# Freakonomics author says it's stupid to vote **URL:** \ **Category:** Politics & Elections\ **Created:** [October 26, 2012, 6:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/freakonomics-author-says-its-stupid-to-vote/638907 "2012-10-26T06:38:38Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![Maeglin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8baadc/32.png) [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2012, 6:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/freakonomics-author-says-its-stupid-to-vote/638907/101 "2012-10-29T18:38:17Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > While I don’t find it fun, believe it or not some people do. I’ve actually met them. > > I mean, people like all kinds of weird shit. > > Levitt’s got a strange blind spot that comes up from time to time where he simply can’t fathom that people do things for reasons that are different from his reasons. It’s a common social science disease. At some point, describing the world and how people behave becomes prescribing how people should behave. When people don’t do what social scientists expect, the scholars just blame the people. They don’t usually realize that if everyone in the world behaved like an economist, then we wouldn’t need economists anymore. The fact that people are odd and hard to figure out keeps the robots from doing my job. ---
**Author:** ![polar\_bear](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ec9cab/32.png) [@polar\_bear](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/polar_bear)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2012, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/freakonomics-author-says-its-stupid-to-vote/638907/102 "2012-10-29T19:14:51Z")
> [@Maeglin](#): > > You have completely misinterpreted the median voter theorem. Downs’ simple model is a frictionless pedagogical tool that rarely holds in reality. Under some very rarefied conditions (unidimensional issue space and a single-peaked preference profile) you can get a peculiar result. This result obtains reasonably well for things like school board budget elections, but it does not hold at all for things like presidential elections. The initial conditions are violated, so the result does not obtain. Where do I mention the median voter theorem? I never mention Duncan Black; we are talking about voting and given the assumptions I mentioned, voting is not rational. The median voter theorem is about something completely different (although you might have studied it in the same class). I was not talking about public choice theory, but about the simple question: is it rational for an individual to vote. You do know Downs wrote more than one piece, right? ---
**Author:** ![Maeglin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8baadc/32.png) [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2012, 7:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/freakonomics-author-says-its-stupid-to-vote/638907/103 "2012-10-29T19:36:35Z")
> [@polar\_bear](#): > > Where do I mention the median voter theorem? I never mention Duncan Black; we are talking about voting and given the assumptions I mentioned, voting is not rational. > > The median voter theorem is about something completely different (although you might have studied it in the same class). I was not talking about public choice theory, but about the simple question: is it rational for an individual to vote. You do know Downs wrote more than one piece, right? Downs wrote one book called Downs 1957. I did read your post too fast while multi-tasking. MVT also predicts zero turnout and a coinflip. But you’ve still got the interpretation of Downs backwards. Downs recognized that his simple model _failed_ to explain voting, not that voting itself is irrational. Downs knew his model wasn’t normative. Hence it was a paradox and required a better explanation. Downs proposed some (mostly inadequate) solutions, which Riker & Ordeshook took up in the 60s. The debate is ongoing. Instrumental rationality is an axiom of human nature, not a normative standard of individual decisions. It is a modeling assumption, not a consequence of behaving like a model predicts. If you are committed to assuming that humans are rational, then you need to write models that explain behavior successfully. If you can’t explain the behavior with a given model, then the model is the problem, not the people. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2012, 8:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/freakonomics-author-says-its-stupid-to-vote/638907/104 "2012-10-29T20:20:29Z")
> [@Maeglin](#): > > They don’t usually realize that if everyone in the world behaved like an economist, then we wouldn’t need economists anymore. That’s like saying that because everyone in the world obeys the laws of thermodynamics, we don’t need physicists. ---
**Author:** ![Maeglin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8baadc/32.png) [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2012, 8:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/freakonomics-author-says-its-stupid-to-vote/638907/105 "2012-10-29T20:28:06Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > That’s like saying that because everyone in the world obeys the laws of thermodynamics, we don’t need physicists. Apparently the robots can start telling my jokes instead of me and nobody would notice. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2012, 9:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/freakonomics-author-says-its-stupid-to-vote/638907/106 "2012-10-29T21:38:08Z")
> [@Maeglin](#): > > Downs wrote one book called Downs 1957. I had no idea he was so egotistical! Just for the record, it was [An Economic Theory of Democracy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Economic_Theory_of_Democracy). Some propositions he put forth, many of which we’ve been arguing in recent threads: > [@](#): > > 1. A two-party democracy cannot provide stable and effective government unless there is a large measure of ideological consensus among its citizens. > > 2. Parties in a two-party system deliberately change their platforms so that they resemble one another; whereas parties in a multi-party system try to remain as ideologically distinct from each other as possible. > > 3. If the distribution of ideologies in a society’s citizenry remains constant, its political system will move toward a position of equilibrium in which the number of parties and their ideological positions are stable over time. > > 4. New parties can be most successfully launched immediately after some significant change in the distribution of ideological views among eligible voters. > > 5. In a two-party system, it is rational for each party to encourage voters to be irrational by making its platform vague and ambiguous. He was a very big name 40 years ago. How is he remembered today? ---
**Author:** ![Maeglin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8baadc/32.png) [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)\ **Post date:** [October 29, 2012, 9:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/freakonomics-author-says-its-stupid-to-vote/638907/107 "2012-10-29T21:41:20Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > I had no idea he was so egotistical! > > Just for the record, it was [An Economic Theory of Democracy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Economic_Theory_of_Democracy). > > Some propositions he put forth, many of which we’ve been arguing in recent threads: > > He was a very big name 40 years ago. How is he remembered today? Downs 1957 is a book that everybody cites and nobody reads. It is methodologically pathbreaking, but its results have been superseded by more recent work in just about every way. ---
**Author:** ![Brown\_Eyed\_Girl](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/brown_eyed_girl/32/3574_2.png) [@Brown\_Eyed\_Girl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Brown_Eyed_Girl)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2012, 11:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/freakonomics-author-says-its-stupid-to-vote/638907/108 "2012-10-30T23:53:51Z")
> [@regginbrow](#): > > I’ve heard a (citeless) story that illustrates this. A country allowed internet voting in order to facilitate voting but actually saw a decrease in voter turnout. This is because no one will ever know if you’ve actually voted or not, due to secret ballots, so that incentive is removed. Nonsense. [Two of the top seven states in voter turnout](http://smpbff1.dsd.census.gov/TheDataWeb_HotReport/servlet/HotReportEngineServlet?reportid=ea628dcc3df1c32ee416bb633b0e7e0b&emailname=essb@boc&filename=0328a.hrml) have implemented vote-by-mail programs. I challenge the notion that people generally require recognition as an incentive to voting. ---
**Author:** ![Maeglin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8baadc/32.png) [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2012, 1:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/freakonomics-author-says-its-stupid-to-vote/638907/109 "2012-10-31T01:54:35Z")
> [@Brown\_Eyed\_Girl](#): > > Nonsense. [Two of the top seven states in voter turnout](http://smpbff1.dsd.census.gov/TheDataWeb_HotReport/servlet/HotReportEngineServlet?reportid=ea628dcc3df1c32ee416bb633b0e7e0b&emailname=essb@boc&filename=0328a.hrml) have implemented vote-by-mail programs. I challenge the notion that people generally require recognition as an incentive to voting. I am pretty sure he was talking about [Switzerland](http://www.geneve.ch/evoting/english/welcome.asp), a country with famously low turnout in general. ---
**Author:** ![gamerunknown](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/6bbea6/32.png) [@gamerunknown](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gamerunknown)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2012, 5:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/freakonomics-author-says-its-stupid-to-vote/638907/110 "2012-11-01T17:09:56Z")
I think this qualifies more of a Sorites paradox than a Tragedy of the Commons. By analogy, the grain of sand is the point where votes reach parity and the heap of sand is where the election is too far away to justify leaving the house. Hardly anyone pointed out that this only holds true for certain voting systems anyway. Proportional voting systems have a more direct impact on the demographics of the representatives. An individual’s vote has a negligible influence on two other properties not immediately related to their own immediate satisfaction too. It could lead to a change in the policies of either major candidate to combat the spoiler effect (co-opting the most popular policies of a third party). It could also lead to changes in the electoral system. If parties see demographics which used to solidly vote for them becoming apathetic they may propose the Australian system or a shift to proportional representation. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/freakonomics-author-says-its-stupid-to-vote/638907.md?page=5)