I think the following video from Antz sums up my sentiments perfectly.
01:40 onward.
Voting matters.
One vote doesn’t matter in national elections, but it certainly can in small local ones. There have been several nearby that were decided by less than a dozen votes; at least two that were ties, and a recount didn’t change this.
One tie was settled by tossing a coin.
I suppose they’re the same in the sense that a $1 bill and a $1 lottery ticket are the same.
Note that allocating funding to a political party can have an affect on the election in a way that simply allocating votes doesn’t. For example, if a party receives $500 dollars, they can broadcast an ad that shapes the course of the political discussion, whereas receiving 500 votes (and no money) doesn’t.
I don’t understand this. If candidate Alice gets 6,000,000 votes and candidate Bob gets 4,000,000 votes, then each voter contributed 1/10,000,000 to the outcome. That’s a small, but not zero impact.
That impact may not be significant. It’s very rare that we need 1/10,000,000 precision to decide the outcome.
It’s the classic “which straw breaks the camel’s back”. Each straw has an impact, but only one actually breaks the camel’s back.
In terms of an election, imagine counting the votes in the order cast. The vote that brings Alice to total of 4,000,001 is the vote that decided the election. No vote (for either Alice or Bob) after that point could change the outcome. But, in fact, the votes aren’t ordered. Every vote for Alice contributed equally to her win. And every vote for Bob increased the number of votes Alice needed, so they contributed to the decision as well.
Each individual straw has an impact if there are exactly enough straws to break the camel’s back. If that’s not the case, then the marginal impact of each one is zero. Collectively they had an impact - which is also true of voting - but from the perspective of each individual straw, none did. And an individual contemplating whether to vote only controls his or her own vote, and so would look at it from their own perspective. (Obviously, if you could push a button that swung a million votes you would do it, even if you only needed 100,000.)
My point was that it’s not analogous to a guy throwing a wrapper in the wind. That guy actually has an impact, just a very small one, such that if we knew that he was the only guy doing it it would not be worth making a big deal about it. But he does have an impact. And if a bunch of other people do it too, each is a small part of the problem in their own right, and not just if we arbitrarily assign them to be the tipping point.
I guess I just don’t see why you say this, when we can easily compute how much impact each vote has.
I’m talking about the marginal impact. It is zero. There’s nothing to compute.
If I stay home or if I go out to vote, is there any difference whatsoever? Answer: no.
The difference between 10,000,000 and 9,999,999 is one vote. It changes the outcome by one part in ten million. That’s not zero.
This year, every position in the Texas State Board of Education is up for grabs, due to redistricting. Many of those posts were filled by right-wing idiots because of Texans not paying attention. TheTexas Freedom Network wants us to pay attention! “Intelligent Design” is not in the curriculum & I’d like to stay that way!
My local & state reps will remain Democratic–because I live in an urban district; but I’m glad to vote for them myself! And media voices keep telling me my presidential vote does not matter. The hell with them. I proudly voted for Gore in 2000 & was glad to be counted on his side…
The only outcome of the election that has any meaning is win or lose. A miss is as good as a mile when it comes to elections.
[As someone observed upthread, this is not true of third party candidates, who are not out to win but rather to stengthen the cause. My first ever presidential vote was for Ron Paul, running on the Libertarian ticket in 1988. (He was crushed by the combined Bush-Dukakis forces.) And I remember pointing out to my friends that a vote for Paul was not a wasted vote since it would stengthen Libertarian principles, and that they were the ones preparing to waste their votes by voting for a major party candidate. Didn’t get too far, as I recall it … :)]
Yes, it’s a paradox, and a variation on the tragedy of the commons. Which means that every economist should know better. A simple counterargument is that voting does not take place in a vacuum in which votes magically appear as part of a total. Individuals create an example by being seen voting, by urging others to vote, by assisting in the ability to vote, and by stressing the importance of voting. This is analogous to the way to solve littering, by conspicuously not littering, by cleaning up others’ litter, by showing the value of a clean park, etc. And in both cases, there is the non-insignificant feeling of being part of a team - either a winning team or the comfort of knowing that others supported your worthy but losing views. IOW, this is a known and well-understood issue with a solution. It’s at the exact heart of behavioral economics, which is what Levitt is supposed to be an expert on.
I didn’t like Freakonomics, so I can’t say this surprises me. If you want the same sort of reasoning applying economics to daily life I’d recommend The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor–and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car! by Tim Harford.
And to get that outcome, we count the votes–and we know exactly how much each vote contributes to those counts.
Doesn’t this argument ignore the fact that, while I may not change the outcome of the election (who wins), I may change the impact of the election (the margin may affect the perceived “mandate”)?
It’s always seemed to me that, just because economic decisions on a micro scale are rational, that doesn’t mean they have good consequences on a macro scale. So, if we assign some collective cost to the consequences of everyone deciding not to vote, we can overcome the individual cost of “wasting time” voting when you don’t affect the outcome. Externalities are a bitch.
There is a whole list of things that dont matter individually but matter collectively. Rain. One drop of rain does not matter, but as part of a storm has significance. Atoms, molecules, cells, etc.
To me the argument is a fallacy.
I’m new here. Fill me in (succinctly if you can) as to why Freakonomics thinks voting is a waste of time. Thanks.
Do one push up, and it will not make you stronger. Do several everyday, and it will have an effect.
As One who has supported the Libertarian movement for a long time and who still subscribes to REASON, the libertarian magazine, I can tell you that voting for Ron Paul is just one more lost vote for a really viable candidate. Libertarian prez candidates don’t get anywhere when all is said and done.
There some problems with this logic:
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You are accepting as a predicate that they goal of voting is to swing an election, or even just to get your guy elected. That is not always the case. The evidence is clear that people don’t actual vote with those motivations. That’s why national elections, where your vote is less likely to be decisive, generally have higher turnout than local ones.
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Since you don’t know what straw will break the camel’s back, you never know if your vote will be decisive until after the fact. The analogy would be closer to a bunch of straws landing on the camel’s back at one time. You would not know that tipping point until after the fact.
I think your falling into the same trap people do when they look at “clutch” athletic performances. There is a tendency to think that the run or basket that wins a game is more important than the ones preceding it. It’s not, and with voting, unlike baseball, you don’t even know the tally before you vote meaning you don’t get the emotional impact that comes from “winning the game”. By your logic, since many, if not most games, are not decided by one at bat or drive, then there is no point in an individual player showing up. You would also have a situation where no player on the leading team would feel the need to hit if they are ahead seeing as winning 4-3 is the same in many respects to winning 7-3.
There is also the fact that economists are ignoring how interrelated voting patterns of individuals are. For example, non-voting parent is more likely to have kids that don’t vote. One person deciding not to vote affects, in a small way, whether others decide to vote. It affects how much money is used for voter turnout in an area, and how many ads they will be aired. All of those choices are not independent even if everyone is seemingly acting on their own volition. It’s like how a few people on one block deciding not to pay their mortgage can convince others not to pay. Eventually, you might have a housing crisis.
Arguments like this are one reason I am of the opinion that economists have to be the dumbest, most useless smart people that the public feels inclined to listen to. Not only does much of their discipline fail spectacularly at modeling the real world, but they rarely acknowledge the fact that that is the case. Especially the freakonomics guys who “prefer an interesting story to an accurate one”. These are the guys that argue for drunk driving instead of drunk walking.
It reminds me of the joke about two economists walking down the street. One economist see a $100 bill on the ground. He points it out to the other who tells him to ignore it because he must be seeing things. The second economist notes, if there were really a $100 bill on the ground, someone would have picked it up already.
I think we’re at an impasse here.
IMO the reason is that presidential elections are Big News and very much hyped, and people get more into it.
Which straw breaks the camel’s back is not significant. If it’s not this straw it will be some other.
Players don’t have the option of not showing up - they’re being paid to show up, and the management does not consider it from the perspective on each individual player. But more importantly, the likelihood that an individual player will have a decisive impact on a game is greater by several orders of magnitude than the likelihood that a given voter will have a decisive impact on a given election.
New or not, you should start with clicking on the link in the OP (original post, i.e. post that starts the thread.)