Comments on: Those darn irrational voters

By: Martin

Martin — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 03:25:18 +0000

You are totally on point about Caplan’s bias…. which is that he has none and everyone else’s is fatal…. personally I found the book maddening in its illogical and contradictory arguments, mangled terms, cultural prejudice, and a whole lot of other weaknesses. It’s also pretty scary when you really think about what he is arguing for. Like a lot of cloistered academics, he’s hermetically sealed inside his own thinking and theories, and totally unhinged from the real world… past and present. I won’t recap the whole list of objections here… but it’s on my site. (literalmayhem.com)

By: apotheon

apotheon — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 15:15:05 +0000

Free-market theory depends on the notion that market participants are rational actors; if they’re irrational, then the whole theory collapses — the market doesn’t behave predictably. For classical economics to work, we need to trade in the populace and get us a better one.

Not exactly. Free markets work (better) because rational actors have more opportunities to succeed, and irrational actors fail to get in their way. You don’t need everyone to be rational for a free market economy to work — you just need “enough” people to be rational. Mixed and/or managed economies interfere with that because of two problems:

1. They reward irrationality a lot of the time, and punish rationality at times as well, all of which increases the incidence and degree of market failure.

2. They skew conditions such that rational actors are less generally productive of wealth within the economy, because they pursue personal success in an economy where success and productivity are not as closely aligned.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 23:04:19 +0000

That Mr. Caplan can only see public “irrationality” in terms of its failure to appreciate the virtues of unfettered, maximalist free markets says a lot more about him than it does about the public.

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Tue, 31 Jul 2007 16:37:42 +0000

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By: Luke

Luke — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 13:22:17 +0000

I think the problem that a lot of those voters have with not protecting their jobs from outside sources is they see no method of reciprocation… most people (understandably) don’t want to move from our country to another in order to get a job that they are a perfect fit for. The opposite is mostly true in other countries, though… a lot of people in most other countries would jump at a chance to come here and work. So, the majority of Americans see things as just letting global economics take us over, and don’t see the flip side of our ability to integrate into a global economic picture.