Created at: 2026-05-23
I have picked up this book as a recommendation from a live stream event I was watching. The prospect sounded interesting as I am always keen to read about democracy pitfalls, but I am split on the book.
The writer has a bit of an I-am-right-you-are-wrong attitude which makes it quite annoying to get through the book. There is an underlying ever-constant neo-liberal agenda (the usual free-market, open borders, no protectionism, etc.) in a not nuanced form which makes it even harder to align with the writer in his thinking.
Nonetheless, there are some interesting takes and data information that are in the book and even though I'd say it can be a bit challenging to read this it is worth to considering. More specifically, I think the writer has done a good job of spotting holes in the way modern westerner election systems work (or don't!).
Elections might be a weaker deterrent to misconduct than they seem on the surface, making it more important to please special interests than the general public.
In the naive public-interest view, democracy works because it does what voters want. In the view of most democracy skeptics, it fails because it does not do what voters want. In my view, democracy fails because it does what voters want.
The essence of political democracy—the franchise—has eroded, as voting and face-to-face politics give way to campaign-finance plutocracy . . . [T]here is a direct connection between the domination of politics by special interest money, paid attack ads, strategies driven by polling and focus groups—and the desertion of citizens. . . . People conclude that politics is something that excludes them.3
Fact 2: below-average students are above-average citizens. Most voters never take a single course in economics. If it is disturbing to imagine the bottom half of the class voting on economic policy, it is frightening to realize that the general population already does. The typical voter, to whose opinions politicians cater, is probably unable to earn a passing grade in basic economics. No wonder protectionism, price controls, and other foolish policies so often prevail.
As we never cease to point out, each man is in practice an excellent economist, producing or exchanging according as he finds it more advantageous to do the one or the other. —Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms
Contrary to popular stereotypes of the rich Republican and the poor Democrat, income and party identity are only loosely related. The elderly are if anything slightly less supportive of Social Security and Medicare than the rest of the population. Men are more pro-choice than women.61
politicians have a strong incentive to do what is popular, but little to competently deliver results. Alan Blinder cuttingly refers to “a compliant Congress, disdainful of logic, but deeply respectful of public opinion polls.”62 If one politician fails to carry out the people’s wishes, a competing politician will.
How strictly do elections constrain politicians? My view is that it depends on voters themselves. If they care deeply about an issue—like public use of racial slurs—politicians have almost no slack. One wrong word costs them the election. In contrast, if voters find a subject boring—like banking regulation—if emotion and ideology provide little guidance, their so-called representatives have “wiggle room” to maneuver.
There are two technologies for producing automobiles in America. One is to manufacture them in Detroit, and the other is to grow them in Iowa. Everybody knows about the first technology; let me tell you about the second. First you plant seeds, which are the raw materials from which automobiles are constructed. You wait a few months until wheat appears. Then you harvest the wheat, load it onto ships, and sail the ships westward into the Pacific Ocean. After a few months, the ships reappear with Toyotas on them.
I refer to the public’s leanings as pessimistic bias, a tendency to overestimate the severity of economic problems and underestimate the (recent) past, present, and future performance of the economy.83 Adam Smith famously ridiculed such attitudes with a one-liner: “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”84
We all share a presumption that when an expert disagrees with a nonexpert, the expert is right. This holds in math, science, history, and car repair. Yes, the experts have been wrong before. An amusing book by Cerf and Navasky, The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation,59 provides hundreds of embarrassing examples. Notice, however, that they did not write a companion volume entitled The Public Speaks: The Definitive Compendium of Amateur Misinformation. It would be too easy.
Downs’s one-sentence explanation remains definitive: “it is irrational to be politically well-informed because the low returns from data simply do not justify their cost in time and other resources.”3 The logic is simple. Time is money, and acquiring information requires time. Individuals balance the benefit of learning against its cost.4 In markets, if individuals know too little, they pay the price in missed opportunities; if they know too much, they pay the price in wasted time. The prudent path is to find out enough to make a tolerably good decision. Matters are different in politics. One vote is extraordinarily unlikely to change an election’s outcome.
If candidate behavior is unobservable, voters cannot condition their votes on candidate behavior. If voters cannot condition their votes on candidate behavior, candidates have no incentive to heed them.
At minimum, why wouldn’t highly ignorant voters tune out unreliable sources? They do not have to fact-check political ads, just greet them with blanket skepticism. That is the commonsense response to unverified assertions from sources with questionable motives.
Reelecting incumbent presidents during periods of prosperity is a silly shortcut if economic performance primarily depends on the independent central bank.
Rationally ignorant voters employ a “When in doubt, say no” strategy, giving politicians and activists with good ideas a strong incentive to prove their case. But irrational voters might take the naive stance, “If they say we need a program, we must!”—tempting insiders to concoct one scary story after another.68
For it seemed to me that I could find much more truth in the reasonings that each person makes concerning matters that are important to him, and whose outcome ought to cost him dearly later on if he judged badly, than in those reasonings engaged in by a man of letters in his study, which touch on speculations that produce no effect and are of no other consequence to him except perhaps that, the more they are removed from common sense, the more pride he will take in them. —Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method
Espousing unpopular views often transforms you into an unpopular person. Few want to be pariahs, so they self-censor. If pariahs are less likely to be hired, conformity blends into conflict of interest. However, even bereft of financial consequences, who wants to be hated? The temptation is to balance being right and being liked.
Both economists and the public almost automatically accept the view that poor people are liberal Democrats and rich people are conservative Republicans. The data paint a quite different picture. At least in the United States, there is only a flimsy connection between individuals’ incomes and their ideology or party. The sign fits the stereotype: As your income rises, you are more likely to be conservative and Republican. But the effect is small, and shrinks further after controlling for race. A black millionaire is more likely to be a Democrat than a white janitor.25 The Republicans might be the party for the rich, but they are not the party of the rich.
To get ahead in politics, leaders need a blend of naive populism and realistic cynicism. No wonder the modal politician has a law degree. Dye and Zeigler report that “70 percent of the presidents, vice presidents, and cabinet officers of the United States and more than 50 percent of the U.S. senators and House members” have been lawyers.
Faith helps explain politicians’ tendency to dodge pointed questions with vague answers.23 How can refusing to take a position (or changing the subject) be strategically better than candidly endorsing a moderate position?24 Put yourself in the shoes of a voter who opposes the moderate view but has a degree of faith in a candidate’s good intentions. If the candidate announces his allegiance to the moderate view, faith in him dissolves. But as long as the candidate is silent or vague, it does not tax your faith to maintain, “He’s a decent man, he must agree with me.” From politicians’ point of view, the critical fact is that voters on both sides of the issue can “reason” in the same fashion.
Lately, money has become newly influential in political life. As campaigns become more expensive, money tends to drive out more civic forms of participation. . . . Money-driven elections feed into a brand of politics that leaves out ordinary voters, except as objects to be manipulated by polling, focus groups, mass mailings, and paid TV spots.
If candidates get money solely by selling socially harmful favors to special interests, then advertising would backfire. The populace would reason: The more a politician spends on advertising, the more money he must have; the more money he has, the more illicit favors he must have sold. Lots of ads equal lots of corruption.
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. —Bertrand Russell
Both Mises and Rothbard have passed away, but their outlook—including Ph.D.s who subscribe to it—lives on in the Ludwig von Mises Institute. But groups like these have basically given up on mainstream economics; members mostly talk to each other and publish in their own journals. The closest thing to market fundamentalists are not merely outside the mainstream of the economics profession. They are way outside.
The main upshot of my analysis of democracy is that it is a good idea to rely more on private choice and the free market.
Remarkably, until the passage of the Representation of the People Act of 1949, Britain retained plural voting for graduates of elite universities and business owners. As Speck explains, “Graduates had been able to vote for candidates in twelve universities in addition to those in their own constituencies, and businessmen with premises in a constituency other than their own domicile could vote in both.”57 Since more educated voters think more like economists, there is much to be said for such weighting schemes. I leave it to the reader to decide whether 1948 Britain counts as a democracy.