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Recognizing Our Limits
I love the conversations here, but it brings up an issue that is often very frustrating. The members on here are well read and well informed, but that makes us outliers in the general population. And I mean outliers in the very specific statistical sense; so far out of the distribution that our presence doesn’t represent a useable data point.
I have always known that I follow politics and government more than most people. One incident revealed how far out of the mainstream I was.
Our fire department operates as a 501(c)3 charity. For tax purposes, we are always having to prove our tax exempt status to various entities. One of the documents we have is a letter from the IRS confirming our status. I had scanned it and attached it to various emails and letters.
One day (after years of using it) I had just printed a copy and noticed that it was signed by Lois Lerner. This was maybe two months after the news had broken about her nefarious behavior regarding tax-exempt groups. In the next business meeting, I mentioned it to the room full of firefighters. Three out of 20 people knew who she was. With a couple more, it seemed to click when I explained the story; they had heard her name but didn’t recognize it.
None of these guys is stupid or particularly ignorant; it’s just that this stuff doesn’t matter to them. Fully 75 percent hadn’t heard about an issue that burned up political forums and the news. And didn’t really care.
Every time I hear a proposal to encourage more voting I think it’s exactly the wrong thing to do.
Published in General
I take comfort in this, actually. One of the worst aspects of the Left is their tendency to politicize everything. It is nice to be reminded that most people are not obsessed with politics, but are more concerned with doing their jobs, taking care of their families, and getting on with their lives.
Does it mean they’re not fully informed on every issue that might be relevant in an election? I suppose. But I tend to think that such people (concerned with work and family rather than politics) generally have their heads screwed on right, and are more likely to be conservative than liberal busybodies.
Nowadays, political stuff just raises my blood pressure. I’d probably be better off paying less attention myself.
Third of us believe in zombies, sixty percent in space aliens and 75 % can’t name three branches of our government. It’s also wise to remember the IQ Bell Curve. The mean IQ is 100 which I was reminded of at my visit to Wal-Mart this morning. The mean here on Ricochet is probably north of 130. The inverse of that is there are a bunch of 70 IQ that get to vote same as you.
You mean you encountered folks with the emotional maturity to have large families and are spending their money in a mathematically intelligent and cost effective manner?
Take their votes over the Eloi at Whole Foods every day.
Try explaining to the members of congress what tax exempt organizations are. It seems I remember during hearings on the IRS, Darrell Issa interrupting a female Democrat (can’t find her name) who was going on a tirade about non profits, and telling her if she had a PAC it was probably non profit.
Found it. It was Carolyn Maloney from New York that did not understand 501 (c) 4 and Issa explained it to her. And she sat on the committee to oversee the IRS. Such comfort, huh?
I’m more concerned by people who think they are informed and are activists who have never heard of F&F, the IRS scandal, and the arrest of the Benghazi video scapegoat.
Have to say that I wish I’d never heard of Lerner.
The problem is those people tend to be “go along to get along” types. “She seems nice, I’ll vote for her”.
I’m not advocating for this change because there are benefits to popular voting, such as the fact that it increases civic engagement. I think those benefits, even with their attendant risks of involving uninformed voters, outweigh the goal of having only knowledgeable voters vote.
However: The original post makes a valid point, one that the founding fathers understood well, I think. Their idea of a republic makes sense from an organizational point of view. A republic is an organizational pyramid based on the idea that an individual can know well only so many people and issues.
It would look like this today: Each town committee elects a chair. Those committee chairs also serve on committees that oversee the bottom-row committees. Say, five, for example. Eventually those uppermost-row committee chairs elect the town’s executives and leaders. Those town executives and leaders elect regional executives and leaders. Those regional executives and leaders elect state executives and leaders. Those state executives and leaders elect regional (composed of just a few states) executives and leaders. Those regional state committees elect leaders and executives that govern the entire country.
The theory here is that each person can know only a few people and issues really well. That takes human nature into account quite accurately. People have only so much time and attention to give to politics, and within the political realm, there are so many levels of government that the person who spends time getting to know his or her local officials won’t have the time to get to know the state and federal officials. And it’s not just knowing the officials but also the issues. The issues are complex, and they require a certain amount of general knowledge of government and finance.
I think that popular voting is messy and draws in uninformed people, but I look at it as being comparable to the jury system. Juries are not made up of technical experts or legal scholars. They don’t know the victims or the accused personally. But their lack of in-depth knowledge is valuable nonetheless.
I prefer a government system that incorporates both types of organizational setups. For example, that the state legislatures elect the U.S. senators makes so much sense to me. Having the Senate elected that way and balancing the popularly elected House of Representatives just makes good check-and-balance sense. That’s how the federal government was set up originally, and we should return to it. It would empower the state governments, and that would be a good thing. It would bring to the federal level the concerns of the nation’s state legislatures. I wish we could reinstate this from the original Constitution.
Whenever I hear stories about “75% of Americans think Donald Trump should submit himself to grand jury questions on Russian collusion” etc – I just made that up completely – I think about this kind of thing. Since I’ve stepped out of the political world on a full-time basis and done the parenting thing FT instead (I do writing and editing PT), I get a sense of how normal people engage with current events. Nobody pays attention to most of this stuff; you’d be shocked what people don’t know. I live in a town populated mostly by people who work at Rutgers University – ranging from professors to janitors – and very few mom friends even knew about the Congressional shooting, for example.
I call it the Jay Walking theory of politics, and this is always the link I use to explain it: https://www.vox.com/2016/7/19/12212052/pokemon-go-pikachu-joe-biden
There’s lots of those kinds of things from well into Obama’s presidency, and few knew who Biden was.
Indeed. I was more referencing the employees. I was of course one othe intellectual customers savings peanuts on my peanut butter.
For a while, my wife sat on the board of directors of a small adoption agency here in Aiken, SC. It’s now defunct, but while it operated, it was done so as a for-profit corporation. She asked the founders why, and they told her the sheer volume of paperwork for a non-profit made going for-profit significantly simpler, and would require less time compared to being a charitable organization.
Put another way, being charitable was more taxing effort-wise than for-profit business-wise.
Mises.org is right about everything.
***EDIT***
The amount of centralization embedded during the Woodrow Wilson administration quit working decades ago. All we do is use government to steal from each other.
You are correct, sir!
I am an optimist so I often think that you can “fix stoopid.” But the points you bring forward are worth thinking about.
It amazed me that during the three months that I lived in Scandinavia, their TV shows in the evening were often about the history, geography and politics of some nation in Africa.
Most of the shows had been produced by the BBC. I learned things about places I never thought about.
When you think of the cluster mind fudge that is today’s American TV programming for the masses, it is very discouraging. Our San Francisco-based PBS station would rather have cooking shows on each Saturday than something of an informational matter. And fugget about the rest of the TV dial. There are far too many of the “reality shows” that teach American kids that if they are ugly in thoughts, their character and their actions, they too can be on TV someday.
Absolutely.
I’ve heard a lot of people go overboard, and say we need a new kind of literacy test, or even property requirements for suffrage, and the like. I don’t agree with any of that, but we’ve clearly gone wrong in trying to encourage every random, uninformed person to vote.
Can’t we just leave these condescending discussions of “American stoopid” to liberals, who relish them?
Many Americans of general conservative temperament aren’t fixated on politics. They don’t care who the press secretary or department undersecretary is. Nor do they watch embarrassingly unfunny Kimmel, Colbert and SNL skits about press secretaries at 1am. They have kids and grandkids, cross country races, gymnastic meets, church fundraisers and small businesses to attend to at 6:30am.
Many of these Americans want lower taxes, reasonable regulations, competent policing, schools that teach numeracy, literacy and history with a solid respect for our country, and the freedom to own guns without being equated with mass murderers and practical cars and trucks without being charged with planet murder.
Who cares if they don’t care to know the difference between state supreme court and federal circuit court jurisdiction? Anthony Kennedy can change that tomorrow anyway.
If the Republican Party can’t reach and motivate these everyday conservatives whose fault is it? The party, consultant and media elite are the ones with 130 IQ points apiece, right?
Looking at your potential voters through the lens of “American stoopid” won’t get it done.
What amazes me is something a little different, since there are such wide variations in what interests people. It is that I have friends and relatives who are the epitome of upstanding serious prudent (even prudish) citizens. Hence they will spend most of a conversation (like this afternoon) ranting about the degeneration of society. They notice careless ways people behave and raise kids, assume social superiority, expect their political ideas to be instantly gratified, show disregard for financial planning and personal responsibility etc.. …yet still vote Democrat. I was so tempted to ask “and don’t you see any connection between those behaviors and who it is that promotes those very same things?”
I’ve long been suspicious of this stat. I can imagine myself reflexively picking ‘President, Congress, Senate’ as they are the ones we tend to be most concerned with. I can imagine someone else avoiding an answer that had ‘Executive’ in it because executives are usually thought of in a business rather than governmental sense.
All this is to say that our electorate is pretty dumb but might not be quite as dumb as they are made out to be.
Interesting exercise: Take a look at the latest PISA test scores. There’s a curious result if you dig down into the demographics of race and ethnicity. Very nearly every sociological slice and subslice of Americans perform better than the students in the countries their families emigrated from. Sometimes far better. Compare American Jews with Israeli Jews. Wow. Yet Americans are always the “stoopid” ones when compared with their European betters (tip: Swedes aren’t going to be winning many of those Nobels they are handing out unless a Nobel prize in explosive devices is awarded in honor of the founder).
Another interesting result if you look at tests such as PISA and NAEP is the dramatic difference in reading, math and science abilities amongst subgroups of the American population. Yet if you align the broad racial and ethnic composition of these scores with that of our two major political parties you might come to the conclusion that one party is on average smarter than the other.
Yet, which party is always portrayed as the “stoopid” party, even by some of its high IQ candidates for President?
I only vote for people and proposals I’ve read up on or already know. I leave areas of the ballot blank where they run unopposed or I don’t know who they are, like college trustees, etc.
I agree that people who aren’t inclined to vote shouldn’t be encouraged to do so. I am a therapist in Massachusetts. When Deval Patrick was elected governor in 2007, one of my clients said to me, “So Bush is gone.”
Personally, I think there is a direct relationship between civic knowledge and these desirable things you list. You cannot get good government by having a majority of the people ignorant of and uncaring about government policy. And it starts at the lowest level of government–city government.
That’s probably true, but I think some of this has been caused by no longer teaching Civics in the classroom. It was mandatory for everyone in several classes when I was growing up n California. It has been long gone in California schools for several decades. In addition to imparting some basic knowledge, it would probably generate more interest in some political topics.
I’m not quite sure how civic engagement is increased by GOTV workers rounding up voters and driving them to the polls, and “helping” them fill out their ballots.
You can fix ignorance. You can’t fix stupid.
Given the subject of this conversation, my OCD is urging me to point out that Congress is made up of the House and the Senate. Bad, OCD, bad!
I’d like to think so, but I suspect the
little bastardshigh achieving students of the CA Dept. of Ed would just be given the period off everyday to protest ICE, guns, Christian cake-bakers, dead whales, and Trump in general.Rational ignorance isn’t the problem. It’s rational because we can’t affect much, our vote’s impact is close to zero, so the marginal return to effort spent informing oneself about politics is zero. If you write published material, host TV or radio with large audiences or teach and influence children, sit on boards awarding scholarships and money it’s worth the effort and those were targeted by the far left and they won. We must reverse it.
Most of us read history or about political and policy matters because we like the subject, like to engage in it more than play video games. However, there is a mind set very different than rational ignorance that is a threat. The delicate flowers are easily manipulated, can be stampeded because they lack all background in anything, even many of the very intelligent young have no foundation in western thought, history religion and are so group oriented they are easily formed into dangerous mobs. They think they know things, have views but everything they know is wrong and they’re not equipped to learn.
But it’s not all of them. The far left was a minority when I was young, but they had a strategy. They had help from the Soviet Union, but mostly it was dedication by true believers. They took over our schools and from their everything else. I think organized conservatives and traditional liberals have to do the same.
This is brilliant.
The Koch Brothers need to start a college or something, I think.