OFF: Re: HW: Tour Shirts

[M Holmes]

Woops, slight miscalculation in numbers and this should read:

M Holmes writes:

> Paul:

> >Most individuals lack the
> > resources and breadth of knowledge in all areas to be able to
> > ascertain categorically whether or not they're being lied to.

Sure, but most of the time we don't need to.  There's a good economic
argument that an election is just such a time: In Britain, the
difference between what the two parties propose as state spending is
around 2% of GDP.  That's about 20 billion quid.  Call it 40 million
adults in the UK and that's 500 quid per year each.  Let's be generous
and say that the state is 40% less efficient at using cash than private
industry in terms of spending on what the individual actually wants and
we get a total cost per annum of getting the vote wrong of 200 quid.

They have a 50% chance of just guessing the best way to vote and so
game-theoretically we can halve that cost to 100 quid, or 2 quid per
week.

Call the average wage about 20K, or 400 Pounds per week, and that means
that anyone who spends more than 10 hours in a year, or 12 minutes per
week, even thinking about how to vote has pretty much wasted their time.
Even at minimum wage you'd only just over double it to say half an hour
per week, which is less than most people will spend reading a newspaper
anyway.

FoFP