Seems that folks over on this side of the pond are a bit slower than the Brits in perusing Mr. Caplan’s treatise on what idiots voters are.

And they are less charmed.

In today’s editions of both The Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker, we find somewhat bemused ponderings over what the reviewers seem to regard as Mr. Caplan’s earnest wish that the world be run by economists rather than voters.

Both give Mr. Caplan (The Economist and WSJ keep referring to him as "Mr.," but I wonder whether, in his world, he is known as "Dr."?) his due, as far as it goes. From The New Yorker:

The political knowledge of the average voter has been tested repeatedly, and the scores are impressively low. In polls taken since 1945, a majority of Americans have been unable to name a single branch of government, define the terms “liberal” and “conservative,” and explain what the Bill of Rights is. More than two-thirds have reported that they do not know the substance of Roe v. Wade and what the Food and Drug Administration does. Nearly half do not know that states have two senators and three-quarters do not know the length of a Senate term. More than fifty per cent of Americans cannot name their congressman; forty per cent cannot name either of their senators. Voters’ notions of government spending are wildly distorted: the public believes that foreign aid consumes twenty-four per cent of the federal budget, for example, though it actually consumes about one per cent.

But they are less kind about his conclusions, and The New Yorker is drily dismissive of his "solutions:"

He offers some suggestions for fixing the evils of universal democratic participation (though he does not spend much time elaborating on them, for reasons that may suggest themselves to you when you read them): require voters to pass a test for economic competence; give extra votes to people with greater economic literacy; reduce or eliminate efforts to increase voter turnout; require more economics courses in school, even if this means eliminating courses in other subjects, such as classics; teach people introductory economics without making the usual qualifications about the limits of market solutions. His general feeling is that if the country were run according to the beliefs of professional economists everyone would be better off. Short of that consummation, he favors whatever means are necessary to get everyone who votes to think like a professional economist. He wants to raise the price of voting.

I’m into civility and all that, but I did rather enjoy that parenthetical. The WSJ was, if less sarcastic, equally critical. It was cruel enough to throw some inconvenient facts at the author:

As an analysis of how far voters are out of step with settled economic thinking, Mr. Caplan’s argument seems irrefutable. Yet as a work of political theory it is pretty dismal. Survey data do indeed show that Americans hold some irrational views. But nowhere in "The Myth of the Rational Voter" does Mr. Caplan demonstrate that dumb voter bias triggers bad public policy.

Take free trade. Mr. Caplan reports that support for free trade hit bottom in 1977, when only 18% of Americans favored eliminating tariffs. Yet three years later, Ronald Reagan campaigned on a platform of free trade and proceeded to sign historic free-trade agreements with Canada and laid the groundwork for free trade with Mexico. Later administrations have fought to grant China most-favored nation trading status. True, there has been a lot of populist noise against free trade, but for decades not a single presidential nominee from either party has run for office while waving the protectionist flag.

Personally, I suspect the thing that keeps the country ticking is that, contrary to public whim, our Founders were bright enough to opt for a republic rather than a democracy. We’ve been pulling hard in the opposite direction for more than two centuries now, but occasionally elected officials still do the right thing. But on the rare occasions when I can’t escape hearing the partisan nonsense over the Controversy Of The Day on 24/7 TV "news," I wonder how much longer the vestiges of that can last.

No, seriously. Hold off with the glib, partisan comebacks and think about it. It’s kind of important.

Cleaning up my desk, I glanced through a copy of The Economist and saw a "Lexington" column from June 14 headlined,  "Vote for me, dimwit."

It was about a book called The Myth of the Rational Voter by Bryan Caplan, an economics professor at George Mason University. An excerpt from the column:

The world is a complex place. Most people are inevitably ignorant about most things, which is why shows like “Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?” are funny. Politics is no exception. Only 15% of Americans know who Harry Reid (the Senate majority leader) is, for example. True, more than 90% can identify Arnold Schwarzenegger. But that has a lot to do with the governor of California’s previous job pretending to be a killer robot.

Many political scientists think this does not matter because of a phenomenon called the “miracle of aggregation” or, more poetically, the “wisdom of crowds”. If ignorant voters vote randomly, the candidate who wins a majority of well-informed voters will win. The principle yields good results in other fields. On “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”, another quiz show, the answer most popular with the studio audience is correct 91% of the time. Financial markets, too, show how a huge number of guesses, aggregated, can value a stock or bond more accurately than any individual expert could. But Mr Caplan says that politics is different because ignorant voters do not vote randomly.

It turns out that Mr. Caplan is of a libertarian mindset — he thinks the answer to the problem that voters want stupid governmental policies is to leave less up to the government. This, of course, is ironic, since most libertarians believe individuals always act rationally, so their voting should be rational, but as you see above, Mr. Caplan says politics is different. (Now if more "the market is God" types would realize people don’t act as rational consumers with regard to health care, either, we might get somewhere as a nation with THAT problem.)

But as "Lexington" says about Mr. Caplan, he’s "better at diagnosis than prescription." So back to his diagnosis — do voters vote rationally? Judging by how many politicians who seem like smart people choose to act like dumb people to get elected, one might doubt it.

Or, to refute the Ibsen reference Karen McLeod brought up on another thread, is the majority always right? I give up. What does the audience think?