NEW ENGLAND WHITE
The average voter is not held in much esteem by economists and political scientists, and Caplan rehearses some of the reasons for this. The argument of his book, though, is that economists and political scientists have misunderstood the problem. They think that most voters are ignorant about political issues; Caplan thinks that most voters are wrong about the issues, which is a different matter, and that their wrong ideas lead to policies that make society as a whole worse off. We tend to assume that if the government enacts bad policies, it’s because the system isn’t working properly—and it isn’t working properly because voters are poorly informed, or they’re subject to demagoguery, or special interests thwart the public’s interest. Caplan thinks that these conditions are endemic to democracy. They are not distortions of the process; they are what you would expect to find in a system designed to serve the wishes of the people. “Democracy fails,” he says, “because it does what voters want.” It is sometimes said that the best cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. Caplan thinks that the best cure is less democracy. He doesn’t quite say that the world ought to be run by economists, but he comes pretty close.
Louis Menand, filólogo de Harvard, escribe una reseña de “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Politics”, escrito por un profesor de económicas de la muy anarcoqué antidemocratista George Manson University. Eso ocurre mientras el escritor Will Self se va de paseo por el Jura en una reedición del Ministry of Walks y el profesor de Yale Stephen L. Carter publica una novela de asesinatos entre académicos en una ciudad clavaíta a New Haven. La imagen (más grande) sale de aquí cortada con las ilustraciones de Martin (mi favorita) y si ésta llega de Brasil aquélla no recuerdo do la hallé.
