Voters as Mad Scientists

Bryan Caplan, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, and New York Times Bestselling Author of Open Borders, The Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, and The Case Against Education, blogged for EconLog from 2005-2022. His latest book combines the very best of his EconLog writings on voter irrationality. The main cause of bad policy... is bad thinking.
In the title essay, Caplan argues that democracy's main problem is not that voters are selfish, but that they are altruists with foolish views about how to help the world. Later essays explore voter irrationality from inside voters' heads - and show how much more sense democracy makes when you stop expecting the demos to make sense.
If voters are so bad, what's the alternative? Caplan makes the rational case for freedom. What the world needs is not so much the right to do wrong as the right to do good things that sound wrong.