Jacob Goldsmith

One of the arguments that the reactionary movement makes is that in a democracy, politicians will have to do what voters want, and voters are often wrong about policy. For example, rent control is a bad policy and yet a majority of voters support it. When you add up all the ways that voter opinion deviates from an objective standard of good policy, the loss in terms of economic output is very large. This inevitably leads to worse outcomes than if a rational dictator implemented good policies and then simply took a cut off the top. I won't argue that voters always pick good policies, or whether a dictator would be likely to do better. [1] However, I think voters are more aware of their own lack of policy expertise than some assume, and they respond to this ignorance more rationally than one might appreciate at first. A Simple Model Imagine you are a voter who doesn't understand anything about politics or policy. Not only do you not understand what policies are good, you don't even know what aspects of life are controllable by politics. That is, suppose you are having trouble finding a romantic partner. Is there anything that politicians could do differently that would prevent this? You have no idea. You also have no idea whom to trust when considering whether to defer to peers or experts. For any relevant political issue, you can find a lot of people with various credentials on both sides. Sure, the credentials are different--one side may have a lot of medical doctors and another may have a lot of chiropractors--but you have no way of knowing which credentials signal knowledge, if any. Perhaps you know that some people are very convincing and will be able to make you believe anything about policy, regardless of its true value. If you are this voter, your optimal strategy is to vote for the incumbents whenever your life is going well and vote out the incumbents whenever it is going poorly. Of course, you need to define a threshold for how well life has to be go