Our generation doesn't vote or show any interest in government or politics. OK, that's an exaggeration. But youth turnout, especially in off-year elections, is low and falling. Interest in government service is paltry. Millennials report feeling ignored by a government that is rigged by special interests and ineffective at solving problems. This lack of interest is not confined to the under-privileged or under-educated. I can't tell you how many of my friends from college have told me that they don't vote because they don't feel informed, because they don't care, or because they are just too lazy.
Whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, black, white, or something else, whether you're smart or stupid, this is a big problem for America.
Democracy is the most effective form of government humanity has. While democracies can be slow and frustrating, history has vindicated government by the collective as opposed to the few, from Western Europe to North America, from Ghana to South Africa, to South Korea and Japan.
From a theoretical perspective, this makes sense. The aggregation of many opinions and perspectives is going to be correct more often than the opinions of one person, as subject as individuals are to the emotion, prejudice, and clouded judgment that their own life experiences and struggles bring. Aggregate opinions will almost always be more correct than the decisions of a few people, as these are subject as much to social dynamics as they are to well-considered thought.
I was reminded of this when reading a description of a form of group cognition called "collective thinking,” in Clive Thompson’s 2013 book, Smarter Than You Think. According to Thompson, collective thinking can take place when you "design problems in a way that lets many people pitch in to solve it.” The classic example of collective thinking is the famous experiment performed by scientist Francis Galton in 1906 at a county fair. Galton asked 800 fair attendees to guess the weight of an ox, and the average of their individual answers was far more accurate than the educated guesses of the cattle experts that were present.
In the 21st century, we have many great examples of the power of collective thinking, of which Wikipedia is perhaps the most prominent --- no single person could have written all that knowledge, but by asking everyone to contribute a little bit about what they know, we have one of the most comprehensive sets of information ever assembled.
One of the reasons that democracy has been so effective over its history is because it forces political systems to be accountable to a huge number of people. This de-personalizes politics, and makes it much harder for a group of a few families to carve up the economy for themselves, as has happened in so many countries throughout history. Through the power of collective thinking, political societies under democratic regimes have enjoyed less corruption, and more prosperity, shared by more people.
But collective thinking is conditioned on the idea everyone (or most people) contribute -- and so is democracy. What if Galton had only been able to get 400 fair attendees to guess the weight of the cow? What if he had only been able to get 50 people to care enough to give an answer? Their combined guess would almost certainly have been much less accurate. In that context, siding with the expert's singular opinion would look much more attractive. Democracy's advantages are undercut completely if large subsets of the population refuse to inject their opinions into the policy process. Without participation, we might as well make things more efficient and become authoritarian.
Collective thinking requires that other conditions be met to really work well. Specifically, the collective needs to agree on what their goals are. And contributors must be polite to one another and avoid trying to tear down each other’s work. Obviously, our politics is not meeting these conditions right now. I’m hopeful that we’ll develop ways to get our public thinking on the same page as to what our society’s goals should be, and that we’ll develop more civility in politics as time goes by. There’s also a lot more we can do to create better mechanisms for aggregating public opinion than what we have in place today. Those are topics for other essays.
But for now, we can focus on the easiest part: getting as many people as possible to contribute their piece. In the context of political paralysis and a widening gap between rich and poor, our generation's lack of participation or interest in politics is truly scary. Over a few years, even over a whole generation, we might not notice the deteriorating effects that a decline in political participation has on policy outcomes. But history will not forgive it. Poorly-run societies tend to be, well, poor. Unless you can honestly say you have no care whatsoever if America becomes poor and corrupt, then you need to participate in the system that, indirectly and over years at a time, helps determine the outcome of your life, and your children's lives.
I understand that the exhortation to "make your voice heard" sounds stupid, because in a crowd of millions, your voice will definitely not be heard. So my argument for why you should vote has nothing to do with individual satisfaction, or with trying to make you feel gratified for sharing your opinion.
It has to do with making the very small sacrifice, that, if each one of us makes it, will allow us to live in a society that is more free of corruption, more responsive to groups and individuals, and more able to produce policies that are beneficial to society than any individual's ideas could be.
There are limits to humans thinking individually. Collective cognition is so much more powerful. As we seek to avoid spending all our money and then sinking under the ocean, lets take advantage of collective thinking as best we can.