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Move on -- this isn't true here
I have a simple model of how some people -- but by no means all -- process political issues. Occasionally the real force behind a political ideology is the subconsciously held desire that a certain group of people should not be allowed to rise in relative status.
Take the so-called "right wing." I believe that some people on the right do not like those they perceive as "whiners." They do not want these whiners to rise in relative status. That means they must argue against the whining and also they must argue against the presuppositions behind the whining.
If the whiners say that times are bad, the rebuttal is that times are pretty good or times will become better again. But if the whiners want to increase government benefits (perhaps there is a victim to whine about), we hear about the need to tighten our belts and all the talk about good times is, at least temporarily, muted. Fiscal discipline is now in order.
Take the so-called "left wing." Some of these people favor a kind of meritocracy. They feel it is unfair that money so determines access in capitalist society and they do not want the monied class to rise in relative status, certainly not above the status of the smart people and the virtuous people. It is important to fight for the principle that the desires of this monied class have a relatively low priority in the social ranking. Egalitarianism is the rhetoric of the day, and readjusting the status of other Americans to the status of this monied class often receives more attention than elevating the very poorest in the world to a higher absolute level.
So when happiness research indicates that money brings more happiness only up to a point, this is a popular result. That perspective lowers the status of this monied class by showing they really aren't that happy. When happiness research indicates that conservatives are relatively happy, however, or that many redistributions don't make the beneficiaries much happier (in some accounts the money-happiness relationships flattens out at a pretty low level), suddenly happiness research isn't talked up so much. Inequalities which do not raise the status of this monied class, such as inequalities in the sphere of beauty or teenage sex, don't come under so much criticism.
Some on the right wing will stress "individual responsibility" as a value when it lowers the status of the whiners (why whine when it was the victim's own fault?). Some on the left wing will stress "individual responsibility" when it is time to punish corporate wrongdoers and thus lower their status. Not everyone applies (or rejects) this value consistently.
Given this difference in rhetoric, the right wing will be identified with the monied class, even when the left often has more money. And the left wing will be identified as the whiners, even though the right at times whines as much or more. You might say that both sides are monied, high human capital whiners, on the whole. And if you compare them to Burmese rice farmers, the two sides seem somewhat alike.
For the people caught up in these intellectual traps, it all boils down to which groups of whiners they find most objectionable. And once they choose sides, the wisdom of that choice becomes increasingly clear with time.
Fortunately not everyone has these subconscious motivations. But even if more people did, it's not something I would want to whine about.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on July 26, 2008 at 07:01 AM in Political Science | Permalink
Comments
I tend to find that a two-dimensional matrix helps.
Both scales run from "status quo" to "intervention".
However, one scale is labelled "within my economy" and the other labelled "between national economies."
So, I find people who want status quo everywhere (generally, the apathetics, but fewer of them than there were 12 months ago)...
... people who want wealth to be shared more equally WITHIN their national economy but are happy to live lifestyle well in advance of 90% of the world's population but unhappy that their neighbour beats 95% (awful lot of them, bigger taxes on the "fat cats", but close the doors to economic migration)...
... people who want world socialism (fewer of them than there were 20 years ago, mind)
... and increasingly, a few people who are relatively sanguine about competition WITHIN an economy, but would like to see a more level playing field, and the dismantling of protectionist barriers (actually, this would be me!)
Mark
Posted by: Mark Harrison at Jul 26, 2008 7:28:45 AM
The right vs left dynamic I’ve always found interesting is religion vs social structure.
Righties are more prone to believe in a top-down down design for the universe, but a survival of the fittest model for society.
Lefties believe love the majesty of a world shaped by competition in the form of evolution, but think society should be better designed.
While the righties can claim we should not play god in our social design because we aren’t godlike in foresight and the lefties can say our societal engineering is meant to take the brutality out of the natural world, I tend to think it smacks of large-scale cognitive dissonance.
Posted by: burger flipper at Jul 26, 2008 7:51:55 AM
good analysis...
i care more about how the burmese farmers are doing, with any luck they have increasing access to tools to improve their lot...
imagine a smart kid in the developing world, with internet access, diagnosing diseases by looking at online databases...better than whinging =)
Posted by: c8to at Jul 26, 2008 8:05:19 AM
One odd exception to this rule is a peculiar British newspaper called the Daily Mail, which by and large specialises in Right Wing whining.
I don't get it, myself. One of the big advantages of being right-wing is that you don't have to spend your entire life agonisedly wringing your hands over the status quo. To be a right-wing whiner seems to bring you the worst of both worlds: you go around being upset while everyone around you thinks you're mean spirited.
Posted by: Rory Sutherland at Jul 26, 2008 8:11:24 AM
Professor Cowen,
Might you be interested in Symbolic Crusade:Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement by Joseph Gusfield? It argues that the religious conservatives of the Prohibition era viewed the imposition and continuation of Prohibition as a symbol of their higher status over other American sub-groups.
Posted by: Tim S at Jul 26, 2008 8:40:01 AM
Regarding happiness research the fact that additional dollars do not bring additional happiness is a pretty powerful justification for wealth redistribution. If taking money away from the rich to give to the poor doesn't make the rich much worse off but makes the poor better off it might be more efficient as far as experienced utility even if it lowers efficiency in other ways by distorting incentives.
On the other hand the fact that conservatives are happier doesn't seem to argue for any specific action. Are they happier because they are married? Because of their faith? Because they are retired? Because of how they were raised? Because they are more likely to be white or male? Maybe conservatism is correlated with satisfaction with the status quo. I don't know it is evidence that maybe it is nice to be a conservative but it doesn't support the idea that they are right about anything in particular.
Posted by: Michael Foody at Jul 26, 2008 8:46:28 AM
While I think this model is entertaining and has a kernel of truth, it also offers a bit of a caricature of both lefties and righties, who are actually quite diverse even if they self-identify as a member of their group.
Taking redistributionist lefties as an example, I don't think it's at all fair to claim that they neglect caring about the actual lives of the poorest and instead care primarily concern is lowering the status of the wealthy. While this may describe a very particular type of bourgeois leftism (somewhat) popular among upper-middle-class intellectual and artists who spend more time railing against businesspeople whose cultural tastes and lack of book smarts, etc. they find objectionable, this type of leftism is far from the most common.
I would suspect that Tyler and others would argue that "fair trade"/anti-globalization blue-collar workers fall into this category. However, I don't think that opposition to, say, NAFTA or the WTO necessarily equals a lack of care for the poorest of the world. Rather, it simply reflects several other beliefs (i.e. that a "race to the bottom" is bad for everyone, that national development rather than cheap production for the American market is the best way for other countries to develop their economies, etc.) While everyone is free to disagree with these propositions, it's nonetheless true that they do not necessarily reflect a lack of concern for non-U.S. poor.
Posted by: J at Jul 26, 2008 9:56:52 AM
I don't recognize the "right wingers" in this tale.
Most conservatives I know don't oppose wealth transfers on budgetary or "fiscal discipline" grounds. They do so on grounds of incentives, government inefficiency -- or, if you prefer, morality.
Posted by: Richard Squire at Jul 26, 2008 9:58:10 AM
Tyler - This goes back to Weber and his classic distinction between different kinds of group distinction. What you're talking about is called "status" in his lingo. It's all about relative symbolic position.
Posted by: Fabio Rojas at Jul 26, 2008 9:59:21 AM
I'd like to point out the awesomeness of the permalink.
Posted by: Anittah at Jul 26, 2008 10:03:45 AM
There is a graph out there, showing where McCain and Obama sit relative to their congressional peers ... right vs left.
The purpose of the graph is to show that McCain is more moderate than his conservative peers ... but really the striking thing for me was the overal shape: _/\_/\_. Two peaks, with the two parties left and right of center, and with very few moderates present.
Does this mean our two party system has brought us a congress without pragmatists? Wouldn't that suck?
Posted by: odograph at Jul 26, 2008 10:20:08 AM
BTW, I think happiness research will, like recent discoveries in evolutionary neurobiology, take at least a generation to shake out. The first generation pigeonholes the data within their older belief systems.
Posted by: odograph at Jul 26, 2008 10:25:20 AM
The natural division of men, according to Thomas Jefferson
"Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties: 1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depositary of the public interests. In every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves. Call them, therefore, Liberals and Serviles, Jacobins and Ultras, Whigs and Tories, Republicans and Federalists, Aristocrats and Democrats, or by whatever name you please, they are the same parties still and pursue the same object. The last one of Aristocrats and Democrats is the true one expressing the essence of all."
Posted by: Gadfly at Jul 26, 2008 10:40:04 AM
Tyler,
Code it up and see what grows.
odograph,
You may want to look at the latest book by Poole, Rosenthol and McCarty that really digs into the sources of recent Congressional polarization.
Posted by: goodnessOfFit at Jul 26, 2008 10:55:04 AM
Thanks goodness, found this page: http://voteview.ucsd.edu/Polarized_America.htm
Posted by: odograph at Jul 26, 2008 11:14:45 AM
There is a difference between accepting the status quo and accepting what one cannot change.
Equality is the best example of this. The ultimate conservative document, the Constitution, recognizes the Christian principle of equality under the law (under God). But the difference between men in everything else is completely unequal. The great horrors of history, from the French Revolution through the Communist gulags, were the result of making equality the highest goal. Those who cannot accept that they are unequal will live an unhappy life and, if given power, will make everyone in their power unhappy. Those who accept the inequality of life on Earth can live a happy life.
Posted by: 8 at Jul 26, 2008 11:19:11 AM
The left wingers are control freaks. The right believes in freedom.
Posted by: jorod at Jul 26, 2008 12:36:46 PM
Sounds about right to me. As federal and international politics gain relevance relative to local politics, more and more people are unable to identify their team. With so many people playing politics at so many levels, the incoherence of "left" and "right" as ideologies becomes more transparent, but without removing the innate need to feel a sense of belonging. Thinking is hard. Easier to just go along with whoever seems the most agreeable.
Posted by: Michael F. Martin at Jul 26, 2008 1:04:32 PM
Occasionally the real force behind a political ideology is the subconsciously held desire that a certain group of people should not be allowed to rise in relative status.
Status is a zero sum game. So a desire to reduce (or not less rise) the status of P-type people is the same as wanting to increase (or not less fall) the status of not-P people.
Which brings me to my theory. I think that a large part of political belief boils down to a desire to increase (or maintain) the status of X kind of people, where X is some group that a person either considers himself to be a member of, or otherwise has some sort of emotional identification with.
In the former case, which is the most common, my theory amounts to a belief that "people like me deserve higher status", which I contend most people believe to some extent.
Many existing or historical political movements have their identity based on who they define as X.
So if X=women, you get feminism
for X=Jews, you get Zionism
X=black Africans => the African National Congress
X=poor people => socialists, Old Labour
X=rich people => pre-Cameron Conservatives
X=Muslims => Islamism
X=Germans => Nazism
X=Scots => The SNP
This also works for professions. For example if you're a civil engineer or teacher or policemen, you probably believe that civil engineers / teachers / policemen deserve more status.
Posted by: Cabalamat at Jul 26, 2008 2:39:01 PM
It is singularly odd to describe the left wing as favoring "meritocracy".
Meritocracy implies equal opportunity rather than equal outcomes. The former is favored by the right wing, the latter by the left wing.
Also meritocracy, almost by definition, applies at an individual level, while the left wing favors quotas (or policies by another name that achieve the same result), and tends to believe that collective rights override individual rights or merits.
Posted by: at Jul 26, 2008 2:46:58 PM
I hate the right/left paradigm. What matters is the extent that those on either the right or left choose to use government to achieve their respective aims.
The proper framework (in my opinion) is libertarian/totalitarianism. I am right wing on some issues (mostly, but not entirely, economic) and left wing on other issues (mostly, but not entirely, social, or "civil" if you will). But unlike big government righties and big governemnt lefties, I am not arrogant enough to try to use government coercion to try to force others to do the things I like or to not do the things I dislike.
Posted by: happyjuggler0 at Jul 26, 2008 5:53:00 PM
If you put "right wing", "left wing", and "meritocracy" all in a basket, which does not belong? Probably "meritocracy", but the fact of the matter is, "smartest", and "most virtuous" are qualities that are notoriously difficult to quantize. The meanings assigned to the terms are often assigned arbitrary valuables, and used by the ruling class to drive out those whose morals and goals are incompatible with their own "subconsciously held desires", as Mr. Cowen so artfully put it. On the other hand, we know who makes the most correct decisions in the allocation of economic resources by the amount of wealth they retain at the end of the day, so meritocracy is reasonably strong in the free market(when such market is un-tampered with, another quality that is difficult to identify).
Posted by: Jason Armstrong at Jul 26, 2008 5:57:44 PM
The meritocratic left in America is largely an upper-middle class white phenomenon. They don't believe in meritocratic competition involving poor minorities, but they believe in vicious meritocracy among their fellow whites.
Upper-middle class left wing whites have worked hard to prove to themselves and the world that they are better than middle class whites. Hence the contempt for Wal-mart, Applebees, etc, etc.
Stuff White People Like absolutely nails the rapid status competitions within upper-middle class lefties.
They try to block out any part of their mind that compares and contrasts their relative status with poor minorities (mainly blacks). But it's difficult since so much of their life is spent ruthlessly clambering over other whites. For the purpose of rich left-wing white guilt and status games, Asian-Americans count as white.
Posted by: jim at Jul 26, 2008 6:00:43 PM
I agree with the general need to throw both the left and the right overboard. The reason I end up being called a lefty is not that I agree with all lefties -- far, far from it -- but because the rightwingers cannot bring themselves, in thinking about the market economy, to separate the effects of honest meritocracy from the top-heavy distribution of income which must result even if ALL people had the same abilities. So you can become a leftwing whiner by pointing out a major intellectual failure on the right. Then when you say that the solution is a market economy with a strong safety net, they're like deer caught in headlights.
But beyond that, something else is about to affect the argument of left vs. right.
I think a major condition of our time is the symbiotic result of two separate and inexorable tendencies: (a) the increasing network effects of environmental externalities and social transaction costs, due to the crowding and growing complexity of the world; combined with (b) the increasing narrowness of personal knowledge due to specialization and the division of labor, with this individual narrowness leading to a simplified and rather incompetent common culture. "Lack of individual responsibility" is incorrectly applied to tendency (b).
Markets alone won't fix this symbiotic combination, because prices can't transmit all that kind of information, and YOU don't have enough knowledge to evaluate it for proper market demand, if the info were able to be so transmitted. This is starting to be true of many but the simplest consumer products.
So the solution for some problems is going to be a return to targeted institutions that use expert knowledge to regulate some markets. We see the questions already in the financial crisis and the atmospheric carbon sink. Whining about climatologists won't cut it. Markets won't by themselves solve it. The lefty part of things is ascending, and the righty part will run into intellectual disarray until it adjusts its thinking on this.
Posted by: Lee A. Arnold at Jul 26, 2008 7:47:43 PM
Right, political discourse in the U.S. largely consists of white vs. white status-competition. See "Stuff White People Like" for details.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Jul 26, 2008 8:03:13 PM
