Three Cheers for Ignorance

Does our affection for democracy over alternatives require us to believe that citizens are rational and intelligent? The infamous and insightful comedian Bill Maher recently ranted that Americans are "stupid" and joked that legislators shouldn't bother listening to them during the August recess. At marginalrevolution, Alex Tabarrok blogged that Maher was unleashing his inner Bryan Caplan. Clips from the Maher essay first, then my take on why Tabarrok, Maher, and maybe even Caplan are missing the big picture.

I said [on CNN] 'I wouldn't put anything past this stupid country.' It was amazing - in the minute or so between my calling America stupid and the end of the Cialis commercial, CNN was flooded with furious emails and the twits hit the fan. And you could tell that these people were really mad because they wrote entirely in CAPITAL LETTERS!!! It's how they get the blood circulating when the Cialis wears off. ...

And before I go about demonstrating how, sadly, easy it is to prove the dumbness dragging down our country, let me just say that ignorance has life and death consequences. On the eve of the Iraq War, 69% of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11. Four years later, 34% still did. Or take the health care debate we're presently having: members of Congress have recessed now so they can go home and "listen to their constituents." An urge they should resist because their constituents don't know anything. At a recent town-hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his Congressman to "keep your government hands off my Medicare," which is kind of like driving cross country to protest highways. ...

And these are the idiots we want to weigh in on the minutia of health care policy? ...

And if you want to call me an elitist for this, I say thank you. Yes, I want decisions made by an elite group of people who know what they're talking about. That means Obama budget director Peter Orszag, not Sarah Palin.

Which is the way our founding fathers wanted it. James Madison wrote that "pure democracy" doesn't work because "there is nothing to check... an obnoxious individual." Then, in the margins, he doodled a picture of Joe the Plumber.

Let's be fair to Maher, who is clearly poking fun and going to extremes for a laugh. He's a comedian, but is he unserious? Maher is sincere in his elitism, but he clearly misunderstands James Madison whose fundamental message is that the danger of pure democracy required limiting central government power. Nevertheless, he is channeling an ancient dialogue.

I would note that Will Rogers was also a comedian who made his living with political humor. It is telling how times have changed that Rogers made his mark by mocking the powerful, whereas Maher and his fellow pundits score most of their points off of the public. 

If we take this hostility towards democracy seriously, we have to squarely address the Caplan critique, and in doing so convince Alex why he should be a small d democrat. So let's get started.

For the record, Bryan Caplan is a friend of mine who wrote a great book a few years ago called "The Myth of the Rational Voter" which challenges a bedrock theory of political science. The median voter theory holds that democracy is unbiased in its policy preferences, and Bryan brilliantly exposes that conclusion as failure. This is not the end of the story. The Caplan critique is of great but limited value. It does not imply better alternatives. It affirms the Madisonian caution against mobocracy, and reaffirms the desirability of federalism and mixed government republicanism, the former as a channel for policy experimentation in a biased (imperfectly wise) world and the latter as a buffer against majoritarian populism. In the end, the Caplan critique confirmed my sense that policy discussions in a democracy can seem frivolous; voters ultimately cannot care about policy because of bounded rationality and instead care about pragmatic outcomes. Good outcomes equal re-election, regardless of policy particulars.

In sum, I think the Caplan critique of democracy write large fails (and he might agree). Here's why:

First, Caplan tells us that voters are irrational, not that they are stupid. This is big difference between the wise professor and the devious comedian.

Irrational voters are in some sense ignorant, but ignorance is no sign of stupidity. Many surgeons are perfectly ignorant about "frivolous" skills like gardening, automotive engineering, and probably even the inner physics of X-ray machines. But they know how to read an X-ray machine, and isn't that what matters?

Who prefers the surgeon to know less about anatomy and more about NAFTA, tax progressivity, and the effects of the minimum wage on teenage minorities? The surgeon is a voter, but an irrational one because she has incomplete information about political policies. Is this dangerous? Inefficient? Unjust in some way? If we prefer a society where more citizens live longer lives due to better surgeries, we must prefer an ignorant electorate, no?

Let's agree that the human mind can know one subject expertly, five or six subjects really well, and an additional thousand facts, all this in a world with an infinite amount of subject matter. We can trivially claim that a non-ignorant citizenry is an impossible standard. A utopia, of sorts. And the only way to realize such a utopia is to limit the scope of common knowledge, which hints darkly at Mao's little red book.

Second, a growing society requires more, not less, ignorance. In their new Modern Principles: Macroeconomics textbook, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok argue that the division of labor due to trade (i.e. scale) is better understood as a division of knowledge. Great point. In Chapter 18, they write

In a primitive agricultural economy in which each person or household farms for themselves, each person has about the same knowledge as the person next door.  In this case, the combines knowledge of a society of one million people barely exceeds that of a single person. A society run with the knowledge of one brain is a poor and miserable society.

Again, the alternative to rule by all is rule by the few or rule by one. And yet here is evidence that a more complicated society is even less governable by elites than a pre-modern society was. I think a cursory glance at comparative political economies shows that oligarchies are negatively correlated with prosperity (with North Korea, most of sub-Saharan Africa, and Cuba at one extreme and South Korea and SE Asia moving towards the other end of the spectrum towards democracy).

Third, democratic "failure" is resolved by more federalism not more elitism. Look, if we believe that rational ignorance is a function of growth, then they are both poised to accelerate in the years ahead. As the division of labor and knowledge accelerates, the democratic challenge will be how to reconcile increasing levels of political ignorance with democracy.

Logically, more power will be shifted toward experts because increasingly ignorant citizens don't want to manage train schedules. People tend to desire more varieties of ice cream, barbers, and books, so why would we expect them to be satisfied with fewer choices in the political sphere? They will want more experts, not more powerful experts, to supply them with public goods. Also, it is far from clear that a technocracy is the pre-ordained outcome generated by political "ignorance." The efficient apportionment of public goods supply among various service providers is not something people will vote on in a booth. More likely, different nations will try different institutions, and there will be an iterative social learning process. But I suspect political markets may have a better chance of success than a coercive technocracy at finding optimal solutions.

An example that Bryan and I have discussed is the Federal Reserve, which has a kind of technocratic control over the money supply. I think money is a special case, so the Federal Reserve is a necessarily technocratic organization much like the Supreme Court is. Quite different are health care, transportation, welfare, crime, and education. It is not at all clear to me that a centralized organization can effectively manage those issues on a national scale. To the contrary, I trust voter choices among competing products (states, cities) far more than expert knowledge.

Congress is increasingly failing institutionally at selecting weapons systems efficiently, let alone managing public education. Congress' failures have been the luxuries of a rich nation without a basic budget constraint, which will soon change thanks to looming international financiers. When the pressures to balance the budget become critical, fixing of the "broken branch" will inevitably involve a devolution of central power. Congress is simply overcommitted right now, and the limits of taxation will prove unyielding.

So in the end big fiscal decisions about the balance of government services and taxation will play out among 50 state alternatives (with voters making choices via the right of exit -- voting with their feet). Voters may be ever more ignorant of the policies of the 50 states, but they will know where the good schools, low taxes, and growing economies are.

Comments

[jaf]

superb article. Very informative

Thank you

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