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!)
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!)