Fernando Torres has agreed a £26m transfer from Athletico Madrid to Liverpool. He will get around £90,000 a week in a 4 or 5 year deal. I’m hearing he has agreed personal terms and is in Liverpool as I type. So, you heard it here first! Torres has signed.

You can see my views on the Liverpool attack and the signing of Torres here. His statistics below show that he is what Liverpool are looking for. He’s a goals scorer, quick, good in the air and has a good touch. In signing Torres Benitez has solved the biggest problem Liverpool had last season. Putting the ball in the net when it counts! My only fear would be that too much would be expected of this young man in the season ahead. A new country, a new style of football and a very big transfer fee. Add to that the expectations that myself and Biff have been discussing and you get a very difficult situation indeed.

One Torres does not a title bring, but it’s a start!

I completely forgot that I had nominated us for ‘best Blog About Stuff’ in the Bloggers Choice Awards. Since I did we have received 0 votes. I would imagine that’s because I forgot to tell anyone to vote for us. So, er, vote for us, please.

The winners won’t be announced till October anyway, so plenty of time to rack up votes - why not nominate your own blog and try to scoop a meaningless blog award you can brag about?

Recently I read an article in the Economist about a book called ‘The Myth of the Rational Voter’ by one Bryan Caplan.

Essentially the book sets out that the American voting system doesn’t work because of the fact that, inevitably, when it comes to politics most of us are by and large ignorant about the details of an awful lot of it.

Many ‘political scientists’ feel that the wisdom of crowds wins out when the candidate who wins the majority of informed votes wins the election.

However, Caplan reckons that this is knocked of course by the fact that voters by and large have biases that skew the vote and make us vote for policies that, in his view, actually make us worse off. Voters have an anti market bias, an anti foreign bias, a bias toward employment rather than production and a general bias toward pessimism (thinking the economy is worse off than it is for example).

Caplan believes that these biases, which are not in his view based on sound fact, result in voting trends which are ultimately damaging to government and country.

The article doesn’t go into detail on Caplan’s suggestions to address the issues:

To curb the majority’s tendency to impose its economic ignorance on everyone else, he suggests we rely less on government and more on private choice. Industries do better when deregulated. Religions thrive when disestablished. Market failures should be tackled, of course, but always with an eye for the unintended consequences of regulation. Mr Caplan is better at diagnosis than prescription.

The article was certainly thought provoking, though I’m not convinced from the article that I’d agree with Caplan on a lot of fronts… I’d be curious to read more, particularly in terms of what he suggests we do about it. I’d certainly be quite uncomfortable with what Dave has (mischievously?) opened for discussion.

The Myth of the Rational Voter is available on Amazon.co.uk