What if voters are irrational?

Finally reread Caplan’s book (this time with the book and audio at the same time) while it’s a book with ideas worth understanding. What I’ve taken away, is probably is concepts about the publics “anti market bias”, “anti foreign bias”, “make work bias” and “pessimistic bias”. I have doubts about, though, whether the biases are universal. Living in Denmark, which is a much smaller nation than the US, some of these policies are so blatantly economically irrational and destructive that even the least bright citizen can realise that giving into them would lead to a scarcity or non-existence if so many products, which we have no chance of producing ourselves. Being a small nation can give you an edge in realising what is in your material interest. Another idea, which I hadn’t thought of, was Caplan’s pointing out that unselfishness, irrational cognition and little slack for politicians is as bad as it gets. If voters are systematically biased and irrational, then when they cast their vote, they don’t even have a selfishness to safe them from choosing policies with bad economic outcomes. The juxtaposition of market fundamentalism to democracy fundamentalism was also worth understanding. Caplan is probably rigget, that we trust democracy to eagerly and are to sceptical towards markets. It’s one point where I myself have changed perspective as I’ve learned and read about markets and economy. It’s not all evident and some of it is counterintuitive, so some of people’s resistance comes from ignorance and inability to comprehend rather than irrationality. A fault in Caplan’s thinking, though, is the primacy of economic outcomes. I also care about prosperity, wealth, the eradication of poverty, but there are also other things which are important and which might impair economic development more or less. Isn’t it irrational only to fixate on economic development and disregard all other considerations and wants that people might rightly or wrongly perceive.

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