This blog post has been anticipated for a few weeks now, during which time I managed to put my notes and thoughts together in such a way that enabled me to finally patch together my first entry at AOTP. So here goes.

On the topic of political ignorance, political economy and the potentially debilitating cognitive barriers that inform the two, no contemporary collection of thinkers can match those who have contributed to the social science journal Critical Review (CR) in recent years. Launched in 1986 by then graduate student Jeffrey Friedman, and dutifully edited all the while by now professor Friedman of the University of Texas at Austin, CR has seen its modus operandi evolve from that of a self-critical libertarian academic journal into a cutting edge intellectual free-for-all. But truth be told, its generally libertarian-friendly roster of scholarly sparring partners is obvious to any casual observer.

The most relevant issue of CR for this post is entitled “Democratic Competence”, first published in late 2006 as a special triple issue. A kind of homage to the work of political scientist Philip Converse - the first to expose not only the dearth of political knowledge on the part of the masses, but the dogmatic tendencies of those few citizens who were informed – and including his original work “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics”, this issue presented the views of contemporary empiricists, historians, economists and political philosophers to address mass democracy’s crisis of legitimacy (or, in some cases, the assertion of such a crisis at all.)

More recently, on August 31^st of this year, as the last of the activities of the meeting of the American Political Scientists Association (APSA) were wrapping up, the Critical Review Foundation held its conference on the “ignorant, closed-minded” and (possibly even) “irrational” American voter. More or less inspired by George Mason University’s Bryan Caplan and his recent book The Myth of the Rational Voter, the goal of the event was to bring together researchers in public opinion, political economy and even evolutionary psychology to hopefully converge upon an overall assessment of just what drives voters to think and behave the way they do. Ignorant, closed-minded and irrational. (Oh my.) As we’ll see, although these are considered undesirable character traits at the interpersonal level, politics in a mass democracy only tends to amplify them.

Probably the most popular and enduring political campaign issue in these United States is the generic economy. No presidential candidate is without a platform that speaks to this all encompassing realm of human activity (which may explain why, of course). With both Barack Obama and John McCain touting the need to “achieve energy independence”, “create strong jobs” and “protect American workers”, the classical liberal, laissez faire conception of freely contracting individuals unconsciously contributing to an overall increase in wealth and living standards – even across borders – is implicitly, if not explicitly, chucked aside. And the masses eat it up.

Economist Bryan Caplan’s thesis is that voters are “rationally irrational” to hold the ideas they do about economics, and to subsequently vote for those who promise to (a) create (or protect) jobs, (b) reduce foreign competition, (c) allay anxieties about the “obviously” poor state of the economy and (d) somehow reign in the substandard performance of the market generally – the “anti-market bias”. Though this last point would seem to subsume the others, it actually represents a somewhat different phenomenon. As Caplan writes:

The public has severe doubts about how much it can count on profit-seeking business to produce socially beneficial outcomes. People focus on the motives of business and neglect the discipline imposed by competition [emphasis mine].[i]

This sentiment is probably the result of evolutionary psychology, which we’ll get to later. But the paradox of “rational irrationality”, according to Caplan, begins with the disincentive for any given individual to embrace an education in economists’ truisms – open borders, free trade, anti-protectionism – because their “penalty” for doing so – higher prices, primarily – are not acute (i.e. personalized) enough for them to notice. How is this different from “rational ignorance” exactly? After all, that theory attempts to explain why most people don’t vote: it doesn’t pay. To cast a vote when the alleged benefits are so widely dispersed, and the decisiveness of one’s vote so low (indeed, virtually non-existent), can legitimately be seen as a waste of time.

But the fact is millions of people do vote, and herein lies the rub. Precisely because there is far more energy expended on encouraging people to vote than there is on urging said people to vote intelligently, there exists the fact of hundreds of thousands of “I Voted”-sticker-wearing…ignoramuses. But that’s not all. Caplan submits that the satisfaction gleaned from rather proudly remaining ignorant, especially when our default setting is to distrust the fusion of Popper’s “Open Society” and Hayek’s “Extended Order”, is strong enough to override a mere introduction to Economics 101.

The depressing implication for those who’d like to “strengthen democracy”, through increased government transparency and the proliferation of information, is that these changes would be far from adequate. Being armed with knowledge is not enough if people are irrationally committed to foolish (in this case, economic) ideas.

But as far as Caplan’s thesis goes, that of “rational irrationality”, Jeffrey Friedman remarked during the conference that this would seem to attribute too much knowledge to the typical voter. On the one hand Caplan acknowledges ignorance, but on the other hand seems to think that voters are self-scrutinizing enough to consciously weigh the utility gained from economic knowledge against the emotional, and social, appeal of rejecting it. Whereas Caplan posits ignorance + conviction, Friedman just sees ignorance, plain and simple.

This is a strong point, but Caplan rebuts that in the battle of rational deliberation vs. the emotional equivalent of resting on one’s laurels, the latter typically wins – unless there is a material price to be paid. When irrational beliefs result in obvious and direct negative stimuli - high prices for instance - they are more likely to be overcome. Politics (or what Friedman more accurately refers to as Social Democracy), unfortunately, can mask and diffuse that high price.

It would seem, then, that cognitive biases combined with poor incentives are a barrier to the “proper” functioning of mass democracy. Friedman has written elsewhere of the effect of what is referred to as the “environment of evolutionary adaptedness” (EEA). The tendency to anthropomorphize the unintended – in the Hayekian sense – result of billions of discrete interacting individuals is the result of the EEA’s effect on the human psyche. For the vast majority of human history, the link between intention and result – to the extent that the one is causally correlated with the other – has been readily observable, because the social environment in which our ancestors operated contained relatively few individuals who could be blamed, or praised, for any given outcome. Or at least those outcomes not perceived as attributable to god(s) or animals. Unfortunately, in the modern age this foible of evolved human psychology can manifest itself in conspiratorial machinations; from high gas prices as corporate collusion to a sinister international cabal of Jewish financiers – well, some misdiagnoses of social ills are uglier than others.

But more than just an understandable holdover from prehistoric times, this limitation on the ability to sufficiently de-personalize and abstract out to various causes of pleasure or displeasure may in fact have been a survival strategy. After all, complete open-mindedness can result in what Friedman aptly describes as “fatal inaction”. Friedman writes,

There would have been little point in being able to reason well (or to have instincts that mimicked reasoning well) about the causes of: consequences that run counter to intentions; consequences to anonymous others; consequences to members of a larger group than a hunter-gatherer band; or consequences that were incremental to or otherwise too slow to affect reproductive chances.[ii]

But this diminished capacity for advanced reasoning skills is no longer necessary for survival. An education in comparative advantage will not result in injury, much less death. But what this persistence of circumscribed intellectual potency portends for the median citizen’s ability to assess the ramifications of social policy is telling. Friedman notes that,

…it would be very powerful evidence for divine intervention [sic] if our unconscious intuitions mimicked those of competent economists, mass psychologists, or historians, since there were no selection pressures in the EEA that would have made us good at analyzing such subject matter of social sciences – subject matter that did not exist for hunter-gatherers in small, personalistic groups.[iii]

Our evolutionary history has given us humans a sharp talent for reasoning, no doubt. But the impetus to reason well very much depends on social context. An easy way to get cheap psychic satisfaction is to vote for the candidate that promises to reign in illegal immigration. A difficult way to get your lawn mowed cheaply is to hire the neighbor kid for twice as much as what the now-turned-back-immigrant would have accepted.

When bigotry doesn’t pay, we’re on to something good. The trick is to make it expensive to indulge.

The citizen-consumer is a perplexing duality; both rational and irrational, depending on the circumstances. In either case, it would be a wise (and rational) decision to go here for photos and other tidbits from the aforementioned CR conference.