I find all of them persuasive, except point 4.1 about not voting. It overlooks that you’re not necessarily just picking policies to impose on someone, but you’re potentially picking someone who would impose LESS. This might not be super clear between say Biden and Trump, but many times it’s very clear, especially when one party/candidate is pushing socialism or worse.
By analogy, saying not to vote is a bit like telling one of ailing George Washington’s extended family not to help choose a doctor, because doctors are bad. But the better advice may be to help him pick a more chill doctor rather than one of the aggressive drain-half-your-blood ones (as there’s no hope of convincing him to not have one at all.)
(The feebleness of the act differs across the analogy scenarios, but I don’t think that is relevant to the point.)
What if the vast majority of doctors at that time all believe in blood letting so the net effect of choosing any doctor is likely to be negative?
By analogy, what if participating in the voting process, even in the cases where the probability of it mattering is not very close to zero (e.g. swing counties, local elections, etc.) may have net negative unintended consequences? I know this analogy might seem a bit strained, but, having coming from the Soviet Union, the collapse of the U.S.S.R. was related to widespread apathy, i.e. non-participation.
I think one of the fundamental insights of Huemer's piece is that when the burden of proof for action is not exceeded, it's better to act on what one can be more confident in.
I think that is the strongest argument to be made, but empirically, I think “negative consequences” of voting are negligible. Local elections often get like 15% turnout. Does anyone care that it’s low? Do people listen to the local officials less because of it? I don’t see it. I do, however, see fairly big differences in the oppressiveness of local politicians when comparing e.g. SF and Miami.
Additionally, it matters who you are. I agree that voters with less intelligence/information than the median shouldn’t vote. But they won’t be swayed by this argument anyway. If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably relatively competent to select the relatively more passive politicians.
Fair points. I've built an emotional aversion to voting over the years (best exemplified by Caplan's "Why I Don't Vote" article: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/09/why_i_dont_vote.html); however, I do see your points, particularly as the probability of impact increases (e.g. local votes), though I live in a large city, so it's still hard for me to justify the psychic costs.
One thing I've been wondering about lately is whether political "passivity" -- i.e. pursuing selfish cultural pursuits instead of fighting in politics -- may, counterintuitively, have a large positive cultural impact. This is applying Adam Smith's invisible hand point about economics to culture. Perhaps selfishly enacting "freedom-oriented" culture in one's own life (e.g. going to the gun range, hunting, boating, etc.) has a much larger societal impact.
Very fair point - the only issue with that is culture today relies on extreme "shock factors" to be remotely profitable or impactful (which, in a self-interested context, would be the main objective). This applies for both cultural consumers & content creators/producers. So what I could only see happening in that case is large populations of indifferent, ignorant and individualistic people who do continually try to maximize cultural impacts would simply lead to the degradation of the quality of that culture itself. Additionally, because everything is so individualistic, the necessary knowledge-sharing and cultural exchange might slow - causing stagnation of progress (although on the other hand, competition could also increase?)
That could be, but my hope is that, as in the economics case, the "best" culture would naturally emerge. In the economics case, entrepreneurs selfishly pursue profit by creating products that consumers want, and that has led to the greatest improvement in human welfare. Putting aside all the destructive impacts of governments on the markets for the sake of argument, even if we suppose that a lot of the degeneracy that we see today would have been also been created in a pure free market, that degeneracy came with better medicine, transportation, free time, etc., and I can always just ignore the degeneracy.
To extend the Adam Smith analogy to culture, I propose that I am both producer and consumer in the cultural context. As in economics, I should therefore prefer "products" (i.e. my cultural activities) that maximize my happiness and meaning (as a healthy consumer maximizes their value-seeking in economics). Therefore, given the opportunity (i.e. not an option in North Korea, etc.), I should choose to produce/consume the best culture -- "freedom" culture -- over hedonism, degeneracy, etc. Of course, as with economics, people can choose to buy terrible food (again, putting to the side the distortions of government on food production), but, given the opportunity, people generally would rather be healthy and they might look to leaders in the community. Similar, if there were more "cultural entrepreneurs" enacting "freedom culture", people might be more likely to see a happy, meaningful life and try to emulate it, just like people see a good product in economics and buy it if they can.
Voting isn't what it used to be certainly. In the liberal democracies we set great store by our pluralist party politics and such is the obsessive media coverage of its gladiatorial contests between elected politicians that it can appear to represent more or less the whole story of how we are governed. Whereas in truth it very much depends on which party is ‘in power’. Unsurprisingly, neither governmental bureaucracies and quangos nor other civil institutions keep statistics on the political leanings of their employees. But there are clues. Unherd columnist Peter Franklin reflecting on his own experience of working in two UK government departments comments: “How many of the civil servants that most closely serve this Conservative government are actually Leftwing? Well....I would say approximately all of them”. And it’s not just the UK. Research in the US context finds that “the political beliefs of the median federal government employee lie to the left not only of the median Republican, but also the median Democrat”. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/carry-on-governing
Great post. Our laws certainly suffer from error costs as a result of voting. And encouraging people to vote, producing excessive voting, raises these costs. But there is still value in "some" votes over others.
If (1) democracy is valuable for crowdsourcing information to create better informed policy, (2) votes can be informed (signal) or misinformed (noise), and (3) better policies can be produced by a better informed/misinformed vote ratio, then (4) we'd want to encourage informed votes and discourage misinformed votes.
Fantastic, very well said. Personally I’ve always found the epistemic humility arguments for limited government the most persuasive and you did a great job distilling the argument.
SDo we live in a republic, oligarchy, or confederacy? If we are using ordinary language, it could be all three. Rome had a republic that was highly oligarchic. Plato wrote about a republic that would probably be a dictatorship, at best an oligarchy. Switzerland is a confederacy, aren’t they? They are different from the US in important ways, but ...
I don’t see republic and oligarchy as mutually exclusive, and though no one would use the word “confederacy” (unfortunate associations?), the writers of the constitution tried to implement federalism; and before the constitution was ratified, there were the articles of confederation.
If you maintain a truly representative government, the representatives should be required to have reasonable expertise in government. What we have today in America seems far from that.
“It would be better if the constitution prohibited the government from intervening in more areas — and thereby removed those areas from democratic control. “
This assumes that our politics is democratic, and the alternatives are not. Alright, it uses the term in a way that it is often used, and mostly conveys a meaning. But I think the terminology blunts the point a bit. People are still in charge when politics isn't, and often much more so. Democracy can be monolithic, or it can be pluralistic. Our way or the highway, vs. do what you will.
Very interesting post!
I find all of them persuasive, except point 4.1 about not voting. It overlooks that you’re not necessarily just picking policies to impose on someone, but you’re potentially picking someone who would impose LESS. This might not be super clear between say Biden and Trump, but many times it’s very clear, especially when one party/candidate is pushing socialism or worse.
By analogy, saying not to vote is a bit like telling one of ailing George Washington’s extended family not to help choose a doctor, because doctors are bad. But the better advice may be to help him pick a more chill doctor rather than one of the aggressive drain-half-your-blood ones (as there’s no hope of convincing him to not have one at all.)
(The feebleness of the act differs across the analogy scenarios, but I don’t think that is relevant to the point.)
Good point!
What if the vast majority of doctors at that time all believe in blood letting so the net effect of choosing any doctor is likely to be negative?
By analogy, what if participating in the voting process, even in the cases where the probability of it mattering is not very close to zero (e.g. swing counties, local elections, etc.) may have net negative unintended consequences? I know this analogy might seem a bit strained, but, having coming from the Soviet Union, the collapse of the U.S.S.R. was related to widespread apathy, i.e. non-participation.
I think one of the fundamental insights of Huemer's piece is that when the burden of proof for action is not exceeded, it's better to act on what one can be more confident in.
I think that is the strongest argument to be made, but empirically, I think “negative consequences” of voting are negligible. Local elections often get like 15% turnout. Does anyone care that it’s low? Do people listen to the local officials less because of it? I don’t see it. I do, however, see fairly big differences in the oppressiveness of local politicians when comparing e.g. SF and Miami.
Additionally, it matters who you are. I agree that voters with less intelligence/information than the median shouldn’t vote. But they won’t be swayed by this argument anyway. If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably relatively competent to select the relatively more passive politicians.
Fair points. I've built an emotional aversion to voting over the years (best exemplified by Caplan's "Why I Don't Vote" article: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/09/why_i_dont_vote.html); however, I do see your points, particularly as the probability of impact increases (e.g. local votes), though I live in a large city, so it's still hard for me to justify the psychic costs.
Those AI images are creepy!
One thing I've been wondering about lately is whether political "passivity" -- i.e. pursuing selfish cultural pursuits instead of fighting in politics -- may, counterintuitively, have a large positive cultural impact. This is applying Adam Smith's invisible hand point about economics to culture. Perhaps selfishly enacting "freedom-oriented" culture in one's own life (e.g. going to the gun range, hunting, boating, etc.) has a much larger societal impact.
Very fair point - the only issue with that is culture today relies on extreme "shock factors" to be remotely profitable or impactful (which, in a self-interested context, would be the main objective). This applies for both cultural consumers & content creators/producers. So what I could only see happening in that case is large populations of indifferent, ignorant and individualistic people who do continually try to maximize cultural impacts would simply lead to the degradation of the quality of that culture itself. Additionally, because everything is so individualistic, the necessary knowledge-sharing and cultural exchange might slow - causing stagnation of progress (although on the other hand, competition could also increase?)
That could be, but my hope is that, as in the economics case, the "best" culture would naturally emerge. In the economics case, entrepreneurs selfishly pursue profit by creating products that consumers want, and that has led to the greatest improvement in human welfare. Putting aside all the destructive impacts of governments on the markets for the sake of argument, even if we suppose that a lot of the degeneracy that we see today would have been also been created in a pure free market, that degeneracy came with better medicine, transportation, free time, etc., and I can always just ignore the degeneracy.
To extend the Adam Smith analogy to culture, I propose that I am both producer and consumer in the cultural context. As in economics, I should therefore prefer "products" (i.e. my cultural activities) that maximize my happiness and meaning (as a healthy consumer maximizes their value-seeking in economics). Therefore, given the opportunity (i.e. not an option in North Korea, etc.), I should choose to produce/consume the best culture -- "freedom" culture -- over hedonism, degeneracy, etc. Of course, as with economics, people can choose to buy terrible food (again, putting to the side the distortions of government on food production), but, given the opportunity, people generally would rather be healthy and they might look to leaders in the community. Similar, if there were more "cultural entrepreneurs" enacting "freedom culture", people might be more likely to see a happy, meaningful life and try to emulate it, just like people see a good product in economics and buy it if they can.
Voting isn't what it used to be certainly. In the liberal democracies we set great store by our pluralist party politics and such is the obsessive media coverage of its gladiatorial contests between elected politicians that it can appear to represent more or less the whole story of how we are governed. Whereas in truth it very much depends on which party is ‘in power’. Unsurprisingly, neither governmental bureaucracies and quangos nor other civil institutions keep statistics on the political leanings of their employees. But there are clues. Unherd columnist Peter Franklin reflecting on his own experience of working in two UK government departments comments: “How many of the civil servants that most closely serve this Conservative government are actually Leftwing? Well....I would say approximately all of them”. And it’s not just the UK. Research in the US context finds that “the political beliefs of the median federal government employee lie to the left not only of the median Republican, but also the median Democrat”. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/carry-on-governing
Great post. Our laws certainly suffer from error costs as a result of voting. And encouraging people to vote, producing excessive voting, raises these costs. But there is still value in "some" votes over others.
If (1) democracy is valuable for crowdsourcing information to create better informed policy, (2) votes can be informed (signal) or misinformed (noise), and (3) better policies can be produced by a better informed/misinformed vote ratio, then (4) we'd want to encourage informed votes and discourage misinformed votes.
I believe this may be accomplished by compensating non-voters (essentially subsidize passivity), as I argue for here: https://neonomos.substack.com/p/let-the-government-buy-your-vote
Fantastic, very well said. Personally I’ve always found the epistemic humility arguments for limited government the most persuasive and you did a great job distilling the argument.
SDo we live in a republic, oligarchy, or confederacy? If we are using ordinary language, it could be all three. Rome had a republic that was highly oligarchic. Plato wrote about a republic that would probably be a dictatorship, at best an oligarchy. Switzerland is a confederacy, aren’t they? They are different from the US in important ways, but ...
I don’t see republic and oligarchy as mutually exclusive, and though no one would use the word “confederacy” (unfortunate associations?), the writers of the constitution tried to implement federalism; and before the constitution was ratified, there were the articles of confederation.
So that one was a trick question.
If you maintain a truly representative government, the representatives should be required to have reasonable expertise in government. What we have today in America seems far from that.
Your approach makes me think of Walter Block's book Defending the Undefendable.
“It would be better if the constitution prohibited the government from intervening in more areas — and thereby removed those areas from democratic control. “
This assumes that our politics is democratic, and the alternatives are not. Alright, it uses the term in a way that it is often used, and mostly conveys a meaning. But I think the terminology blunts the point a bit. People are still in charge when politics isn't, and often much more so. Democracy can be monolithic, or it can be pluralistic. Our way or the highway, vs. do what you will.