Rational Ignorance: Why Not Knowing Can Be a Sensible Choice

Rational ignorance is the idea that it can be perfectly reasonable to stay uninformed about something. When learning about a subject costs more, in time, effort or money, than the benefit you can expect to get from knowing it, skipping the research is the sensible choice. Ignorance in this sense is not a failure of intelligence or a character flaw. It is the result of a cost-benefit calculation, usually an unconscious one, that most people make dozens of times a day.

The concept is most closely associated with the American economist Anthony Downs, who set it out in his 1957 book An Economic Theory of Democracy. Downs was interested in a specific puzzle: why are so many citizens of democracies poorly informed about politics, even on issues that affect them? His answer was that, for any single voter, becoming well informed is expensive while the chance that one vote will change an election is tiny. A self-interested person weighing those two facts would, quite rationally, choose not to study the details of tax policy, foreign affairs or a candidate's voting record.

Since then the idea has become a standard tool in economics, especially in public choice theory, which applies economic reasoning to politics and government. It also appears in discussions of marketing, law, epistemology (the study of knowledge) and game theory. This article explains where the idea came from, how the underlying logic works, where it is applied, what its critics say, and how it relates to neighbouring ideas such as bounded rationality and rational irrationality.

The core idea in plain terms

Every piece of knowledge has a price. Reading a product review, comparing insurance quotes, studying a ballot measure or learning how a new law works all take time and attention, which are scarce. The benefit of that knowledge is whatever better decision it lets you make, multiplied by how likely it is to change your decision at all.

Rational ignorance arises when:

1. Information is costly. It takes time, effort, money or attention to gather and understand.
2. The payoff is small or uncertain. Either the decision does not matter much, or your knowledge is unlikely to change what happens.
3. The person is (roughly) weighing costs against benefits. They need not do arithmetic, but their behaviour reflects a sense that "this isn't worth looking into."

When all three hold, staying uninformed is not a mistake by the person's own standards. It may still be bad for society, which is where the concept becomes politically interesting, but for the individual it is a reasonable allocation of limited time.

A useful way to put it: nobody can know everything, so everyone must choose what to remain ignorant about. Rational ignorance is the claim that those choices are not random. People tend to stay ignorant about precisely the things where knowledge pays them least.

Origins: Anthony Downs and the economic theory of democracy

The setting

In the 1950s economists were extending their tools beyond markets. Kenneth Arrow had already shown, in work published at the start of the decade, that turning individual preferences into a collective ranking runs into deep logical problems. Downs took a different approach. Rather than asking what an ideal voting system would look like, he asked how real voters and political parties would behave if they acted like the self-interested, rational agents of economic models.

An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957) modelled parties as teams seeking office and voters as people choosing whichever party they expected to benefit them most. Within that framework, Downs devoted substantial attention to information: how voters get it, what it costs and what it is worth. The Wikipedia summary of the concept points to pages 244–46 and 266–71 of the book as the key passages where the idea is developed.

Downs's argument

The logic runs roughly like this:

• To vote "correctly" by your own lights, you need to know what the parties propose, what they are likely to actually do, and how those actions will affect you.
• Gathering and processing that information takes real time and effort.
• The benefit of being informed comes from casting a better vote. But a better vote only helps you if it changes the outcome, and in a large electorate the chance that any one vote is decisive is extremely small.
• So the expected benefit of political information, for a single voter, is tiny, while the cost is not.
• Therefore a rational voter will typically acquire little political information beyond what arrives free or almost free.

Downs did not claim that people know nothing. A great deal of political information reaches people as a by-product of other activities: chatting with friends, glancing at headlines, watching entertainment that touches on current events. Later commentators, including the political scientist Bernard Grofman writing about Downs's legacy, have emphasised this "by-product" route. The point is that people do not invest much in deliberately seeking political information, because deliberate investment does not pay.

Downs also drew a sobering implication. If information is costly and its value differs from person to person, then some citizens (for example, those whose jobs or interests make political information cheap or valuable) will be much better informed than others. Commentators on Downs have noted that he saw this as undermining the ideal of full political equality: influence tends to flow to those for whom information is cheapest or most rewarding, such as organised interest groups.

The paradox of voting

Rational ignorance is closely connected to another famous puzzle that Downs's framework raised: the paradox of voting. If the probability of casting the decisive vote is near zero, why vote at all, given that voting itself has costs (registering, travelling to a polling place, waiting in line)?

In 1968 William Riker and Peter Ordeshook published "A Theory of the Calculus of Voting" in the American Political Science Review (volume 62, pages 25–42). They expressed the voter's decision in a compact form often written as:

R = PB − C + D

Without the D term, the equation predicts that almost nobody should vote, because P is so small that PB is swamped by C. Riker and Ordeshook added D to reconcile the model with the fact that large numbers of people do vote. Critics have pointed out that adding a "duty" term risks making the theory unfalsifiable, a concern Ordeshook himself later acknowledged when he reflected on whether the addition made voting rational only by turning rationality into a tautology.

The same structure applies with even greater force to information. Even if civic duty gets you to the polls, it is a further step for that duty to motivate hours of research. The cost of becoming informed is usually larger than the cost of voting, and the PB term attached to it is just as small.

How small is the chance of a decisive vote?

The rational ignorance argument depends on the claim that one vote almost never matters. That claim has been studied empirically.

In a paper published in Economic Inquiry in 2012 (volume 50, pages 321–326), the statistician Andrew Gelman, the forecaster Nate Silver and the economist Aaron Edlin estimated the probability that a single vote would have decided the 2008 United States presidential election. Using state-by-state forecasts based on polls about a week before the election, they found that the average American voter had roughly a 1 in 60 million chance of being decisive. In the states where a single vote was most likely to matter (they named New Mexico, Virginia, New Hampshire and Colorado), the chance was around 1 in 10 million.

Their method treated decisiveness as two probabilities multiplied together: the probability that your state's electoral votes are necessary for a national win, times the probability that the popular vote in your state is exactly tied in that scenario. In many states one or both factors are effectively zero.

These figures are not the whole story. Gelman and his co-authors, among others, have argued that a tiny probability multiplied by a very large social benefit (the difference an election makes to millions of people) can still make voting worthwhile for someone who cares about others. That is a separate argument about altruistic motives. For the purely self-interested calculation that Downs described, the numbers support his premise: the private return to an informed vote is minuscule.

A worked example (hypothetical)

The following example is hypothetical and is meant only to illustrate the arithmetic of rational ignorance.

Imagine a voter in a large state facing a ballot with a complex measure on how a regional water authority is funded. To understand it properly she would need to read the official voter guide, look up two or three independent analyses and perhaps watch a debate. Call that four hours.

Suppose she values her time at a modest $25 per hour. The information costs her about $100.

Now suppose that, if she understood the measure, she would discover it would cost her household $300 a year for ten years, so roughly $3,000 in total, and she would vote against it. If she does not research it, she might vote for it because the title sounds appealing.

What is the expected benefit of researching? It is not $3,000. It is $3,000 multiplied by the probability that her single vote changes the result. Even if we generously assume that probability is 1 in 1 million (far higher than the presidential estimates above), the expected benefit is $3,000 ÷ 1,000,000 = $0.003, less than a cent.

Four hours of work for an expected gain of a third of a cent is a terrible deal. By the narrow logic of rational ignorance, she should skip the research. That conclusion holds even though the measure matters a lot to her household, which is exactly the counterintuitive point Downs was making: the size of the stakes is not enough. What matters is the stakes multiplied by your influence.

Contrast this with a private decision. If the same voter were choosing between two water-saving appliances that would differ by $3,000 over ten years, four hours of research would be well worth it, because her choice directly determines her outcome. The probability that her decision "counts" is 1, not 1 in a million.

This asymmetry is the heart of the concept. People are often careful shoppers and careless voters, not because they care more about appliances than about policy, but because their individual choices determine what appliance they get while having almost no effect on what policy they get.

Rational ignorance outside politics

Although the concept was born in political economy, the same logic applies anywhere information is costly and its payoff is limited.

Everyday decisions

The Wikipedia article on the topic uses a simple employment example. An employer is choosing between two job candidates who each charge $10 an hour and whose time to complete a task is expected to fall between 195 and 205 hours. The difference between the best and worst cases is ten hours, or $100. If another day of interviewing would itself cost about $100, then the most extra interviewing could save is no more than its cost. Picking one candidate, even by a coin flip, is a rational response.

Similar reasoning explains why people:

• Accept software terms of service without reading them. The documents are long, the chance that a clause will matter is small, and the user typically cannot negotiate the terms anyway.
• Choose a supermarket product using a single cue, such as the lowest sugar content or a familiar brand, rather than comparing every attribute.
• Do not learn the detailed workings of their pension fund's investment strategy, especially when small differences in management have uncertain effects.

None of these behaviours necessarily signals laziness. Each can be a reasonable response to the cost of information.

Search theory and the economics of information

Rational ignorance sits comfortably alongside a broader body of economic work on the cost of information. In 1961 the economist George Stigler published "The Economics of Information" in the Journal of Political Economy, which modelled how a buyer searching for a good price should decide when to stop searching. The insight was that searching has a cost, so a rational buyer stops once the expected gain from one more price quote falls below the cost of getting it. The result is that buyers remain partly ignorant of the full range of prices, and that this ignorance is rational. Stigler's framework helped explain why the same product can sell at different prices in the same market.

Rational ignorance can be thought of as the political cousin of optimal search. In both cases the decision-maker stops gathering information before reaching full knowledge, and in both cases that is the efficient choice from the individual's point of view.

Marketing and complexity

Sellers can exploit rational ignorance. If a product is surrounded by a large number of features, add-ons, pricing tiers and options, comparing it properly with competitors becomes expensive. Some buyers will decide the research is too much trouble and pick based on brand familiarity, a salient headline price or a salesperson's recommendation. Wikipedia's entry notes this possibility but flags it as uncited, so it is best treated as a plausible application of the theory rather than an established empirical finding. Economists and consumer regulators have, however, long discussed the related idea that complexity in pricing (for example in mobile phone plans or financial products) can make comparison shopping difficult.

Law and contracts

Legal scholars discuss rational ignorance in the context of contracts that nobody reads, and in the behaviour of shareholders. A small shareholder in a large company has little incentive to study the details of a proxy vote, for the same reason a voter has little incentive to study a ballot: their shares are too few to change the outcome. This is part of why institutional investors and proxy advisory firms play an outsized role in corporate governance.

Private choices versus collective choices

The single most useful way to understand rational ignorance is to compare decisions where you are the only decision-maker with decisions where you are one of many. The table below summarises the difference.

The comparison shows why rational ignorance is not a claim about how much people care. The same person can be a meticulous researcher when buying a house and a casual, cue-driven voter, without any inconsistency in their values. What changes is the structure of the decision.

A second worked example: the small shareholder (hypothetical)

The following example is hypothetical.

Suppose a retiree owns 200 shares in a company that has 500 million shares outstanding. The company's annual meeting includes a contested resolution on executive pay, accompanied by a proxy statement of well over a hundred pages. Reading and evaluating it might take six hours.

Her stake is 200 ÷ 500,000,000, or 0.00004% of the votes. Even if the resolution would change the value of her shares by a noticeable amount, say $200, the probability that her vote tips the result is negligible, so the expected benefit of studying the proxy is close to zero. She does what most small shareholders do: either ignores the ballot or follows the board's recommendation.

Now consider a pension fund holding 2% of the same company. Its votes could plausibly swing a close resolution, and the value at stake on its holding is large. It has a strong incentive to analyse the proxy, or to pay a specialist adviser to do so. The result is the same pattern seen in politics: informed, concentrated holders shape outcomes, while dispersed holders stay rationally ignorant and rely on cues.

This also shows that rational ignorance responds to structure. If many small shareholders pooled their votes through a trusted intermediary, the intermediary would have the incentive to become informed on their behalf. Much of the institutional landscape of modern life, from consumer magazines to proxy advisers to political parties, can be understood as a set of intermediaries that exist partly because individuals find it rational not to do the research themselves.

Collective action and concentrated interests

Rational ignorance helps explain one of the most important patterns in public choice theory: small, organised groups with concentrated interests often win policy battles against large, dispersed groups.

The economist Mancur Olson made a closely related argument in The Logic of Collective Action (1965), showing that large groups have trouble organising because each member's contribution makes little difference and each can free-ride on the efforts of others. Rational ignorance adds an informational layer to Olson's point.

Consider a policy that gives a large benefit to a small industry and spreads a small cost over millions of consumers. For each firm in the industry, the stakes are large and knowing the details of the policy is extremely valuable, so they invest heavily in information and lobbying. For each consumer, the cost is small, perhaps a few dollars a year, and learning about the policy is not worth the effort. The rationally ignorant majority never notices. The informed minority shapes the outcome.

This pattern is often used to explain the persistence of tariffs, subsidies and regulatory barriers that benefit particular producers. It does not prove that any specific policy is captured by special interests, but it identifies an incentive structure that makes such capture more likely.

How voters cope: information shortcuts

If voters are rationally ignorant, how do democracies function at all? A large literature in political science argues that voters use shortcuts, also called heuristics or cues, that let them make reasonable choices without detailed knowledge.

Party labels

The most powerful shortcut is a party label. If you know that a party's positions have generally matched your own in the past, voting for its candidates is a cheap way to approximate an informed vote. The Wikipedia entry on rational ignorance notes that adding more issues and offices to a ballot increases the cost of informed voting and can push voters toward single-issue voting, party-line voting or straight-ticket voting. It observes that such voters may be "rationally ignorant not because they do not care but because they simply do not have the time."

Endorsements and trusted sources

In a widely cited 1994 article, "Shortcuts versus Encyclopedias," published in the American Political Science Review (volume 88, pages 63–76), political scientist Arthur Lupia studied California voters facing five complicated ballot propositions on automobile insurance reform in 1988. The insurance industry had funnelled money to organisations that appeared pro-consumer, making the information environment confusing. Lupia's survey found that poorly informed voters who knew one key fact, which side the insurance industry was on, voted in patterns similar to those of much better informed voters. In other words, a single well-chosen cue could substitute for encyclopedic knowledge.

Lupia's later work with Mathew McCubbins, The Democratic Dilemma (1998), developed the theory of when people can learn what they need to know from others, emphasising that a cue is only useful if the source is both knowledgeable and has interests aligned with the listener's (or faces penalties for lying).

Low-information rationality

The political scientist Samuel Popkin, in The Reasoning Voter (1991), described voters as practising "low-information rationality": drawing inferences from everyday experience, campaign signals, the candidates' personal traits and the opinions of friends. On this view, voters are not ignorant in a way that makes their choices random; they are economical in how they gather information, which is exactly what Downs's theory predicts.

Limits of shortcuts

Shortcuts are not a complete answer. They work only when the cues are reliable and point in the right direction. A party label tells you little about a primary election between two candidates of the same party, or about a non-partisan local race. Endorsements can be manipulated, as Lupia's own insurance case showed: industry money went to groups with consumer-friendly names. Critics of the optimistic shortcut literature, including a 2025 retrospective on Lupia's study, have also questioned how the comparison groups were constructed and whether the findings generalise. Shortcuts reduce the problem of rational ignorance; they do not eliminate it.

Rational irrationality: a darker extension

Rational ignorance says voters will not bother to learn much. A related idea, rational irrationality, says something more troubling: voters may not bother to think carefully about the information they do have.

The economist Bryan Caplan developed this idea most fully in The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton University Press, 2007). His argument runs as follows:

• People often get emotional or psychological satisfaction from holding certain beliefs, for example beliefs that flatter their group or confirm their worldview.
• In private life, holding wrong beliefs is costly. If you believe something false about your finances or health, you pay for it directly.
• In politics, because a single vote almost never matters, holding a wrong belief costs the individual essentially nothing.
• So people can "afford" to indulge comfortable but mistaken political beliefs. Being irrational is, in this narrow sense, rational.

Caplan drew on the Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy to argue that the public holds systematic biases about economics, which he grouped into four: anti-market bias, anti-foreign bias, make-work bias (overvaluing jobs relative to output) and pessimistic bias. Because these errors are systematic rather than random, they do not cancel out in large electorates.

This matters because one of the standard defences against rational ignorance is the "miracle of aggregation." If uninformed voters vote randomly, their errors cancel out, and the informed minority effectively decides the election. Caplan's point is that if ignorance is accompanied by systematic bias, errors do not cancel, and outcomes can be pulled in a consistent wrong direction.

Caplan's work has been influential and contested. Reviewers have questioned whether gaps between economists' and the public's views always reflect public error rather than differences in values, and whether the psychological mechanism behind rational irrationality is well established. The concept is best understood as a hypothesis about how incentives shape belief, not a settled fact.

Political ignorance and the case for decentralisation

The legal scholar Ilya Somin has built a broad argument on rational ignorance in Democracy and Political Ignorance (Stanford University Press, 2013; a second edition subtitled Why Smaller Government Is Smarter followed in 2016). Somin argues that widespread political ignorance is a serious problem for democratic accountability, that it is largely the result of rational behaviour, and that it is unlikely to be fixed by education alone.

His proposed remedy is "foot voting": letting people choose among jurisdictions, such as states, cities or private communities, by moving. Somin argues that people choosing where to live have much stronger incentives to gather information than people choosing how to vote, because their choice directly determines their outcome. On this view, decentralising and limiting government power lets more decisions be made through foot voting and fewer through rationally ignorant ballot-box voting.

Critics have responded that moving is costly and unequally available, that many issues (defence, climate, monetary policy) cannot be decentralised, and that the case for foot voting relies on empirical assumptions that may not hold. As with Caplan, the argument is a contribution to an ongoing debate rather than a consensus position.

Criticisms and limits of the concept

Rational ignorance is a powerful idea, but it has well-known weaknesses.

It does not explain why people know as much as they do

If the logic were strictly applied, people should know almost nothing about politics. Yet many people follow politics closely, read extensively about candidates and argue about policy for fun. One response is that much political information is consumed for entertainment, social belonging or identity rather than for voting, in the same way that sports fans know a great deal about teams whose results they cannot influence. Once information has consumption value of its own, the cost-benefit calculation changes.

Historical evidence was mixed

According to Wikipedia's summary, much of the early empirical support for voter ignorance came from studies of voter apathy in the 1950s, especially The American Voter (1960) by Angus Campbell, Philip Converse, Warren Miller and Donald Stokes. That landmark study portrayed many American voters as having limited and inconsistent political views. In the 1960s, however, apparent apathy declined as issues such as the Vietnam War and increasing polarisation engaged the public. The Changing American Voter (1976) by Norman Nie, Sidney Verba and John Petrocik documented a rise in issue-based voting. This suggests that how much people know depends on the political environment, not only on fixed individual incentives.

Learning as an investment

Arthur Denzau and Douglass North, in a 1994 article in the journal Kyklos, argued that learning is a form of capital investment. Knowledge gained in one area can pay off in others, and mental models built for one purpose can be reused. When people weigh the costs and benefits of learning about a single decision, they may overlook these spillovers. If so, some apparent "rational ignorance" may be a miscalculation rather than an optimal choice, and some apparent over-investment in information may be perfectly rational.

It assumes a narrow kind of motivation

The theory works best for self-interested individuals. If people care about outcomes for others, a small probability of influence multiplied by a very large social benefit can justify both voting and being informed. Similarly, people may feel a moral duty to be informed. The R = PB − C + D framework can accommodate this with the D term, but critics argue that adding such terms makes the theory hard to test.

Formal models give nuanced answers

Game theorists have examined whether rational voters would acquire costly information under different assumptions. The economist César Martinelli, for example, published "Would Rational Voters Acquire Costly Information?" in the Journal of Economic Theory (2006) and "Rational Ignorance and Voting Behavior" in the International Journal of Game Theory (2007). Work of this kind shows that the conclusions depend on details such as the cost of information, the size of the electorate and how voters' signals relate to one another. Under some conditions elections can aggregate information well even when individual voters invest very little; under others they cannot. The informal version of the argument is a useful starting point, but the formal results are more conditional than the slogan suggests.

Ignorance is not the only explanation

Not knowing a fact can result from many things besides rational choice: poor education, limited access to reliable sources, deliberate misinformation, or simple lack of interest. Labelling all political ignorance "rational" can obscure these other causes, some of which are easier to address.

Common misconceptions

"Rational ignorance means people are stupid." No. It means people are allocating limited time sensibly given their incentives. Highly intelligent people are rationally ignorant about most subjects.

"Rational ignorance means voters don't care." Not necessarily. As the Wikipedia entry puts it, voters may be rationally ignorant "not because they do not care but because they simply do not have the time." The theory is about incentives, not attitudes.

"If ignorance is rational, it's good." Individually rational behaviour can produce collectively poor results. The concept describes a problem; it does not endorse the outcome. Many writers who use the idea, including Downs, saw it as a challenge to democracy.

"Rational ignorance means people know nothing." People often acquire information cheaply as a by-product of daily life, and use shortcuts such as party labels. The theory predicts low investment in deliberate information-gathering, not total ignorance.

"Rational ignorance and rational irrationality are the same thing." They are related but distinct. Rational ignorance concerns how much information people gather. Rational irrationality, as developed by Caplan, concerns how carefully and objectively people process the information they have.

"Better education will fix it." Education can lower the cost of understanding information, which helps. But the core of the argument is about the low payoff to an individual vote, which education does not change. That is why writers such as Somin are sceptical that education alone is a solution.

Related concepts

Can rational ignorance be reduced?

If political ignorance is largely the product of incentives, then changing either the costs or the benefits of information could change behaviour. Proposals discussed in the literature and in public debate include:

• Lowering the cost of information. Clear, neutral voter guides, standardised summaries of ballot measures and accessible comparisons of candidates' positions reduce the effort needed to become informed.
• Reducing ballot complexity. Fewer elected offices and fewer ballot measures mean each one can receive more attention. The Wikipedia summary notes that adding issues raises the cost of informed voting.
• Strengthening reliable cues. Since voters rely on shortcuts, making shortcuts more trustworthy (for example through disclosure of who funds campaigns) can improve decisions without requiring voters to study details.
• Delegating to informed bodies. Some decisions are delegated to experts, courts or independent agencies, partly on the reasoning that voters cannot be expected to master technical issues. This has its own costs for accountability.
• Decentralisation and choice. As Somin argues, moving decisions to levels where individuals' choices matter more can increase the incentive to become informed.

Each of these approaches involves trade-offs, and none fully removes the basic problem: as long as one vote among millions has a tiny chance of mattering, the private return to political knowledge will be low.

Frequently asked questions

Who coined the term "rational ignorance"? The idea is credited to Anthony Downs, who developed it in An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957). The term is now standard in economics and political science.

Is rational ignorance only about voting? No. It applies to any situation where gathering information costs more than it is expected to return, including shopping, reading contracts, investing and corporate shareholder voting. Voting is simply the most famous and consequential example.

Does rational ignorance mean I shouldn't bother learning about elections? The theory describes incentives for a purely self-interested person. It does not tell anyone what they ought to do. Many people choose to be informed because they care about others, feel a civic duty, enjoy following politics, or want to participate in public discussion, all of which change the calculation.

How is rational ignorance different from apathy? Apathy is a lack of interest or concern. Rational ignorance can occur even when someone cares a great deal about an outcome, because caring does not change how little their individual vote affects that outcome.

Why do special interest groups seem to know more than the public? Because their stakes are concentrated. A firm that gains millions from a regulation has every reason to understand it in detail, while a consumer who loses a few dollars does not. Rational ignorance helps explain why concentrated interests often outperform diffuse ones in politics.

Does the internet solve rational ignorance? The internet has lowered the cost of finding information, which should reduce rational ignorance at the margin. But it has not changed the low probability of a decisive vote, and it has increased the volume of competing and sometimes unreliable information, which raises the cost of sorting good information from bad.

Is there evidence that uninformed voters vote differently from informed ones? Research on this question is extensive and contested. Lupia's 1994 study found that a simple cue let poorly informed voters behave like well-informed ones on a set of insurance measures. Other researchers, including Caplan, argue that on some issues the gap between informed and uninformed opinion is large and systematic. The answer appears to depend on the issue and on the quality of cues available.

What is the difference between rational ignorance and bounded rationality? Bounded rationality says people cannot process all information because of cognitive limits. Rational ignorance says people choose not to gather some information because it is not worth the cost. The two often work together: limited mental capacity is one reason information is costly to process.

Why the idea endures

Rational ignorance has lasted for more than six decades because it captures something true and uncomfortable. Democracy asks citizens to make collective decisions about complicated matters, yet gives each citizen almost no individual reason to study those matters. That tension does not mean democracy fails, since shortcuts, by-product learning, civic motivation and the efforts of journalists and interest groups all help, but it does mean that the quality of public knowledge cannot be taken for granted.

The concept also offers a useful lens for personal decisions. Recognising that you cannot know everything, and that some ignorance is sensible, can help you focus attention where it matters: on decisions where your choice actually determines the outcome, and on finding trustworthy sources for the rest.

Sources

• Rational ignorance (Wikipedia)
• An Economic Theory of Democracy (Wikipedia)
• Gelman, Silver & Edlin (2012). What is the probability your vote will make a difference? Economic Inquiry 50(2)
• Gelman, Silver & Edlin, NBER working paper w15220
• Riker & Ordeshook (1968). A Theory of the Calculus of Voting. American Political Science Review 62(1)
• Lupia (1994). Shortcuts versus Encyclopedias. American Political Science Review 88(1)
• Caplan (2007). The Myth of the Rational Voter (overview)
• Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance, Stanford University Press (table of contents)
• Altruism theory of voting (Wikipedia)