Thing is, you can reduce any act, no matter how selfless and altruistic, to a selfish motive by saying it made the person happy, and that feeling of happiness is ultimately what that person is after.
But that’s so broad as to be meaningless, so it’s more useful to say that feeling of happiness is utility, or satisfaction of values, and move the selfishness/altruism line up to where the act benefits the actor in any way.
A Secret Service agent who takes a bullet has unquestionably committed an altruistic act, but if you asked him he’d probably tell you he was proud to be able to serve and protect the President. That’s personal utility/values/happiness.
To bring it back to the topic at hand, it therefore doesn’t matter why a person votes how they vote; whether they believe it’ll be the tipping vote, whether they believe it’s their duty, whether they think it’s fun, whatever, in the end it makes them happier to vote than not to vote.
I don’t quite understand the idea that one vote doesn’t matter, yet 100,000 or 10,000,000, or whatever, do. Where do you think those 10,000,000 votes came from? Not from one person casting 10,000,000 votes, that’s for sure.
I thought of another angle to look at it in terms of voting, and another comparison to a non-voting analogue.
(1) If the candidate I prefer wins 55 to 45, then essentially s/he needed at least 90 percent of his/her supporters to show up and cast their votes that day. So I can look at it as my vote having counted as nine-tenths of a vote, in a way.
(2) (this one illustrates why it links in my mind to Zeno’s Paradox): Let’s say I resolve to start wearing a pedometer and walking 10,000 steps a day due to the research showing health benefits. On the first day I do the full ten thousand. On the second, though, I note when the pedometer gets to 9,999 and say to myself “surely a single step less doesn’t suddenly erase the health benefits–it can’t possibly matter”. Then on the third day, by the same logic, I only walk 9,998 steps. Well, by 20 or 25 years later, I’ve clearly dropped to a level of walking that really is pretty anemic in its level of health benefit; but was I really wrong on any given day that one step less than the previous day doesn’t hurt me?
Shoot, ran out of time to save edits, but I’ve got another one I really like:
ETA: Let’s say a large crowd stones someone to death. There were no large rocks available, so each person throwing stones was able to only throw a single pebble. There were so many people throwing them, though, that this was more than sufficient to kill the victim. Can any single one of these people, when interviewed, declare their conscience clear, with no moral culpability–since the victim still would have died had they alone decided not to throw their own pebble? (I think this one might be the best illustration yet.)
No, that isn’t what I said. People vote because they feel they’re getting something out of it. That could be a lot of things:
“Fun,” as Leavitt claims
A feeling of pride
Public demonstration of their civic virtue
Setting a good example for children
Avoiding the guilt of not voting
Etc. etc.
You don’t necessarily have to feel great about a decision; you just have to feel better about it than the alternatives. Personally, I think voting’s a pain in the ass and not at all fun, but I do it because I’d feel worse if I didn’t. I feel bound by civic duty to vote; I feel that as a Canadian citizen I have a responsibility to vote, and that while it’s inconvenient, it’s a minor inconvenience I should put up with to contribute to democracy. I hate running, too, but it’s better than being fat.
I don’t have to fool myself into thinking my vote matters to motivate myself to vote. In our last election my vote made no difference and I KNEW it would make no difference. My riding (the Canadian equivalent of a Cognressional district, and it;s the only ballot we have to cast because there is no separate executive branch election) was absolutely 100% in the bag for the Conservative candidate. He had no chance of losing, and indeed won by a huge margin. I voted because I wanted to anyway. I got something out of it.
That’s great. Lots of people vote because it gives them warm/fuzzies. But what would you tell someone who said that he doesn’t get anything out of fruitless gestures?
I dunno, what should I say? If someone really truly gets nothing at all out of voting they won’t vote. I can try to tell someone “well, it’s your civic duty” I guess. Perhaps I could convince someone they’ll feel better if they vote. Or I could shame them into voting, though I personally don’t roll that way.
Someone else’s decision to vote or not vote is their call, not mine. It’s a free country.
I think what a lot of people are failing to realize is that, while voting in a normal national election is pretty useless, voting in the United States presidential election for most people is especially useless due to the uniquely disenfranchising way the electoral college & winner take all system is set up.
The chance of my vote in California influence the election is not 1 in 300 million or so, it’s somewhere less than 1 in a billion billion billion billion. For my vote to be the deciding one in the election, California would have to swing an unprecedented amount towards the Republicans so that it was exactly 50/50. Simultaneously, demographically similar states like Oregon and Washington have to not be affected by this same swing. And simultaneous to that, several deeply Republican states have to have unprecedented swings towards leaning Democrat so that the Electoral College can be precisely tipped over by California’s vote.
Such a confluence of circumstances is so unlikely and would require such a bizarre series of events to occur (aliens landing, earthquake in CA, destroying all the liberal cities, China invading the west coast) that, if it were to happen, the outcome of the Presidential elections would probably be the least of everyone’s worries. And that’s what Levitt means by “useless”.
And yet none of what you said changes the fact that people still need to vote. Yours and Levitt’s logic assume that there will always be this block of votes that always happen no matter what you, personally, do with yours. The problem is that you are a human individual. The rest of the votes also come from human individuals. If enough of them decide their vote doesn’t count, they won’t vote and things will go haywire.
It’s not too bad when the calculus of voting happens inside one person’s own head. But when you try to persuade people that their vote doesn’t count using the fallacious reasoning Levitt does, that has the potential to wreck things if enough people listened to him.
One person deciding their vote doesn’t count doesn’t change anything. A couple million deciding their votes don’t count do.
That’s the mistake right there. How are you determining meaning? And I’m not referring to “civic duty” or “feeling better.” Even if only one person votes for a candidate, it means something. You can’t mix meaning and utility.
No, what we see here is a purely egotistical, self-obsessed perspective of the process, because everyone wants him- or herself to be the deciding factor. Everyone want to be the one–and the only one–who “makes a difference.” No one wants to accept the fact that he’s just one of a very large population. It’s really infantile–like a new-born baby that doesn’t understand that it’s not the center of the universe.
How hard is it to vote? You just fill out a form, put a stamp on it, and give it to the mail carrier. (Probably thinking about it is the hardest part for most.) It’s not about feeling good about oneself, or “duty,” and the electoral college is a whole different issue. It’s about how we create meaning.
My vote will not decide the election, but it will influence the election.
Put it this way: What’s the smallest number of votes that can influence an election? There has to be some number, right? Let’s say that you pick 500. But that means, then, that 499 votes are not enough to influence an election. But the difference between the 499 votes that can’t, and the 500 that can, is just a single vote. Surely, then, that single vote did influence the election after all?
No, voting is not at all like a tragedy of the commons. Voting probably is strategic: an individual’s decision to vote takes into account his expectations for what others will do and vice versa. But pretty much everything in political science worth studying is strategic. After that, the similarity ends.
The problem is that rational choice & game theory are very good at explaining why people don’t vote but have pretty jejune explanations for why people actually do. This is a major and well-known blind spot in political game theory. Apparently pop economists have not yet caught onto it. Levitt is an econometrician; he is definitely not a theorist. Well-intentioned but wrong rationalists attribute the failure to model some behavior accurately to widespread error by the subjects. This is a real sleight of hand and actually erodes the validity of formal theory as a social scientific tool.
The basis of rational choice theory is positive. It is supposed to describe observed behaviors. The theorists observes some stuff, starts with some axioms of human behavior, and develops a mathematical model to explain some choices and predict others. Models of widespread, low-cost behavior are not meant to be normative, that is, what people should do. It is possible to do normative rational choice theory for high-stakes strategic interactions by highly rational people who have had the opportunity to learn from their mistakes and spend some serious time thinking through their decisions.
But this doesn’t really describe voting at all. Voting is low-stakes. Costs are low and it is common knowledge that individual decisions don’t have much impact at all. So our models sort of break down at this margin. Instead of just acknowledging this and trying to push the theory harder, some people push the burden off the social scientist and onto the subject. But it’s really not their fault that we don’t yet have the right model to make some behavior consistent with our axioms of human nature. Physicists don’t blame the particles for not behaving according to their models. They develop better models. This is what game theorists do as well. Most don’t blame people for doing what people want to do. It’s always these empirical guys who do crap like that.
ETA: Maybe some physicists do blame the particles. The ones I know don’t.
I’m not sure exactly who you’re referring to with all those "they"s, but Levitt is not supposed to be a pop economist. He claims to be a behavioral economist. Those terms are not mutually exclusive, nor does one imply anything about the other. Much of the best popular science writing is done by working scientists who are experts in their fields.
Leaving aside the issue of how good Levitt is either as a popular writer or as a scientist, the field of behavioral economics has produced some interesting work. It doesn’t pretend to explain everything, and much of it is garbage. That’s too bad, but it’s also the norm for all sciences. Much of the stuff published in the medical literature is garbage, too; you wade through it to get to the good stuff. That’s true everywhere, and for all history.
If you’re saying all this just to dismiss Levitt’s comments, then fine. I have no quarrel. If you’re saying that we just don’t know enough yet about a great many behaviors, I agree there as well. But you seem to be dismissing something that is large and you lost me at what that is.
Everyone’s ignoring my “stoning to death” scenario? C’mon, that was the greatest thing ever–totally earthshakingly dispositive IMO.
No. As **Chronos **said, it doesn’t have to be the one individual vote that tips things to one candidate or another for it to influence the result. If you vote for a candidate, and that candidate wins California, and also wins the election, you will have helped influence the result. That candidate would not have won without a group of supporters of which you are a part. (That’s not to say your influence wouldn’t be *greater *if you lived in Ohio.)
Around every major election there is a rash of rational choice justifications for not voting. I was thinking of one that appeared in Reason Magazine that was heavily criticized in The Economist last week. I lumped in Levitt with that group. The arguments are always the same: people are stupid for voting.
I know who Levitt is. Freakonomics is 2 hours of my life I will never get back.
Actually, I disagree. I think behavioral economics began with a lot of promise and has turned out, more or less, to be research program with a dead end. To my knowledge there has been no convincing axiomatization of bounded rationality. Basically, behaviorists start with the usual neoclassical assumptions and then they deform them ad hoc to try to make them consistent with some cherry-picked result from the experimental literature. Behaviorists have basically the same model of human behavior and motivation as everyone else, except that it is even less general and well theorized. Nobody really knows which behavioral assumptions apply under what circumstances, and after twenty years and much fanfare, we really aren’t any closer to finding out.
I also think the experimental literature sucks altogether, but I recognize that is my own issue.
I’m sorry to have been unclear. I’m muddling through my dissertation at the moment, which is a game theoretical model of some political phenomenon or other not worth mentioning. I am just cranky because my work sucks, Levitt is rich and famous and makes stupid arguments, and well yeah. I have a big commitment to axiomatizing human behavior like every other economist and many political scientists, so by no means am I dissing how Levitt goes about doing things. Not at all.
The problem is that the decision to vote is something that game theorists (including myself here) have a really hard time explaining. It is hard to make the choice to vote consistent with our basic belief that people are instrumentally rational. So we observe a lot of people doing the opposite of what most models predict. One approach is to admit that our models of this phenomenon suck. The other is to say that people are collectively irrational and should do what the models tell them to do.
They’re both wrong, of course. People are *sometimes *collectively irrational.
I went to school 40 years when econometrics and cliometrics were first being added to curricula. They promised to change everything. What happened instead was that they added some valuable new insights to what were considered settled problems but were often badly applied to situations in which the needed underlying data was forever unavailable.
Semiotics and deconstruction and structuralism were also being introduced at that time, which also promised to change everything. Those are usually considered to have ended disastrously, but they permanently altered the way we look at texts and provided some valuable new insights.
The social sciences are not the physical sciences and it was mistake for the field to think that way. (A massive inferiority complex was the reason, IMO; that plus envy about all the delicious grant money.) The information is never there for either side. No social scientist has sufficient data about events to properly quantify them and people never have sufficient data to make purely rational decisions.
At best, valuable new insights can emerge. If you can provide any of those you’ve made a real contribution. This is not what any graduate student wants to hear, I realize. My suggestion: Go into history. That way in 40 years you can write about the foolishness of today’s world to acclaim.
Some things haven’t changed. The grant money is in cooking up ever more sophisticated analytical techniques to make sense of inadequate and bad data. Inquiry/research design are the big losers here, since analytical horsepower usually trumps ingenious research design these days. But this isn’t really my bag. My own work is blissfully unconstrained by lots of data.
To be fair, deconstruction and post-structuralism did change everything. Not necessarily for the best, of course, but the intellectual landscape in the humanities is totally different. The problem is that very few people can make the research program really work. Eco can still pull it off, but he makes the rest of us look like hacks,
Sort of. We do have monstrous green-eyed physics envy, it is true. There is an unfortunate but not entirely false stereotype that people who can’t hack it in physics and mathematics become economists and political scientists. I could go on all day about this.
But the division between natural and social sciences is relatively modern and somewhat artificial. The important common element is a “scientific” epistemology. Observe, theorize, generate hypotheses, test them, revise models. The idea that some sciences are “harder” than others is very recent and easy to deconstruct.
Your comment about making purely rational decisions doesn’t quite reflect the state of the discipline. The most interesting results in game theory, for instance, are all about how people make decisions under uncertain conditions and without the benefit of full information. It’s a theory of how people make educated guesses and form beliefs based on what they observe.
You sound like you wrote my dissertation proposal. My research is some game theoretic models of communication in common strategic problems around 300-700 AD. I write about how incredibly smart ordinary, illiterate people were way back when.
