I attended the Caplan-Wittman debate at GMU on Wednesday night. Both debaters did a good job keeping the discussion interesting, humorous, and civil despite taking opposing positions on the nature of democracy.
Caplan's main thesis in both the debate and in his book, The Myth of the Rational Voter, is that voters are rationally irrational. Basically, what this means is that voters bear a very low cost if they hold mistaken political beliefs and so they tend to indulge their emotional biases without verifying the accuracy of their political beliefs. This leads to systematic biases on the part of voters that can lead to less than optimal political outcomes.
In contrast, Wittman posits that voters are extremely rational and that democracy leads to optimal political outcomes.
Overall, I thought Caplan did a good job defending his positions and was slightly disappointed by Wittman's arguments. They seemed to mostly revolve around "this could be..." or "that doesn't necessarily mean...". Unfortunately, he didn't seem to muster any strong empirical or logical challenge to Caplan's fundamental thesis. I would commend both debaters for keeping the discourse civil and courteous and for treating GMU students to an entertaining and informative debate and drawing attention to the strengths and weaknesses of democratic forms of government.
I found Caplan's debate with Professor Iannaccone a couple years ago on the rationality of religion to be even more engaging. Both debates were well attended, but I'd say that the religion debate probably drew twice as many people as this one. Is that indication that people care more about religion than they do about politics? If so, I find that to be a very encouraging sign for this rising generation of college students.If you haven't read Caplan's book yet, be sure to check it out. It's a great read and just might change the way you look at democracy.
See related posts on Caplan's debates and The Myth of the Rational Voter:
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