There is also the theory of what Caplan calls the Miracle of Aggregation. As James Surowiecki illustrates in “The Wisdom of Crowds” (2004), a large number of people with partial information and varying degrees of intelligence and expertise will collectively reach better or more accurate results than will a small number of like-minded, highly intelligent experts. Stock prices work this way, but so can many other things, such as determining the odds in sports gambling, guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar, and analyzing intelligence. An individual voter has limited amounts of information and political sense, but a hundred million voters, each with a different amount of information and political sense, will produce the “right” result. Then, there is the theory that people vote the same way that they act in the marketplace: they pursue their self-interest. In the market, selfish behavior conduces to the general good, and the same should be true for elections.

Caplan thinks that democracy as it is now practiced cannot be salvaged, and his position is based on a simple observation: “Democracy is a commons, not a market.” A commons is an unregulated public resource—in the classic example, in Garrett Hardin’s essay “The Tragedy of the Commons” (1968), it is literally a commons, a public pasture on which anyone may graze his cattle. It is in the interest of each herdsman to graze as many of his own cattle as he can, since the resource is free, but too many cattle will result in overgrazing and the destruction of the pasture. So the pursuit of individual self-interest leads to a loss for everyone. (The subject Hardin was addressing was population growth: someone may be concerned about overpopulation but still decide to have another child, since the cost to the individual of adding one more person to the planet is much less than the benefit of having the child.)

Caplan rejects the assumption that voters pay no attention to politics and have no real views. He thinks that voters do have views, and that they are, basically, prejudices. He calls these views “irrational,” because, once they are translated into policy, they make everyone worse off. People not only hold irrational views, he thinks; they like their irrational views. In the language of economics, they have “demand for irrationality” curves: they will give up y amount of wealth in order to consume x amount of irrationality. Since voting carries no cost, people are free to be as irrational as they like. They can ignore the consequences, just as the herdsman can ignore the consequences of putting one more cow on the public pasture. “Voting is not a slight variation on shopping,” as Caplan puts it. “Shoppers have incentives to be rational. Voters do not.”

Caplan suspects that voters cherish irrational views on many issues, but he discusses only views relevant to economic policy. The average person, he says, has four biases about economics—four main areas in which he or she differs from the economic expert. The typical noneconomist does not understand or appreciate the way markets work (and thus favors regulation and is suspicious of the profit motive), dislikes foreigners (and thus tends to be protectionist), equates prosperity with employment rather than with production (and thus overvalues the preservation of existing jobs), and usually thinks that economic conditions are getting worse (and thus favors government intervention in the economy). Economists know that these positions are irrational, because the average person actually benefits from market competition, which provides the best product at the lowest price; from free trade with other countries, which (for American consumers) usually lowers the cost of labor and thus the price of goods; and from technological change, which redistributes labor from less productive to more productive enterprises.

The economic biases of the non-economist form a secular world view that people cling to dogmatically, the way they once clung to their religious faith, Caplan thinks. People do not, he proposes, vote their self-interest: they are much more altruistic than the standard model, in which voters behave like shoppers, predicts. (This explains the phenomenon, puzzling to many social critics, of the auto worker who supports the elimination of the inheritance tax and the Hollywood producer who favors its retention.) “Precisely because people put personal interests aside when they enter the political arena,” Caplan says, “intellectual errors readily blossom into foolish policies.” People really believe that the country would be better off if profits were regulated, if foreign goods were taxed, and if companies were prevented from downsizing. Politicians who pander to these beliefs are more likely to be elected, and the special interests that lobby for protectionism and anticompetitive legislation are the beneficiaries—not the public. The result, over time, is a decline in the standard of living.

Caplan insists that he is not a market fundamentalist, but he does think that most economists peg the optimal level of government involvement in the economy too high, because they overestimate the virtues of democracy. He offers some suggestions for fixing the evils of universal democratic participation (though he does not spend much time elaborating on them, for reasons that may suggest themselves to you when you read them): require voters to pass a test for economic competence; give extra votes to people with greater economic literacy; reduce or eliminate efforts to increase voter turnout; require more economics courses in school, even if this means eliminating courses in other subjects, such as classics; teach people introductory economics without making the usual qualifications about the limits of market solutions. His general feeling is that if the country were run according to the beliefs of professional economists everyone would be better off. Short of that consummation, he favors whatever means are necessary to get everyone who votes to think like a professional economist. He wants to raise the price of voting.

It is not clear whether “The Myth of the Rational Voter” is intended merely to be provocative (a motive that has been known to get other economists in big trouble) or whether its recommendations for changing the rules for political participation are to be taken seriously (and by whom?). The book is, in part, a challenge to some of the assumptions made about voting behavior in the academic field known as public choice theory. Caplan has assembled a lot of data that reveal significant disparities between the average person’s views on economic questions and the views of professional economists: the public thinks that the price of gasoline is too high, for instance, but most economists think it is about right or too low; the public thinks that most new jobs being created in the United States are low-paying, but economists disagree; the public thinks that top executives are overpaid, and economists do not. Caplan’s point is that voters’ views on the economy are not random, the result of “rational ignorance”; they reflect systematic biases caused by an erroneous understanding of the way economies work.

But, as Caplan certainly knows, though he does not give sufficient weight to it, the problem, if it is a problem, is more deeply rooted. It’s not a matter of information, or the lack of it; it’s a matter of psychology. Most people do not think politically, and they do not think like economists, either. People exaggerate the risk of loss; they like the status quo and tend to regard it as a norm; they overreact to sensational but unrepresentative information (the shark-attack phenomenon); they will pay extravagantly to punish cheaters, even when there is no benefit to themselves; and they often rank fairness and reciprocity ahead of self-interest. Most people, even if you explained to them what the economically rational choice was, would be reluctant to make it, because they value other things—in particular, they want to protect themselves from the downside of change. They would rather feel good about themselves than maximize (even legitimately) their profit, and they would rather not have more of something than run the risk, even if the risk is small by actuarial standards, of having significantly less.