This may not be news, but I think that any investigation of optimal governance needs to at least privately acknowledge the rational ignorance argument (e.g., as popularized by Bryan Caplan) and its uncomfortable/dicey implications for “democratic” design features: as the number of voters increases, the likelihood of one individual vote affecting a policy outcome diminishes, and thus so does the incentive to care about figuring out the optimal policy (ceteris paribus). This can potentially be partially offset with social and psychological norms to care about making good decisions, but systems such as social media (including e.g., echo chamber algorithms) increase the reward for social conformity rather than critical thinking. The social/psychological norm strategy also can run into problems if the community norm becomes “Critically examine your options and support policies/politicians which seem to be socially beneficial”, yet the complexity of decisions increases to the extent that the socially-optimal strategy should simply be “delegate your evaluations to political/policy experts that make voting recommendations and whom you sample-test for credibility rather than trying to directly evaluate optimal policies/politicians.” Such a calculating strategy might lack the warm social/moral appeal needed to propagate as a norm.
This may not be news, but I think that any investigation of optimal governance needs to at least privately acknowledge the rational ignorance argument (e.g., as popularized by Bryan Caplan) and its uncomfortable/dicey implications for “democratic” design features: as the number of voters increases, the likelihood of one individual vote affecting a policy outcome diminishes, and thus so does the incentive to care about figuring out the optimal policy (ceteris paribus). This can potentially be partially offset with social and psychological norms to care about making good decisions, but systems such as social media (including e.g., echo chamber algorithms) increase the reward for social conformity rather than critical thinking. The social/psychological norm strategy also can run into problems if the community norm becomes “Critically examine your options and support policies/politicians which seem to be socially beneficial”, yet the complexity of decisions increases to the extent that the socially-optimal strategy should simply be “delegate your evaluations to political/policy experts that make voting recommendations and whom you sample-test for credibility rather than trying to directly evaluate optimal policies/politicians.” Such a calculating strategy might lack the warm social/moral appeal needed to propagate as a norm.