The Myth of the Rational Voter, Sowell Edition

If I interpet it correctly, Mr. Sowell’s claim is that politicians are persuaders. The “people” they try and persuade may be fellow politicians, or constituants. Often what politicians try to convince is: “I believe what you do.”, even if it is wrong. This is far easier than trying to educate on what is believed to be best. Examples; minium wage and free trade.

What bugs me most about politicians is that once elected, most of them automatically assume they have gained electorial magic powers that enable them to be experts in every field they are asked to vote upon. Course it is difficult to persuade others if you admit ignorance.

The desire for power over others is evil. Pols are, by this definition, evil (with very few exceptions).

Hmmm, then again so is every boss, every business owner, and so on. I think imagining human society where power does not come into play is as utopian as trying to imagine a society without money or work.

You’re wrong that pols don’t even try. There was a massive effort by the Clinton admin to sell NAFTA, for example. I even remember (was it Gore or Reich?) going on Larry King to argue with Ross Perot for it. At the end of the day few Americans were hurt by it, unfortunately the results in Mexico were not as good as they could have been (that’s not saying they were bad).

I think there’s a persistent belief that should be explained. I don’t think it is because most people believe their jobs are threatened by overseas competition and certainly the supermajority of people have jobs far above min. wage. I think there is an underlying sense that the market needs to be slowed down. Not stopped but slowed. This can be done thru various methods…min. wages, regulation or trade restrictions etc.

Boonton, what would be an example of a society that had too few speed bumps and changed too fast?

Behavioral economics is often considered to be contrary to the standard assumptions of the neoclassical orthodoxy, but it would definitely appear to bolster the economist-elitist claim that “the people” are wrong about a lot, with their “common sense” heuristics badly applicable to the issues of a modern capitalistic economy.

You obviously do not know what power is.

The simplest definition I can think of would run like this…”the ability to get others to do what one wants”. Politicians then often have very little power. Yes in theory they could, say, vote for a 70% tax bracket on everyone and give themselves all the money but they don’t because quite often it is other groups in the economy that have power over politicians…not the other way around.

This is the exception that proves the rule, and it only happened because a billionaire spent millions trying to mis-educate the population.

On the contrary, why would the politicians have cared to fight Perot’s miseducation efforts? Why not simply shrug and say “this bad treaty came from the previous administration who we defeated…we will save America by rejecting this!”. Perot didn’t spend millions to fight it. He spent a lot to run for office but his campaign against NAFTA was quite cheap. All he had to do was appear on talk shows and speak against it and people clapped. Pat Buchannan, likewise, got people to pay him to ‘miseducate’ them through his books.

Boonton, what would be an example of a society that had too few speed bumps and changed too fast?

No I can’t but if a penchant for speed bumps is a part of human nature then you’re never going to see such an example. I find it interesting, though, because perhaps the libertarian ideal society is as unrealistic as Marx’s.

Let me remind you that socialists and communists had a long list of excuses for why they had no good examples of the ‘perfect socialism’ they advocated. They said that the revolution was betrayed by traitors to the cause. That stuff was done in the name of socialism that wasn’t really socialism. That socialism was sabatoged by capitalist economies. What they would never admit as a cause…until maybe the end…was that the reason there were no successful examples of socialism was the same reason there are no examples of a human society run by a hive mind or a human society that uses asexual reproduction…because such is not compatitable with human nature.

Hayek recognized that the theorist might fancy himself very smart but it was more likely that human nature was more complicated than even the smartest theorist. Yet what’s interesting to me is that many economists are equally arrogant in thinking their models must be perfect. If there is a persistent failure to adopt a libertarian style gov’t/society despite theoretical results that indicate such would be better for everyone then perhaps the theory is missing something fundamental about human nature?

You misunderstand Hayek. Hayek referred to institutions, like marriage. Economic fallacies aren’t institutions; they’re part of culture.

I understand that Hayek would have never supported protectionism, that is not what I meant to imply. However apply his analysis to traditions in society. Basically he is saying we can never really understand fully why something has the price it does because a price is the sum of incountable bits of information scattered among the brains of millions of people. Likewise any society will have traditions that will never make sense to any individual that seeks to fully understand or explain them but they are nevertheless valid because they are the sum of the experiences of millions of people…both living and dead. In fact, traditions may be even more valid than prices because they represent the assimilation of more information AND being tradition…not law…have no way of surviving unless multiple generations of people find it worthwhile to adopt them.

So what I’m wondering is not that an economic fallacy like protectionism for sugar-based ethanol is an institution. What I’m wondering is does human culture seek a certain amount of stability over growth and will adopt a certain level of economic fallacies to maintain that? If this is true then possibly they are not really economic fallacies at all. If, say, the real motivation behind protectionism is to slow the rate of economic change in a geographic area then that’s hardly a fallacy…that’s what protectionism does! The fallacy is assuming the words on the surface “save jobs”, “protect domestic manufacuring” etc. are the real motivation for the transaction. In job interviews people are often coached to say they are “seeking challenges” or “like hard work” but we all know a better economic analysis is the assumption of the ‘economic man’ seeking to work the least for the most and to pay the least but get the most.

Boonton writes “Why are some economic fallacies so persistent? Are we sure they are fallacies?”

I know a thing or two about three largely independent fields (biology, physics, and software) in which we know various things very well, and our knowledge gets tested against reality constantly by its use in various technological tricks. In none of those fields have I found stubbornly inconsistent opinions of stubbornly ignorant people (people who choose to remain so nonexpert that not only can’t they paraphrase the standard model, they can’t even pick a paraphrase of the standard model out of a lineup) to be a useful warning of incorrectness. Why should economics be different?

Also, we can find economic questions where we know the answer with great confidence but the popular consensus has it quite wrong. One example, from memory: what is the proportion of the US federal government budget devoted to foreign aid?

Admittedly there’s one reason economics should be different: it’s more politicized. But the most effective response to politicized science that I know of is to find killer factoids and experiments (sometimes just thought experiments) and technological applications where the politicized version looks silly. (Or, fairly often, the political version avoids testable specifics as much as possible while jumping to its preferred politically charged generalities, in which case you are driven to some tradeoff between specific observations that kill it and mockery about how it generally doesn’t actually disallow anything.) Did the alternative of appealing to the horse sense of the general population work against political obfuscation around creationism, or Lysenkoism, or Nazi non-Jewish physics, or any of the variants of 1900ish biology in which the political winners were determined to be overwhelmingly genetically superior, or Catholic anti-Galilean astronomy?

(“Stubbornly ignorant” has broader negative judgmental connotations than I really want: there are too many things to know, so anyone necessarily chooses ignorance in many fields. But if we narrow things down a little to just those people who also choose to hold strong opinions in fields where they choose ignorance, I think a little judgmentalism is justified.)

As long as mainstream journalists continue to be completely clueless about economics, their readers/viewers/listeners will be too. Politicians don’t persuade. They just go where the wind blows, and most of the wind is produced by MSM.

John Stossel can’t counterbalance the entire country’s cadre of journalists, no matter how many specials ABC gives him.