Self-Harming, Irrational Voters and disaster prevention/relief spending

Bryan Caplan links to some empirical research showing that voters reward politicians for less efficient disaster relief spending rather than for more efficient disaster prevention spending, which harms ... voters, of course.

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/07/disastrous_voti.html

Comments

[TGGP]

The harm is spread out among both voters and non-voters. If it was restricted to voters, that would be an incentive not to vote, which would improve things.

[Hopefully Anonymous]

TGGP, I think that's an obvious point that's useless to point out right now. Distinguish between efficiency of writing and errors that warp meaningful analysis.