Why it's ok to engage in politics

Parliament of Eritrea

Routledge has recently launched a most interesting series of books:  "Why It's OK: The Ethics and Aesthetics of How We Live". This is the description in their website:

"Philosophers often build cogent arguments for unpopular positions. Recent examples include cases against marriage and pregnancy, for treating animals as our equals, and dismissing some widely popular art as aesthetically inferior. What philosophers have done less often is to offer compelling arguments for widespread and established human behavior, like getting married, having children, eating animals, and going to the movies. But if one role for philosophy is to help us reflect on our lives and build sound justifications for our beliefs and actions, it seems odd that philosophers would neglect the development of arguments for the lifestyles most people—including many philosophers—actually lead. Unfortunately, philosophers’ inattention to normalcy has meant that the ways of life that define our modern societies have gone largely without defense, even as whole literatures have emerged to condemn them."

A worthy endeavor. Books include "Why It's OK to Want to Be Rich" by Jason Brennan, Why It's OK to Be of Two Minds by Jennifer Church and "Why It's OK to Ignore Politics", by Christopher Freiman. This post will deal with this last one.

It is a good book, but it goes too far. Indeed it is perfectly OK to ignore politics, including by not voting. The reasons are there: your chances of affecting the election results are absolutely minimal. Even if you knew for sure what the best candidate is, a cost-benefit analysis would reveal that it is not worth the effort, much like it is not worth playing Powerball, despite the incredible prizes they offer. The reason it goes too far is that it argues that it is not OK to engage in politics, including by voting. 

Freiman argues that to be a competent voter you would need to understand the major policies each candidate is proposing, its probable effects, the costs and benefits of the alternatives, etc. That is a far too demanding requirement, however, and not realistic. Compare voting to buying a house. When you choose a house, the research you have done is minimal compared to voting. While it is true that people will devote a long time to thinking about their house when they are in the process of buying one, the total amount of time compared to watching political news and discussing politics over a lifetime is trivial. The consequences are potentially tremendous. If you buy a bad house, you will lose a lot of your savings. And you have no reason to believe that the marginal buyer of a house has done much more research than you have. For all you know, you are a typical buyer. 

Yet most people, when buying a house, feel reasonably confident that they are not going to get a complete piece of junk. Maybe their house will be a bit better than their neighbor's (and a better deal too, you won't believe it!) but by and large people get what they pay for when it comes to real estate. This is because of how the market aggregates the small pieces of information of every buyer and how competition sees that realtors will want to keep customers happy enough.

In voting, this efficiency arising from low individual information may or may not happen, depending on one crucial factor: whether or not voters are biased, meaning that they get things wrong on the same side of issues. And while they are terribly biased on issues, as Freiman correctly argues, they are not biased when choosing the people to represent them. As I argue in the book, people are reasonably competent to choose representatives which are good enough to then pick the best professionals to run the government, and do something closer to the analysis Freiman would expect every voter to conduct. As Dal Bo et al found:

 We document four new facts that together characterize an “inclusive meritocracy.” First, politicians are on average significantly smarter and better leaders than the population they represent. Second, this positive selection is present even when conditioning on family (and hence social) background, suggesting that individual competence is key for selection. Third, the representation of social background, whether measured by parental earnings or occupational social class, is remarkably even. Fourth, there is at best a weak trade-off in selection between competence and social representation, mainly due to strong positive selection of politicians of low (parental) socioeconomic status. A broad implication of these facts is that it is possible for democracy to generate competent and socially representative leadership. 

So the average voter seems to be adding some value to governance. But is the marginal voter adding value (maybe), and if so, is this value greater than other uses of their time in altruistic endeavors? Probably not. But this requirement is too stringent. We have already agreed that it is OK not to vote. For there to be a moral obligation not to vote, however, it must be shown that it is actually harmful. The argument Freiman relies on is that people who vote are spending their altruistic budget on something which is not the very best thing they can do. But altruistic budgets do not work in such a simple form. Some people actually enjoy voting. Turning them away from politics will not automatically create effective altruists, it might as well create nihilists. 

So my test would be: does politics really bring you satisfaction? If it does, go for it, be happy. Does it bring you anxiety, as it does to so many others? Ignore it, be happy. Either way, it's ok.