More on the relationship between dollars and votes, from a reader:
At the end, in a US election, you have to go from dollars to votes, and what bothers me is that there is a positive relationship between campaign spending and votes. When voters are rational, political advertising shouldn't matter. You or I will not be influenced by such spending, but enough people are that it becomes important how much money a candidate has. As an economist, it's virtually impossible to make sense of this. That is, in a world in which agents are rational, this would never happen. The only possibility that leaves is that people are not rational, which in this case more or less means stupid.An excellent point. The question of rationality among voters (or anybody really) isn't really dealt with at the policy school I attend, because without rationality it's simply impossible to build models, which means there's nowhere to begin an analysis. For shame...
One way of explaining voters' seeming irrationality (notice I'm in denial about the possibility that voters are really irrational) here is to look at information. Without a complete set of facts before them, even rational voters can't be expected to make the most rational decision. And our system doesn't do a very good job of getting all the facts out there - our private media is set up with the primary goal of increasing its own influence (and therefore profit). To be sure, there is a remote possibility the media's behavior can turn out the same as if its purpose were simply to inform the public, but such a result would require a public already educated and engaged by the political process. We are not such a public.
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