I’m a bit puzzled why it is rational to bother to vote and irrational to purchase lottery tickets, based on the mathematics. Surely there is a clear, obvious unbiased Bayesian explanation somewhere, but I seem to have misplaced it. . .
Because voting is free. Because voting is fun. Because the value of voting has more to do with how you can participate in the political discussion than it does with whether your vote mathematically changes the outcome of this election. Because the net trends of voting have high influence on future policy, future choices put before the electorate, this influence is likely worth more than the utility of a current vote on the current election outcome.
Voting is not free (it has a nontrivial opportunity cost of registering ahead of time and then going to some random part of town in the middle of the day) and it is not fun (I don’t find it so). When your simple arguments are so easily refuted, I am skeptical of your more complicated arguments as well; presumably if you had a strong argument you wouldn’t feel the need to pad it with two weak arguments.
It depends on where you are—as I realized reading a comment subthread on Overcoming Bias which I can’t think of a good way of googling for. (People discussing this seem to be always Generalizing From One Example.) Where I am, I had to register once and for all (before the first election in which I was eligible to vote), and it takes less than half an hour to walk to the polling station, queue, vote, and walk back home—and it’s usually on Sunday afternoon during the early summer, when if I stayed home I’d most likely just waste my time on TVTropes or something
(Now, if among people voting in the same election going to the poll station and queuing would be a much greater inconvenience for some than for others, that would be pretty bad as it could introduce biases. Does that happen?)
No matter what, voting will be more inconvenient for some people than others. E.g. in your example, people that go to church on Sunday afternoon, maybe? Certainly people that work weekends in the summer, although they can probably still take a lunch break to vote.
It probably doesn’t matter too much. But in a close election, if even an additional 1% of people that have to work weekends chose not to vote (and these tend to be a specific class of jobs that probably are biased towards one candidate), that could change the outcome.
IIRC, elections in Italy are usually Sunday all day (from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.) plus Monday morning (from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.), or Saturday afternoon plus Sunday all day. I think the main group of people it biases against is those who like to go to the seaside for the weekend as soon as they can—almost all people who stay in town could find some time to vote if they want to. OTOH, plenty of people (including) don’t switch their legal residence when they rent an apartment to study in another town, so they’d have to go back to their parents’ in order to vote. I study relatively close to where I grew up and my parents live so I go back home most weekends anyway, but students living further away from their home towns might be under-represented among voters. (I hear they can get free train tickets for that, though. I’ve never bothered to do that because train tickets from my home town to my university town and back are so cheap anyway.)
Certainly I meant voting is free in the trivial sense that unlike to lottery, the other activity discussed in the original comment, it does not cost money to vote. In terms of the time and effort it takes beyond money, it seems entirely comparable to buying a lottery ticket. I can’t remember registering to vote, I certainly never went particularly out of my way to do it, and since that registration voting has been about the equivalent of going to a nearby 7-11 to get a lottery ticket, except it doesn’t cost any money.
Do you disagree that the cost of voting is extremely similar to the cost of buying a lottery ticket, except for the actual dollar cost?
You seem to think I’m trying to prove a theorem here, padding my non-existent strong argument with weak arguments in some sort of attempt to trick people. In fact, my belief about most motivations comes from my study of economics: a given event has multiple kinds of costs and multiple kinds of payouts. Listing the multiple payouts makes as much sense as valuing an investment by summing the dividends, the capital appreciation, AND the tax benefits it brings you, benefits are additive.
Don’t you think in determining a course of action it makes sense to add the benefits rather than just picking the “strongest” benefit and relying solely on that?
Good, we are adding facts to the examination of this question. As for facts:
1) The press is an outlier and wild claim discovery machine. I wonder what the average wait is? In my 37 years of voting I don’t think I’ve ever waited more than 5 minutes, and that covers voting in New York, New Jersey, and California. If there were a way to come up with a mean, or even a 95th percentile value, I would imagine the mean would be < 5 minutes, and within minutes of the mean to buy a lottery ticket and I would expect the 95th percentiles to be down in the 15 minutes or less range, and for both voting and lottery ticket buying.
2) A quick google quickly turns up a story of a 4 hour line to buy lottery tickets. The analogy between a lottery where the expected payout has increased a lot and voting in a swing state where the expected influence of a single vote has increased a lot seems reasonable, and they both seem to result in outlier waits measured in hours.
Good point about the wait, though, but amazingly even in this respect buying lottery tickets seems similar to voting.
I’m a bit puzzled why it is rational to bother to vote and irrational to purchase lottery tickets, based on the mathematics. Surely there is a clear, obvious unbiased Bayesian explanation somewhere, but I seem to have misplaced it. . .
Voting can have significant positive externalities. Lottery not so much.
Because voting is free. Because voting is fun. Because the value of voting has more to do with how you can participate in the political discussion than it does with whether your vote mathematically changes the outcome of this election. Because the net trends of voting have high influence on future policy, future choices put before the electorate, this influence is likely worth more than the utility of a current vote on the current election outcome.
Voting is not free (it has a nontrivial opportunity cost of registering ahead of time and then going to some random part of town in the middle of the day) and it is not fun (I don’t find it so). When your simple arguments are so easily refuted, I am skeptical of your more complicated arguments as well; presumably if you had a strong argument you wouldn’t feel the need to pad it with two weak arguments.
It depends on where you are—as I realized reading a comment subthread on Overcoming Bias which I can’t think of a good way of googling for. (People discussing this seem to be always Generalizing From One Example.) Where I am, I had to register once and for all (before the first election in which I was eligible to vote), and it takes less than half an hour to walk to the polling station, queue, vote, and walk back home—and it’s usually on Sunday afternoon during the early summer, when if I stayed home I’d most likely just waste my time on TVTropes or something
(Now, if among people voting in the same election going to the poll station and queuing would be a much greater inconvenience for some than for others, that would be pretty bad as it could introduce biases. Does that happen?)
No matter what, voting will be more inconvenient for some people than others. E.g. in your example, people that go to church on Sunday afternoon, maybe? Certainly people that work weekends in the summer, although they can probably still take a lunch break to vote.
It probably doesn’t matter too much. But in a close election, if even an additional 1% of people that have to work weekends chose not to vote (and these tend to be a specific class of jobs that probably are biased towards one candidate), that could change the outcome.
IIRC, elections in Italy are usually Sunday all day (from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.) plus Monday morning (from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.), or Saturday afternoon plus Sunday all day. I think the main group of people it biases against is those who like to go to the seaside for the weekend as soon as they can—almost all people who stay in town could find some time to vote if they want to. OTOH, plenty of people (including) don’t switch their legal residence when they rent an apartment to study in another town, so they’d have to go back to their parents’ in order to vote. I study relatively close to where I grew up and my parents live so I go back home most weekends anyway, but students living further away from their home towns might be under-represented among voters. (I hear they can get free train tickets for that, though. I’ve never bothered to do that because train tickets from my home town to my university town and back are so cheap anyway.)
Certainly I meant voting is free in the trivial sense that unlike to lottery, the other activity discussed in the original comment, it does not cost money to vote. In terms of the time and effort it takes beyond money, it seems entirely comparable to buying a lottery ticket. I can’t remember registering to vote, I certainly never went particularly out of my way to do it, and since that registration voting has been about the equivalent of going to a nearby 7-11 to get a lottery ticket, except it doesn’t cost any money.
Do you disagree that the cost of voting is extremely similar to the cost of buying a lottery ticket, except for the actual dollar cost?
You seem to think I’m trying to prove a theorem here, padding my non-existent strong argument with weak arguments in some sort of attempt to trick people. In fact, my belief about most motivations comes from my study of economics: a given event has multiple kinds of costs and multiple kinds of payouts. Listing the multiple payouts makes as much sense as valuing an investment by summing the dividends, the capital appreciation, AND the tax benefits it brings you, benefits are additive.
Don’t you think in determining a course of action it makes sense to add the benefits rather than just picking the “strongest” benefit and relying solely on that?
In swing states, people have to wait in line for about eight hours in order to vote, so, I personally do disagree.
Good, we are adding facts to the examination of this question. As for facts:
1) The press is an outlier and wild claim discovery machine. I wonder what the average wait is? In my 37 years of voting I don’t think I’ve ever waited more than 5 minutes, and that covers voting in New York, New Jersey, and California. If there were a way to come up with a mean, or even a 95th percentile value, I would imagine the mean would be < 5 minutes, and within minutes of the mean to buy a lottery ticket and I would expect the 95th percentiles to be down in the 15 minutes or less range, and for both voting and lottery ticket buying.
2) A quick google quickly turns up a story of a 4 hour line to buy lottery tickets. The analogy between a lottery where the expected payout has increased a lot and voting in a swing state where the expected influence of a single vote has increased a lot seems reasonable, and they both seem to result in outlier waits measured in hours.
Good point about the wait, though, but amazingly even in this respect buying lottery tickets seems similar to voting.
o.O