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MAJORITIES AGAINST UTILITY: IMPLICATIONS OF THE FAILURE OF THE MIRACLE OF AGGREGATION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2008

Bryan Caplan
Bryan Caplan
Affiliation:
Economics, George Mason University
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Abstract

A surprising conclusion of modern political economy is that democracies with highly ignorant voters can still deliver very good results as long as voters' errors balance each other out. This result is known as the Miracle of Aggregation. This paper begins by reviewing a large body of evidence against this Miracle. Empirically, voters' errors tend to be systematic; they compound rather than cancel. Furthermore, since most citizens vote for the policies they believe are best for society, systematic errors lead voters to support socially suboptimal policies. The paper then considers the case for “paternalistically” vetoing popular but misguided democratic decisions, presenting several arguments that overruling democratic decisions is much less objectionable than overruling individual decisions. In fact, since democracies routinely adopt paternalistic policies, the opponent of paternalism for individual decisions should embrace paternalism for democratic decisions. The paper concludes by considering several different mechanisms for improving upon majority rule.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , January 2009 , pp. 198 - 211
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2008

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References

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8 This is true for continuous choices. For discrete choices, a biased electorate can still make the right choice as long as the bias is not too severe. For example, suppose an electorate faces a discrete choice to declare war or not, and voters err in a slightly hawkish direction. If peace is clearly the better option, a slight bias will not be enough to distort policy.

9 For more details, see Caplan, Bryan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 25, 79–80Google Scholar.

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16 These results indicate that democracies adopt policies that are bad given the existing distribution of values. The enlightened preference literature does not address whether existing policies are bad in some more objective sense.

17 The leading potential confounding variables are usually proxies for self-serving bias, such as income, income growth, job security, race, gender, and age, or proxies for ideological bias, such as party identification and self-identified position on the left-right spectrum. For more details, see Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter, 52–56.

18 See ibid., 50–93. This does not mean that economists are infallible, only that their views tend to be sensible relative to contemporary public opinion. During the New Deal, for example, many economists supported policies that modern economists see as deeply misguided. But given the mass appeal of these policies, it is still quite likely that the average economist during the New Deal was, by comparison, a critic.

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26 Furthermore, support by the young persists even though many young people think Social Security benefits will be sharply lower by the time they retire. See Brennan, Geoffrey and Lomasky, Loren, Democracy and Decision: The Pure Theory of Electoral Preference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 103CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 For more details, see Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter, 148–51.

28 See Caplan, “Sociotropes, Systematic Bias, and Political Failure.”

29 See Paul, Ellen Frankel, Miller, Fred D. Jr., and Paul, Jeffrey, eds., Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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37 In fact, economists would roughly say that everyone but the individual driver is worse off. Unlike the other people who breathe his emissions, the driver enjoys the compensating benefit of convenient personal transportation.

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43 Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter, 154–58.

44 The fact that tests have at some point been used for discriminatory ends is hardly a decisive counterargument. Should we abolish drivers' licenses simply because Saudi Arabia refuses to issue them to women?

45 Admittedly, this problem is not insuperable: voter-approved expansions of the franchise on the basis of property, race, gender, age, and more have occurred in the past.

46 For further discussion, see ibid., 199–205.

47 Of course, the “knows more than average” stipulation is crucial. Before they try to correct their students' “misconceptions,” teachers ought to double-check the quality of their lessons.