 Welcome to Free Thoughts, a podcast project of the Cato Institute's Libertarianism.org. Free Thoughts is a show about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it. I'm Aaron Powell, a research fellow here at Cato, an editor of Libertarianism.org. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. The idea of democracy is that the citizen should decide how they're governed and what policies their government adopts. And the way they do this is via the ballot box. But what if the voters are too ignorant about what makes good policy or even about the effects of bad policy to vote well in the first place? Joining us to discuss this important question is Ilya Soman, law professor at George Mason University and contributor to the popular blog The Volick Conspiracy. Ilya, you've written a book called Democracy and Political Ignorance, Why Smaller Government is Smarter. Can you give us maybe the thumbnail sketch of what the book's about? The first half of the book explains why widespread political ignorance is a serious problem for modern democracy. It shows that most of the public knows very little about government and politics, even often on very basic issues. And it also explains why this political ignorance, for the most part, is not a consequence of stupidity or lack of education, but rather is a consequence of perfectly rational behavior by individual voters. In addition, I explain why most people not only know relatively little about politics, but also do a poor job of evaluating the political information that they do have. The second half of the book explains how we can address the problem of political ignorance or at least mitigate it by decentralizing and limiting government. That would enable us to make more decisions by voting with our feet and fewer at the ballot box. And when we vote with our feet, we both have better incentives to acquire needed information and also to evaluate it in a more rational and unbiased manner. Is this different than being like, oh, those Republicans are global warming deniers? So it could be the case that global warming denialism is an example of political ignorance, but political ignorance includes even much more basic issues than that, such as voter's lack of understanding even of the very basic structure of government. For example, a 2006 poll found that only 42% of the public can even name the three branches of their federal government, the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. That would seem to be a problem. Why would that be a problem so far as voting goes? If they're listening to candidates who are saying, if I'm elected, I'm going to do X, Y, and Z. And the other guy's saying A, B, and C, and they prefer X, Y, and Z. Why does it matter if they can't name their members of Congress or don't know that there's a judicial branch? So for a couple of reasons. One is when a candidate says they're going to do A, B, and C, or X, Y, and Z, you want to be able to know whether the branch of government they're running for is actually capable of doing A, B, or C, or is responsible for that issue. Secondly, ideally you want to know whether A, B, and C will actually have the effects that you want them to have, and these are precisely the kinds of things that the voters don't know. Third, in terms of the judiciary, which you mentioned, you may want to know what kinds of judges the candidates will appoint to it if they're candidates for president or also whether their policies are the kind that may be likely to be struck down by the judiciary and other things of this sort. So you were talking about some of the ramifications for democracy, but how big of a problem is this, would you say, for democratic political theory? It's a pretty significant problem because virtually every variant of democratic theory implicitly includes some knowledge prerequisites that voters have to have in order for political participation to work effectively. And there are some which are very demanding, such as deliberative democracy, which asks a lot of voters, but even very basic theories such as simply trying to hold the incumbents accountable for the policies they enact, even that requires more knowledge than most of voters seem to have. So that would just be the pure, they vote them out type of issue that they have. I know my pocketbook and I know the guy who's currently holding the office where I can find out, and I'll just vote them out if that would seem to be pretty low information. Yeah, perhaps the least demanding version of democratic theory, what you just described is known as retrospective voting or alternatively as shampaterian democracy after Joseph A. Shumpeter, the famous economist who developed it in the 1940s, and the idea is, well, if you don't like what the incumbents are doing, you can just vote the bums out and then vote in a different set of bums who hopefully will do better. But even that implicitly requires knowledge of what policies did the current set of bums put in place and also what effects those policies are having, and the voters much of the time, majority of them don't understand that. In many elections, they in reality end up holding incumbents responsible for things they didn't cause. The main determinant of most electoral outcomes in the United States and in many other democracies is short-term economic conditions, despite the fact that most economists will tell you that incumbents actually have very little impact on that. But does something like a wisdom of crowds cut against this? So the voters may be ignorant about whether this guy is at fault for the given bad effects that we're feeling, whether the policies he enacted or have made us better off or worse. But if they don't know, some of the people are going to blame him perhaps too much. Some of the people are not going to blame him enough. And in the aggregate, when we've got millions and millions of votes, it all comes out of the wash. So the wisdom of crowds would be a strong argument if it actually worked. But as I describe in the book, in most cases it actually doesn't because the simple version of the wisdom of crowds you describe only works if errors in one direction are almost exactly offset by errors in the other direction. But if in fact the errors are systematic rather than random, then it doesn't work. In the case that you mentioned, there are many more people who air and assigning incumbents too much responsibility for the short-term trends in the economy than air and assigning them too little. So while there are certainly some people who air in both directions, one kind of error is vastly more common in the other. And this is also something that occurs with respect to many other issues. There are lots of situations in life where errors in one direction are more intuitive for most people than errors in the other. This is not limited to political issues, but it's especially bad with respect to politics because voters have so little incentive to acquire necessary knowledge and also to correct their errors when they do occur. So the other theory of democracy I was thinking of before we go into different types of ignorance or levels of it is just the no-knowledge theory. The idea that democracy is actually not a theory based on any knowledge whatsoever of the voters just that they choose. And so if you—it's more important than a monarchy or despotism of some sort that if you vote for a law where you bang your own head against the wall, at least you chose to vote for that law. Is that—would that still be undercut by your theory? There are what scholars call pure proceduralist theories of democracy which don't depend on any kind of substantive outcomes. The problem is that these theories are very unattractive. They imply that democracy is good completely independent of what the voters vote for. So, you know, if they vote for slavery or mass murder, we can't evaluate that from a moral point of view as long as it's democratic. Moreover, the idea that voting is just an individual choice which the voter can do however he wants, that runs into the problem pointed out by John Stuart Mill 150 years ago, whereas he pointed out voting is not just an exercise of individual freedom rather as he put it, it is the exercise of power over others. The people that we elect perhaps out of ignorance are not just going to rule over those who voted for them. They're going to rule over all the rest of society and therefore we have a responsibility if we do vote to do so in at least a minimally responsible way and that requires having at least some knowledge of the issues that we're voting on and of the effects that particular policies are going to have. Now, if people actually took that, I mean, that duty, I think a lot of people do, understanding that they're pushing power on to other people and you hear a lot of discussion of voting as the sacred duty and all these things. So, why is it that people seemingly so ignorant about even the most basic policies? I mean, you're talking about, you're not talking about partisan issues about what is the best outcome of these. You're talking about they don't know basic rules of government, who the representative is. So, what's causing this? Why don't they know more if voting is such a sacred duty? So, many people think they have a duty to vote. Many fewer people believe they have a duty to be more than minimally informed and even if they do believe that they have that duty, it takes much more time and effort to inform yourself about the issues than to simply go to the polling places and vote. And as it turns out for most people, it's rational not to spend very much time on political information because the chance that your vote will actually determine the outcome of an election is infinitesimally small. So, for most people, they put a higher priority on learning other things or doing other kinds of activities that are more likely to actually make a difference in their lives or in the lives of the people that they care about. This is true not just for narrowly self-interested people, but even for very altruistic people, even the very altruistic individual realizes that the chance that his or her altruism will make a difference is much higher with activities other than acquiring political information, where even if he or she becomes very well-informed, the chance that it will make a difference and will determine an electoral outcome is tiny. The story that you just told of how this ignorance operates put a level of kind of intention behind it, like the people know they have a duty to vote or believe they have a duty to vote and they believe they have a duty to be informed, but then for whatever reason, they're choosing not to fulfill that duty to learn enough about politics. But I'm wondering, do people overestimate their level of knowledge? Is it are people saying I'm choosing to be ignorant or are they saying I'm actually not ignorant, but in fact, they really are? So, probably some combination of both. Regarding the question of duty, as I said before, I think while people think they have a duty to vote, very likely many fewer people believe they have a duty to be informed. That's not inculcated into people anywhere near as much as the supposed duty to vote. Moreover, I think with respect to the question of to what extent it's conscious they're being under-informed, to some extent it's conscious. To some extent, there's a second-level problem here, which is it's not just that people have little incentive to acquire knowledge in the first place, they also have little incentive to do a good job of evaluating the knowledge that they do have, because that too requires time and effort, being objective, being logical. That requires effort that most people aren't willing to put in. So, I think to some extent, people are consciously deciding, am I going to spend this hour watching TV news about detailed policy issues, or am I going to spend it watching The Simpsons or going about my business? Most of the time, they choose to do the latter kinds of activities. That's a conscious choice. I think it's also the case that most people don't sit down and carefully think about whether the information that they have is really sufficient to understand the issues. They just often engage in knee-jerk reactions based on partisan sympathies or intuitions that they have, and they don't carefully evaluate the decision in the way that they would, if it really made a difference. Think about if you're like most people, you probably spent more time acquiring information and thinking about it carefully the last time you bought a TV or a car than the last time that you decided who to vote for for president. That's not because the presidency is less complicated than your TV. It's because when you bought the TV, you knew the decision to make a difference, so you took it seriously. When you bought the president, so to speak, you knew that the decision probably wouldn't make much difference, and therefore you didn't take it really as seriously. But if you listen to the rhetoric and the way that people talk about politics, it seems like they do think it will make an enormous difference. In fact, it seems like a lot of voters overestimate the amount of difference that it will make if one candidate wins over another, that these are apocalyptic scenarios. If Romney wins, it means the end of America. And if Obama wins, it means socialism everywhere or whatever. It seems like people get much more fired up about politics than they do over buying television. So why is that fired upness if it exists? And it may not. I may be misreading things, but if it exists, why is that not translating into the sort of research one finds when looking for a TV? So many people believe that it makes a real difference whether Romney wins or Obama wins, but that's not the same thing as believing that it makes a big difference whether you personally vote for Romney or Obama because the chance that your individual vote will be decisive is so extremely low. Moreover, while there are some people who are hardcore political partisans, there's actually more people who don't care as much and spend more time on the TV and the like. Similarly, there's many people, by the way, who care enormously about which sports team wins or big sports fans, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they devote more time to following sports statistics or figuring out what determines the performance of sports teams than they devote to every day activities of theirs. They're more likely to make a difference. Or if they do devote a lot of time to sports, it's not because they think that their rooting for their team will make a difference. The outcome of the Super Bowl is because they find it entertaining and interesting and the same thing is true of many political fans. Some of them do know a lot about politics, but because they're acquiring information for the purpose of being a fan and enhancing that experience rather than for the purpose of seeking the truth, they also tend to be highly biased in a way that they evaluate that information usually even more so than the average voter is. So that people who are more informed are worse than the average voter? I mean, are more partisan, at least? On average, people who are more partisan are more informed and they're also more biased in their evaluation of information. So people who are more informed are better in the sense that they know more, but in some ways, they actually do a worse job of evaluating the information that they do learn. All the calls go against your home team or your favorite team type of analysis. Or more to the point, if you think about it from a sports fan's point of view, if a call goes against your team, if it's a close call, you think that must be a wrong call, the ref must be blind or he must be on the take. If it's a call in your team's favor, you think, oh, it must be a good call. It's obviously correct. And that's more or less the way that partisans evaluate new political information as well. They tend to ignore or downplay any information that cuts against their pre-existing views and overvalue anything that reinforces that. And there are lots of studies which show this for both liberal democratic partisans and conservative Republican ones. So I think that a lot of people, though, probably, I mean, I think that if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably already in a smaller subset of people who are politically informed. And then just people generally in this town, Washington, D.C., they would just say, okay, yeah, I've been complaining about voter ignorance for a long time. People need to get out there. They need to get involved. They need to call their congressmen, know about the issues. Life is going to pass them by and big issues are going to pass them by. So the solution to your problem is to tell people to get involved, rock the vote, all that type of stuff like that. What do you say to that kind of? So we've been telling that to people for many decades now and for the most part, they haven't listened in large part because it's just not rational for them to take the time and effort to acquire more than a minimal amount of political information. Moreover, even if they did make more of an effort and learn more than they do now, it's still unlikely that they would understand more than a small fraction of all the issues that modern government covers, given that modern government spending is some 40% of GDP. And in addition to that, there's also lots of regulatory activities that that figure doesn't include. So I think it's time to learn from our past mistakes and realize that most people are not going to pay as close attention to politics as the political fans do or as political professionals in this town, Washington, D.C. do. And we should instead look for other ways to address the problem. That seems like I can already see people saying, well, that's the throwing up your hands solution to this problem. So sometimes throwing up your hands is a lot better than continuing to bang your head against the wall. Are there historical trends here? Are people more politically ignorant today than say they used to be? Do we have data about that? Yes, we do. And it's actually about the same. Today's levels of political knowledge are quite similar in most ways to those of 50 or 60 years ago. But things are worse in two respects. One is knowledge has been relatively flat, even as education has gone up and also even as information has become more readily available through the internet and other modern technology. In addition, knowledge has stagnated even as government has gotten larger and more complicated. So today's levels of political knowledge, while roughly the same as 50 years ago, are more inadequate relative to the challenge that's actually before the electorate. Interesting. But to push back maybe a little bit with possible solutions, if we look at some of the data and some of it's in your book about what did people know? Do they know which candidate favors higher taxes or less taxes? But some of them they're pretty good on. We have the 70% of voters did know that Al Gore favored a higher level of spending than George W. Bush. 76% in 2008 knew that Barack Obama supported a timetable for a draw from Iraq. And 62% knew that McCain had opposed such a timetable. Those are pretty good. I think might surprise people that's higher than they might expect. Is that good enough to accomplish the task of governing ourselves? So it's better than nothing. But in that same table, there are many other examples of very basic things that the voters didn't know. Moreover, merely knowing what position which candidate has often isn't enough. Usually you care not about, most people, we care not about the level of spending for its own sake, but whether the spending will actually achieve the objectives that it's supposed to get us, such as getting us out of a recession, improving healthcare, dealing with entitlements effectively and other such matters. And on those issues, often the voters are even worse than on the issue of simply knowing what positions the candidates have. Moreover, being able to compare the two candidates before us is itself often not sufficient because our ignorance affects not just our decisions on the candidates immediately before us, it affects what choices are put before us to begin with. So the parties and their professional handlers, they know that the electorate is generally ignorant in a wide range of issues. And they adopt platforms which try to appeal to the ignorant electorate. If the electorate were more knowledgeable, you would probably see, in many ways, better platforms put before us and better choices. You said that to some extent it doesn't matter if lots of people know that someone, that this candidate wants to lower the debt because what really matters is whether lowering the debt is going to have good effects. So we have to know if the policies they're advocating are going to work or not. And that's a very important kind of ingirdance. But it seems like as we move from the basic like does this candidate want to do A or B to is A or B going to work, we're moving in areas where it seems more difficult to talk about voters being ignorant given that very smart, very well-informed people disagree strongly about whether this particular policy will have a good or bad effect. So there are some issues where even a lot of knowledge may not be enough to tell you what's the right answer. But there's also a lot of low-hanging fruit which the voters fail to pick. For instance, for centuries, economists have known that protectionism is generally bad for the economy except maybe in a few narrowly specialized scenarios. Yet the public consistently fails to recognize that even after 200 years. Similarly, the public doesn't know very basic things about the distribution of spending in the federal budget. They greatly underestimate the percentage spent on entitlements and overestimate the percentage spent on things like foreign aid. As a result, they don't realize what most policymakers and experts do realize, which is that if you want to address the federal government spending problems, you have to deal with entitlements. And there are many other similar examples like that where there's low-hanging fruit which most knowledgeable people do understand, which the public doesn't pick up. Some good historical examples are that for many decades after most knowledgeable people realize that racial segregation was harmful in all sorts of ways, including for the economy of the South and its impact even on white people, never mind blacks. It took a long time for majority public opinion in the nation in the South to come around to that. And on that issue and quite a few others, more knowledgeable voters came around to the truth much earlier than less knowledgeable ones. The recent history of gay and lesbian rights is a similar story. It took a long time for the majority of the electorate to realize what more knowledgeable people knew a long time ago, which is that gays and lesbians pose no meaningful threat to straight people. And therefore, there's no harm in letting them live and let live. I guess to push back a little bit more, I'm wondering if those sorts of things are instances where the ignorance is actually just a symptom of differing values. So protectionism, people say, well, I think that protectionism is going to help and we should have it. And you say, well, the economics has shown for hundreds of years that it doesn't. But that what's really going on is it's not so much that they care about the economy and what will boost it. But they have these other values about what matters is American jobs, even if, you know, and and so then they're just that that value system is leading them to thinking protectionism is good. But what's really going on there is this valuing is this different value system, similar to the racism in the South that they they liked the racism. And then, of course, that led them to think it has good effects. And although it made them poorer. Right. But pointing out the bad effects isn't going to get at the underlying real value of, say, liking the racism or not liking gays and so not thinking they should get married no matter what. And then you kind of make up facts to support that. So in some cases, it is true that people support bad policies out of bad, intrinsic values. They may hate a different race or ethnic group for its own sake, rather than because that group is in their mind going to cause some bad effects. But most of the time, actually, very few people actually hate a group solely intrinsically. If you ask people, why do you hate blacks or why do you disapprove of gays? Usually they will tell you a story about harm that blacks might inflict on whites or gays on straights or the harm that gays might inflict on the moral, climate of society or whatnot. And those stories are important because they do affect people's attitudes. And we have both controlled studies in common sense, which shows that that is the case. So I'm not claiming that if people had an accurate factual understanding of the effects of segregation that all racism would have disappeared, that's not true. But there would have been a lot less of it. And majority opinion would have swung against segregation a lot earlier than it did. I would make the same point with respect to protectionism. Yes, there are some people just say why just hate foreign goods because they're foreign. I don't really care about their effects. But most of the time, if you ask people, why do they support protectionism? They will tell you that it's because protectionism is important for strengthening the American economy overall. And even if your goal is to just promote the American economy and you don't care about the state of foreigners, it does turn out from very basic economics that the American economy will be better off overall with free trade than with protectionism. That's one of the most basic findings of modern economics. So if they knew that, not that nobody would support protectionism. Some people still might. But the level of support for protectionism would be much lower. And indeed on that issue and a number of others, you actually have controlled experiments where we ask people, would you support X if you thought it had effect Y? And people say, yes, if I thought it had effect Y, I would change my mind. So all that level of ignorance. We talked about a rational ignorance. I don't know if we use that word yet, but the idea that at some point it makes sense to not pursue knowledge any further because knowledge is costly to obtain. And there's another phrase you use in the book, which we've kind of broached on, but I want to come back to rational irrationality, which I think is Brian Kaplan's phrase originally. Can you talk again about what that is and then how that sort of underscores even the problem of voters not wanting to get having enough incentive to get knowledge. And then on top of that, there's this rational irrationality. Sure. So there's two levels to the problem. One is we've already talked about at some length, rational ignorance, acquiring and learning information is costly. When the information is very unlikely to make a difference, say to an electoral outcome, most people have little incentive to acquire more than a small amount. The second level of the problem is rational irrationality. Let's say you do learn some political information. It still requires time and effort to evaluate it in an unbiased, rational way. And given the low probability of influencing the unequal of an election for most people, it's also rational not to make much effort to be unbiased in the way that you evaluate the information that you do know. Especially this is the case if the reason why you learn the information in the first place is not primarily to seek the truth, but for other kinds of reasons such as being a political fan who enjoys supporting his or her preferred party or ideology, or simply being a person who finds politics entertaining. If you learn political information for those kinds of reasons, those reasons are often inimical to seeking the truth. Now it's not the case that political fans deliberately come to believe things they know aren't true. If you think about it, that's an oxymoron. If you know it isn't true, that means you don't really believe it. But it is the case that when you acquire information for purposes of being a fan, you don't work very hard to try to control your biases and to evaluate that information objectively. And that is exactly how political fans react to new political information that they learn. And it also might be the case that your position is the number one fan, at least in the political sense, the most red meat Republican or blue Democrat gives you status. So you have a huge countervailing. You have incentives pushing you to being more irrational and less about truth and more about the team, right? Yeah. So you might have a sense of identity. I'm a committed Republican. I'm a committed conservative. Or I'm a committed progressive Democrat. And once you develop that sense of identity, information that cuts against views associated with it may be very emotionally painful for you to accept. It sort of undermines your sense of who you are and it may hurt your relations with your friends or fellow political partisans. So that's also an obstacle to seeking the truth as well. So you talk a lot about maybe what is this and what is the implications of this and how can we solve this. Some of the ones I think maybe listeners are thinking about that could maybe solve some of these problems. One that pops in my head is mandatory voting. Maybe that would solve problems. Any thoughts on mandatory voting? Mandatory voting would probably make things worse because the people who currently vote on average know somewhat more about politics than people who don't vote. If you require everybody to vote, then the electoral would probably be somewhat more ignorant than it currently is. Maybe not a lot more ignorant, but at least somewhat more. You might say well if they were required to vote they would learn more information but it doesn't follow because the fact that you have to go vote doesn't mean that your vote will make a big difference to the outcome of an election and therefore you might vote to avoid a fine or avoid going to prison or whatnot but that doesn't mean you're going to make yourself well informed and indeed nations that do have mandatory voting on average there doesn't seem to be higher levels of political information in those countries than in nations which don't have it. What about something like a deliberative democracy or just the notion of encouraging people or forcing them to take more part in political conversations and talk about this stuff more in say town hall meetings and whatever else because I'm thinking I knew nothing about football and then when I started dating my now wife and I started hanging out with her father who was a huge Denver Broncos fan just the act of having to talk with him, watch the games and then have to talk with him about it I ended up learning an enormous amount about the game because I wanted to be able to participate in these conversations and so would something similar happen if we got people having more conversations about politics and these open forums that they would then have an incentive to learn more of these kinds of details so they wouldn't look silly because they don't know who their representatives are. So some scholars do argue that we can address the problem of political ignorance by requiring or incentivizing people to show up for deliberation say before every election or to like and have discussions with either experts on issues or other voters and the like. So it's kind of oppressive. There is, it could be but even setting that aside there's several problems with this solution. One is the government would have to decide what issues would be covered in those fora who would get to make presentations and so forth and there's a lot of opportunity for bias and abuse in making those decisions second it's very unlikely that those deliberative fora unless they lasted for many days or weeks could cover anything even remotely close to a full range of issues addressed by modern government. So at the very least in order for this to work well you would want to couple it with greatly reducing the scope and complexity of government so that you could actually cover all the relevant issues without taking up you know weeks or months or whatnot. And finally even when people are deliberating with others who have different views often they tend to dig in on their pre-existing positions rather than be more open-minded. The research has somewhat split on that but at least for people who have strong pre-existing views it's actually not easy to get them off of it and to try to get them to be more objective and in some cases being exposed to opposing views just angers them and gets them to dig in further. So okay how about civics class? I mean that seems to be government class you know in my home state of Colorado I think we had one year of government required where we learned about the branch to government it was eighth grade. Let's make it six years let's make it seven years of classes would that would that help? Perhaps the most common or most obvious solution for the problem of poetic ignorance is the idea that we can solve it through education. This actually is one of the standard rationals for having public education. The problem is that we actually do have a lot more education on average than we used to yet it doesn't hasn't raised political knowledge. The average American today has two to three years more formal education than the average American 50 or 60 years ago but political knowledge levels are flat so that suggests it's a lot harder to use education to raise political knowledge than we might think it is. Is that education in political so do they have to have more civics classes now or do they instead have two to three more years of science and English? So it could be you might argue if only we had the right education then we would solve the problem there's a couple of difficulties with that solution as well. One is that government officials have very little incentive to actually use the public schools to increase political knowledge. Many of them after all were elected by an electorate that is largely ignorant. Why would they want to change a situation such that their position might actually be imperiled? In addition, historically governments have used public education more to indoctrinate people in their preferred views or those of powerful interest groups or those in majority of population than to educate people in political knowledge in some objective sense. Indeed indoctrination was one of the main reasons why public education was instituted in the first place in the 19th century. And you might say well if the public closely monitored the schools and incentivized politicians to really use it to increase political knowledge that would change things but if the public were that knowledge about public education we probably wouldn't have a problem of political ignorance in the first place. Finally, even if the government did make a sincere effort to use public education to increase political knowledge it is questionable whether they could actually use it to get people to be knowledge about more than a small fraction of the full range of issues that modern government addresses. Moreover, once you graduate from high school at the age of 18 obviously you're going to be a voter perhaps for 50, 60, 70 years new issues will arise and so unless you're sent back to some kind of reeducation boot camp every few years the knowledge that you acquired in high school will tend to atrophy over time and be less relevant to new issues as they arise. So I think all of those issues are formidable obstacles to overcoming political ignorance through education. So the technocrats I mean kind of agree with you I think if I think of people like Peter Orzog for example who has written before that he thinks that too much democracy is a problem and therefore we need more automatic processes and administrative technically literate and smart people to rule these things and not ask the voters to make these decisions that's the solution to your problem is to not even ask them to do that. So Peter Orzog also favors mandatory voting so he's not entirely consistent on these issues but there are certainly people like Cass Sunstein Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and others who say yes put equilibrations is a serious problem yes we're unlikely to overcome it anytime soon therefore let's concentrate power in the hands of knowledgeable experts bureaucrats economists social scientists and others and they can solve our problems. I think there's a couple of difficulties here one is if these people are still going to be accountable to the democratic process then political ignorance comes in by the back door so to speak. If they're not going to be accountable if they're going to be insulated from public pressure or public opinion then you have to ask what is their incentive to actually serve the public good as opposed to their own interest and often the incentives will be poor even if at first only altruistic people have these jobs if being a technocrat or a government bureaucrat is a good way to wield unaccountable power over time these positions will attract power seekers and ruthless individuals and ruthless power seekers on average have an advantage in political composition over people who are more altruistic or more squeamish about the means that they're willing to use to get power. Finally, technocrats have problems of ignorance of their own which I've discussed only briefly in my book but which is well known from prior literature and that is while they have a good knowledge of technical scientific facts they may have a poor knowledge of the personal preferences of the individuals whom they're trying to benefit so the expert in public health may well have a great understanding of the harm that using drugs or alcohol or cigarettes may cause to you in terms of health but he or she has a poor understanding or probably no understanding of how much I enjoy drinking or how much I enjoy using marijuana or whatnot in my case despite being Russian it's actually very little but for a lot of people it's a lot more than me particularly for some of my fellow Russians and there's no way to bureaucrat can know how much you enjoy these things and therefore way against yeah and a bureaucrat doesn't have a good metric for weighing the benefits against the cost which is what you ultimately and that would be one thing that democracy would do I mean people would if they were allowed to vote they if they loved I mean I guess they did this in Colorado and Washington they liked marijuana enough to actually vote it in as opposed to some bureaucrat who'd be up there saying well we've determined that your level of pleasure does not is outweighed by the risk so I think democracy also does a poor job of weighing these matters for the reasons we covered earlier because people are often ignorant about the effects of public policies and have little incentive to acquire information on the other hand decision-making in the market and the private sector does better because then each individual can decide for him or herself whether they want to purchase alcohol or marijuana or the like they might still make mistakes and some people obviously do but they have much better incentive to think about well if I drink this beverage I might enjoy it but it might also harm me in various ways so but that beverage is a bit different I mean the question of referenda specific itemized referenda like should Colorado legalize marijuana or Washington legalize marijuana is it it seems like the problem is less there for voter ignorance it says this is what we're doing and and there's no representative intermediary this is what we're doing and do you want it yes or no I'm not against referendum necessarily but they still have serious political ignorance problems for a couple reasons one is even if the question on the ballot is an isolated single question one of the things that you often need to think about in making an intelligent decision is the effect of this referendum on other issues so for instance in California there's many referenda which say we should raise spending on acts such as education and people say well yes I like education so I'll vote to raise spending on that and they don't think about well if we raise spending education either we have to raise taxes or there's less money available for other kinds of things California is really bad at that in particular yeah in in in addition when you vote on referenda there's also the issue that the because the chance that your vote will have an impact is still very small people often don't think carefully about the relevant effects or acquire relevant information to any great degree finally if although any one referendum may be focused on a particular issue if you have a lot of referenda as some states do then that means you have to learn about a lot of different issues and that brings back selling the same problems that you have an elections for the legislature or for the executive where you're electing someone to deal to the wide range of different issues and what about shortcuts to knowledge so I don't know anything about medicine and I'm some totally ignorant of of those sorts of issues but I go to a doctor who knows that stuff and I allow that person to then make decisions for me or by a brand name or by a brand name television assuming that the brand is a fix to things or a certain quality because I have a sense that that brand is of a certain quality does can something like that work to get around these problems of political ignorance in the sense that like I know that this this political party the people in it know a lot and I generally like my views tend to align with theirs so I'll let them figure out who would be best and let them figure out what the policies are and then I will just vote for them for that whatever the whatever the party decides so both in politics and in life in general often we can use information shortcuts small bits of information to substitute for larger bodies of knowledge that we don't have in the book I devoted an entire chapter to these information shortcuts and I explain why at least in a political realm they often don't work nearly as well as advertised one big problem with them is that to use them effectively often you need at least some pre-existing knowledge which the voters don't have so you mentioned the example of going to a doctor it's true we go to the doctor because he or she has specialized knowledge about medicine that most of us don't have but you need to have enough knowledge ahead of time to know that you're going to a real doctor as opposed to a witch doctor and much of the political shortcuts that people use are in fact the equivalent of going to a witch doctor so one standard shortcuts similar to the doctor one with respect to medicine is using opinion leaders having individuals guide your vote who know more than you do but if you look at the opinion leaders that people choose often it's not those who are most expert in politics or have the best track record of predicting the outcome of past government policies it's people like Rush Wimba or John Stewart whose main skill is not expertise in public policy but rather that they're entertaining and they do a good job of reinforcing the pre-existing views of their audience the fundamental problem here I think is that when you decide which doctor to go to treat you know that that choice will make a big difference so you make at least some effort to find somebody who's a real doctor as opposed to a quack some people still get victimized by quacks nonetheless but fewer than get victimized by political quacks because when we try to find an opinion leader to guide our vote we know that ultimately the choice won't make a very big difference it only has a 1 in 60 million chance of affecting the outcome of a presidential election for instance so we're much more willing to let entertainment or other frivolous considerations guide our decision and we would be in the case of searching out a doctor or making any kind of decision in our private lives that we know will make a real difference someone listening though might be thinking well but the reason that I can have a pretty strong sense that this doctor I've chosen as a good one is credentialing you know they this person has an MD and also has a medical license and therefore I can be relatively certain that they know what they're doing could then something like that could we just have a licensing for politicians like you've got it you've got to pass a certain test and we now know that you possess a certain level of knowledge licensing for pundits too sure pundit yeah that could rush limba it could but in one sense we already have licensing for pundits in that we have degrees in subjects called economics political science sociology law and so forth but it's striking that when the public chooses which pundit to look to they don't look to see what degrees they have for the most part they don't look to see what publications they have and how often those publications get cited or how often those publications made accurate predictions instead they use other kinds of criteria that are more closely related to entertainment or to such factors as whether the person is reinforcing your pre-existing views so there are lots of credentialing systems if you like that the public could potentially make use of we could also invent new ones perhaps you wanted to but it's striking that those are not actually the ones that the most people use in deciding which pundit to listen to So we we can be pretty pessimistic here it seems like I mean the the fundamental problem seems to keep coming back to incentive structures that that as long as you're standing with the cost-benefit analysis of one vote especially in a national election versus how much this can make a difference then I'm not going to have much incentive to change and if that's still what you're looking at all the time and what most voters are looking at again especially in national elections very hard to figure out how to change that incentive structure and ask them to be all they can be and be better than they are if they don't actually have the reason to do that does it seem sort of insoluble as long as that those are the chances that we're working with? If it were an easy problem I wouldn't have had to write an entire book addressing it nor would there be lots of other books and articles about it going all the way back to ancient Greece but I think there are some things we can do one is we can try to make more of our decisions in frameworks where people have better incentive to be informed in other words when the book I call voting with your feet as opposed to voting at the ballot box you can vote with your feet in one of two general ways one is you can choose which jurisdiction you're going to live in which city or which state and that's a decision where you have an incentive to be well informed similarly you can often vote with your feet in the marketplace when you decide what car to buy what TV to buy what house to buy or what private plan community or condominium to live in all of those kind of decisions because they actually have a high probability of making a difference people have better incentives to be informed about than they do when they vote at the ballot box and if we decentralize government that means there's more opportunities for people to vote with their feet between different localities or different states similarly if we take some decisions out of the political sphere all together and have them in the private sector then people have good incentive to be well informed there as well and I think that's the direction that we want to go in if the problem is the incentive structure and I think it is then we want to make more of our decisions in a framework where the incentives are different where people have more incentive to acquire information and also to evaluate it in an unbiased way than they do when they vote at the ballot box So would you say this is actually one of the reasons that markets are good maybe at what they're good at is because the incentive structure is different than the political incentive structure? I would say this it may well be the single most important reason that when people operate in markets they certainly make mistakes they don't always acquire all the information they need but on average they do better than they vote when they vote at the ballot box because they know the decision will actually make a difference that's why you probably spent more time acquiring information about the last TV you bought than about the last president that you voted for That's also why the company cares about that they trust your knowledge more they're not placating you as much as politicians you mentioned how political campaigns with the operatives running them they know that people are ignorant so they organize a campaign around the fact that people are ignorant I'm not so sure that that's Sony's strategy right I think it would be very different Certainly market participants do try to sometimes exploit consumer ignorance and sometimes even succeed but it's tougher to do it than it is in political competition because in fact the consumers are on average less ignorant than voters moreover they approach economic advertising if you like with greater skepticism than people approach political advertising or political statements by candidates so the kind of lies and deceptions that you see in an average speech by a political candidate would be much tougher to get away with with respect to most products product pitches and the like if Sony lied and deceived people to the same extent as presidential candidates often do Sony would have very few customers left pretty soon I can see someone who's perhaps more skeptical of markets than we in this room responding to that by saying look in under a system we're making these decisions politically and democratically my vote may not matter for much but it does it matters some I have some degree of say but what you're advocating is turning all this decision over to private actors to corporate leaders to big business to people who I have no control over and letting them make these decisions so where before I could say like if I think that shipping jobs overseas is bad I can do something about it but now these people who I have no control over can make these enormous decisions that can have a big impact on my life and there's nothing I can do or another way how much does you know how much does Walmart really care about my business personally as like as a purchaser of Walmart do they really care that much do they care that much more than a politician Walmart probably doesn't care very much about you as an individual unless you buy a lot more products from Walmart than I think you probably do but at least you have the choice of going to Target or going to CVS or going to one of any number of other stores and your choice is individually decisive you don't have to persuade a million other people or 50 million other people to make that same decision moreover to the extent that millions of other people are also making individually decisive choices with respect to Walmart and Walmart knows that they have an incentive to actually produce products which are good and cheap and effective so as to try to get those customers and on average Walmart actually does just that it does in fact produce products which are cheap and easy to use on the whole of at least reasonably good quality which is more than can be said for most politicians most of the time I would note that if Walmart doesn't care about the individual customer and they probably don't care about any one customer very much of course the same thing is true of politicians and political parties they too don't care about the individual voter they care about getting enough votes to win but often it's easier to get enough votes to win by being deceptive or by appealing to unreasoned emotions than it is to get a large number of customers by deceiving people in the same way there certainly are clever con artists think of Bernie Madoff who get away with things in markets but even Bernie Madoff usually doesn't get away with deceptions or selling bad products on a scale comparable to that which politicians often get away with it So the another one that I thought of that we didn't talk about for addressing the problem restricting voting I mean you'll hear people it's not very popular but it used to be much more popular restricting to property rights owners a voting test for example you have to take a test before you can vote how about that? That seems like it could solve a problem As you say this is an idea that's little advocated today that it has had a lot of advocacy historic we the idea is if most voters are ignorant let's limit the franchise to the knowledgeable I think there are two problems with this approach one often recognize the other less understood though it's actually more severe the often recognized problem is that if you restrict the franchise to a small group of people then obviously they might then use it to terrorize over the rest of society and that could potentially happen and has sometimes happened historically when this approach has been tried the less recognized problem is do we trust the government to come up with an objective knowledge test? Obviously if incumbent political leaders have the power to exclude people from the franchise based on their levels of knowledge then they could very easily skew that test in favor of their own party's supporters and they would have a very strong incentive to do just that however there is an alternative less onerous version of this idea which might be worth exploring I do in fact explore it somewhat in one of the chapters of my book and that is instead of using knowledge test to limit the franchise we can use knowledge test to reward people for their political knowledge so give them two votes? Yeah no no no that's another possible version but the version I had in mind was you let people take these tests say once a year once every two years whatever and if they do well you give them a monetary award that gives people incentives to acquire additional political knowledge and nobody loses their vote if they don't take the test or if they do badly on it but they do get an incentive to increase their knowledge I think this idea is worth considering though it does still suffer from the problem of the government might buy us to test so because I don't have a good solution to that problem I don't actually advocate trying to institute it but I do think it's worth exploring although it seems like something that could be instituted privately that there are there are many say rich individuals who would be interested in increasing general political knowledge and so there's no reason why a foundation couldn't set up such a test that would be fascinating that your charity is just paying people to educate potentially do it would have to be a pretty massive investment by the foundation in order to create incentives for hundreds of millions of people to do this obviously also you could argue that the foundation might buy us the test in favor of its preferred views but yes potentially you could do it privately if some private individual or foundation were able to devote possibly tens of billions of dollars to this or even more so maybe that's what Bill Gates should have done or something perhaps so the other so your book is called Democracy and Political Ignorance but the subtitle is why smaller government is smarter and we're getting close to running out of time but now we maybe got to the point of saying now what do you Ilya say about what we can do beyond fixing this on a broad level through all the things we've mentioned to make government work better for us so here I would insert what I said earlier about voting with your feet but to expand on that further if the key problem is a lack of incentive to acquire information when you vote at the ballot box and also a lack of incentive to use that information wisely then you want people to make more decisions in a framework where they have better incentives to both acquire information and use it rationally and that's exactly what we have if we decentralize government and also if we limit the role of government in some issues entirely now I would stress that my book doesn't show that we should decentralize government to the maximum possible extent or that we should have the smallest possible role for government and society there are clearly other issues that we have to consider besides political knowledge in determining what the role of government should be or how centralized it should be but political ignorance is a major problem that should play an important role in debates over the size and centralization of government and most of the time it tends to be ignored in these discussions and that's ultimately why I wrote the book that this is an important piece of the puzzle even if it's not the only piece and it's an important piece that tends to be ignored So would you be in favor of township model like bet more local control with the right of exit sort of like New England townships type of thing would that be something you think would work better because it demands less it has more effect on people demands less knowledge and has more effect on people's lives So other things equal decentralizing the lower levels of government is good not because the government is closer to people are necessarily simpler but because more decisions can be made through foot voting that way the costs of movement are less when you move from one town to another than one state to another and even less when you make choices in the private sector where often you can vote with your feet without even physically moving at all that doesn't mean that every aspect of government should be decentralized to the township level because there are going to be some functions which you can only do effectively at a higher level say national defense or dealing with global warming or a number of other problems like this but there's a lot of things that we can decentralize much further than we currently do without losing anything significant think about how many American states are actually bigger than various European countries nobody or at least very few people argue that say Switzerland or Belgium or Denmark is too small to be an effective nation we have many states that are a lot larger than Switzerland or Belgium or Denmark and so at the very least we can decentralize a lot of things that the federal government currently does to the state level or to level of localities and cities you've said then that the solution to these problems of political ignorance is smaller government but how do we get to smaller government given the problems of political ignorance I think this is a good question in that obviously political ignorance often is itself the obstacle to its own solution in part because of ignorance people don't realize often that we would be better off with smaller and more decentralized government I would note also there's distinction between the two decentralization can occur without necessarily making the overall role of government smaller if this were easy I would not have had to write a book about the problem but I think there is some reasons for hope one is that a number of liberal democracies have in fact been successful in shrinking and decentralizing their governments in recent years our neighbor Canada is an excellent example today Canada is actually ahead of the United States in the index of economic liberties put out by Cato and other organizations some of that is just the U.S. getting worse in recent years but a lot of it is Canada getting a lot better by cutting their spending and doing other kinds of reforms you can tell a similar story about New Zealand and a few other countries secondly while it's unlikely that we can ever get people to pay close attention to details of all political issues we do know from polls that many people in fact the majority have a strong suspicion and distrust of government often unfortunately that distrust is channeled into the idea if only we elect the right person he or she will fix the problem so if only we elect a uniter rather than a divider as George W. Bush promised he would be things would be better or if only we elect a person who can bring change we can believe in his Barack Obama promise but I think it should be possible over time to channel that suspicion of government into reducing its power as opposed to merely transferring it to a different person historically over time sometimes people have recognized that certain issues should be outside the sphere of government for example for most of the history of the western world most people believe that one of the most obvious functions of government was promoting the right religion surely what could be more important than that if people don't believe in a right religion they might go to hell or other terrible things might happen but over time most people in the United States and Europe became to recognize that this is in fact something that government is very bad at doing even though religion is very important it's hard to argue that it isn't nonetheless it's better to leave it to private sector and people can make the same realization gradually at least over other things especially as they come to realize perhaps that they and most are fellow citizens actually don't know that much well politics and that that's unlikely to change is it easy to achieve this of course not but we can achieve it incrementally over time moreover my book while in some ways it's radical as it suggests we might be better off with radical reductions in the size and centralization of government it's also moderate and incrementalist in that I recognize that the best should not be the enemy of the good if we achieve modest reductions in the size and centralization of government that's still beneficial because it still means at least at the margin we can make more decisions by voting with our feet and fewer at the ballot box that may not fundamentally transform the world and make everything good but at least make things somewhat better than they would be otherwise and that too is where it's thriving for for listeners who found this topic really interesting we encourage them to of course buy your book which is democracy and political ignorance why smaller government is smarter by ilia soman but are there other places they can find you do you do you blog or are you on social media anywhere certainly the book is available in places like amazon and barns and noble including in a nice cheap kindle edition if you have kindle or nuke if you have that on barns and noble in addition I blog regularly at the voluk conspiracy blog v-o-l-o-k-h including extensively about political ignorance and related issues I'm also on facebook and on twitter my twitter handle is simply just my name ilia soman all one word also perhaps we should mention that we did a an extensive presentation and debate about my book on the kato unbound website back in october and there I wrote an introductory essay which summarizes more fully what is in the rest of the book if you have any questions or comments about today's episode you can find me on twitter at arossp that's a r o s s p and you can find me on twitter at tc burris t c b u r r u s free thoughts is a project of libertarianism.org and the kato institute and is produced by ebb and banks to learn more about libertarianism visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org