Your vote doesn't matter

The other day, I told my students I wasn't voting because single votes don't matter, particularly in presidential races. I immediately felt like crap and wished I had kept my big mouth shut, as I have a sneaking feeling that to even admit that out loud (which is 100% true) comes awfully close to telling students they shouldn't vote, which I suspect would make my students' parents very angry. I told them that if they were rational, and they only voted based on the presumption that their vote mattered, then they shouldn't vote b/c the probability their vote is a deciding vote is statistically equal to zero, which always tip the choice against doing it at all since voters incur costs. Of course, I immediately told them that the right reason to vote is if they think they have some moral obligation to vote, in which case, they should. But even then, I hemmed and hawed. Is it that we want people to vote or to cast informed votes? Because if it's that they should cast informed votes, then I'm definitely not going to vote. Think about it. The different policies of Obama and McCain are such that understanding them requires a lot of careful study. Not simply making sure you understand what their proposals are, but forecasting how those policy proposals will materialize under different probable scenarios where House and Senate seats go different ways. That, plus you need to have some metric that ranks those various outcomes under the different states of nature, and hopefully you're not just using something stupid and biased, but maybe something objective and helpful. Altogether, how many hours would you have to spend do you think before you felt like you had a grib on those preferred orderings based on a comprehensive understanding of the candidates' stated positions vs. their likely choices given the strategic environment they'll be placed within? Heck, let's say you're super bright and could do it all in 10 hours. That's 10 hours of foregone wages or foregone leisure consumption. Ten hours you could've spent with your kids or your wife. Ten hours you could've spent reading War and Peace. Ten hours you could've spent on your producing something really valuable for society. All for what? To basically have a chance to influence a race that apparently has a probability of between 0.5x10^(-7) and 1.5x10^(-7). Wow. Talk about great odds. Seriously, what a complete waste of time! I mean it. It is very difficult to get motivated to devote the resources needed to become informed so that I can cast one vote that has no effect whatsoever on the outcome of the race.

So of course, it's rational to be ignorant of the race itself. That is, it's optimal from the perspective of the individual voter to choose ignorance over knowledge, because choosing knowledge incurs costs that cannot be recovered through some higher benefits from a vote mattering. And then of course, given that rational ignorance on the part of voters, what do politicians do? They say crap they don't mean, or that they know no one is going to catch them on, since voters are idiots and can't be trusted to fact check anything. We end up with extremely biased speakers and lobbyists who we look to to tell us what to think because they have, we hope, done the homework needed. But do they also have incentives to produce careful analysis? Sometimes, sometimes not. Oftentimes it seems like they have only an incentive to produce output that maximizes their profits. That may or may not mean they are producing unbiased information.

I think the best argument to vote and to become informed is that it's moral to do so. And I think the morality argument is not so much a genuinely morality argument, but rather, it's a social norm constructed to deal with the collective action problems inherent in voting. That is, it's a kind of imaginary morality - we need you to believe that voting is an ethical issue because if it's not, you simply won't vote. So we tell a lot of stories about democracy, which hinges on voter participation, to try and get around this free rider problem, even if it is unsuccessful.

Somehow, though, you've got to deal with the externality issue more directly. I think you've got to actually compensate people for their foregone opportunity costs through tax incentives requiring that they present evidence from an audit that they became informed and voted. Only if you became informed and voted could you get the rebate. This way, we are aligning private benefits of voting with the social benefits of voting. But of course, we don't do that because the auditor would be the state, and the state doesn't actually have an interest in making sure voters are better informed. They just voters to vote; they don't need the voter to actually be informed. In fact, the less informed the voter is, the better it is b/c it relaxes some of the constraints individual politicians face, since they can make promises they have no intention of keeping, or do things which create serious social harm but only after they've left office (like minimum wage laws, among a billion other things).

My wife says I need to not say anything else to my students about it, but I'm simply stating the facts. It is apparently a fact, according to Gelman, et al, that the probability that the race is going to come down to your state in the electoral college, and then conditional on that, the probability that it comes down to your individual vote is about 0.0000015, and that's being generous! The theories of voting we come up with are going to always, in the end, have to appeal to some kind of explanation that forces voters to basically ignore how utterly meaningless their vote is! It's got to get them vote, b/c there are small marginal benefits associated with them becoming informed voters and voting, but it's not rational for them to reach that point on their own. It's a basic, traditional, externality/public good/agency problem. So, I realize the point, but at the same time, I have a point too, and I can't help but feel like it's a complete mirage to make the ethical argument when the ethical argument is only trying to overcome a collective action problem! Am I a bad person for feeling like collective action problems are not in the same class of other genuine ethical failings?