Hi, thanks so much for doing this! This is really interesting.
Something I think wasn’t sufficiently clear from the post itself: even using the the weighting scheme I suggested in the post, that would move the median voter (in the US) from age 55 to age 40. (H/T Zach Groff for these numbers. Note this doesn’t account for incentive effects, of younger people being more likely to go out to vote, which could lower the median age to a little under 40.) And under reasonable assumptions (with the most controversial being single-peaked preferences), the median voter is decisive. So it’s not like 20 year olds are now deciding what happens. On the epistocratic question, then, we should be asking whether we think 40yr olds will make better decisions than 55 year olds; not whether 20 year olds make better decisions than 60 year olds. I’d need to dig into the studies a lot more to determine whether 40 year olds discount more steeply than 55 year olds.
And then, I’ve only done a quick scan of the studies you link to, but I don’t think the discounting literature you’re pointing to is actually all that relevant, because the timescales they are looking at are so short: 90 days in one case; up to 6 months in another. Whereas the time horizons for the impact of political decisions, especially the most important ones, are on the order of years or decades—over such timescales, discounting due to risk of death become a much bigger factor than discounting due to impulsiveness / impatience.
Usually such a brief perusal of the literature would not give me a huge amount of confidence in the core claims; however in this case the conclusion should seem prima facie very plausible to anyone who has ever met a young boy.
Again, I think this depends on what timescales we’re talking about. Sure, it seems prima facie plausible that someone who is 21 is more likely to prefer $5 today to $10 in a month’s time than a 60 year old is. But (on the assumption of self-interest) I’d strongly wager that a 21 year old is more likely to prefer $100 in 40 years’ time over $10 in a month’s time than a 60 year old is, because the 21 year old is so much more likely to be around and be able to enjoy the benefits.
The altruism and age discussion is interesting, and I agree that if it were borne out it could form part of an epistocratic argument for the age-weighting going the other way around.
the the weighting scheme I suggested in the post, that would move the median voter (in the US) from age 55 to age 40. (H/T Zach Groff for these numbers. Note this doesn’t account for incentive effects, of younger people being more likely to go out to vote, which could lower the median age to a little under 40.) And under reasonable assumptions (with the most controversial being single-peaked preferences), the median voter is decisive. So it’s not like 20 year olds are now deciding what happens. On the epistocratic question, then, we should be asking whether we think 40yr olds will make better decisions than 55 year olds; not whether 20 year olds make better decisions than 60 year olds. I’d need to dig into the studies a lot more to determine whether 40 year olds discount more steeply than 55 year olds.
If you want to give extra influence to 40 year olds, it probably makes more sense just to give 40 year olds more votes. Otherwise you’re putting a lot of faith in one model of how voters work, despite the median voter theorem having lost some of its academic appeal over time (multidimensional preferences, selectorate vs electorate, veto players, heresthetics).
Additionally, if we did give young people lots of extra votes, we’d probably get a Goodheart’s Law type situation, where politicians would adopt special policies designed to exploit it—like promising student debt forgiveness, or to ban tuition fees (the latter of which seemed to have been quite successful at manipulating UK students to vote for the Democrat Party in 2015!)
Hi, thanks so much for doing this! This is really interesting.
Something I think wasn’t sufficiently clear from the post itself: even using the the weighting scheme I suggested in the post, that would move the median voter (in the US) from age 55 to age 40. (H/T Zach Groff for these numbers. Note this doesn’t account for incentive effects, of younger people being more likely to go out to vote, which could lower the median age to a little under 40.) And under reasonable assumptions (with the most controversial being single-peaked preferences), the median voter is decisive. So it’s not like 20 year olds are now deciding what happens. On the epistocratic question, then, we should be asking whether we think 40yr olds will make better decisions than 55 year olds; not whether 20 year olds make better decisions than 60 year olds. I’d need to dig into the studies a lot more to determine whether 40 year olds discount more steeply than 55 year olds.
And then, I’ve only done a quick scan of the studies you link to, but I don’t think the discounting literature you’re pointing to is actually all that relevant, because the timescales they are looking at are so short: 90 days in one case; up to 6 months in another. Whereas the time horizons for the impact of political decisions, especially the most important ones, are on the order of years or decades—over such timescales, discounting due to risk of death become a much bigger factor than discounting due to impulsiveness / impatience.
Again, I think this depends on what timescales we’re talking about. Sure, it seems prima facie plausible that someone who is 21 is more likely to prefer $5 today to $10 in a month’s time than a 60 year old is. But (on the assumption of self-interest) I’d strongly wager that a 21 year old is more likely to prefer $100 in 40 years’ time over $10 in a month’s time than a 60 year old is, because the 21 year old is so much more likely to be around and be able to enjoy the benefits.
The altruism and age discussion is interesting, and I agree that if it were borne out it could form part of an epistocratic argument for the age-weighting going the other way around.
If you want to give extra influence to 40 year olds, it probably makes more sense just to give 40 year olds more votes. Otherwise you’re putting a lot of faith in one model of how voters work, despite the median voter theorem having lost some of its academic appeal over time (multidimensional preferences, selectorate vs electorate, veto players, heresthetics).
Additionally, if we did give young people lots of extra votes, we’d probably get a Goodheart’s Law type situation, where politicians would adopt special policies designed to exploit it—like promising student debt forgiveness, or to ban tuition fees (the latter of which seemed to have been quite successful at manipulating UK students to vote for the Democrat Party in 2015!)