Clueless: NYTimes 5/27/07 - "systematic folly of voters"

[Steve Kurtz]

a good case in point on how 'the story' has a fantasy life of its own,
and how people really are quite clueless about natural network systems
and what happens when you interfere with them..  ph

.... from Steve Kurtz   "Bravo for the NYT publishing this."

  _____  

May 27, 2007

Idea Lab


Clueless


By GARY J. BASS

Of all the people who deserve some blame for the debacle in Iraq, don't
forget the American public. Today, about two-thirds of Americans oppose
the war. But back in March 2003, when United States troops stormed into
Iraq, nearly three out of four Americans supported the invasion. Doves
say that the public was suckered into war by a deceitful White House,
and hawks say that the press has since led the public to lose its nerve
- but the two sides implicitly agree that the public has been
dangerously unsure, or easily propagandized, or ignorant.

The disaster in Iraq has also fed a contradiction in American thinking
about democracy. On the one hand, Americans continue to share the
triumphalist, post-Soviet conviction that no other system of government
has any real legitimacy. On the other hand, there is a deepening despair
about whether and how the United States should spread democracy,
prompted not just by Iraq but also by the endurance of authoritarianism
in booming China and Vietnam and the disheartening Palestinian and
Lebanese experiments in democratization.

Now Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University, has attracted
notice for raising a pointed question: Do voters have any idea what they
are doing? In his provocative new book, "The Myth of the Rational Voter:
Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies," Caplan argues that "voters are
worse than ignorant; they are, in a word, irrational - and vote
accordingly." Caplan's complaint is not that special-interest groups
might subvert the will of the people, or that government might ignore
the will of the people. He objects to the will of the people itself.

In defending democracy, theorists of public choice sometimes invoke what
they call "the miracle of aggregation." It might seem obvious that few
voters fully understand the intricacies of, say, single-payer universal
health care. (I certainly don't.) But imagine, Caplan writes, that just
1 percent of voters are fully informed and the other 99 percent are so
ignorant that they vote at random. In a campaign between two candidates,
one of whom has an excellent health care plan and the other a horrible
plan, the candidates evenly split the ignorant voters' ballots. Since
all the well-informed voters opt for the candidate with the good health
care plan, she wins. Thus, even in a democracy composed almost
exclusively of the ignorant, we achieve first-rate health care.

The hitch, as Caplan points out, is that this miracle of aggregation
works only if the errors are random. When that's the case, the thousands
of ill-informed votes in favor of the bad health plan are canceled out
by thousands of equally ignorant votes in favor of the good plan. But
Caplan argues that in the real world, voters make systematic mistakes
about economic policy - and probably other policy issues too.

Caplan's own evidence for the systematic folly of voters comes from a
1996 survey comparing the views of Ph.D. economists and the general
public. To the exasperation of the libertarian-minded Caplan, most
Americans do not think like economists. They are biased against free
markets and against trade with foreigners. Absurdly, they think that the
American economy is being hurt by too much spending on foreign aid; they
also exaggerate the potential economic harms of immigration
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/immigrat
ion_and_refugees/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> . In a similar vein,
Scott L. Althaus, a University
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/uni
versity_of_illinois/index.html?inline=nyt-org> of Illinois political
scientist, finds that if the public were better informed, it would
overcome its ingrained biases and make different political decisions.
According to his studies, such a public would be more progressive on
social issues like abortion
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/a/abortion
/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>  and gay rights, more ideologically
conservative in preferring markets to government intervention and less
isolationist but more dovish in foreign policy.

If the public doesn't know how to think, is there a solution? Caplan has
some radical medicine in mind. To encourage greater economic literacy,
he suggests tests of voter competence, or "giving extra votes to
individuals or groups with greater economic literacy." Until 1949, he
points out, Britain gave extra votes to some business owners and
graduates of elite universities. (Since worse-educated citizens are less
likely to vote, Caplan dislikes efforts to increase voter turnout.) Most
provocatively, perhaps, in an online essay Caplan has suggested a
curious twist on the tradition of judicial review: If the Supreme Court
can strike down laws as unconstitutional, why shouldn't the Council
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/w/whi
te_house_council_of_economic_advisers/index.html?inline=nyt-org> of
Economic Advisers be able to strike down laws as "uneconomical"?
(Caplan's book has been warmly recommended by N. Gregory Mankiw, the
former chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers,
although Mankiw did not allude to this particular proposal.) Caplan also
suggests changing the educational curriculum to stamp out biased beliefs
in voters and policy makers alike - a suggestion as old as Plato's wish
that a city's ruling guardians be schooled in the "royal science" of
governance, which has seemingly been reincarnated as economics.

Caplan's argument has kicked off some stormy Internet debates. The
liberal blogger Ezra Klein wrote: "Obviously I, like most coastal-bred
elitists, don't think voters make terribly good decisions. But I also
don't think economic actors are particularly rational." He might have
added that many policy issues cannot be decided on the basis of avowedly
rational expert judgment alone. Take immigration, where governments
weigh not just economic costs and benefits but also demands of national
identity and cosmopolitanism. Or war: it's very complicated, so should
we abandon military planning to the professional generals?

Caplan's view of democracy is all about efficiency, not legitimacy. But
some time ago, the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington pointed out
the weakness of dictatorships that justify their rule by only the
quality of their job performance: as soon as something goes wrong - a
war is lost or inflation skyrockets - the public has no further reason
to put up with a despot. If the public asked Caplan's Council of
Economic Advisers by what authority it struck down a law, the council
members could point only to their diplomas and peer-reviewed articles. A
democratic public may not always like - or understand - the government's
policy, but the consent of the governed gives the citizens a reason not
to reject the whole system.

Caplan recognizes that politicians, like voters, are prone to error. In
his zeal to question the public's judgment, however, he may underplay
the role of political elites in shaping that judgment. Would the public
choose badly if it had better guidance? John R. Zaller, a U.C.L.A.
political scientist, argues that even the more politically aware
citizens are driven largely by partisanship and by the cues they take
from political leaders. That sounds like George
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/george_w_b
ush/index.html?inline=nyt-per> W. Bush leading the country into war in
Iraq or, more happily, Bill
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/bill_clint
on/index.html?inline=nyt-per> Clinton tirelessly explaining how deficit
reduction would reduce long-term interest rates and thus strengthen the
economy - quite a complex argument. Maybe the public doesn't measure up
because the politicians are not doing their job properly, not the other
way around.

Gary J. Bass, an associate professor of politics and international
affairs at Princeton, is writing a book on humanitarian intervention.

 <http://www.nytimes.com/> Home



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[Bill Eldridge]

As Bob Somersby (www.dailyhowler.com) would say, "Ha ha ha".

A long article in the New York Times reviewing how the public and
politicians
aren't doing their jobs, but alas, what about the press? Wasn't it the
NY Times
that let Judith Miller be used as an uncritical spigot for the White House,
deceiving "informed" Americans into thinking they were actually informed?
Isn't it the Times' "well respected" Thomas Friedman who's been saying
the war
will turn around in 6 months, saying it for about 3 1/2 years now so
that the
Netroots has now created the "F.U." - Friedman Unit - in his honor?
And that's what the supposed respected objective press was doing -
for the percentage getting their "information" from Fox News,
fuhgeddaboudit.

Democracy can't be separated from social factors, nor can it be very
developed
without reasonably free flow of information. If you're pushing for
democracy in
Soviet Russia, you have relatively low access to information except for
issues
you witness first hand, so primarily you're lobbying for generic
improvements in
democracy and freedom of information, but shooting in the dark on a
variety of
specific choices. You're still likely to take a pro-Russian view of
foreign affairs
say in Chechnya and Serbia though - even if educated, we're not all
enlightened
and without biased. If left up to the "informed" intelligentsia of 1917,
however,
they would quite likely have chosen the Marxist system by election
anyway, perhaps
preferring the Whites over the Reds if it got that far.

Caplan gives way too much credit to the farsightedness of educated, informed
people, however. In WWI, the "informed" way of fighting wars was sending
waves
of bodies across the lines to get massacred (even in Iraq-Iran for that
matter).
Malaysia ignored the "informed" advice of the IMF/World Bank in the 90's and
saved their economy, while other Asian Tigers got blasted by doing what
economists
thought the appropriate thing.

The throwaway line "they also exaggerate the potential economic harms of
immigration
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/immigration_and_refugees/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>"
ignores the possibility that maybe the public is observing on a local
level what politicians
and academics treat abstractly on a global level. 2 days ago, a guy I
met from Georgia
who worked in airport immigration and was noting how one suburb of
Atlanta had very obviously
become filled with African Muslims since 9/11 (everyone pushing to get
their relatives in because
they're worried immigration will get cut off now). I was amazed by how
quickly suburbs of
Washington were changing in the last 10 years. Pim Fortuyn gained
prominence by noting the
very real issues and effects involved with immigration and related jobs
and overcrowding issues
that the politicians were ignoring.

On both an economic and a social level, it's local changes that local
people voting locally are
likely to take into consideration, and it's not irrational to say, "I
don't like how my neighborhood's
changing", especially if the change includes increased crime, worse
schools, decreased house values
and clogged roads. We're talking about an aggregation of localized
optimums, not a system tuned nationally
or globally. Is that the "best" possible way? Hard for me to say, but in
some ways, I think uninformed pragmatic
people will often make as reasonable local choices as super-informed
not-very-clever people.
Whether the country will be better of or the world will approve is
another issue. I once wrote an
angry letter to Barbara Mikulski complaining about her voting against
improved CAFE standards
because she was worried about the soccer moms. It's doubtful that the
soccer moms did the same,
even though they might feel a little bit a guilty about their choice. My
guess is that they were all
quite well "informed". Buckminster Fuller expressed very well the need
for solutions to take into
account and use the greed or desires of real people, otherwise it wasn't
a viable solution.

Last point in what's already way too long is that economists need to
learn to advertise and market.
Greenspan's worries about paying down the debt too quickly certainly got
used to gut Social Security
and the surplus. Worries about offshoring computer jobs were met with
unsatisfying, "It's healthy for the global economy".
Name a well-known columnist or economist who pointed out that
computer-related fields occupied something
like 5 of the 12 fastest job growers in the US Bureau of Labor
Statistics 10 year projection, rather than the misleading
doom and gloom from Lou Dobbs. If Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan can get
millions of people to pay attention
to black holes and basic physics, someone ought to be able to do
something popular and informative with useful
basic economics that's changing our lives. A $20 Barbie leaves 35 cents
in China where it's made. Who do you
think keeps the rest of the money? Why won't Lou Dobbs tell us that?

Okay, one other "last" point is that the article ignores issues of
reactiveness in a system - it can be that we
put up with certain short-term negative effects of democracy while
having improved long-term stability.
Real situations require real responses and implemented policies, not
just the abstractness of "less isolationist
but more dovish". Troops along the Maginot Line might seem an acceptable
compromise, but it takes just
one day to prove you wrong. Debates over security/intrusion vs.
individual freedom/right to privacy will
persist forever, and there's no magical exact right amount. We'll
continue to adjust the system based on
threats, technology, attitudes, political changes, etc. And we can't
ever really prove we're doing it "right" or
in good proportions - we only tend to be able to show we've done it
without incident or catastrophically.

Steve Kurtz wrote:

> a good case in point on how 'the story' has a fantasy life of its own,
> and how people really are quite clueless about natural network systems
> and what happens when you interfere with them..  ph
>
> .... from Steve Kurtz   "Bravo for the NYT publishing this."
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> *May 27, 2007***
>
> *Idea Lab*
>
>
>   Clueless
>
> *By GARY J. BASS*
>
> Of all the people who deserve some blame for the debacle in Iraq,
> don't forget the American public. Today, about two-thirds of Americans
> oppose the war. But back in March 2003, when United States troops
> stormed into Iraq, nearly three out of four Americans supported the
> invasion. Doves say that the public was suckered into war by a
> deceitful White House, and hawks say that the press has since led the
> public to lose its nerve --- but the two sides implicitly agree that
> the public has been dangerously unsure, or easily propagandized, or
> ignorant.
>
> The disaster in Iraq has also fed a contradiction in American thinking
> about democracy. On the one hand, Americans continue to share the
> triumphalist, post-Soviet conviction that no other system of
> government has any real legitimacy. On the other hand, there is a
> deepening despair about whether and how the United States should
> spread democracy, prompted not just by Iraq but also by the endurance
> of authoritarianism in booming China and Vietnam and the disheartening
> Palestinian and Lebanese experiments in democratization.
>
> Now Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University, has
> attracted notice for raising a pointed question: Do voters have any
> idea what they are doing? In his provocative new book, "The Myth of
> the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies," Caplan
> argues that "voters are worse than ignorant; they are, in a word,
> irrational --- and vote accordingly." Caplan's complaint is not that
> special-interest groups might subvert the will of the people, or that
> government might ignore the will of the people. He objects to the will
> of the people itself.
>
> In defending democracy, theorists of public choice sometimes invoke
> what they call "the miracle of aggregation." It might seem obvious
> that few voters fully understand the intricacies of, say, single-payer
> universal health care. (I certainly don't.) But imagine, Caplan
> writes, that just 1 percent of voters are fully informed and the other
> 99 percent are so ignorant that they vote at random. In a campaign
> between two candidates, one of whom has an excellent health care plan
> and the other a horrible plan, the candidates evenly split the
> ignorant voters' ballots. Since all the well-informed voters opt for
> the candidate with the good health care plan, she wins. Thus, even in
> a democracy composed almost exclusively of the ignorant, we achieve
> first-rate health care.
>
> The hitch, as Caplan points out, is that this miracle of aggregation
> works only if the errors are random. When that's the case, the
> thousands of ill-informed votes in favor of the bad health plan are
> canceled out by thousands of equally ignorant votes in favor of the
> good plan. But Caplan argues that in the real world, voters make
> systematic mistakes about economic policy --- and probably other
> policy issues too.
>
> Caplan's own evidence for the systematic folly of voters comes from a
> 1996 survey comparing the views of Ph.D. economists and the general
> public. To the exasperation of the libertarian-minded Caplan, most
> Americans do not think like economists. They are biased against free
> markets and against trade with foreigners. Absurdly, they think that
> the American economy is being hurt by too much spending on foreign
> aid; they also exaggerate the potential economic harms of immigration
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/immigration_and_refugees/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>.
> In a similar vein, Scott L. Althaus, a University of Illinois
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_illinois/index.html?inline=nyt-org>
> political scientist, finds that if the public were better informed, it
> would overcome its ingrained biases and make different political
> decisions. According to his studies, such a public would be more
> progressive on social issues like abortion
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/a/abortion/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>
> and gay rights, more ideologically conservative in preferring markets
> to government intervention and less isolationist but more dovish in
> foreign policy.
>
> If the public doesn't know how to think, is there a solution? Caplan
> has some radical medicine in mind. To encourage greater economic
> literacy, he suggests tests of voter competence, or "giving extra
> votes to individuals or groups with greater economic literacy." Until
> 1949, he points out, Britain gave extra votes to some business owners
> and graduates of elite universities. (Since worse-educated citizens
> are less likely to vote, Caplan dislikes efforts to increase voter
> turnout.) Most provocatively, perhaps, in an online essay Caplan has
> suggested a curious twist on the tradition of judicial review: If the
> Supreme Court can strike down laws as unconstitutional, why shouldn't
> the Council of Economic Advisers
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/w/white_house_council_of_economic_advisers/index.html?inline=nyt-org>
> be able to strike down laws as "uneconomical"? (Caplan's book has been
> warmly recommended by N. Gregory Mankiw, the former chairman of
> President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, although Mankiw did not
> allude to this particular proposal.) Caplan also suggests changing the
> educational curriculum to stamp out biased beliefs in voters and
> policy makers alike --- a suggestion as old as Plato's wish that a
> city's ruling guardians be schooled in the "royal science" of
> governance, which has seemingly been reincarnated as economics.
>
> Caplan's argument has kicked off some stormy Internet debates. The
> liberal blogger Ezra Klein wrote: "Obviously I, like most coastal-bred
> elitists, don't think voters make terribly good decisions. But I also
> don't think economic actors are particularly rational." He might have
> added that many policy issues cannot be decided on the basis of
> avowedly rational expert judgment alone. Take immigration, where
> governments weigh not just economic costs and benefits but also
> demands of national identity and cosmopolitanism. Or war: it's very
> complicated, so should we abandon military planning to the
> professional generals?
>
> Caplan's view of democracy is all about efficiency, not legitimacy.
> But some time ago, the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington
> pointed out the weakness of dictatorships that justify their rule by
> only the quality of their job performance: as soon as something goes
> wrong --- a war is lost or inflation skyrockets --- the public has no
> further reason to put up with a despot. If the public asked Caplan's
> Council of Economic Advisers by what authority it struck down a law,
> the council members could point only to their diplomas and
> peer-reviewed articles. A democratic public may not always like --- or
> understand --- the government's policy, but the consent of the
> governed gives the citizens a reason not to reject the whole system.
>
> Caplan recognizes that politicians, like voters, are prone to error.
> In his zeal to question the public's judgment, however, he may
> underplay the role of political elites in shaping that judgment. Would
> the public choose badly if it had better guidance? John R. Zaller, a
> U.C.L.A. political scientist, argues that even the more politically
> aware citizens are driven largely by partisanship and by the cues they
> take from political leaders. That sounds like George W. Bush
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/george_w_bush/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
> leading the country into war in Iraq or, more happily, Bill Clinton
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/bill_clinton/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
> tirelessly explaining how deficit reduction would reduce long-term
> interest rates and thus strengthen the economy --- quite a complex
> argument. Maybe the public doesn't measure up because the politicians
> are not doing their job properly, not the other way around.
>
> /Gary J. Bass, an associate professor of politics and international
> affairs at Princeton, is writing a book on humanitarian intervention./
>
> Home <http://www.nytimes.com/>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

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