Disastrous Voting

great post, thanks for sharing this.

This is not surprising. There is a general problem with spending on prevention, namely that if successful the event to be prevented never occurs, providing evidence for those who opposed the prevention spending.

A good example is Y2K. It's received wisdom outside the IT industry that all the spending on Y2K was a con by the geeks to rip everyone off. Their evidence? That Y2K problems didn't occur. Occam's Razor would suggest a less complex hypothesis - that the spending on prevention worked. Of course that story won't sell newspapers.

Similarly, there is a consistent bias in Government against maintenance spending. No politician wants to cut a ribbon on a project to repair a bridge (say, I don't know, on 1-34 in Minnesota) when they could cut a ribbon on a shiny new one somewhere. It's even worse in areas like water distribution where the voter's can't even see most of the infrastructure.

A very interesting paper ideed ... I also agree with your ending caveat. I currently work for a government and we have similarly been trying to plead the case of spending on maintaining the existing stock as opposed to spending on new infrastructure; I see a lot of similarities.

I would guess that there are high political returns to prevention *after* a disaster happens. This might be constrained rational (the actual disaster causes people to update their beliefs about how likely this kind of disaster is), but it's probably just a salience thing; the actual disaster makes it salient which makes preventing a recurrence look good to voters.

The problem is that we've now reached a point where there are some potential threats that are earth-threateningly catastrophic. So it seems to me that we'd better either get a lot more rational real quick or hope that it is the nature of these threats to cause some relatively minor damage before they cause the catastrophic damage.

Contrary to your prior post that advised voters to wait until a crisis to act isn't it?

"In the hands of rational voters, government is strong medicine for public goods problems. But in the hands of real voters, government is usually a big bottle of snake oil. "

Hmm ...

You might want to prove that these same real voters demonstrate more reasonable decisions as consumers - but knowing only two facts - that 15% of people in USA are obese and 60% are overweight, it appears that human rationality as filtered through political system is still better than one people demonstrate directly in their own lives.