THE IRRELEVANCE OF ECONOMIC THEORY TO UNDERSTANDING ECONOMIC IGNORANCE

Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter treats several immensely important and understudied topicspublic ignorance of economics, political ideology, and their connection to policy errorfrom an orthodox economic perspective whose applicability to these topics is overwhelmingly disproven by the available evidence. Moreover, Caplan adds to the traditional and largely irrelevant orthodox economic notion of rational public ignorance the claim that when voters favor counterproductive economic policies, they do so deliberately, i.e., knowingly. This leads him to assume (without any evidence) that emotion or ideology explain mass economic error. Straightforward, unchosen mass ignorance of economic principlesneither rational nor irrational, but simply mistakenis a more coherent explanation for economic error, and it is backed up by the vast body of public-opinion research.