Chris Dillow writes,

there’s no conflict between leftism and a belief in the heritability of ability. In this respect at least, the left has nothing to fear from science.

Suppose that one believes that intelligence is heritable and that intelligence affects economic status. To the extent that you believe those two things, you have to maintain a somewhat lower belief in the importance of effort in determining economic status. Accordingly, in scoring a policy of pure income redistribution, as Dillow points out, you have to give it additional philosophical points because the well-off are the beneficiaries of lucky inheritance. In addition, such a policy loses fewer economic-efficiency points, because taxes that discourage effort will not diminish total wealth as much as they would if wealth were entirely determined by effort.

So Dillow would appear to be correct. And in fact Gregory Clark, who is well known for his findings supporting heritability of economic status, says that his findings support income redistribution.

Why, then, is heritability of intelligence a problem for the left? I believe that the three-axes model can help provide the answer.

In the three-axes model, progressives want to squeeze every issue into an oppressor-oppressed narrative. To suggest that ethnic groups differ in average income for reasons other than oppression would be to weaken that narrative. So even if from a policy perspective a belief in heritability is tolerable, from a narrative perspective a book like The Bell Curve represents a huge threat.

My sense is that this produces a great deal of cognitive dissonance on the left. I have many friends on the left, and I do not know a single one who would instinctively deny the heritability of intelligence. On the other hand, they have been instructed to regard Murray and Herrnstein as vile racists.

Evidence that runs counter to the oppressor-oppressed axis narrative is difficult for people on the left to process. I think that, notwithstanding Dillow’s reasoning, the left is going to continue to be uncomfortable with the science of heritability of intelligence.

Peace will come to Syria, Iraq, Libya, and the rest of the Middle East when ______.

I define peace as a situation in which at least 99 percent of the people do not have to consider abandoning their homes for fear of violence.

Off the top of my head, I do not have an answer. But I find myself drawn more to the conservative civilization-barbarism axis than to the progressive oppressor-oppressed axis or to the libertarian freedom-coercion axis. Along those lines, you may wish to re-read Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick’s classic Dictatorships and Double Standards. Among many possible excerpts I might choose, there is this:

Although most governments in the world are, as they always have been, autocracies of one kind or another, no idea holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans than the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances.

She argued against this brand of wishful thinking. If you think that you have a reliable answer to my question, then ask yourself whether you are engaged in wishful thinking.

For example, I would give a low grade to anyone who thinks that the solution is to focus on empowering communities. In other words, community organizers are the solution to terrorism. When I read that, I did not know whether to laugh or cry. I am afraid that I could not come up with anything charitable to say.

If anything, libertarians tend to think more wishfully than progressives. My own wishful thought has been that violence would wane at some point because so many people would become fed up with it. [UPDATE: I am not entirely wrong about that.] I think that in fact more people are getting fed up with it, but they are not being provided with a reason to hope that the militants will be defeated.

I am not saying that the solution is to bomb the heck out of the Middle East. It may very well be that the most prudent thing to do is nothing. But the policy articulated by our leaders sounds like it came out of a class discussion in freshman sociology. I find it demoralizing. And I imagine that anyone who is on the front lines against the Islamic militants has to feel totally bereft.

Some further thoughts inspired by comments on this post.

1. I don’t think that progressives would be comfortable with a narrative that says that things used to be better. That is much more of a conservative trope. Also, as an aside, Karl Marx himself said that capitalism saved people from the idiocy of rural life.

2. Instead, I think that progressives have two complaints about capitalism. First, it creates winners and losers. This leads to the winners becoming oppressors and the losers becoming oppressed.

3. The other narrative of capitalism is that it is unorganized and unplanned. It requires oversight in order to correct market failures. I think that this narrative does not fit in with the language of oppressor-oppressed.

4. I think that Randazzo have the libertarian narrative for capitalism correct. It is consistent with freedom and its success demonstrates the virtues of a free society.

5. I think that one of the commenters on the post suggests a reasonable conservative narrative. However, I think that conservatives feel some ambivalence toward capitalism. It is a civilizing force primarily because it rewards effort, individual responsibility, and self-discipline. However, it is an anti-civilizing force to the extent that it promotes greed and elevates materialism over values that ought to be higher.

In the EconJournalWatch symposium, they write,

There are two basic narratives about capitalism circulating in Western society today. One says that capitalism is exploitation (or at least is highly conducive to exploitation); the other says that capitalism is liberation. If you endorse the exploitation narrative, then you are more likely to see government as the main force that protects innocent victims. It protects them with a welfare state and with a regulatory state. But if you endorse the liberation narrative, then you’ll want government to step back as much as possible and let capitalism work its magic. You’ll want to shrink both the welfare state and the regulatory state.

This is somewhat congruent with the three-axis model. In my terminology, your basic economic narrative is oppressor-oppressed or freedom-coercion.

As they themselves admit, the narrative that they provide for economists on the left is not something they would recognize as characterizing their own views. It would fail Bryan Caplan’s ideological Turing test.

I believe that most economists on the left believe that there are incentive problems in markets and that technocrats can fix those problems. They do not think of markets as intrinsically about exploitation.

Randazzo and Haidt argue that economists’ moral views can predict their economic analysis.

our survey data shows that responses to moral propositions can be used to predict responses to empirical (positive) economic theory propositions. For example, how much importance an economist assigns to the moral foundation of “care” predicts views on whether austerity is good or bad for economic growth, whether a single-payer healthcare system would reduce national healthcare costs or not, whether minimum-wage laws benefit or harm workers, and whether or not national debt and deficits adversely affect economic growth.