Posted by Ilya Somin: Ignorance vs. Stupidity: http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_07_15-2007_07_21.shtml#1184642389
Whenever I write about the dangers of political ignorance, some people misinterpret me as claiming that ordinary voters are "stupid;" occasionally, I am even accused of having "contempt" for them. This is an understandable mistake. However, it ignores the important distinction between ignorance and stupidity. My argument is not that voters know too little about politics because they have low intelligence and thereby behave irrationally. To the contrary, my claim is that investing little or no time in learning about politics is perfectly rational and intelligent behavior for most individual voters. I have made this claim (which in its basic form is not my original idea) in all my academic writings on political ignorance, most recently [1]here. Because an individual vote has almost no chance of determining the outcome of an election, a person whose only reason to acquire political information is to make sure that the "best" candidate wins is quite rational to invest very little time in learning such information. We are all inevitably ignorant about a vast range of matters because they don't interest us much, and because we have little or no incentive to learn about them. For most people, politics falls into that category. The same goes for many other matters, such as theoretical physics or - for me - many parts of [2]pop culture. Unfortunately,political ignorance is a classic example of a situation where rational and intelligent behavior by individuals leads to poor collective outcomes. It is a collective action problem similar in structure to that which causes air pollution or overuse of [3]common pool resources. Various arguments can be made against my thesis, and I have tried to address them in my writings. However, it is not correct to argue that my claims are based on the assumption that ordinary voters are "stupid" or on "contempt" for them. To the contrary, the assumption is that they are rational and that their ignorance is primarily the result of perfectly intelligent decisions about how best to allocate their time and effort, not stupidity. References 1. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=916963 2. http://volokh.com/posts/1182296075.shtml 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common-pool_resource _______________________________________________ Volokh mailing list [email protected] http://lists.powerblogs.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volokh
