{"id":30416,"date":"2018-02-01T08:52:28","date_gmt":"2018-02-01T13:52:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=30416"},"modified":"2018-02-01T09:31:04","modified_gmt":"2018-02-01T14:31:04","slug":"the-dunning-kruger-effect-explains-the-growth-of-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=30416","title":{"rendered":"The Dunning-Kruger Effect Explains the Growth of Government"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"article-about\">\n<h3 class=\"article-republish-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/fee.org\/articles\/the-dunning-kruger-effect-explains-the-growth-of-government\/\">The Dunning-Kruger Effect Explains the Growth of Government<\/a><\/h3>\n<div class=\"article-subtitle\"><strong>Why do democracies lead to ever-growing states?<\/strong><\/div>\n<div class=\"author-list-box\">\n<div><\/div>\n<div class=\"author-content\">We\u2019ve all found ourselves at least a few times in our lives listening to friends or relatives complain about voter apathy. If only voters properly researched policies and politicians, everything would be better, we hear. Unfortunately, the incentives just aren\u2019t there.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body-cont ng-isolate-scope\">\n<div class=\"article-body-text\">\n<p>Anthony Downs called this phenomenon &#8220;rational ignorance,&#8221; and it is especially significant with government-related decision-making, or &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.econlib.org\/library\/Enc\/PublicChoice.html\">Public Choice<\/a>.&#8221; Economic analysis shows us that the value of the time individuals spend informing themselves must exceed its opportunity cost. Take this into consideration when contemplating the ludicrous probability\u00a0of a single participant swaying an entire election. There is very little individual upside to justify any significant effort to inform oneself on voting for the &#8220;right&#8221; solution.<\/p>\n<p>Thus, ignorance is a perfectly reasonable alternative and should be a completely expected outcome of democracy. After all, the individual losses of inadequate voting are just too low to matter much, if at all. Proper examination simply doesn\u2019t make nearly as much economic sense for political agents as it does for market ones.<\/p>\n<p>But if people are choosing ignorantly, wouldn\u2019t the properly-educated minority weigh the scale towards good, effective policies? And if, as I believe, good policy means a less-intrusive government, why does the opposite always seem to happen?<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Head Start of Statism<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>An important distinction must here be made: the issue at hand is not an <em>admitted<\/em> lack of knowledge. Otherwise, the very fact that voting is not random at all would completely debunk the theory. In this case, however, ignorance is knowing things wrong.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Dunning-Kruger Effect Explains the Growth of Government Why do democracies lead to ever-growing states? We\u2019ve all found ourselves at least a few times in our lives listening to friends or relatives complain about voter apathy. If only voters properly researched policies and politicians, everything would be better, we hear. Unfortunately, the incentives just aren\u2019t [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[18285,204,18280,18279,14991,18281,18284,10739,18283,18282,972],"class_list":["post-30416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-5000no","tag-democracy","tag-dunning-kruger-effect","tag-eduardo-gindri","tag-foundation-for-economic-education","tag-government-growth","tag-opportunity-cost","tag-policy","tag-public-choice-theory","tag-rational-ignorance","tag-statism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30416"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30419,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30416\/revisions\/30419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}