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Ilya Somin George Mason University School of Law WHY POLITICAL IGNORANCE UNDERMINES THE WISDOM OF THE MANY Ilya Somin George Mason University School of Law Critical Review, Vol. 26, Nos. 1-2, pp. 151-169, 2014 (Symposium on Hélène Landemore’s Democratic Reason: Politics, Cognitive Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many) George Mason University Legal Studies Research Paper Series LS 16-04 This paper is available on the Social Science Research Network at ssrn.com/abstract=2729327 Ilya Somin WHY POLITICAL IGNORANCE UNDERMINES THE WISDOM OF THE MANY ABSTRACT: Hélène Landemore’s Democratic Reason effectively demonstrates how cognitive diversity may potentially improve the quality of democratic decisions. But in setting out the preconditions that democracy must meet in order for the many to make collectively well-informed decisions, Landemore undermines the case for voter competence more than she strengthens it. The conditions she specifies are highly unlikely to be achieved by any real-world democracy. Widespread voter ignorance and the size and complexity of modern government are severe obstacles to any effort to implement Landemore’s vision. Better-informed decision making is more likely to be achieved by allowing a wider range of issues to be decided by “voting with your feet” instead of at the ballot box. Hélène Landemore’s Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton University Press, 2013) is a valuable contribution to the literature on democratic competence and the “miracle of aggregation.” Unlike most previous scholarship, it analyzes the potential benefits of diversity of knowledge and perspective in the electorate. It also effectively sets forth many of the conditions that must be established before a large group of laypeople can aggregate informa- tion more effectively than a small group of experts. Ilya Somin, [email protected], George Mason University School of Law, 3301 Fairfax Dr., Arlington, VA 22201, the author, inter alia,ofDemocracy and Political Ignorance (Stanford, 2013), thanks Jeffrey Friedman and Jason Brennan for helpful comments and suggestions. Critical Review 26(1-2): 151–169 ISSN 0891-3811 print, 1933-8007 online # 2014 Critical Review Foundation http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2014.907047 152 Critical Review Vol. 26, Nos. 1–2 But there is a deep tension at the heart of Landemore’s project. On the surface, it seems to be an argument for the epistemic virtue of democracy. As Landemore puts it, she seeks to establish that “democracy is a smart collective decision-making procedure that taps into the collective intelligence of the people as a group in ways that can even, under the right conditions, make it smarter than alternative regimes such as the rule of one or the rule of the few” (1–2). The key phrase in this passage is “the right conditions.” As Landemore defines them, those conditions are so improbable that her work ends up doing more to discredit than support the “wisdom of crowds” rationale for democratic decision making. This is particularly true once we recognize that the rule of the one and the rule of the many do not exhaust the possible alternatives to democratic decision-making processes. “Voting with your feet” in a federal system or in the market and civil society is an additional alternative that can also tap the wisdom of the many, while avoiding both the epistemic pitfalls of democracy and the dangerous concentration of power inherent in oligarchy or dictatorship. These problems don’t necessarily diminish the value of Landemore’s project or even show that it fails to meet her own objectives in writing the book. As she indicates, her main interest in this work is to develop an “ideal of democratic decision making” that could work well “provided the theoretical assumptions are shown to have a real life equivalent” (9). But in order for the argument to provide support for democratic decision making in ways relevant to real-world debates about the desirability of alternative political institutions, there should be a realistically feasible way to meet those assumptions. Unfortunately, the stringent nature of the assumptions also makes them extraordinarily difficult to achieve in the real world. In Part I of this review, I briefly outline Landemore’s argument and the contribution it makes to democratic theory. Part II explains why the ideal conditions necessary for the wisdom of the many to work are unlikely to be met in any real-world democratic political system.1 Finally, Part III explains the epistemic superiority of foot voting over democratic decision making under Landemore’s own criteria for evaluating the latter. The agenda of this review is limited. I do not claim that democratic decision making always fails, or that we should make all social decisions by means of foot voting. Obviously, the effective use of information is just one of many factors that must be Somin • Political Ignorance and the Wisdom of the Many 153 considered in deciding the appropriate size, scope, and structure of government. But I do suggest that, at least at the margin, wisdom-of- crowds arguments like Landemore’s strengthen the case for foot voting over ballot-box voting. I. LANDEMORE’S THEORY OF DIVERSITY AND COLLECTIVE WISDOM Decades of survey data suggest that most voters know very little about politics and public policy.2 A variety of scholars have argued that this problem can be overcome through the “miracle of aggregation,” whereby the effects of ignorance cancel each other out (e.g., Wittman 1995; Converse 1990): Those whose ignorance leads them to vote for one candidate are offset by those whose ignorance leads them to vote for his or her opponent. In this way, the electoral outcome is determined by the knowledgeable minority. More recently, some scholars have argued that large groups of laypeople can often outperform smaller groups of experts because the former have a greater diversity of knowledge, even if each individual layperson knows less than each individual expert (Surowiecki 2004; Page 2007). Landemore’s distinctive contribution is to combine these two literatures in a sustained and systematic way. She argues that diversity enables democratic electorates to reach epistemically superior decisions relative to those of a more expert elite (160–66). A simple example can help illustrate why Landemore’s theory might be true. Imagine an electorate of 1 million voters where each possesses one distinct unit of relevant knowledge, but each knows a different unit from the others. Compare that electorate to 100 experts, each of whom possess 100 distinct units of knowledge. Although each expert knows 100 times more information than each member of the lay electorate, the total knowledge of the larger group is vastly greater than that of the smaller group of experts: 1 million units of information compared to just 10,000. If the large group of laypeople can effectively harness its greater pool of knowledge, it can make vastly better-informed decisions than the smaller group of experts, even though individual members of the former group know much less than individual members of the latter. The knowledge distribution of real-world electorates does not, of course, precisely mimic this example. In many cases, the information held by one voter duplicates that of others. Nonetheless, it is at least 154 Critical Review Vol. 26, Nos. 1–2 highly plausible to suppose that the hundred million or more people who vote in American national elections, for example, collectively know more politically relevant information than any small group of experts. The question is whether majority voting or other similar democratic decision-making structures can in fact effectively harness the diverse knowledge of the many, or whether ignorance, irrationality, and poor incentives undercut the prospects for such a happy outcome. As Landemore recognizes (chs. 5, 7), we cannot assume that majority rule automatically makes effective use of diverse knowledge. It can do so only if certain essential preconditions are met. The question is whether any actually existing democracy can meet them, or is likely to do so in the foreseeable future. II. DEMOCRACY AND THE PRECONDITIONS OF COLLECTIVE WISDOM Landemore’s optimistic account of collective intelligence under demo- cracy is correct as far as it goes—but only if the polity in question meets stringent preconditions. Among the most important of these is lack of correlated errors and a serious effort on the part of most voters to engage with opposing views. In addition, voters need to have at least some basic preliminary knowledge on which to base their deliberations and their decisions to seek out additional information. Unfortunately, actual electorates routinely fall short on all of these counts. And the reasons for their failure are deeply rooted in the basic structure of the modern democratic state. Diversity and Uncorrelated Errors As Landemore recognizes (162–63), a large but diverse electorate is likely to make good decisions only if it does not suffer from correlated errors. If their mistakes are “negatively correlated” with each other, then they will tend to “cancel each other out,” thereby allowing the collective wisdom of the group to overcome individual ignorance (163). Thus, Landemore’s conclusions “rely on the assumption that there is a sym- metrical distribution (random or otherwise) of errors around the right answer (Miracle of Aggregation) or that errors are negatively correlated” (195). If this assumption is false, so too is the theory’s optimistic Somin • Political Ignorance and the Wisdom of the Many 155 conclusion about democracy. The collective benefits of cognitive diversity are unlikely to have much effect if the electorate suffers from systematic errors that afflict a majority of the voters, or sometimes even just a large minority. For example, if there is a widespread error that leads 60 percent of the voters in an electorate of 1 million people to greatly overestimate the benefits of Policy A relative to those of Policy B, then it is highly likely that the voters will make a wrong decision on this issue regardless of how cognitively diverse they otherwise are, and regardless of much collective knowledge they otherwise have.
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