What Voters Know That Isn't So

You can call it economic illiteracy, as John Stossel does.  Or you can talk about the The Myth of the Rational Voter as Bryan Caplan does, arguing that “most voters cast their ballot on the basis of irrational biases about economic matters.”  As Stossel writes:

People tend to acquire their wrong opinions about economic policy packaged in worldviews they inherited while growing up. They never test their views against the evidence because that would be unsettling. No one likes having his worldview challenged. So people vote for candidates who make them feel good. They vote irrationally.

Actually, I think that is unfair.  Most people do not really experience the market.  They live in market-sheltered enclaves, as employees or as government dependents.  They really do not experience the operation of capitalist economics.

But sheltered away from the market as they are, they suffer from four common-sense biases that confirm the old adage that it’s not what you don’t know, it’s what you know that isn’t so.

• Antimarket bias: people think that the market is a zero-sum game
• Antiforeign bias: people mistrust foreigners and try to protect themselves against cheap foreign goods
• Make-work bias: people think that jobs make us rich, not the products of jobs
• Pessimistic bias: “any economic problem is proof of economic decline”

Really these biases are not irrational.  They are only irrational in politicians, academicians, and businessmen who ought to know better. 

In people who do know better, but who demagogue to get votes or subsidies anyway, we are not talking about irrationalism either.  We are talking about evil.