Voters as Mad Scientists - by Bryan Caplan
ISBN: 9798378725281Date read: 2025-07-15
How strongly I recommend it: 7/10
(See my list of 430+ books, for more.)
Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
Fun philosophical essays about political irrationality. I love the way he thinks, so I'm happy to read his thoughts on almost anything, just to hear his thought process.
my notes
If voters actually understood policy:
Selfish voters would choose the policies best for themselves.
Unselfish voters would choose the policies best for society.
Unselfishness is worse for society than selfishness.
A mad scientist thinks he’s got the cure for what ails you, but all he’s got is a syringe full of cyanide.
An unselfish mad scientist would insist on helping you whether or not you paid, even if you screamed “No!”
He’d say: “You’ll thank me once you’re cured.”
What to hate about politics:
Hyperbole: People should speak literal, measured truth.
Innumeracy: People should focus on what’s quantitatively important, not what thrills the masses.
Overconfidence: People shouldn’t make claims they won’t bet on, and shouldn’t assert certainty unless they’re willing to bet everything they own.
Strive to be fair to out-groups.
Scrupulously monitor in-groups, to counteract our natural human inclination to do the opposite.
Popular views are often wrong.
In politics, words speak louder than actions.
Psychologists are deeply skeptical about mere words.
They carefully measure and compare the divergence between what people say and what they do.
Why say, “I can’t” when the truth is “It’s too costly for me” or “I don’t feel like it”?
Because “I can’t” sounds better.
People lie when the truth sounds bad.
“I’ll do my best.”
Unless you devote 100% of your resources to success, you haven’t really done your best.
Also false:
“We’re doing everything in our power”
“I’ll stop at nothing”
“We have no choice”
Because you’re doing somthing that seems wrong, and you don’t feel like justifying your action as the lesser evil.
My skeptical take on addiction – and mental illness generally:
“I can’t stop drinking” directly parallels “I can’t come to your party.”
Of course you *can* refrain from drinking alcoholic beverages.
When we let Social Desirability Bias rule our diction, there’s a grave danger our literally false words will corrupt our thinking.
If what sounds good conflicts with what works well, we usually respond with hypocrisy: we say what sounds good, then do what works well.
In politics, words rule.
From the viewpoint of any individual voter, elections are surveys.
We’re ashamed to admit how much convenience matters for our quality of life.
The market mercifully sells us the convenience we want without judging us.
Government, in contrast, takes us at our word.
When someone expresses views with a calm mood, you consider them more reliable than someone who expresses views with hysteria.
This is justified.
Comparing the mood reasonable proponents would hold to the mood actual proponents do hold.
For many popular positions, the reasonable mood is virtually invisible.
Restrictionists hunt for horrific immigrant outliers, then use these outliers to justify harsh treatment of immigrants in general.
Most people are too irrational to change their minds on anything important.
But most people who change their minds on important issues nevertheless do so irrationally.
Many apostasy stories discuss people rather than ideas: “I had a falling-out with my fellow believers, so I stopped agreeing with them.”
The status quo is deeply immoral, and would remain so even if there were many moderate changes in the right direction.
The fact that there are people more extreme than you is revealing.
You must think there’s some reason why it’s wrong to be any more extreme than you are.
What precisely are those reasons?
He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
If someone can correctly explain a position but continue to disagree with it, that position is less likely to be correct.
If ability to correctly explain a position leads almost automatically to agreement with it, that position is more likely to be correct.
Whenever I say the words “I bet,” my mind starts to imagine losing scenarios.
When predicting, I start with long-run averages, and presume the “latest news” is distracting trivia.
Assume the future would resemble the past. As usual, it did.
I spurn hyperbole.
Human beings adore superlatives, but superlatives rarely apply to the real world.
So when I notice someone treating hyperbolic poetry as literal truth, I rush to wager against it.
Step back, calm down, look at the numbers, and target thinkers who say, “This time it’s different.”
The overwhelming majority of recent events are sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Serious thinkers don’t base their worldview on what happened yesterday, or last week, or last year.
While the public often likes crazy policies, they resent the disastrous consequences of those crazy policies.
Issue X is complicated.
Perspective Y’s position on X is not complicated.
Therefore, Perspective Y is wrong about X.
Many people who could have won material dominance invest their lives in acquiring rhetorical dominance instead: intellectuals, activists, and religious leaders are all prime examples. Why do they bother? Because man does not live by bread alone. Material dominance gives you luxuries, but rhetorical dominance makes you feel like you’re on top of the world.
If I can’t be persuasive without tricks, I choose to be unpersuasive.
If only one religion was allowed, the Government could become arbitrary.
If only two, the people would cut one another’s throats.
But with a multitude, we all live happy and in peace.
Numerical superiority can turn even the nicest groups into a mortal danger.
Welcoming everyone is a great way to turn everyone into a minority.
And while that hardly guarantees safety, it’s less menacing than the status quo.
People vote for whoever respects them more.
If your overall reaction to business progress over the last fifteen years is even mildly negative, you are impossible to please.
We have more privacy than ever before in human history.
You can now buy embarrassing products in secret.
You can read or view virtually anything you like in secret.
You can interact with over a billion people in secret.
Hating corporations is like hating your parents.
In democracy, if the median voter is a fool, everyone has to live under foolish policies
Advocates of government action typically make extreme claims.
They make extreme claims about how awful things will be if government does nothing.
And they make extreme claims about how much better things will be if government heeds them.
What if any public figure who refuses to bet large sums on his literal statements becomes an instant laughingstock?
What happens? Political hyperbole ends. Hysterica
doom-saying and promises of utopia vanish from public discourse.
No one serious could afford them!
First World welfare states provide a popular rationale for restricting immigration from countries where absolute poverty is rampant:
“They’re just coming to sponge off of us.”
Given the rarity of absolute poverty in the First World and the massive labor market benefits of migration from the Third World to the First, it is therefore likely that existing welfare states make global absolute poverty worse.
if history’s Great Names get too much praise, it’s easy to imagine current thinkers reducing their effort in abject frustration:
“I’ll never match the glorious achievements of Adam Smith, so why bother?”
Limited government helps everyone in the long-run, but immediately hurts the ruling party.