The entire podcast with Russ Roberts is fantastic, but I especially like the last 10-12 minutes.
Bloom and Roberts are dismayed by what they see as a cultural change in which politicians focus on the individual case to tug at emotions. (Think of President Reagan starting the tradition of spotlighting someone at the State of the Union address.) It made me think of this WaPo op-ed, which offended me on several levels, and which I will discuss more later this week. Compare this culture with the way that America’s Founding Fathers were able to operate at a more abstract level.
Bloom hopes for a reversal of the cultural trend away from rational thinking about public policy. But my thought is that the battle is lost. Somewhere along the way, the most highly educated people, who you would ordinarily count on to get beyond emotion-driven policy views, have instead turned out to be very tribal and simplistic in their outlook.
Bloom and Roberts are dismayed by what they see as a cultural change in which politicians focus on the individual case to tug at emotions. I suspect that is the biggest change in TV elections in which the President with a stronger emotional connection with voters wins. I believe this to be true in every election since 1968 and this POV explains a lot of Trump’s victory. (HRC did not connect with voters very well. Just think Spock like Obama made a strong plea in 2008 versus McCain and probably was lucky that he ran against Romney in 2012.)
But wasn’t Ronald Reagan successful in campaigning on emotion versus policy? (Not just empathy here. His famous quote “Tear Down That Wall” was a strong emotional plea) There was lots of conservative ideology floating around in the 1970s and 1980s but it did take Reagan to sell to the American people.
“the most highly educated people”
Yeah, I don’t think you are looking at the history of “highly educated people” with an objective eye. In any case, people use “educated” when they really mean “credentialed” these days.
“The fading of the critical sense is a serious menace to the preservation of our civilization. It makes it easy for quacks to fool the people. It is remarkable that the educated strata are more gullible than the less educated. The most enthusiastic supporters of Marxism, Nazism, and Fascism were the intellectuals, not the boors. The intellectuals were never keen enough to see the manifest contradictions of their creeds. It did not in the least impair the popularity of Fascism that Mussolini in the same speech praised the Italians as the representatives of the oldest Western civilization and as the youngest among the civilized nations. No German nationalist minded it when dark-haired Hitler, corpulent Goering, and lame Goebbels were praised as the shining representatives of the tall, slim, fair-haired, heroic Aryan master race. Is it not amazing that many millions of non-Russians are firmly convinced that the Soviet regime is democratic, even more democratic than America?”
von Mises, Ludwig (1945). Bureaucracy
Why does the Trans person get to decide who gets into the ladies room and not the 99.9% of cis-gendered women? What is the actual logic behind this and people getting to decide how others think and label?
My solution is, hey fellas, let’s just let everyone use the men’s room.
It is worth listening to the opening of the Federalist Society’s podcast on Trump’s executive order on travel.
The open statement by the first speaker illustrates one of the things mentioned in EconTalk, as the speaker first observers that most the critiques of the EO have no basis in legal reasoning and are strictly emotional appeals, and then immediately begins making an emotional appeal regarding their own family’s immigration history.
At the very least this appeal is seen a fundamentally required in order to move on and discuss the legal issues. “Because I can tell a heart-wrenching story about my family, I am credibility to be able to speak about the real issues.”
Implicitly, if I had no heart-wrenching story, I would be out of luck. Empathy for the win.
I wish I had either proofread that or that there existed an edit button…