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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (59322)	4/15/2008 9:59:31 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542149

This might amuse. Or annoy. <g> home.sprynet.com "The theory of Rational Ignorance holds that people often choose—rationally—to remain ignorant because the costs of collecting information are greater than the expected value of the information. Footnote This is very often true of political information. To illustrate, on several occasions, I have given talks on the subject of this paper, and I always ask the audience if they know who their Congressman is. Most do not. Among senior citizens, perhaps half raise their hands; among college students, perhaps a fifth. Then I ask if anyone knows what the last vote taken in Congress was. So far, of hundreds of people I have asked, not one has answered affirmatively. Why? It simply isn’t worth their while to collect this information. If you tried to keep track of every politician and bureaucrat who is supposed to be representing (or serving) you, you’d probably spend your whole life on that. Even then, it wouldn’t do you any good—perhaps you’d know which politician to vote for in the next election, but the other 400,000 voters in your district (or the 200,000 who are going to turn up to vote) are still going to vote for whomever they were going to vote for before you collected the information. Contrast what happens when you buy a product on the market. If you take the time to read the Consumer Reports to determine which kind of car to buy, you then get that car. But if you take the time to research politicians’ records to find out which politician to vote for, you do not thereby get that politician. You still get the politician that the majority of the other people voted for (unless the other voters are exactly tied, a negligible possibility). Footnote From the standpoint of self-interest, it is normally irrational to collect political information."