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The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton University Press, 2007)

Bryan Caplan · c. 2007

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Bryan Caplan did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this book, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The book prints chapter headings its extracted text does not preserve, so the claims below are in the book's order but not grouped. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

  1. Democracy is a commons, not a market
  2. In my view, democracy fails because it does what voters want.
  3. The central idea is that voters are worse than ignorant; they are, in a word, irrational—and vote accordingly.
  4. Economists have been at war with make-work bias for centuries.
  5. In many cases, economists should embrace the free market in spite of its defects, because it still outshines the democratic alternative.

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