I am particularly interested in what Hayman have to say about Japan, as there is generally not much useful analysis available on the idiosyncratic fate of the Japanese economy; and unfortunately the Misesian orbit too is conspicuous with a regrettable paucity of insights - with such a long history of radically manipulating interest rates one would expect Japan to be a constant focal point of Misesian analysis.
The entire document is worth reading; the assessment of Japan begins at page 16.
The standard argument underlying the theorem of rational voter ignorance strikes me as more evidence for (a) academics mindlessly copying academics (including even the excellent Mark Pennington) and (b) academics ignoring the real world.
Mind you, the conclusion that voters are rationally ignorant is correct in my view, but not on account of the reasons habitually given (see "conclusion" below).
It is true, people know infinitely less than they ought to in order to make an informed choice. Hence, voting is based on nonsense. And I agree with Bryan Caplan (hat tip to Laura), who belongs to the last of three schools: (i) the first arguing that democracy works well in that it faithfully reflects the will of the people, (ii) the second school holding that democracy is not working well at all, since it is NOT faithfully reflecting the will of the people, and (iii) the third school suggesting that democracy is a bit of a catastrophe because it DOES represent the will of a highly uninformed and ideologically misled electorate.
As for my introductory propositions (a) and (b), in contradistinction to the theory, virtually no-one is making probability-based cost-benefit assessments in order to decide whether to go to the booth or not. People participate in voting simply because they have been conditioned into a number of habits that encourage them to vote.
Elections are a festival, a virtual orgy of the unthinking, including the fact that few things are less likely than finding a voter who has ever seriously thought through the pros and cons of democracy. When I was allowed to vote for the first time, voting was to me like a rite of passage, a proof of my maturity; and for a long time I did think that my vote mattered - vaguely following the line of reasoning, if at all, whereby my party would have no chance to win if each of its supporters thought their individual vote was not significant enough to warrant participation in the election.
People are divided in their opinion about who is going to win the presidential election. Just compare here (Obama very likely to win), here (Romney sure to win), and here (intuiting Romney will win) - the latter with an interesting link to an article on the manner polling works and fails.
Concerning the first link, I immediately concluded that Obama was very likely to win, but do the permutational options really support my expectation?
I am an uninterested and very superficial observer of the presidential election. But, again, how much gain is there in more extensive efforts at being in the picture?
Conclusion:
Voting is simply a different form of cheap talk. You can get a big kick at very little expense. Finding out what is really going on would be prohibitively expensive and without commensurate reward, indeed depressing. It is better to dream of nicer things, as everyone else does. One votes in order to do the done thing, feel socially accepted, even important.
If voting helps you feel good about yourself, so much the better. If it does not, never mind - what cost is there involved? The rational ignorance tenet should perhaps be rephrased thus: It is rational to vote, despite being uninformed and misinformed, for it can make you achieve a desired state of mind at little expense. And since long-term consequences, indeed any kind of consequences can be made part of achieving "a desired state of mind at little expense", they need not bother the voter.
PS
Bryan Caplan as well as his rather short, yet still too long book ("The Myth of the Rational Voter") are overrated, however I do not regret having read the book, and his main conclusion, reported above, alone is worth the reading. Mind you, Caplan seems to dream of a world ruled by economist kings (like himself), rather than representatives of 'the plebs' (i.e. people who do not know as much economics as he does). However, in his exorbitant confidence in the wisdom of economists, he comically fails to recognise the wide spectrum of divergent and incompatible views among economists and the fact that large numbers, probably the majority of them support the same irrational world for which 'the plebs' is casting their votes.
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UPDATE - The result is in: Apparently, the prize goes to the Erbsenzähler (literally: pea counters; bean counters, nit-pickers). Some media outlets are excited because they think the award honours scientists dealing with yet a range of supposedly ubiquitous market failures. However, Peter G. Klein puts the matter sensibly in perspective in this insightful post at The Circle Bastiat.
I suppose, this year's choice of winners only goes to underscore the gist of Peter Schiff's point in his below video:
End of UPDATE
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The inestimable Peter Schiff reveals a huge slice of truth about the academic establishment in economics:
Anyone in a mood for some weekend reading on economists and their noble flashes of wit, find below a number of starting points:
Though an ordinary mortal and not at all a noteworthy economist, for some awkward reason, I have met in person a number of Nobel prize winning economists and even collaborated with one (Merton H. Miller) -- Solow, Sen, Scholes, Miller and Modigliani.
If the politically not so terribly correct stand a chance, my tip for Monday, when the new winners will be announced: Armen Alchian, Stephen Ross, and Gordon Tullock. Perhaps Harold Demsetz. And for a daring guess: Deepak Lal.
Of all winners, for the purposes of my own intellectual progress, these are the ones that have been particularly influential:
Friedrich August von Hayek (1974), Sir Arthur Lewis (1979), James M. Buchanan (1986), Ronald H. Coase (1991), Douglass C. North (1993), and to a lesser degree: Vernon L. Smith (2002), Elinor Ostrom and Oliver E. Williamson (2009).
Among the biggest lies of the welfare states on both sides of the Atlantic is the notion that the government can supply the people with things they want but cannot afford. Since the government gets its resources from the people, if the people as a whole cannot afford something, neither can the government.
The source.
This post is by way of addendum to Eric Parks' recent article The last exit ramp on the road to unlimited government. I find Eric's post noteworthy not least because it reminds me of how undiscerning and crude people have become in the face of the most blatant violations of justice and the rule of law. The position taken by the Institute for Justice (see Eric's post) is a pleasant exception, deserving wide dissemination.
On a different level, this post on Hayek's thesis that in a politicised society the worst get to the top forms part of the background to Eric's observations.
I like the author's definition of a statist, i.e. a person passionately asking for leadership by the worst:
“Someone who learns nothing from human nature, economics, or experience, and repeats the same mistakes over and over again without a care for the rights and lives of people he crushes with his good intentions.”
Even the worst features of the statist reality, Hayek showed, “are not accidental byproducts” but phenomena that are part and parcel of statism itself. He argued with great insightfulness that “the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful” in any society in which government is seen as the answer to most problems. They are precisely the kind of people who elevate power over persuasion, force over cooperation. Government, possessing by definition a legal and political monopoly of the use of force, attracts them just as surely as dung draws flies. Ultimately, it is the apparatus of government that allows them to wreak their havoc on the rest of us.
It is ironic but perhaps sadly appropriate that Attorney General Eric Holder would choose a law school, Northwestern University, to deliver a speech earlier this month in which he demolished what was left of the rule of law in America.
In what history likely will record as a turning point, Attorney General Holder bluntly explained that this administration believes it has the authority to use lethal force against Americans if the President determines them to be a threat to the nation. He tells us that this is not a violation of the due process requirements of our Constitution because the President himself embodies “due process” as he unilaterally determines who is to be targeted. As Holder said, “a careful and thorough executive branch review of the facts in a case amounts to ‘due process.’” That means that the administration believes it is the President himself who is to be the judge, jury, and executioner.
As George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley wrote of the Holder speech:
“All the Administration has said is that they closely and faithfully follow their own guidelines — even if their decisions are not subject to judicial review. The fact that they say those guidelines are based on notions of due process is meaningless. They are not a constitutional process of review.”
It is particularly bizarre to hear the logic of the administration claiming the right to target its citizens according to some secret selection process, when we justified our attacks against Iraq and Libya because their leaders supposedly were targeting their own citizens! We also now plan a covert war against Syria for the same reason.
I should make it perfectly clear that I believe any individual who is engaging in violence against this country or its citizens should be brought to justice. But as Attorney General Holder himself points out in the same speech, our civilian courts have a very good track record of trying and convicting individuals involved with terrorism against the United States. Our civilian court system, with the guarantee of real due process, judicial review, and a fair trial, is our strength, not a weakness. It is not an impediment to be sidestepped in the push for convictions or assassinations, but rather a process that guarantees that fundamental right to be considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
I am encouraged, however that there appears to be the beginning of a backlash against the administration’s authoritarian claims. Just recently I did an interview with conservative radio talk show host Laura Ingraham who expressed grave concern over using these sorts of tactics against Americans using the supposed war on terror as justification. Sadly, many conservative leaders were silent when Republican President George W. Bush laid the groundwork for this administration’s lawlessness with the PATRIOT Act, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention without trial, and other violations. Similarly, as Professor Turley points out, “Democrats previously demanded the ‘torture memos’ of the Bush administration that revealed poor legal analysis by Judge Jay Bybee and Professor John Yoo to justify torture. Now, however, Democrats are largely silent in the face of a president claiming the right to unilaterally kill citizens.” The misuse of and disregard for our Constitution for partisan political gain is likely one reason the American public holds Congress in such low esteem. Now the stakes are much higher. Congress and the people should finally wake up!
Leaving education in the state's hands is a guarantee to keep the conscripts of such enlightenment so self-contentedly uneducated as to take pride nationwide - by democratic majority and other mean means - in their preposterous ignorance and to cheer the paragons of educationally acquired obtuseness as men of genius and compelling leadership.
In this respect Obama is the people's president (no less than Bush), and a dignitary truly worthy of representative democracy.
Writes Mark Steyn:
A great nation needs successful self-made businessmen like George Peck, and purveyors of scholarly excellence like Mary Somerville. It's not clear [well, it is - see above, G.T.] why it needs a smug over-credentialed President Solyndra to recycle "Crowd-Pleasing For Dummies" as a keynote address.
The source.
See also More Obarrassment.
There is a global war on rational energy use going on, see only these two posts on German anti-energy madness at NoTricksZone - here and here. However, the anti-energy, anti-economy war is simply the result of the wealthiest states of the world using their wealth to indoctrinate generation after generation to ensure they do not understand, hate, and destroy the sources of their wealth.
There is a high cost of maintaining the statist creed amongst the broad populace.
Warren Meyer, the Coyote, writes at Forbes on Keystone XL:
Ostensibly, Obama made the decision to block the pipeline because of concern over contamination of the Ogallala Reservoir, a vast underground water source that makes much of Midwestern agriculture possible. And I am sure there are folks whose concerns are narrowly about the Ogallala or other enivornmental and NIMBY concerns along the proposed route. But the US has tens of thousands of miles of petroleum pipelines, many cris-crossing this same general area. There is nothing unprecedented or unmanageable about this particular line. Had these routing issues been the actual problem, the Obama Administration could easily have approved the line with conditions or route modifications.
But local environmental concerns were merely the public pretext for a decision that is much more troubling. Opposition to the pipeline began to rally among radical environmental groups long before any of them had the first clue about the pipeline route. The real goal of these groups was not to protect water along the pipeline route, but to make it impossible to develop new sources of oil in Canada. Unable to stop Canadian oil drilling and tar sand extraction programs, environmental groups are now trying to block any pipeline that is proposed out of the oil producing regions.
Some would argue that these opponents aren’t anti-energy, they just want to shift energy use from fossil fuels to “green” energy like wind and solar. This is either disingenuous or unbelievably naive. The Keystone XL pipeline would have single-handedly carried more energy to the United States than the sum of all the green energy projects funded by the Obama Administration. And it would have done so entirely with private funds rather than the Administrations increasingly ill-fated and ham-handed attempts at venture capitalism with taxpayer funds. The fact of the matter is that, for the foreseeable future, opposing fossil fuels is equivalent to opposing energy use.
The Keystone decision only makes sense in the context of a general push to limit energy supply and roll back our industrial economy and all its amazing gifts. Part and parcel of this same effort has been the growing opposition to natural gas fracking. Fracking is an underground procedure that has been used safely and succesfully for decades to extend the life of older oil wells. Fracking is one reason that serial predictions of older fields “running out of oil” have been repeatedly incorrect.
Recently, though, fracking has presented the promise of substantially inreasing our domestic energy supply by opening up new shale formations previously thought to be impossible to produce. With this new promise, anti-growth, anti-energy environmentalists have suddenly taken notice, and are gearing up to try to kill this exciting (and ironically quite clean) new energy source.
Read the entire short post.
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