Why Vote when it wont affect the outcome?

Just voted today in Taiwan’s presidential election, why did i vote when i know perfectly well voting wont effect the outcome of the election?

According to a research cited by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, “Of the more than 16,000 Congressional elections, in which many more people vote, only one election in the past 100 years – a 1910 race in Buffalo – was decided by a single vote.” and as they correctly argue the closer the election is the more likely the winner will be decided by a lawsuit. therefore they add people who spent the effort to cast their vote are properly “not very bright and therefore wrongly believe that [they] will affect the outcome.”

Although i mostly agree with their argument, i do want to add a few point.

In a presidential election, while the candidate with the most votes wins the election, the margin of his/her victory will have an effect on how powerful his/her administration may be. The larger the margin is in each individual electoral districts will have an influence on how much the congressperson from those districts will cooperate (or antagonize) with the president on issues the president campaigned on.

For example, a congressperson is unlikely to vote against a pro-choice bill if the his/her district voted heavily in favor of a president who ran on a pro-choice campaign platform, because the presidents victory signals a pro-choice majority in the district.

Furthermore, the act of voting in a group, as i did today with my family is not a bad way to encourage and make sure those people in the group actually go out and vote. Its an excise of peer pressure and cheater detection.

Are these sufficient reason for an rationally thinking economist to vote? I don’t know, properly not, lol.

Is Obama’s experience a real issue?

Hillary Clinton has repeatedly used “Experience” to attack Barack Obama, to portrait him as a candidate who is inspiring though not competent enough to handled the presidency. The most recent and arguably the more damaging incarnation of this argument is the “3 am ad” shown on TV before the March 4^th democratic primaries.
This ad portrait HRC as capable of making quick decisions to deal with foreign/security crisis without on-job training as president, because of her experience as a politically active formal First Lady and eight years on the senate arms committee. Moreover she argues in her stomp speeches that BHO who is 14 year younger and have only had one term in the senate is inexperienced and require on job training, thus unable to deal with sudden foreign/security crisis. Is this an compiling argument? No.

First of all, if experience is such an important quality, Americans should elect John McCain, or the oldest living American. Experience is important only if its relevant. Dick Cheney formal secretary of defense who oversaw the 1991 Gulf War, Donald Rumsfeld the youngest and oldest secretary of defense under Gerald Ford and Geoge Bush Jr and Condoleezza Rice a Soviet expert from Standford university these are people suppose to have the deepest experience and knowledge of security and foreign affairs, but somehow they got America into the Iraq mess. By the way most international relation expert were against invading Iraq in the first place.

What happen? Why didn’t their experience prevent them from making such a blunder? Maybe because these experts cannot get out of their Cold War era state centric mind frame, only know hows to bomb states to solve their problem, and fail to recognize that Al-Qaeda is not a state but a part trans-national criminal organization and part extremist ideology.

The world is in a transformative phase, power is slowly moving from world’s-only-superpower-America to multiple rising world powers: EU, China, India, Russia, etc. Cold War experience may not be so useful in a world that is so different from the past.

In a world unknown, a studious character, a fast learner, a clear thinking mind beats irrelevant experience any day.

Lastly, Obama have an undergraduate degree from Columbia in political science with international relation specialization, thats academic knowledge in international affair that Clinton do not have. The knowledge and skill that comes with such a degree is useful, I know because I have a master in international relations.