Reddit mentions of An Economic Theory of Democracy

Holy shit.. can we PLEASE start a "shitty book drive" for Kuhn??


How to Send Books and Magazines to Pennsylvania Inmates

Friends and family members of Pennsylvania inmates can send books, magazines, and newspapers to an inmate. All publications must be ordered directly from a reputable vendor like Amazon.com. No books, or magazines may contain nudity, maps, or describe the manufacture of drugs, alcohol, or weapons. All books should be new and paperback editions, hardcover books are prohibited. When ordering from Amazon be sure to mail to the inmate's name and ID number and send to the inmate's institutional mailing address. If you want to learn more about sending these items to an inmate read about it here.

Starting with this one because it's literal: https://www.amazon.com/Crash-Burn-Artie-Lange/dp/1476765596

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Phillip/dp/B000F3T9BS/

https://www.amazon.com/He-Talk-Like-White-Boy/dp/B000MKYKVI/

https://www.amazon.com/Darkest-Child-Novel-Delores-Phillips/dp/1569473455/

https://www.amazon.com/Hate-Your-Guts-Jim-Norton/dp/1416587853/

https://www.amazon.com/Happy-Endings-Tales-Meaty-Breasted-Zilch/dp/1416961054

https://www.amazon.com/Everybody-Awful-Except-Jim-Florentine/dp/0306825635

https://www.amazon.com/Wanna-Bet-Degenerate-Gamblers-Living/dp/1250121175

https://www.amazon.com/Too-Fat-Fish-Artie-Lange/dp/0385526571/

and somehow, searching for "Opie and Anthony" yields this... https://www.amazon.com/Economic-Theory-Democracy-Anthony-Downs/dp/0060417501/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1522171298&sr=1-4&keywords=opie+and+anthony

> This is the point - it is a rational decision, not something that does not matter.

You still don't understand. It has nothing to do with whether you think it "matters". That is entirely subjective. But from an individual utility payoff standpoint, an individual faces a choice in which they bear an immediate cost (the time and effort of voting) in the face of no payoff (the end result is the same regardless of an individual's actions). That has important implications in political science.

At which number precisely do votes stop mattering? There's no number, there are only probabilities that your vote will effect the election. As the election includes more and more people or more complex systems of choosing a winner, the probability that any individual voter will affect the outcome goes down. For the presidential election, this number is infinitesimally small, for all practical decision making and statistical purposes 0%.

Posted here is an excerpt from this blog.

"In a game-theory sense, your vote matters only when it is pivotal. The proof follows from a thought experiment. If the election was hypothetically decided by two or more votes, then you could have safely abstained from voting without affecting the majority rule. In other words, your vote was not needed.

How often will your vote be pivotal? A mathematical approach is to calculate the odds that all the other voters will be tied. The approach treats each voter as having some probability of voting for one candidate or the other. The odds of a tie are maximized when each voter is equally likely to vote for one candidate or the other. Here are some estimates from this methodology. At 1,000 voters, the optimistic odds of a tie, making you pivotal, are less than 3 percent. At 100 million voters, the optimistic odds are less than 0.01 percent (roughly 1 in 10,000).

In fact, the true odds are lower because candidates are not equally favored. Small preferences among voters can lead to margins of victory that make your vote irrelevant. The odds can be estimated in an empirical approach that examines at the history of elections. This exercise was done by economists Casey Mulligan and Charles Hunter, and here are their results as summarized in the New York Times:

Even in the closest elections, it is almost never the case that a single vote is pivotal. Of the more than 40,000 elections for state legislator that Mulligan and Hunter analyzed, comprising nearly 1 billion votes, only 7 elections were decided by a single vote, with 2 others tied. Of the more than 16,000 Congressional elections, in which many more people vote, only one election in the past 100 years – a 1910 race in Buffalo – was decided by a single vote. (source)

The conclusion is that your vote is very, very unlikely to affect the outcome. An economic argument extends the logic to say “voting doesn’t pay.” This is because voting has little expected benefit but costs time and effort. This view holds voting in the same light as buying a lottery ticket: a losing bet."


I don't necessarily agree with everything he says, but it's a decent cursory explanation.

> Do the votes of the individual senators in the house of representatives matter?

It depends what you mean. For the most part, votes in the house do not impact the outcome. This is why congressmen from both the senate and the house skip an enormous amount of votes. For most congressmen, votes are important for two reasons. Firstly, on a small select array of hot button issues, constituents pay attention to the votes of their elected officials. Congressmen fear 'bad' votes will be seized upon by their opponents and result in trouble back home for them. Secondly, most of a congressman's job is not casting a vote. It's working with their party and other members of congress to push legislation onto the agenda and garner support for it. If you've ever seen any television, movies or documentaries about Congress you might notice that the characters or politicians often work far harder for votes in the Senate than in the House. For instance, during one of the biggest legislative fights in recent history, Obama heavily lobbied Senator Ben Nelson and made several concessions JUST to get his one vote. In contrast, Obama conducted his political operations in the house largely through Nancy Pelosi. Devoting resources to individuals in the House is much less effective -- each vote in the House is worth much less than a vote in the Senate. Controlling House votes is better left to the Speaker of the House and other leadership who can work to get large numbers of their members to support their agenda.

(by the way, individuals in the house of representatives are called congressmen)

> If we believe that "Your vote will not impact the election" holds true for each individual in a voting body, aren't we suggesting that voting itself has no use or merit as a decision-making system?

That's a fair question, and its answer is subjective. Clearly, it is impossible to create a system in which each individual vote can matter in a country of over 300 million people. It's not that the government is necessarily "unrepresentative" though, at least not for this reason -- after all, the election is decided by votes whether each individual changes the outcome or not. It may be that you decide that this fact delegitimizes the government -- and again, that's a subjective opinion. There are some people who hold that view, though as I stated this is a simply a reality of large democracies. I would also tell you that in my opinion, voting isn't what makes democracies special. It's the free exchange of ideas, the independent watchdog press and the constant debate over values & policy that makes democracy what it is.

Whether or not you think it 'matters', the fact is that no individual will change the outcome of an election through their vote alone. Again, what conclusions you draw from that reality are your own. And by the way, people make irrational decisions all the time. When you buy a lottery ticket, you're making an irrational decision. And your chances of winning are still better than the chances of your vote deciding an election (your chance of deciding a state is roughly 1 in 10 million, which is incredibly low but the chance of that state deciding an election adds a whole different layer and makes it much more unlikely than it already is)

If you're looking for further reading, I would direct you to any of these:

https://www.amazon.com/Economic-Theory-Democracy-Anthony-Downs/dp/0060417501?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0

https://www.amazon.com/Logic-Collective-Action-printing-appendix/dp/0674537513?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice

https://www.princeton.edu/ceps/workingpapers/196farber.pdf

http://reason.com/archives/2012/10/03/your-vote-doesnt-count

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory

I would highly recommend Anthony Downs and Olson, the two books off of Amazon

The Median Voter Theorem is the principal concept. You can find a primer on Wikipedia or a variety of books on the concept.

Pretty much the only situations in which moving to the middle wouldn't be better would be:

Voters on the edges of the political spectrum are irrational. If they are unable to realize--Bernie bros who would rather vote for Trump than Clinton, for example. The issue is that actual voting behavior studies have found that this is more of a threat than an,actual observed behavior.

The edge voters decide they would rather not vote at all than support a moderate. Again, this is usually a threat. Most of the fringe voters are hyper-involved in politics and do not follow through on this threat.

The voting spectrum is not single peaked, but double peaked--as in voters cannot be accurately relented by a bell curve. The problem here is that it's very hard to actually determine when there genuinely are multiple peaks, and there's plenty of reason to suspect that it will not actually happen in a given population. Either way, you'd need an awful lot of confidence in a double peaked voter distribution before you start making political decisions based off of that.

EDIT: Here you can buy the original work that first proposed the Median Voter Theorem. It's obviously the best start and from here you can surely find plenty of more recent works that discuss the concept in more depth.

https://www.amazon.com/Economic-Theory-Democracy-Anthony-Downs/dp/0060417501

Political Ideologies and Political Parties in America is a good book. In summary he looks at the history of partisan politics and the roots of current political ideology in America and points out that traditionally parties were not ideologically based but typically determined by your social network and community-- simply a coalition to elect candidates. He shows that contemporary political ideology started to solidify in the 50s and 60s, which later shifted parties as people began to "sort" themselves into the two major parties based on ideology.

In the 50s American political scientists were actually complaining that the party platforms were too similar. Anthony Downs Economic Theory of Democracy stated that two-party systems would lead to nearly identical party platforms in their attempts to appeal to the largest number of voters. This thesis also tended to assume that the effect would skew the platforms to be more centrist, which national elections tend to do.

Also in Anthony Down's analysis though was a cost-benefit equation for voting. He argued the impact and thus benefit of voting was exceptionally low and the cost of voting--informing yourself about candidate's platforms and physically going to vote was high. Ideologically distinct parties help to address this paradox of voting by reducing the cost of voting as you have a pretty good idea of general policy stance based on party affiliation alone. Also, individual candidates then have more of an opportunity to point out the flaws/risks of their opponents, as well as highlighting the benefits of their own policies--helping the other side of the equation as well.

Also, while I'm not very knowledgeable about the UK government, your parliament is many times the size of our legislative branch while simultaneously representing a smaller populace. This could allow for more distinct parties and platforms to form and get enough backing to impact government.

>There's the appeal to history that completely ignores the fact that all predictions made by "political scientists" were wildly inaccurate.

But they haven't been - sorry son simply asserting something does not make true.

>Like economics, political science has no real objective way of measuring things. You can be a political scientist and argue for or against X depending on your subjective motives.

Some one doesn't know fuck all about how social science works.

>That's why your appeals to authority are irrelevant ("I know X, believe me" is Trump's version of it).

TIL linking actual research is an appeal to authority.

>Democrats have constantly moved to the right to capture these independents while increasingly neglecting the left

Exactly like political scientists predicted

>Maybe you ended up as a political scientist because you lacked the logical reasoning to get past the LSAT

Yeah the GREs don't exist. Maybe you never went to college because you couldn't pass the SATs

>If so, maybe you should stay humble and not flash your internet credentials so quickly.

Are you ignoring the actual research for a reason?

>And back to the fundamentals that you fail to grasp:

Hey Mr. Dunning Kruger, people will vote for the candidate closest to their position, move left (or right) and those toward the center will find themselves closer to the candidate on the other side.

We've known this shit since 1957.

We call this Median Voter Theorem

Oh look Here's another paper on the subject

And a very informative graphic on illustrating how wrong you are

>the moderate voter (Democrats and some independents) are going to vote Democrat over Trump, the logical thing to do is to cast your net into the pool of voters that you haven't locked up. Those voters are progressives and millenials

Why would a progressive not vote for any candidate left of Trump? You're holding on spinets of logic and half truths without thinking the through. What kind of fucking moron who claims to be progressive votes for Trump or stays home on election day? It's just as rational for a liberal to want a Conservative over a moderate as it is for a someone who loves dark chocolate to prefer shit over milk chocolate.

> doesn't exists and all you achieve in the process is to disenfranchise progressives and millenials.

Only the fucking idiots who don't exist. Listen son, I'm both a millenal and a progressive and if you think there's any chance of me not voting against Trump regardless of who the democrats nominate you don't understand fuck all.

Now stop talking shit about an entire discipline of research you know fuck all about but are somehow arrogant enough to assume is wrong because some bullshit you think it is.

Also ive noticed you still haven't linked any research to support your argument. All I'm hearing is from you is "but I feel like vaccines will give my baby Autism and the drug companies just want my money"