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No, this is one of the greatest arguments for small government or no government. People are more rational when the cost to them of being irrational is larger. V

• jknz 8y ago
  > Voting for good policies is a public good. When a voter is one among three hundred millions of citizens, only 1/300,000,000 (on average) of the benefits of the vote befall the individual voter. Typically, voting results are highly skewed towards 50/50, say in most elections in democratic regimes with fair elections. This was the case for Brexit or the popular vote in the US 2016 election for instance. For an election whose expected result is close to 50/50, each voter is highly influential; intuitively, if all but one voter are decided and produce a 50/50 draw, the last undecided voter has complete power. Since a lot of fair elections are approximately 50/50, undecided voters have far better influence than 1/300,000,000 for a population of 300,000,000. In an approximately 50/50 election with few undecided voters, it is quite cheap to swing the results by bombarding the few undecided voters with ads. Mathematicians use this concept coined "influence" of a variable, or "influence function" to analyze properties of random boolean functions in percolation for instance.
  • StanislavPetrov 8y ago
    One of many reasons that offering false, contrived, binary choices in a world defined by its complexity is always a losing proposition.
  • savanaly 8y ago
    I don't think that 1/300 million part was about the likelihood of influencing the election, but rather about what percentage of the gains go to the person (not more than the percentage that that person represents of the population, presumably). Even if you had guaranteed ability to affect the outcome of an election, supposing you knew that by spending many hours researching the correct policy to vote for you could save each person in USA $1, it would not be worth it for you to spend the time figuring it out. Although from a social perspective it would be a worthy thing to spend time on.
  • mjevans 8y ago
    That's actually a strong argument for requiring a 'super majority' to decide any major decision.
    • mcguire 8y ago
      Then no decision would be made, which is a decision. When was the last time someone got a supermajority with more than a small number of voters?
      • baddox 8y ago
        Presumably different referenda would be put to a vote if a supermajority were required, namely, ones that are less controversial.
      • RugnirViking 8y ago
        To be fair in some situations where it is not internal political pressure that caused the vote in the first place, large majorities can occur; see the falkland islands referendum on joining argentina
• ucaetano 8y ago
  > People are more rational when the cost to them of being irrational is larger. This isn't strictly true, and I'd love to see you provide extensive data on such a exceptional claim. There is a lot of evidence showing that harsher punitive measures often have little to no impact on crime and wrongdoing.
  • throwaway37585 8y ago
    I don’t think the claim is exceptional, but I’d love to see more studies on this. Check out the Centipede Game (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centipede_game https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centipede_game): “Parco, Rapoport and Stein (2002) illustrated that the level of financial incentives can have a profound effect on the outcome in a three-player game: the larger the incentives are for deviation, the greater propensity for learning behavior in a repeated single-play experimental design to move toward the Nash equilibrium.” I recall reading somewhere that people also behave more rationally in other games like the Dictator Game (and exhibit fewer cognitive biases) when the stakes are higher, but can’t remember where.
    • dEnigma 8y ago
      The Nash equilibrium in this case being immediately taking the larger stash, instead of waiting (or even cooperating) with the other player for much higher payouts.
    • afpx 8y ago
      What would the game’s results be if the financial incentives were unknown and/or highly variable? That’s more like real life.
  • CuriouslyC 8y ago
    If your choice is between death and jail, or if your life is not significantly better than jail, the duration of incarceration isn't going to matter to you at all. I'd be willing to bet that harsher punitive measures (and more aggressive enforcement) would have a big impact on white collar crime rates.
• pm90 8y ago
  On commenting on an article about why people have difficulty comprehending complex systems, you have just delivered an example of the phenomena. Your basic point seems to be that a big Government will be so well run that individuals would rely on it to provide them with benefits, even in the case that the Government make poor decisions on policy choices. That is the whole point of a Government: to make life easier for people by taking care of things that are too expensive or complicated for people to do individually.
  • kungtotte 8y ago
    It's also a regulatory body to ensure that certain functions and services are provided equally to every citizen. E.g. everyone has the same basic human right of access to health care and education for example. Who else should guarantee that access for a whole population if not the government?
    • sethrin 8y ago
      I would phrase it as, "The government is the natural monopoly of natural monopolies".
• webkike 8y ago
  People will be irrational regardless of its cost. Here's some evidence to support my claim with no citation: people will gamble their entire life savings away, regardless of how much money they have.
• kadenshep 8y ago
  >People are more rational when the cost to them of being irrational is larger. This was directly negated in the article.
• rhizome 8y ago
  People are more rational when the cost to them of being irrational is larger People are not fundamentally rational, and people do not know how rational they themselves are in any given context.
• dstroot 8y ago
  Is there more I could read to get educated about this? How can we construct polical systems that are better?
  • matt4077 8y ago
    Note that you are still living in the best times humanity has ever seen. That's true in the US, but also world-wide, with few exceptions such as Syria. There's less war, life expectancies are generally rising (the opioid epidemic being a temporary, and local, blip), the possibility of achieving one's true potential is less dependent on class/gender/race than it has ever been. It's not perfect, but it's far away from life as it was even 100 years ago: nasty, brutish, and short.
• Koshkin 8y ago
  > No, this is one of the greatest arguments for small government Well, soon enough, I am sure, the AI will satisfy both views on the government: it will control everything, and it will fit in your pocket.
• thaumaturgy 8y ago
  I really wish this notion of "society by survival of the fittest" would die its long-overdue death. What actually happens, in the real world, in situations like this, is that people suffer and die. They don't become Ayn Rand's ideal man; there's just lots of needless suffering. And because people are capable of violence, and because people don't like suffering very much, they commit violence against each other to improve their own position -- which increases the suffering. And then other people, who don't want to suffer and don't want to commit violence, try to leave. And they come to countries like the United States, which they've heard at some point is a great and welcoming land of opportunity, only to discover that it's all a big marketing sham and the majority of the US wants to put up a sign that says, "Go away, we're closed." Given the number of failing or failed states around the world recently, you have to have your head quite deep in the sand, or maybe far up in some body part, to still subscribe to this idea that anarcho-capitalism is a solution to anything. There are many complex problems with many governments around the world right now. "Get rid of government" will not make any of it better.
  • aeorgnoieang 8y ago
    > What actually happens, in the real world, in situations like this, is that people suffer and die. They don't become Ayn Rand's ideal man; there's just lots of needless suffering. There are many many counterexamples to this. See [Seeing Like a State - Wikiwand](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Seeing_Like_a_State https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Seeing_Like_a_State) for many good ones. There's a lot of good evidence that people are in fact capable of taking care of themselves pretty well. But violence, especially organized violence, is tho a very real problem for basically everyone. But that's basically what a government is, fundamentally, so it's not obvious that 'more government' always rebounds to the betterment of everyone or even most people. As with everything, there are tradeoffs to be weighed!
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
• matt4077 8y ago
  I don't think it's valid to discount the individual's power by the number of voters. If the low impact of any single vote had the sort of effect you're suggesting, people would be much more likely not to vote at all. When a voter is just one of millions, their share of power is necessarily low. Yet the total power obviously rises linearly. (or even super-linearly, considering the outsize influence the US has in the world). Your comment also suggests that you believe people are fundamentally open to altruistic decisions. It should therefore not matter if the power they have is over themselves, or their compatriots. I also doubt widespread agreement with the policies you mention. Answers to such survey questions depend on the phrasing more than anything. And to use one recent datapoint: we all know a recent candidate who embodied those policies more than anyone before him. Yet they actually got fewer votes than their free trade / pro-immigration opponent.
• mcguire 8y ago
  "People are more rational when the cost to them of being irrational is larger." We may need a source on that. Are you are familiar with Thaler's work?
• jhanschoo 8y ago
  Other commenters have addressed how your claim that people behave more rationally when government is small. I would like to address the fact that even if we assume that citizens behave rationally, this does not mean that behavior maximizing personal benefit translates to behavior maximizing net benefit. Consider, for example, the international politics arena, wherein there is no government over state actors, and where sufficiently important players pursue sufficiently rational actions, since the cost of not pursuing it is so high. Yet even with good evidence that current human activities are leading to future food and environmental insecurity via climate change, the rational actors have been struggling to coordinate on a plan.
• b1daly 8y ago
  This is an unorthodox way of looking at this, and could only be persuasive with actual data. The economic argument for government providing public services is actually that for public goods, the incentives on the individual lead to sub-optimal outcomes (that’s partly just the definition of a public good). Just because voters vote for government that may be less good at providing that public good (let’s say police protection) is not an argument that this completely eliminates any benefit from that service being provided as a public good. From the simple example, the Democrats may provide less optimal policing than Republicans (wasting money on nanny state directives) does not mean the service can effectively provided by the private market. You’re positing that sort inverse incentives apply when voters are choosing the governmental provision of public services. This seems unlikely to be true in the aggregate because voters do not get to choose politicians who are going to pursue policies to benefit themselves, as an individual, when they vote. As you point out, they may vote for totally psychological benefits. So the tension is not really over the size of government; it is over making the correct determination of how much of a good or service is comprised of being a “public good.” Classic public good problems, like imposing the correct costs on pollution, can’t be solved by wishing them away. What you’re complaint more seems to be with is that democracy allows elements of self, or class, interests into individuals voting choices. The solution to this would be some kind of perfect benevolent dictator, who would make the optimum determination as to which goods should be provided by the government, and dedicate the correct resources to them. The problem with this, of course, is again the incentives on the holders of power distort their decision making to their own benefit, as had be shown over and over in the real world.
• ppeetteerr 8y ago
  > People are more rational when the cost to them of being irrational is larger. Do you mean like buying a house they cannot afford for some ideal of home ownership? ;)