'Anyone who hates children and dogs," WC. Fields declared, "can't be all bad." Surely the bibulous iconoclast would have warmly received Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Caplan 2006). Democracy has become such a sacred cow for us that nothing, not even its avowed embrace by George W Bush, will lead people to voice suspicions. Caplan, however, is a conspicuous exception. Democracies, he tells us in the subtitle, choose bad policies, and they do so because voters fall down badly in their civic performances. It's not only that they are ignorant about politicians and policy, an understandable shortfall in a world in which bits of good information are mixed in with superabundant dross. Rather, asserts Caplan, they are irrational This means that not only do they commit errors, but these mistakes are systematically biased. Rather than some individuals' ignorance being checked and balanced by the equal and opposed mistakes of other voters, they predictably tend to get the same things wrong in the same sort of way. What's worse, they do so over and over again, obdurately declining to learn from past mistakes. The result is a parade of policies that make us all worse off than we could be. Within contemporary political practice, there is no cure for the democratic malady. Only if the power of irrational majorities is cut back will policy prospects improve. Caplan is not optimistic. (Neither was Fields.) He is aware of the momentum of populist enthusiasms. Nonetheless, he concludes the volume with suggestions for improvement, most notably a much enhanced public presence by economists. That this may seem a bit self-serving coming from a member of George Mason University's Economics department does not imply that the prescription is erroneous. This lively and provocative work is welcome for a number of reasons, not least the zeal with which it punctures conventional wisdom.1