My favorite books on democracy, its promises and perils

This is perhaps the best, most illuminating book on human nature ever written. You’ll walk away having a better understanding of people behave as they do, and why so many institutions and behaviors fail to achieve their stated goals. 

Simler and Hanson’s main thesis is that we are designed, by evolution, to act upon hidden selfish motives. We all benefit from general cooperation, but as individuals, we each benefit if others are cooperative, while we skirt the rules a bit and act selfishly. But we face two problems. One is that this works only if we don’t get caught.

The second is that other people have evolved to be good at reading our minds and assessing our intentions, especially over repeated interactions. Evolution’s solution, Simler and Hanson argue, is that in our conscious minds, we earnestly and sincerely believe we act on noble motives, while we subconsciously pursue status, power, money, and sex.

Our conscious mind is not the mirror of the soul but the press secretary of the brain. We self-deceive in order to deceive others. They prove this not by telling bogus just-so stories. Of course, you could always make up selfish motives for any behavior—maybe the hero saved the drowning baby because he wanted to impress women.

That’s not what Simler and Hanson do. Rather, they note that this theory—that people act on subconscious selfish desires—and the rival theory—that people are aiming to do what they say they are—lead to different predictions about how people will behave and how institutions will function.

They then go through multiple spheres of life, from education, art, medicine, charity, religion, and most importantly for this list, politics, and show that their theory better predicts and explains the behavior we actually see.

Roughly around sixth grade, most people in the West learn a basic model of how democracy functions.

According to the sixth-grade model, voters each have various interests and values. They then learn how the world works, what politics can and can’t do, and so on. On the basis of their values and information, they form ideologies or general political preferences.

They then seek out and vote for the parties and candidates which will best realize their goals. The parties and candidates in turn run on platforms that appeal to such voters. So, the theory goes, elections turn the popular will into power.

Achen and Bartels show that this model is entirely wrong, or, more precisely, correct for at best a small minority of voters. Instead, most people vote for who they are, not what they want. People vote and join political parties not to change government, but to show other members of their identity groups that they are loyal members of that group.

For a college professor or artist, voting Democrat is equivalent to a former Bostonian like me wearing Red Sox and Patriots gear. Most political partisans don’t know about or even support what their party plans to do.

And it’s far more common that someone agrees with, say, the Democrat’s platform because she votes Democrat than that she votes Democrat because she agrees with the platform. Rather than elections being the means by which the people get their way, they are effectively random events.

For seventy-five years, nearly every study on political knowledge finds that most voters are overwhelmingly ignorant of nearly anything you might reasonably think they should know to vote well.

Voters don’t know relevant statistics (even broadly), know what laws were passed, know who represents them, know what government can and can’t do, or know who is responsible for what. There are still some political scientists who, for ideological reasons deny this or deny that it’s important, but that’s like saying there are people who think the world is 6000 years old.

At any rate, Somin’s book is one of the most up-to-date and thorough summaries of all the relevant data and statistics. But it’s not just that. He also does a great job showing how many attempts to downplay ignorance—by saying that the crowd is wise even though most members of that crowd are wise—fail. Democratic ignorance matters.

Political scientists and economists have long argued that voters are rationally ignorant.

On this theory, people tend to acquire and retain information only if the expected benefits exceed the expected costs. This explains why students cram material to pass a test but let themselves forget it afterward, why Americans who speak English at home don’t usually bother to learn a foreign language but so many people learn English, or why you don’t bother attempt to memorize your local phonebook.

It also explains why voters know so little. Since individual votes make so little difference, individual voters can afford to remain ignorant. Political information is a collective action problem: what we know matters, but what any one of us knows does not. 

Caplan adds an innovation. This point also applies to how we think, not just what we know. Political psychologists have long found that voters process what little information they have in highly biased ways—they try to believe what they want to believe rather than what the evidence implies.

Caplan argues that voters are “rationally irrational”. That is, it serves their goals and interests to process political information in unscientific, non-truth-tracking ways. Part of the reason is that we reward each other for being biased. Just as sports fans like their fellow fans more when the fans are biased against the umpires, political fans like their fellow partisans more when they are loyal (and thus biased against the truth).

Along the way, he also shows that voters are systematically mistaken about basic economics, and these mistakes are not explained by, say, the demographic biases inside economics as a discipline. Instead, the average voter, if they have any economic ideology at all, believes something close to the mercantilist theory Adam Smith refuted in 1776.

This is not only one of the best books on politics, but on people’s behavior in social media and beyond. Grandstanding, Warmke and Tosi say, is the use of moral language for the purpose of self-promotion.

For example, my neighbors put up political signs that say “No human is illegal” even though those same neighbors (unlike me) in fact advocate closed borders, suppose immigration restrictions, and want to deport illegal immigrants. (In contrast, I actually advocate open borders, though my lawn remains silent about my politics.)

The point of this behavior is like praying in public—it’s about trying to impress other people and convince them you’re a good person. 

Today, people are in a kind of moral arms-race with each other, each trying to prove they’re better than others. This explains why people are dismissive of evidence, tend to have over-the-top, exaggerated emotional reactions, make exaggerated moral complaints, or invent moral complaints even when nothing is at stake.

Think of the princess and the pea story: a real princess can feel the pea even under 100 layers of mattresses. Well, if I’m a better person than you, this means I can detect evil where you see nothing, or I cannot tolerate being in the presence of wrongdoing while you can. Politics is so often toxic because being toxic pays.