Rational ignorance is the proposition that a voter has little incentive to become well informed about political questions, because one vote among many is unlikely to change an election’s outcome. On The Bob Zadek Show the concept was discussed in two episodes: a 2022 conversation with Abigail Hall about government propaganda, and a 2022 conversation with Richard Epstein about a California food-regulation referendum and the Supreme Court.
Abigail Hall: rational ignorance and noble deception
Abigail Hall, discussing her book Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror, raised the idea of rational ignorance of voters and recommended Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter as a concise, readable book on the issue Manufacturing Militarism: A Fresh Look at Propaganda (2022). Bob Zadek noted that Caplan had appeared on his show to talk about that book.
Hall connected rational ignorance to the argument that government must propagandize in order to convince the citizenry because doing so is in the public’s best interest. She referred back to her book’s earlier discussion of “noble deception,” which she said assumes that voters or the broader public cannot handle information, cannot process it, or cannot make decisions. She also invoked Hayek’s discussion in Chapter 10 of The Road to Serfdom, asking who the people are who are likely to be putting out such information, and whether they are likely to have the public’s best interest at heart. She said it does not require much stretching to think that they are probably not.
Hall added that her book puts a large burden on the citizenry and concludes by looking at four different—at which point Bob Zadek interrupted to remind the audience about the book. After the interruption, Hall said that readers who read the conclusion will find out everything she was about to say.
Richard Epstein: rational ignorance and the California food referendum
Richard Epstein, discussing a California referendum on food regulation, said that rational ignorance has been well understood in the political science literature: a voter has one vote out of many, it is not likely to change the outcome of any election, and although the voter feels a duty and an entitlement as a citizen to think about the matter, the voter will look for shortcuts, such as who is endorsing or opposing a bill, and may rely on those shortcuts to determine how to vote California’s Food Fight (2022). He said this is true of many ballot issues, though a referendum gets somewhat more attention because there is no other issue to worry about.
Epstein argued that if the measure were upheld and there were a change, it is a big enough issue that it will not suffer from voter ignorance, because telling millions of people who spend millions of dollars what they can and cannot eat in California will provoke a huge uproar and response. He contrasted this with technical questions such as how water bonds are amortized, which he said would involve rational ignorance, and compared the food issue to disputes over a woke curriculum in a public school system. He said there is rational ignorance in Virginia, but when the Republican won the election, that issue drove it, and so he thought the food issue could be a driving issue.
Epstein then turned to the Supreme Court, saying the Dormant Commerce Clause seems to have bipartisan support: the left is generally against monopolies imposed by the state, as is the right, and the difference between the two parties is whether the federal government has the power to rule comprehensively or whether it is limited to particular cases involving transportation and like activities. He said he could not imagine the food measure producing that kind of situation. As an illustration of why other things matter, he said the two most reluctant members of the Supreme Court in dealing with the Dormant Commerce Clause were the late Justice Scalia and his often traveling companion, current Justice Thomas. Their objection, he said, is not because of the economics; they are constitutionalists, and their attitude is that there is only an affirmative power for Congress to pass legislation and it has to be an implied power on the states to limit it, so they want to give the commerce clause in its dormant aspect a very narrow reading.
Epstein described what he called a funny loop: justices such as Justice Kagan or Justice Breyer, who is retiring, and in his view the new Justice Jackson, when she is appointed, do not have a literalist, formalist interpretation of the Constitution and are much more free-wheeling, so formalist objections will not weigh heavily with them. He said the question is how many justices think states should be able to impose parochial barriers on competition, and that number is pretty small on the outright merits. He noted that even Justice Scalia, when he had to deal with some of these cases, was prepared to strike down tax schemes at the state level which were particularly odious, such as taxing foreign and domestic companies equally but giving a rebate to domestic companies, which Epstein called just a fraud, and he said the guy who struck it down was Justice Scalia when he was on the court.
Epstein said he would see the food issue as a more bipartisan situation and did not see anybody who would be strongly opposed to it. He guessed that if there were a dissent, the most likely person would be Justice Thomas, whose argument would be that there is no real Dormant Commerce Clause, that he would apply it only in the narrowest possible way, and that the case does not fall within the prohibition on discrimination, so he would not touch it. Epstein said he had tried to explain why he thinks discrimination is an important category, easy to please, but that states are much more dangerous when they can impose restrictions on other states even though they do not have any product of their own. He said the conventional wisdom is the opposite: that if a state has no domestic producers of a product and can have a free hand with foreign goods, knowing there will be no domestic opposition based on domestic producers, that is where the real danger is. He hoped that would be the argument emphasized when the case gets to the Supreme Court. He assumed it would be held over to the next year given that it was already late April, which would mean Justice Breyer, whom he thought would be sympathetic to the Dormant Commerce Clause claim, would be that way, and Justice Jackson, who was Breyer’s clerk, would, he saw no reason to think, not be inclined to follow the way Breyer had gone. Epstein said the drift of the lower court precedents had been in favor of things like the California statute, but he thought on this issue the Supreme Court is likely to be more interventionist than was the Ninth Circuit.
Across episodes: rational ignorance in two settings
The two episodes treat rational ignorance in different settings rather than developing a single argument. Hall discusses it in connection with government propaganda and the “noble deception” of officials who claim the public cannot process information, and recommends Caplan’s book. Epstein treats it as an established finding in political science and applies it to a California food referendum, arguing that the salience of the issue means it will not suffer from voter ignorance, and then discusses the Dormant Commerce Clause and the justices’ likely positions. The excerpts show no development of the concept between the earlier and later treatment; each speaker uses it for a different subject.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not define rational ignorance beyond the formulations the speakers give, nor do they state who first coined the term or when. They do not describe the outcome of the California referendum or any Supreme Court ruling on it, and they do not name the referendum, the statute, or the case. The excerpts also do not give the title or date of the Hayek chapter beyond Chapter 10 of The Road to Serfdom, and Hall’s list of the four things her book’s conclusion examines is cut off before she states them.