DanKohn.com

I keep blathering on about pluralist ideals of market democracy, and yet I live in a country where far less than 50% of people vote. Gordon Mohr argues that one shouldn’t vote unless you’re familiar with the issues.

First, rather than saying that you shouldn’t vote unless you’ve studied the issues, I would just say that you should study the issues. Voting or not is certainly a matter of personal preference, and I’m comfortable with people making the choice not to vote. Of course, I’m also comfortable with people who decide to vote even though they’re not familiar with the issues, as I believe the right to vote (even to vote poorly) is a fundamental human one.

My only concern is that voting does require a certain naive belief in democracy and even an irrational belief that one person can have an impact. That is, voting is almost impossible to justify as a matter of simple economics.

To see why, assume that your city of 100,000 is voting to raise the minimum wage from $6 to $10 an hour, which will directly mean your salary goes from $12 K to $20 K a year. What could be more obvious than that you should take the hour to go vote, right? Well, no. Technically, with majority-take-all voting (like we use in the States), your vote only matters if it’s the tie-breaking one. If about half the folks are going to vote, that’s a 1 in 50,000 chance that your vote will matter. Multiply that by the $8,000 you’ll get if the vote passes, and the expected value of you voting is 16 cents. Since you already make $6 an hour, your time is definitely worth more than 16 cents.

Now, there’s still a whole raft of reasons to vote, such as civic responsibility, the warm feeling it gives you compared to the billion or so people who don’t have the right, the huge regret you’d feel if the measure really did lose by 1 vote, etc. However, it’s just not worth doing solely for the economic basis. (And, of course, most votes have far less clear economic benefits, and your impact is diluted across more voters.)

On the other hand, all sorts of areas of modern life (from co-worker interaction, to friendships, to dating, to most areas of morality) would be quite unpleasant if they were decided solely on a rational economic basis. For instance, I don’t think we should dump our toxic waste to Africa (as former Treasury secretary and now Harvard president Larry Summers once facetiously suggested), even though resulting deaths in Africa would have far less economic impact than ones here (due to their lower incomes).

Michael Ignatieff from the NYT writes on the American Empire:

The Greeks taught the Romans to call this failure hubris. It was also, in the 1990’s, a general failure of the historical imagination, an inability of the post-cold-war West to grasp that the emerging crisis of state order in so many overlapping zones of the world — from Egypt to Afghanistan — would eventually become a security threat at home. Radical Islam would never have succeeded in winning adherents if the Muslim countries that won independence from the European empires had been able to convert dreams of self-determination into the reality of competent, rule-abiding states. America has inherited this crisis of self-determination from the empires of the past. Its solution — to create democracy in Iraq, then hopefully roll out the same happy experiment throughout the Middle East — is both noble and dangerous: noble because, if successful, it will finally give these peoples the self-determination they vainly fought for against the empires of the past; dangerous because, if it fails, there will be nobody left to blame but the Americans.

All true, but I fail to see a lot of downsides. Disengagement from the world to a degree where Osama bin Laden wouldn’t target the US is utterly inconceivable. We’ll continue to trade, and to travel, and to interact with people around the world, and this will make us an existential threat to totalitarian fundamentalists who realize that they cannot stand to have their stagnant ideas compared to the market democracies of the pluralist West.

And, so, I think we need to steady ourselves for the coming tribulations of an American empire, even one that’s oxymoronically dedicated to the idea that everyone, everywhere deserves the freedom to make choices about how they live.