My definition of great study music: Loud enough to drown out the people around me at the coffeehouse/student union/bar, no words. This makes your standard orchestral classical music (or at least the Beethoven and Handel to which I listen) inadequate, as there are too many quiet passages even in compositions like Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
Today I read one of the better explanations for American political apathy: It doesn't pay to pay attention.
Time spent on public affairs competes with time acquiring information on more personal matters -- like the price and quality of cars or houses. In these cases, each of us suffers a direct cost for ignorant decisions -- I may buy a lemon unless I am careful to analyze options ahead of time. In contrast, nobody pays a price for voting ignorantly since the outcome of a major election never hinges on a single ballot. ... As a consequence, it may well be "rational" for individual voters to remain ignorant about public matters.
Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin, Deliberation Day
You can read more on the economic concept of direct costs and the political science and psychological concept of rational choice.
Just as people want governmental services without the pain of taxes, they also want democratic procedures without the pain of witnessing what comes along with those procedures. Political observers have failed to understand this situation no doubt partly because many of us enjoy watching the give and take of politics. In this, we are quite different from ordinary people.
-- John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, Congress as Public Enemy
[M]ost of the opinions captured by conventional polling are cognitively threadbare.
--Experimenting with a Democratic Ideal:
Deliberative Polling and Public Opinion
James Fishkin, Stanford University
