not just those who make the decision or those who are ignorant who suffer the consequences, it's all the rest of us. So if for instance you're ignorant about diet and therefore you eat eight cheese burgers every day under the mistaken impression that it's actually good for you, for the most part it's just you that suffers, right? On the other hand if you vote for bad policies that require everybody to do the equivalent of eating eight cheese burgers every day then that imposes harms on everybody. So the fact that voting is a decision not just for yourself but for the rest of society means that there are moral considerations reflected in your ignorance that might not occur with purely private decisions that affect only you or those who voluntarily interact with you. As John Stuart Mill put it 150 years ago voting can't really be considered purely as an individual right or an exercise of individual freedom because it is also the exercise of power over others is the equivalent of making other people eat eight cheese burgers a day not just merely choosing to eat those cheese burgers yourself. So therefore I think there are good reasons to be concerned about political ignorance both for those who value democratic accountability for its own sake and for those who care only just about the actual consequential effects of political decisions. Unfortunately it turns out that a high proportion of public actually has very low political knowledge in many cases to an astounding degree. I'll just go through a few of the many examples that could be said of this I go through many more in my book. So for example right after the 2010 election which was obviously a very important election taking place at a crucial time in our history polls showed that only 46% of the public knew that the result of the election was that the Republican Party had taken over the House of Representatives but not taken over the Senate. According to most surveys the most important issue in that election was the state of the economy. We were coming out of a very deep recession yet 67% of the public right before the election did not even know that the economy had actually grown rather than shrank during the previous year. Obviously if you're concerned about the economy and you want to vote about it in an intelligent way it helps to at least know the basics of what's going on with the economy at the time that you're casting your vote. One of the most controversial policies enacted in response to the recession and financial crisis that began in 2008 with the so-called TARP bailout of the banks. Yet only 34% of voters surveyed in 2010 knew that the TARP had been enacted under President George W. Bush, 47% believed that it had been enacted under President Obama. Especially if you're going to hold politicians and political parties responsible for the policies that they enact it's useful to know which politicians actually enacted which policies especially major ones like TARP which had an over $800 billion price tag which is certainly not trivial by any measure. Another major policy initiative discussed in 2009 and 2010 was the so-called cap and trade plan to try to address global warming which passed the House of Representatives in 2009 that would eventually failed. At the time that this was being debated surveys showed that only 24% of the public knew that cap and trade is an environmental policy. Many more people than that thought it was some sort of financial regulation and obviously if you don't even know that this is a policy that seeks to address an environmental issue it's very hard for you to make any kind of intelligent judgment on whether you think is a good policy or not. In over the last couple years obviously a very important policy that has been debated extensively in the press and among the public is the Obama health care plan. Various polls showed that only 30 to 40% of the public believe that they understand this plan and those numbers probably greatly overstate the true level of understanding because we know that many people are reluctant to admit to pollsters that they don't understand something they don't want to look stupid in front of pollsters that's why pollsters have actually found that if you ask people their opinions on non-existent legislations such as the Metallic Metals Act an actual example from past surveys people many people will express opinions about this rather than admit that they've never heard of the Metallic Metals Act so the same thing is true of the Obama health care plan not that as many people have never heard of it but a great many people who don't know much about it probably would not for understandable reasons want to tell a pollster about it. Now this kind of ignorance is not unique by any means the last couple of years it extends back for as long as we've had survey evidence on policy issues for example about 10 years ago the Bush administration pushed through Congress Bush's prescription drug bill which was the biggest new government program in American history in nearly 40 years at the time that it was enacted 70% of public did not even know that this massive bill had actually gone through Congress much less had an understanding of how it worked or whether it was a good idea and there are many other similar examples that can be given. Now ignorance extends not just to specific policies but also to the basic structure of government and how it operates for instance a survey shows that only 42% of Americans can even name the three branches of the federal government the executive the legislative and a judicial similarly voters often don't know which branch of government is responsible for what issues and therefore find it hard to determine who to blame or credit for particular results they also are often confused about what kinds of issues are actually the result of government policy or not so they often for instance end up blaming incumbent politicians for things that they can't control such as cyclical recessions or in many cases conditions in the world economy that national governments cannot affect it's also the case for instance that governments and incumbents are often punished at the ballot box especially in farm states for things like bad weather which reduce agricultural output or in some other studies for shark attacks and coastal waters and other things which politicians either can't control at all or at least have only very limited impact on on the other hand there are many other instances where public policy does have an effect on something but the public misses it because the effect is subtle or indirect now it's worth noting that this phenomenon of political ignorance is not just the product of the current generation or people today older people like me often say oh you know the kids today they know nothing they're completing their amuses compared to us that may or may not be true however if you look at the last six or seven decades of public opinion polling levels of political knowledge were roughly the same throughout most of that period as they are today this is not a case of a steep decline that has occurred recently this is rather a fairly stable result that is held true for many years and therefore cannot be attributed to some peculiarity of the current situation or to kids today playing too many video games or something back in the days before video games people were roughly as ignorant as they are today indeed today relative to our levels of education were actually perhaps slightly more ignorant than people were before but the differences are small now this ignorance is exacerbated by the size scope and complexity of modern government even if voters knew significantly more facts than they most of them currently know they still would be able to know and understand only a small fraction of the activity is the modern state in the United States government spending is nearly 40 percent of gross domestic product in most European countries and other democracies it is even higher than that and that doesn't take account of all the extensive regulation and other activities of government so even the best informed voters actually can only keep track of a relatively modest proportion of what government does and that makes the problem of political ignorance even more severe and more dangerous than it would be otherwise so I think it's important to recognize though that this ignorance is not just a result of stupidity or playing too many video games or problems in the education system or lack of availability of information rather it turns out that for most voters ignorance is actually rational behavior at least most at a time think about voting in an American presidential election what's the chance that your vote will actually determine the outcome well studies suggest that while it varies by state on average the chance that your vote will have an impact will determine the outcome is only about one in 60 million now in smaller elections such as for Congress or for a local office your chances are better but it's still usually at least many thousands to one so if your only reason to acquire political knowledge is to be a better voter to know for as certain as you can that say Obama is better than Romney or vice versa that turns out not to be much of an incentive to acquire political knowledge at all your better off putting your time and effort into things that are more likely to make a difference and that is in fact what the vast majority of people seem to do they devote only a small amount of time or sometimes no time at all to seeking out political knowledge and trying to understand it they instead devote their time to other things where they have more of a chance of making a difference in their own lives or perhaps the lives of other people that they care about so it turns out therefore that political ignorance for most part at least is actually rational behavior and this helps explain why ignorance has remained stable despite rising education levels despite the Internet and other modern media making information more available to people never before and so forth it turns out that the real constraint in political knowledge for most people is not the availability of information or their ability to find it or learn it it's rather the unwillingness to take the time and effort to actually acquire more than a minimal amount of political information yes there's huge amounts of information out there but most people just don't want to use their time and effort to acquire more than a small amount of it they have better things to do with their time now a further implication of rational ignorance is that when people do acquire political information in most cases it won't be for the purposes of being a better voter but rather for other kinds of reasons and indeed there certainly are people who acquire political information for those reasons just as there are sports fans like me who acquire sports information because we find it enjoyable we like cheering on our favorite sports teams and alike so similarly there are political fans who enjoy acquiring information about politics for example I'm a big Boston Red Sox fan I love pouring through baseball statistics learning about the Red Sox and their opponents it's not because I feel that I can influence the outcome of Red Sox games though many times I wish that I could it just because it's fun to cheer on my team and learn more about it and so forth similarly if you have a strong commitment to conservatism or liberalism or to Democrats or Republicans you may well be a political fan who enjoys cheering on their political team who enjoys hating its opponents just as I as a Red Sox fan enjoy hating the rival New York Yankees now it actually is very rational to hate the Yankees but in general it's the fact that it's part of the fan experience rather than a desire or hope that you will have a significant influence on outcomes and I think there's nothing wrong with people getting entertainment from being a political fan just think there's also nothing wrong with being a sports fan I am actually both a sports fan and a political fan myself however from the standpoint of political information this does pose a challenge if you're acting as a fan rather than somebody trying to be a better voter then that probably means that when you evaluate the political information that you get you're probably not going to evaluate it in a very fair or very logical and unbiased way just as Red Sox fans tend not to be completely unbiased when they get information about the Yankees in the Red Sox so similarly political fans tend to overvalue any information that supports their pre-existing views while ignoring or discounting information that cuts the other way so it turns out for example that when a few years ago an experiment was done where people who were strong supporters of President George W. Bush they were presented with information that contrary to Bush's predictions weapons of mass destruction for the most part were not found when the United States invaded Iraq not only did most of these people discount that information but a large percentage of actually came to believe even more firmly than they did before that weapons of mass destruction actually had been found in Iraq and there are similar experiments which show comparable results for left-wing voters similarly when you look at people and who they talk politics with it turns out that the vast majority of people talk politics exclusively or primarily with people that already agree with their own pre-existing views similarly people tend to read political media or watch media that conforms to your previous views so if you're a liberal you will tend to read the New York Times or listen to NPR if you're a conservative you're very likely to watch Fox News or read conservative media this is exactly the opposite of the behavior that would be rational to engage in if you were seeking the truth as John Stuart Mill famously pointed out if you're a truth seeker you should be seeking out opposing views to your own why because people who disagree with you are more likely to give you arguments and facts information that you haven't heard before from your own side however all of this is perfectly rational behavior if what people are doing is not acting as truth seekers but rather acting as political fans it's often unpleasant to have your beliefs challenged to be exposed to opposing arguments especially if they're at all strong or compelling and therefore people prefer to have their pre-existing views validated to act as political fans and that's fine in terms of the entertainment and personal satisfaction that they get it's not so good in terms of truth seeking and interestingly the people who know the most about politics and those who care about it the most are more likely to act in this highly biased way than people don't care about politics very much and simply are relatively ignorant so in effect on average the more political knowledge you have the more sort of irrationality you actually display indeed economist Brian Kaplan actually calls this rational irrationality that is that if your goal is not actually to seek the truth but to get some kind of entertainment or to act as a political fan it's actually rational to evaluate the information that you get in an illogical way that is at being rational and unbiased is hard work so often unpleasant so often more fun to be biased than to reinforce your pre-existing views now I do not mean by this to suggest that people deliberately start believing things that they know not to be true obviously it's actually impossible to believe something and yet know it's not true rather what I'm saying is that people when they look at political information often make little or no effort to be rational unbiased or logical in the way that they evaluate the information they get so they genuinely believe the things that they say they believe in most cases but that belief is the result of not really making much of an effort to evaluate information logically which I think is a common human failing but it's more common situations where the incentives to act rationally are much smaller now many scholars argue that despite the kind of evidence that I've just cited we don't need to worry about political ignorance too much because people can use information shortcuts sometimes there are situations where a small amount of information can serve as a stand-in for a much larger body of knowledge and there's a variety of shortcuts that are proposed in the literature in this presentation we're going to go through one or two of the most important ones but if you want to read about the other ones you should read my book which I encourage you to for other reasons anyway so I think information shortcuts sometimes do have some value in certain way I'm not going to suggest that they're completely useless however they have several systematic problems one is that you often need some kind of prior information or background knowledge to use them effectively secondly even if you have a shortcut that could potentially be used effectively they often don't cure the problem of rational irrationality that is shortcut theories implicitly assume that people choose information shortcuts for the purpose of seeking the truth but if in fact many people are acting as political fans rather than as truth seekers they often might select shortcuts which are conducive to their entertainment value rather than conducive to actual truth-seeking for instance one shortcut that is often proposed is the idea of opinion leaders instead of acquiring knowledge in your own you defer to knowledge of an opinion leader somebody who knows more than you do but perhaps shares the same values but as it turns out many of the people who serve as opinion leaders actually get that way not because of their superior knowledge and insight but because they're entertaining funny and they're good at validating people's pre-existing views people like John Stuart on the left or Rashwimba or Ann Koltron to right if you look at the kinds of things these people say they often make numerous factual and analytical errors but people don't watch them because they're the best possible or most experts on their subjects or because they're especially insightful they watch them because they're entertaining and they do a good job of validating their audience's pre-existing views but obviously at the same time they often also misweed the audience with poor analysis or factually inaccurate information now i'm going to now go into discussion of what i think is the most powerful shortcut argument the one that's perhaps most often cited in discussed in the literature and this is the idea of retrospective voting what retrospective voting says essentially is that you don't need to have much in a way of actual information or knowledge about policy when you vote all you really need to know is are things going reasonably well uh under the current incumbent administration or congress if things are going well then you vote for the incumbents and you reelect them you reward them for the good outcome if on the other hand things are going badly then you vote the bastards out you vote in a new set of bastards and a new set of bastards is on notice that they have to produce better results otherwise you can vote them out too city ideas that even if the voters don't know much about the details of policy this gives politicians incentives to produce good results in office and it economizes on information i think there are actually situations where retrospective voting works well in particular it works well when there's a large and obvious disaster that has occurred of some sort one that can be pinned on the incumbent administration can be held responsible for it and then you can punish them at the ballot box and indeed create these sorts of good incentives that i just mentioned so for example research shows that no democracy has ever had a mass famine on its own territory why will retrospective voting is surely part of the story here uh if a mass famine does occur even relatively ignorant voters will tend to notice that it's going on they're likely to blame the incumbent political leadership and vote them out of office and that gives incumbents pretty good example pretty good incentives to avoid mass famines and other similar disasters that are easy to understand and trace the incumbents i think this is a good thing and it's a valuable attribute of democracy but unfortunately most political issues don't work this way and in most of them you have to have more knowledge in order to engage in retrospective voting effectively so one problem as i previously mentioned is that often voters don't even know about the existence of important policies such as the bush prescription drug bill and that makes it hard for them to assess their results if you don't even know that the policy has been enacted there are also many policies out there which are relatively hidden and hard to detect and therefore voters are just unaware of them and therefore can't trace their results back to the incumbents for example there are often many hidden taxes and subsidies that exist in the political system both in europe and in the united states furthermore in deciding whether to credit or blame incumbents for results that occur in the world it's important to know which results are actually affected by government policies and which ones are not and as i mentioned previously very often voters blame incumbents for things that they didn't cause such as short-term economic trends conditions in a world economy bad weather shark attacks the list can go on and on it sometimes is the case that local politicians actually gain votes when the local sports team wins an important championship or victory because there's sort of a good feeling people all things are going well and you know i'll vote for the incumbent obviously except in very rare cases such as the you know such as a few that can have to be cited politicians actually do not cause local sports team victories in addition often people are not evaluating the current record in any kind of rational or unbiased wave so people don't often look at just an objective set of facts and say well the incumbents can be credited or blamed for this rather often what people think the facts are are significantly affected by how they feel about the incumbents rather and vice versa so for instance studies show that when a democrat is in office committed republicans tend to think that inflation and unemployment are significantly higher than they actually are similarly when a republican is in office it's the democratic voters who think that inflation unemployment are unusually high and republicans who tend to underestimate it there's many other examples of similar bias of this type so rational irrationality also affects retrospective voting it's not just ignorance alone much more can be said on this and i say it in the book for now i think the key point is this that while these shortcuts do you have some value they their value is under is overestimated and often the shortcuts can actually make things worse if you evaluate the information that you have in an irrational way or if you simply don't have the pre-existing knowledge that you need to evaluate the information correctly now another argument that is made for the irrelevance of political ignorance one that is perhaps less familiar or less intuitive is the so-called miracle of aggregation and this argument says let's say even that shortcuts don't work very well and that the vast majority of public is ignorant it still perhaps doesn't matter under the following conditions so let's say in the current presidential election most people are ignorant about the policies and positions of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney perhaps it doesn't matter yes there will be millions of people perhaps who choose to vote for Romney based on a mistaken understanding of his positions but there will be a similar number of people who choose to vote for Obama based on other misunderstandings and it all will tend to balance out for every person who mistakenly votes for Romney there will be others who mistakenly vote for Obama and over a large number of people with millions of voters this will tend to balance out and so the ignorant people who vote for Romney will be offset by the ignorant people who vote for Obama because of their lack of knowledge and really the election will be determined by the small knowledgeable minority because these ignorant people will offset each other and all be awash I think it's a little bit ironic that this argument is cited as a defense of democracy and voter knowledge because of course what the theory suggests is that the votes of 80 or 90 percent of the public or even more are actually irrelevant we could deny the franchise to them and instead limit it to the small knowledgeable minority would get the exact same result except that we will save some time and money on tens of millions of ignorant people going to the polls in any case however the aggregation argument rests on assumptions that turn out to be false one key false assumption is the idea that the mistakes for one side will be offset by mistakes for the other in reality there's no reason to believe that this will occur because there are many many issues out there where a mistake in one direction is more intuitive easier to grasp than a mistake in the other direction for instance it turns out that it is much easier to and more intuitive for people to blame incumbents for economic conditions that they didn't cause than for people to make the opposite mistake of giving people too little blame for current economic conditions the former state is just more intuitive more plausible to many more people in addition the aggregation argument predicts that if you increase political knowledge it actually won't matter because the people because the effects of the ignorance that it cures were random to begin with it turns out however that numerous studies show that when you control for other variables such as a person's background their ideology their age gender and many other things when you increase their knowledge people do change their minds on average on many issues and that suggests that previous mistakes or previous effects of ignorance were not just random in their impact libertarians would be happy to know that on a wide range of issues if you control for other variables increase political knowledge leads people to be more socially liberal and more fiscally conservative now i hasten out that does not mean that people would hide political knowledge become libertarian most of them don't rather they become more libertarian than they would have been otherwise this isn't true on all issues for instance taxes are a big exception people who know more about politics tend to be more supportive of the argument for taxes probably because it's more counterintuitive than the argument against them in any case whether they become more libertarian or not knowledge does not have just a random impact and that suggests that the impact of ignorance is also not random and systematic finally there is this important point even if aggregation works perfectly would regard to the choices actually before the electorate say the choice between Obama and Romney the advocates of the miracle of aggregation ignore the fact that the ignorance its effect is not just in the decisions people make between the alternatives before them it also affects what those alternatives are going to be in the first place so if you had a much more knowledgeable electorate it's very likely we would have different candidates perhaps Obama and Romney wouldn't be the options or even if they were the policy platforms they run on would likely be very different they would be catering to a much more knowledgeable electorate when it's more difficult to fool when it has a better understanding of the effects of policies so i think it's important to recognize that political ignorance not only determines to some extent the decisions we make as to choices before us but they also in in many cases have an impact on what those choices are in the first place so what are some of the implications of this problem of political knowledge for the sort of government that we should have well if the core problem here is that it's rational for people to be ignorant and also rational for people to give illogical evaluations of the information they do have then it would be desirable to make more of our decisions in settings where people's incentives are less perverse where they have incentives to acquire more information and to do a better job of evaluating information they have and it turns out that when people vote with their feet as opposed to at the ballot box they do in fact have better incentives whether that voting with your feet be voting in the market or civil society or voting with your feet in a federal system where you try to determine which jurisdiction you want to live on whether in virginia for instance or maryland or new york or the like think about your decision to buy the last car or the last tv that you purchased did you spend more time on that and more effort on that or did you spend more time and effort acquiring information about the last time you voted in a presidential election if you're like me in the vast majority of other people you probably spent more time and effort on the car is that because you think that your car is more important than who becomes president at its dates probably not it's rather because when you choose to purchase a car you know that your decision will be decisive that is uh you don't have to take a vote with a million other people where a majority decides which car you purchase rather yourself or a decisive voter or you and your spouse perhaps and therefore you take the decision more seriously and you try to get more information and evaluate it in a logical way because you know it will actually be decisive moreover it's not just you acquire more information but you're more logical in the way that you evaluate it consider this it is considered bad manners in most social circles to criticize someone else's political opinions right people don't like it they get mad at you on the other hand if you point out that a person's evaluation of a car that they might buy is flawed or it's tv the social norms against this are much weaker and often people are actually happy when you point this out to them why I think a big part of the difference is that people know that when they're buying a car or a tv the decision is decisive so they're willing to put up with more criticism of their views because they know that that criticism might actually improve the outcome for them on the other hand people don't like to put up with criticism of their political views in part because they intuitively sense that even though it does give them some additional information perhaps the chance that information will be useful to them or make a better decision or a better impact on the world is very low so in effect when people criticize your political views you get the annoyance of being criticized but you get very little payoff and that's part of the reason why it tends to violate social norms or rather why social norms tend to frown upon this kind of criticism but not on criticism of other kinds of non-political decisions where your decision is more likely to be decisive so this strengthens the case for making more decisions in the market and in civil society where although certainly we're not completely rational and we do make mistakes and certainly we never have perfect information the incentive to acquire information and the incentive to use it and evaluate it in a rational way is much stronger than it is when we vote at the ballot box with respect to the government that we do have this strengthens the case for decentralizing political authority so that we can vote with our feet if we don't like the policies of virginia the state where i currently live we have the option of moving to many other jurisdictions or if we don't like our local government we have other choices whereas if we don't like the policies of the federal government the only way to get out from under it is to leave the united states entirely which is much more costly and difficult and there's a lot of historic evidence that when people vote with their feet in a federal system or in through immigration they often make quite rational and effective decisions even in situations where information acquisition is difficult and where the costs of getting it are higher than they were today so for instance a hundred years ago millions of african americans in the south where they were highly oppressed at the time learned that they could move to the north where the policies were relatively less favorable and made good and correct decisions about that even though their levels of education were very low and even though the cost of acquiring information in that era was significantly higher than it would be today when we have the internet when people are on average more educated or think of the millions of europeans and asians and others who moved to united states in 19th century correctly deducing the conditions were better there than in their homelands even though many of them were illiterate had low levels of education obviously there certainly wasn't any internet where you could just google united states and economic conditions and find out that incomes and other opportunities were higher in america than in your home country so i think the key implications here is that because in markets and civil society and voting with your feet you have much better information incentives and you have incentives to act more rationally when you get the information that strengthens the case for limited and decentralized government now i hasten to add that this doesn't definitively prove by itself what amount of government we should have or how centralized it should be there are obviously considerations other than political ignorance which also matter what i am suggesting however is the political ignorance should be a much bigger part of the debate on the size scope complexity and centralization of government than it currently is so the next time you think about whether a particular issue should be decided by government or should be left to markets and civil society one of the factors that you want to consider is do you believe that this is the kind of issue that will be handled well by a largely ignorant electorate perhaps in some instances your answer will be yes but i think in a wide range of cases the answer will be no or at the very least you have very serious doubts about whether this is really the kind of thing that we want to throw into the arena of political ignorance so on that note i conclude but i hope that i have succeeded in at least somewhat increasing your knowledge about ignorance thank you