Degrees of Elitism

Referencing my last post, Bryan Caplan writes:

This sounds awfully elitist to me - and awfully plausible. Though my harshest critics come from the left, my model of politics is a lot closer to theirs than they'd like to admit.

Well, kind of. To the degree that Caplan believes most voters are stupid, we're pretty much in agreement. However, Caplan goes beyond that and argues they are irrational and systematically biased in very particular ways -- which is something quite different than mere ignorance.

It's true (and, for liberal Democrats, perhaps strategically useful) that John Edwards is the most liberal viable candidate but is perceived to be the most moderate. While this little fact is bound up in issues of region, race, and gender, it's also bound up in the fact that the public doesn't understand the intricacies of policy wonkery and often relies on personality over substance. But this kind of ignorant behavior is distinct from systematic bias.

Analytical elitism is not wrong per se. The general public will always get any number of things wrong. But not understanding a relatively objective fact (e.g. John Edwards is more liberal than Hillary Clinton) is not directly comparable to not understanding the supposed superiority of a certain policy preference (e.g. more deregulation is a good thing for society). While a lot of evidence can be given for any policy preference, it can't reach the level of objectivity in the same way. In that sense, my belief that the public "just doesn't get" the differences between Edwards and Clinton is a lot different than Caplan's belief that the public "just doesn't get" what's best for the economy. And that's precisely the point where Caplan's irrational voter argument moves from an interesting attempt at dealing with general voter stupidity into the somewhat murkier waters of why Americans just can't understand why the free market is so grand.

Comments

[Bryan Caplan]

How would you classify the belief that the public "just doesn't get" the case for pulling out of Iraq? How about the belief the public "just didn't get" the fact that Hussein was not the architect of 9/11?

[jsalvati]

I think you're both arguing past eachother. Steven White is not suggesting that voters can't see that getting out of iraq is a good idea, but that voters can't tell the policy positions of the candidates (ex: Hillary is the most anti-war Dem candidate). Bryan Caplan is not mostly arguing that voters just can't see the virtues of free-markets; he is mostly arguing that voters have a bad understanding of markets and the economy in general, so that IF they DID prefer the outcomes of free markets, they probably still wouldn't pick free markets.

[Steven White]

To make a distinction like I made in this post: The first is a policy disagreement, whereas the latter is a disagreement over facts. As someone who was never in favor of the Iraq war, it's certainly been frustrating at times to see the level of support for it. But it's also somewhat reassuring to see the public "coming around" to seeing it's not going very well and that perhaps we should get out, which leaves the blame on the President who isn't really terribly reliant on public support at this point in his presidential career. But even when public support was high, I didn't think of it as a "systematic bias." It was mainly the result of the public believing things that turned out to be lies (or at least miscalculations). The fact that over a few years, public opinion has changed so markedly is notable here. As to the belief Hussein was behind 9/11, well, that's half mere ignorance and half the fact that there's a small but important part of the population that will never doubt George Bush no matter what he does. There are always the true believers that no facts can inconvenience. Saying they're wrong is just a matter of pointing out pretty objective evidence.

So some people are stupid and some people are crazy, but that's still different than saying they are systematically biased.

[John]

[Bryan] is mostly arguing that voters have a bad understanding of markets and the economy in general, so that IF they DID prefer the outcomes of free markets, they probably still wouldn't pick free markets.

I'm not one to try and fill Bryan's shoes but I don't think that statement makes sense based on how I understand Bryan's point.

The first part of the statement is correct but the second part makes a slight twist that I don't think he would agree with and I certainly don't. The whole point of market bias is that people don't understand markets as you correctly state BUT Bryan's point is, I think, that an understanding of free market outcomes would MAKE THEM support it.

People don't trust markets and are biased against them precisely because they don't understand them.

[Gareth Morley]

Americans had a high level of support for the Iraq war when pretty much everyone else in the world thought it was a bad idea.

That isn't because Andean peasants had more information than Ohioan autoworkers. It's because everyone has certain nationalistic biases, but for Peruvians they didn't interfere with a relatively objective understanding of the war.

So the Iraq war (like most other wars for that matter) is actually a good example of one of the biases Caplan was talking about.

[TGGP]

If voters were merely ignorant, they might randomly guess how left a candidate is. However, their biases cause them to think the white southern man is the most conservative, with the black man and white woman to his left. Just as voters do not understand the positive facts about what candidates have voted for, neither do they understand how the economy works and how successful an invasion of Iraq might be.