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.
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.
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.
I had no idea he was so egotistical!
Just for the record, it was 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 It is methodologically pathbreaking, but its results have been superseded by more recent work in just about every way.
Nonsense. Two of the top seven states in voter turnout 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, a country with famously low turnout in general.
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.