The shrinking of the middle is largely due to a recent rise in the share of women (who also represent a majority of college students) who identify as either liberal or far left. The share of female respondents, but not male respondents, who describe their political views this way was at an all-time high (41.1 percent for women, 28.9 percent for men).
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Note that this survey is of incoming freshmen and freshwomen.
My hypothesis is that these left-leaning women (and men) use small-community intuition in arriving at their political beliefs. They want the relationship between government and citizen to be one of parent and child. They want to see communal sharing, as if we lived in luck village rather than effort village.
When I went to college, I was on the far left. Those views began to change, in part because taking an economics course shifted my paradigm from small-community intuition to thinking about a complex society in more systemic terms. I am not sure that today’s young leftists will undergo a similar transition.
1. In the systemizer-empathizer dimension, women are more likely than men to lean toward empathizer. Empathizers probably will be less likely to take an economics course, less likely to enjoy an economics course, and less likely to be affected by an economics course.
2. I think that economics courses are going to tilt left and toward empathizers. I have an essay forthcoming in which I suggest that in a few decades economics may turn into a left-wing ideological monoculture comparable to sociology today.
The essay is pretty nice for what it covers in its length.
I kind of feel the opposite though, I was a libertarian when I used small community intuition, and abandoned it when I studied larger systems.
What about an example with two villages. Both are effort villages, but only people in village one have the mental capacity to use advanced farming tools. As a result village one has much high yields.
The people in village two notice that if they move to village one, they usually find a way to get the people of village one to share that high yield with them, even if they don’t contribute much to it themselves. More and more village two people move in. Eventually they are a majority, and they now start voting themselves large shares of village ones yield, not to mention lots of other laws to make village one more like village two, which the village one people don’t like but can’t do much about. Are the people of village one not going to be worse off in this scenario? Perhaps permanently?
Within villages its effort village. Between villages its luck village. What are the moral obligations of the luckier village.
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I’m not sure empathy, rather then social conformity, is the driving force. If progressivism is high status, women are going to conform to it. Even when progressivism is non-empathetic, like my Aunt saying everyone in West Virginia should die of black lung, women seem just fine conforming with it. Women hate very easily if they are told that is how you fit in with your in-group.
If you want to stop progressivism, you have to make women think it will lower their status.
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I think the idea behind “the 99%” is that having that level of wealth almost automatically means your a cheater. Under perfect competition its supposed to be very difficult to achieve that kind of wealth, you learn that in basic economics. Even many early innovators of the industrial revolution in England didn’t even get all that rich, they competed each other down to more modest profit margins. I think the basic assumption is that if you have that much wealth you probably got it nefariously. To the extent the actual cheating can be stopped that’s well and good, but since it may not be practically possible if you believe that most of the 1% wealth comes from cheating its a second best.
In some ways this is more efficient. Stopping cheating via regulation empowers regulators, who may also become cheaters. A simple 1%er tax that was used to pay an EITC would in some ways be like a tax on cheating with low overhead or government interference.
I think the idea behind “the 99%” is that having that level of wealth almost automatically means your a cheater.
Even as progressive, I thought the 99% sort of missed the mark as the majority of the 99% protesters were in the 30 – 70% of the income distribution. And I do find a Sanders speech to be boring.
Our nation tends to act like the 1950s were the beginning of history. The world has been more consistently 1%/2 – 10%/1- 80%/Untouchables over history while the post WW2 was the outlier. The 1950/1960s after WW2 and Great Depression creating lots of opportunity for income mobility and even the people that fell on the economic ladder were still in better shape than the 1930s/1940s.
The difference between villages may or may not be ‘luck’. That’s the word you apply.
But you made a few critical philosophical leaps of faith.
First, you assume village one is willing to share with those who arrive. Perhaps. Perhaps not. The US has, traditionally, ‘shared’ – but not officially, until recently. As an immigrant, you were often met at the boat by mutual aid society workers, family, or friends, back in the earlier years. People voluntarily shared their wealth and helped you. If you didn’t have any of these available upon arrival, you moved into a ghetto and worked harder to get ahead. In other words, the ‘sharing’ wasn’t forced or coerced, but it was voluntary.
Secondly, you assumed that as village 2 people continued to arrive, they would overwhelm village 1 people with their voting. Well, there is your problem. While what you say is true, that’s the problem we face today. We are coerced into sharing by government, and government is managed by votes, while votes tend to be cast based on who will gain the most (or those who wish to see more go to those who ‘deserve’ it). That’s a flaw in the system, that’s a broken system, not a properly functioning one. As long as everything was shared voluntarily, things were fine.
Third, you assume luck is what differentiated village 1 and village 2. But what about effort and initiative? Village 2 MUST have something worthwhile to trade, certainly the villagers have initiative. They’ve got enough to get up and move to village 1, so they are clearly willing to work and put in effort. Moving would only be an option if village 2 has absolutely no resources at all, and if that’s the case, then the village is unlikely to have been there to begin with, since villages form around needed resources.
Fourth, you assume village 2 is unwilling to learn from village 1. It’s possible village 2 people move to village 1, gain from the ‘sharing’ and learn how village 1 became wealthy. Then they move back to village 2 with newer tools and technology and catch up. This, of course, is the situation in many third world nations which have begun to catch up with the rest of the world because our capitalist systems have made technology so widely available and affordable that even backward economies can leapfrog years of effort simply by upgrading to newer and better technologies which are becoming more and more abundant (due to free(r) markets).
I don’t see anything in your framework to support your move away from libertarian viewpoints. You’ve simply made some errors in assumption, and you’ve placed faith in a government to ‘do things right’ when I defy you to show me a government which has ever done things right.
I am not in the 1%. But I’m very close. And you’re just full of it if you think being in the 1% means they’re cheating somehow in order to get that level of wealth. I’ve worked hard, I’ve scrimped, I’ve saved, and I’ve done everything I can to economize and maximize my opportunities. I know many other people like me. I guess in being smart and economical, we’re “cheating”?
Sorry. Not buying it.
The difference between villages is genetics, which is luck. Village two people have no desirable skills that a robot can’t do better and cheaper.
The only countries catching up are high IQ countries with a history of communism. The low IQ ones with roughly capitalist economies are stuck in middle income traps or worse, and have been for decades.
“In other words, the ‘sharing’ wasn’t forced or coerced, but it was voluntary.”
This hasn’t been true anywhere in the developed world since WWII. Seems pointless to long for a political arrangement that has failed the market test for political arrangements. Certainly, the more village two people one imports the less likely it your desired state of affairs becomes.
“I am not in the 1%. But I’m very close.”
There is a pretty huge difference between a self made millionaire and a billionaire. Its very difficult to make that kind of money in a competitive marketplace. And what we find is most of the increase in 1%er worth (and often we are talking a top fraction of the 1%) is in industries like FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) or healthcare where there doesn’t seem to be much production and an incestous relationship with government. Where there is smoke, there’s FIRE.
Looking at the Forbes list of the richest Americans in 2016, in the top 100 FIRE as a source of wealth is outnumbered by non FIRE such as software, retail (Amazon and Walmart), oil and gas, media and other such as the candy for the Mars brother. One might still say there was luck involved in say DOS being chosen over CP/M by IBM.
I’ll leave it to the reader to do their own investigation, but I remember in the past examining this and FIRE has grown quite substantially in the past several decades. Both as a sector as a whole and the number of spectacularly wealthy individuals its produced.
How that shaked out on the Forbes 400 I don’t know. I mostly think about it in terms of people I know from my investment banking days. Many aren’t on the Forbes 400, but they are retiring at 35 with spectacular wealth which many of them admit to having gained in not the most economically productive of ways.
course shifted my paradigm from small-community intuition to thinking about a complex society in more systemic terms.
Then how do you expect conservative institutions, like church, charity and government, to be effective if conservative/libertarians reject small community institutions? The idealized version of 1950s America, is the women worked within the church to support the entire community and ensure the right values. In many you are supporting the Religious Libetarians/Benedict Option types that the country has left them behind. Otherwise, I suspect women, due to potential pregnancy, at an early age probably live more in fear of the community rejecting them than men do.
Freshwomen? Is that a thing now?
I arrived at my small private liberal arts college in 1977 somewhat conservative. I had been for Ford the previous year over Carter.
I took American Economic History before micro and macro from a curmudgeonly professor in his last year of teaching. I remember more of his lessons than probably any other individual class.
1. The depression of 1873 never really ended, and turned into the depression of 1893 which was really bad.
2. WJB’s Cross of Gold speech.
3. It was the New Deal. Otherwise the choice was between Communism or Fascism. This was corroborated by my grandfather who had some very extreme views.
The rest of my college career I was pretty much on the left side.
Anyway, I’ve swung back somewhat and today I can most likely be described as a social liberal/economic centrist. On left leaning blogs that means I am a corporatist neoliberal sellout. Whatever.
My niece is currently at a “good” state University. She’s very socially liberal. Transgender really is a thing and she’s very concerned about it. But she also works a full time job and pays the rent. She’s not big on “daddy” either. So I think the whole “leftist women want a daddy to pay for them” is wrong.
I don’t really see any huge swing in Rampells chart. A little waxing and waning.
My 2c.
Hitler, Stalin, or FDR? I’ll take FDR!
I think that economics courses are going to tilt left and toward empathizers. I have an essay forthcoming in which I suggest that in a few decades economics may turn into a left-wing ideological monoculture comparable to sociology today.
I attended a top public university in the 1990’s, arriving as a systemizer and eager to discuss the linkages between various parts of the economy. I can rightly say there was none of that in the courses I took.
For one thing, my economic history course was taught by a proud Marxist, and another theory course was taught by an Eastern European who focused on the superiority of planned economies. For another, each of my very prominent professors were working very diligently on various forms of market failures, and liked to discuss their research in class.
Thus, most of what I heard was about how capitalism was a flawed system and riddled with market failures. It was a wonder anyone had a loaf of bread or head of cabbage on a given night!
There was no attempt to discuss the normal workings of an economy or the successes of a decentralized system, only an intricate discussion of the times things didn’t work. It was as if a physics student learned nothing but how quantum mechanics made a mockery out of classical mechanics yet could not explain how apples fell from trees.
Isn’t (any) systematic voting behavior a flaw?
Arnold, I’ve just completed the political compass test with my class of 15 year olds in Australia (30 in total). We plotted each student on the board to see where they sat. There was a remarkable similarity in the class. All to the left economically, and all either middle of the road or moderately libertarian socially. I found this to be promising – they just need some economics and they would be very sound I’m sure! They seem to equate intention with outcome and have not grasped the world’s complexity and much economics. It seems that the community-minded element of their thinking is dominating for now.
We have discussed issues they would like to change. There was a distinct split between what girls tended to focus on (abortion laws, gay marriage – legalising both) and boys (gun laws (tightening), immigration (tightening)).
The level of interest in political issues varied widely in the class.
All up an interesting exercise.
For the record, I plotted my score as well. I was libertarian socially and libertarian economically, so I really only diverged from the class economically. Once I began explaining the economics of the minimum wage, some of them seemed a little less sure of their positions with respect to economics.
https://www.politicalcompass.org/test
By posting here I could guess your score. There are personality correlations.
Never saw that. I’m slightly left, somewhat libertarian. Not surprised.
I think that’s how you read it.
Economic Left/Right: -1.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.9
From the source document, a very surprising finding: the left are more tolerant of others with different views, and left students perceive their ability to see the world from someone else’s perspective more highly than the right. p. 6 of the report:
“In regards to tolerating others with different beliefs, just more than two-thirds (68.1%%) of right-of-center students rated their tolerance of others with different beliefs as “strong” or “somewhat strong” compared to 82.0% of “middle of the road” students and 86.6% of left-of-center students.”
“More left-leaning students perceive their ability to see the world from someone else’s perspective as strong (83.6%) compared to their more centrist (76.5%) and right-leaning (68.8%) peers.”
Do they also perceive themselves as more humble? Less given to self-deception?
I’ve never in my life met a leftist who was tolerant of those who wished not to be taxed to pay for the leftist’s consumption preferences.
Imagine we’re a few decades into the future. There are still some holdouts in an economics department, somewhere.
These elderly men don’t talk up the economic way of thinking in itself, but what they do is they self-identify as Autistic-Americans, and they shout as loud as they can that something called “cost-benefit analysis” is an important part of their Autistic-American heritage, and that it’s offensive to them, as elderly Autistic-Americans, that violence has been done to them, their voice silenced, and their humanity taken from them, by the younger cohort.
So these octogenarians bang their canes against all the windows, and they start fires, and they’re allowed to teach a course in Autistic-American Identity Studies, where people learn about price theory and cost incidence.
For the dean has always boasted about being wise and empathetic, and is easily embarrassed by anyone who says the word “identity” really angrily.
The spectrum has benefits and advantages. You seem to be focused on the drawbacks.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”
John Rogers
That’s still funny!
Is female-driven liberalism growth the same as historical patriarchal liberalism? More child care, less union protectionism, perhaps? I’m not sure if I mind feminine liberalism yet.
The real issue is what you called “The Basic Social Rule” about two years ago. Women tend to be simultaneously more sensitive to, and stronger enforcers of, the rule, but unfortunately, the rule in most applications is simply not compatible with the traditional and still purported intellectual goals of Academia. It already suffers from far too much of it, and this trend is this likely to cause things to head further in the wrong direction. Conformity to an orthodox consensus while crushing any contrarian voices is the enemy of creativity and a surefire recipe for bureaucratic sclerosis and stagnation. Certain forms of intellectual progress simply require independent personalities with competitive, adversarial spirits. A deeply Basic-Ruled environment is completely hostile to such personalities.
This is what Laura Kipnis says in her latest book:
Irony doesn’t sit very well in the current climate, especially when it comes to irony about the current climate. Critical distance itself is out of fashion—not exactly a plus when it comes to intellectual life (or education itself). Feelings are what’s in fashion.
I’m all for feelings. I’m a standard-issue female, after all. But this cult of feeling has an authoritarian underbelly: Feelings can’t be questioned or probed, even while furnishing the rationale for sweeping new policies, which can’t be questioned or probed either. The result is that higher education has been so radically transformed that the place is almost unrecognizable.
Seems relevant.