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This is a "perfect is the enemy of the good" fallacy.

Yes, you COULD do more by working/donating than voting. But you could apply that logic to just about any good thing someone does -- there's almost always something better. The question is, ARE you going to do that ideal thing? Last election day, did you, Chris Freiman, "work some overtime and earn, say, $50 to donate to the Seva Foundation"? Or did you just not vote, thus contributing less to society that day than an informed person who just did the boring thing and voted?

Voting is a collective action problem, because the individual voter gains essentially no benefit, but added up, informed voting makes society richer.

As a result, informed voting should be seen as the contribution to society that it is.

Regarding whether an "example can be set" I think it's quite clear that culture is contagious. Many social groups / cultural tribes have a norm where you must vote -- and as a result, their tribe's say in the policy process is higher.

To the extent that a tribe of people who support freedom or rationality exists, it would be good for society if they maximize their say in politics by having a cultural norm of voting.

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Jun 7, 2022·edited Jun 7, 2022

I think the best argument against this view is that even though the chance of your vote changing the election is tiny, the expected value of voting still seems to be high. Suppose there's a one in one million chance of my vote changing the outcome of the election in the UK - if having a different government in power changes the way that £100bn is spent in a way that I think is preferable to how some alternative government would have spent it, then the EV of voting is 0.000001 * 100,000,000,000 = £100,000. So voting seems like an immensely high EV decision, even though the raw chance your vote makes a difference is extremely low.

Although my numbers may be some way off the true numbers, the fact that David Shor (who is very good with numbers and thinks about the impact of voting/elections a lot) has made the same argument is reassuring: https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1425506809788477440

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As a recent convert to voting who still doesn't think of it as a rational act the signalling value wins out for me. Friends knowing I don't vote will lower their opinion of me and make them less likely to listen to me in more consequential matters, such as donating precious charity dollars to the most effective operators.

I also live in California, where ballots are now mailed to my house automatically and can be returned virtually anywhere, so voting is very low-effort and not doing so would allow me very little time to earn money that might go to more productive ends. There are modest norms against discussing who one votes for, so the choices I make don't even matter all that much to my ends and I mostly follow the suggestions of trusted elites.

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1. Wearing a false/fake "I voted" sticker is practically sociopathic.

2. You voting may not matter but "Bryan Caplan's audience" or "people who can follow decision theoretic arguments about opportunity costs and effective altruism"... those are pretty bad subsets of the electorate to disenfranchise!

3. You're at least correct about the "what if *no one* voted??" rebuttal being dumb. A better retort is "ah well in that case I *would* vote, since I could single-handedly decide the election". People say this not because it's a coherent argument for voting but because they're enforcing the norm that voting is a civic duty. Which brings me back to point 2. We in the econ nerd community, or whatever we are, need to also have that norm. Because "econ nerds tend not to vote" would be a pretty bad outcome for our democracy. Which means you deserve scorn and ridicule for writing this essay!

4. I do agree about reading the news though. I was first convinced of this by a classic essay by Aaron Swartz: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews . Relevant excerpt:

> To become an informed voter all one needs to do is read a short guide about the candidates and issues before the election. There’s no need to have to suffer through the daily back-and-forth of allegations and counter-allegations, of scurrilous lies and their refutations. Indeed, reading a voter’s guide is much better: there’s no recency bias (where you only remember the crimes reported in the past couple months), you get to hear both sides of the story after the investigation has died down, you can actually think about the issues instead of worrying about the politics.

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"...which actually suggests that at least I am not influential" Love it - worth the read for that alone!

I agree with the post, really. Still, it's ironic that if there could be any outcome beyond rhetoric from making this argument very persuasively, it would likely be to marginally discourage the most reasonable voters from voting. Further irony: any such effect would likely be negligible. I doubt you would actually convince people to do something beyong just not voting.

But after reading this and commenting, I'm feeling unusually civic - I'm going to go order some "I didn't vote" stickers.

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Subjective value, anyone?

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So clearly written by a conservative propagandist targeting young voters who are likely to sway elections in more liberal directions. Sick that McCombs approves sending this out to students but not surprising. Please always look at "advice" such as this with a healthy amount of skepticism. They do not care about the "energy you're wasting" being involved in politics, they just don't want your vote interfering with their agenda.

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I don't have any great arguments to counter the one's that Chris makes, but his first example is quite a head scratcher. Let's put it this way: how many times, reader, have you ever found yourself even remotely in a position where voting kept you from doing some immediately beneficial task? Maybe I'm weird since I live in a city and voting has always been a matter of stopping off on my way to the subway before work - usually a total of 3-5 minutes, but what other important activity did I miss? I can still do whatever effective altruism research I was planning to do while waiting in line, right?

At any rate, I thought, why not take a look at some evidence that voting is actually important? What would demonstrate that? The OECD library has tables that give voting participation and trust in government, so I took the tables, cross indexed against country and found a generally upward sloping line that indicates that where voting participation is highest, trust in government is highest. Maybe you think trust in government isn't important, but just looking at the list, the countries where trust in government was high tended to be countries that I found would be attractive places to live if I were inclined to move.

A graph of the data is here: https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/_-eBRT-oE2gNscB6JNIrzPhA2neuYESWGmMG7SIQJyWgpRonLuMaPP2DnaIc8NBE4DCwmXzzJQB3zz-K3qIQHys8z0GUpkWB5T8-cUSDC4Oh8nvXlHZdlT_K3Hc9tKYu3w=w1280.

The one outlier on the far bottom, right is Belgium. High voting participation, low trust in government. My guess is that's because of the roughly even split between French and Dutch speakers. Neither group trusts the government when so many of the other group are in it so they go to the polls to ensure their own group is on top. Maybe, but that's just a guess.

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> imagine that you’re on your way to the polls to cast a vote in the next presidential election.

A presidetial election is where an individual's vote has the least effect possible.

A more iinterestingcade would be,say, a single local ordinance referendum in a primary during an odd (in the US) year, where your vitehas a chance of being the one vote that makes the difference)

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https://80000hours.org/articles/is-voting-important/

Hi Chris,

I'm also interested in Effective Altruism and this article by 80,000 hours seems to disagree with your opinion that voting does not matter.

"Again using US to illustrate, over the next four years6 the US federal government will spend about $17.5 trillion.

Written out as a number it looks like $17,500,000,000,000. That’s $53,000 for each American, or $129,000 for each vote cast in 2016.

If you multiply all that spending through a 1 in 10 million chance of changing the outcome, in a swing state like New Hampshire, it comes to $1.75 million. That’s the fraction of the budget you might ‘expect’ to influence by voting in a swing state, in the statistical sense of expectation."

Keen to hear your thoughts on this.

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I haven't been engaged academic philosophy since college, but I thought that Jonathan Glover's Baked Bean Bandits was a classic counter example to claims that relied on "actions are too insignificant to "make a difference"" type arguments. Was I misinformed, or is this no longer (never was?) the dominant take? Whats the counter-counter argument these days?

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Less politics—fine. More altruism—maybe not.

Altruism suffers from an “information problem,” like that under which planners in a socialist system labor: the information needed for reliably effective altruism is too hard to obtain. Instead, for the most part each person should focus on matters close to home—private affairs, where he is more likely to know what is really going on. As for influencing the larger society: putting one’s efforts to a market test is the best way to get some information about how much good he is doing. For example, someone who can earn $75,000/year as an electrician but only $50,000 as a schoolteacher should take that as a sign that his contribution to society as an electrician is the greater.

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Thanks for the post and nice to read about your work and book. I will try to read it at some point, partly because I am working with ideas of liquid and decentralised democracy, politics without politicians and political parties, uberisation of politics etc. The future of democracy is very much about humans having more free time for meaningful things and being able to delegate their votes to different individuals and communities https://vladanlausevic.medium.com/abc-of-liquid-democracy-82c4ea85bc1

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Even if 100% of voting were attributable to influence-by-example, it would still be impossible for the *average* voter to have influenced more than one other person to vote. So even if the influence argument were true it could only multiply the utility of voting by <2 unless you are exceptional in some way.

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I'm unconvinced. I always felt that if I were very wealthy, one of the best things I could do with my money would be to donate to political causes that will keep (or move) the US as free as possible. Maintaining free markets, free speech, gun rights and all the things that make progress and prosperity possible is huge. One could coldly argue that the long term utility of keeping our institutions working properly, especially in the face of the seeming one way ratchet away from freedom, far outweighs the utility of saving some people from malaria right now.

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