Public Choice

The speaker for this podcast seemed to touch very little on economics as a subject. Rather, he seemed to point out what he perceived as problems with the current system. In fact, he seemed to point out the basics of what someone would learn on a Saturday morning political strategy workshop. For instance, he pointed out that there are a number of different reasons for why people vote the way they do. I will begin by pointing out the most familiar one. He mentioned that people who have a "baby face" are less likely to be elected. Fine, if the statistics demonstrate this, I will take his word for it. He then created some sort of a sociology experiment in which people had to express their views, first through a forced mechanism, then through their free will. Again, alright, I will recognize that this is a legitimate way to carry out a social experiment. What was bothersome about his overall talk, however, was that he really didn't provide any sort of a convincing argument. Sure, people will vote for people for their own moral conscience, because they want to express some sort of off-the-wall view, or maybe they even buy into a popular campaign slogan. I get it. However, he didn't cite any studies to demonstrate this. Granted, it would be very hard to conduct such a study, but it seemed to be more speculation than anything else.