This post is one of a 4-part series on 4 ways to vote stupidly.

This series is based on this Reason Magazine article by Bryan Caplan, one of my favorite economists/writers.

4. Pessimistic Bias

Last, but certainly not least, is perhaps the most important and hard to overcome bias of all: the bias of pessimism.

This bias is founded in the idea that things are always getting worse, from the specific to the general. The economy is collapsing, the environment is being consumed and destroyed, the culture is decaying, corruption is becoming more rampant, and people are turning into amoral, brainless savages.

I’m here to tell you that things are not nearly as bad as you think. Recall, for instance, Hans Rosling’s presentation on the emergence of the third-world and the still-improving standard of life throughout the world. Good news isn’t nearly as interesting or as compelling as bad news, and thus “news” for the most part is synonymous with “bad news”.

Take for instance, the news that your favorite pet, Rover, was just hit by a truck and died a horrible death. It makes the front page and everyone is sad. However, the other 4000 days of your pet’s life, was the headline of the paper “Rover continues to live happy life, enjoys snausages.”? For every 1 tragic or gloomy headline, there are 1000 headlines of good news that are never printed. My point isn’t to marginalize the tragedy of Rover’s death, but simply to point out that people are more affected by bad news than good news. Thus, a pessimistic bias exists in the general populace, and thus the populace demands media with pessimistic bias as well. “If it bleeds, it leads,” so they say.

So, I’m really just talking in the general here, and I really haven’t demonstrated the harm in pessimistic bias yet. The harm is this:

If the general state of affairs is not nearly as bad as it might seem, but a pessimistic bias makes people think that it is, then by jingo, something must be done. There oughta be a law! So then a well-intentioned law is drafted and signed into law. But it doesn’t matter how well-intentioned the law is: the premise is faulty. People are unnecessarily burdened or inconvenienced and conditions are actually made worse.

Sometimes the best thing to do is to not do anything at all. Sometimes the unattainable goal of perfection is the enemy of the already obtained good. This is one thing that almost every politician is guilty of. The guy who runs on the “everything is pretty good, let’s just make a few tweaks and maybe reduce governmental interference for once” platform rarely gets elected.

A lot of this can be seen in populist philosophies of politicians who ‘fight for the little guy!’ with well-intentioned taxes, subsidies, and regulations that end up hurting all guys (including the little ones).

Finally, let me just say that I’m not a delusional Polyanna. Certainly there are times when things suck a great deal and something really must be done about them. Slavery. Terrorism. Abortion. Rape. We don’t live in a perfect world, and we never will. Martin Luther King, Jr. said “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” But he also said the first step is “collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist.” Don’t use pessimism to skip that first step.

In The Misanthrope, Moliere writes:

Why, no. These faults of which you so complain
Are part of human nature, I maintain,
And it’s no more a matter for disgust
That men are knavish, selfish and unjust,
Than that the vulture dines upon the dead,
And wolves are furious, and apes ill-bred.

While this excerpt seems to convey a very pessimistic viewpoint, I would submit that what Moliere is trying to say is that corruption is systemic. The goal, then, is not to elect heroes to public office, but rather to make sure the system functions equally well whether an office is occupied by a hero or a villain.

Thank you for reading this series of posts on 4 Ways to Vote Stupidly. My goal in these posts were not to sway your opinion for any one candidate or ideology, but rather to sharpen your existing opinions and help you examine and improve them, even as writing them has helped to sharpen and improve mine.