General belief superiority (GBS): Personality, motivation, and interpersonal relations. Kaitlin T. Raimi & Katrina P. Jongman-Sereno. Self and Identity, Jul 24 2019. https://doi.org/10.1080/15298868.2019.1640785
ABSTRACT: This paper introduces general belief superiority (GBS)—the tendency for people to think their beliefs are superior to alternatives—and investigates its personological, motivational, and interpersonal features. Across four studies of US residents, a new GBS Scale found that GBS was related to how people process information, think about their attitudes, compare themselves to others, and interact during conflicts. GBS correlated with various existing constructs (e.g., social vigilantism, narcissism), but was unrelated to others (e.g., selfishness). Study 2 established test-retest reliability and found that the belief superior have negative thoughts about controversial topics and are more likely to share opinions online. Study 3 found GBS predicted maladaptive reactions to conflicts with romantic partners. Gender differences and self-enhancement motivations in belief superiority are discussed.
KEYWORDS: Belief superiority, social vigilantism, self-enhancement, relationships, gender differences
Thursday, July 25, 2019
Perpetrators of discrimination are held less accountable and often seen as less worthy of punishment when their behavior is attributed to implicit rather than to explicit bias
Consequences of attributing discrimination to implicit vs. explicit bias. Natalie M. Daumeyer et al. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 84, September 2019, 103812. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2019.04.010
Abstract: Implicit bias has garnered considerable public attention, with a number of behaviors (e.g., police shootings) attributed to it. Here, we present the results of 4 studies and an internal meta-analysis that examine how people reason about discrimination based on whether it was attributed to the implicit or explicit attitudes of the perpetrators. Participants' perceptions of perpetrator accountability, support for punishment, level of concern about the bias, and support for various efforts to reduce it (e.g., education) were assessed. Taken together, the results suggest that perpetrators of discrimination are held less accountable and often seen as less worthy of punishment when their behavior is attributed to implicit rather than to explicit bias. Moreover, at least under some circumstances, people express less concern about, and are less likely to support efforts to combat, implicit compared with explicit bias. Implications for efforts to communicate the science of implicit bias without undermining accountability for the discrimination it engenders are discussed.
Keywords: Implicit biasBias attributionAccountabilityScience communication
Abstract: Implicit bias has garnered considerable public attention, with a number of behaviors (e.g., police shootings) attributed to it. Here, we present the results of 4 studies and an internal meta-analysis that examine how people reason about discrimination based on whether it was attributed to the implicit or explicit attitudes of the perpetrators. Participants' perceptions of perpetrator accountability, support for punishment, level of concern about the bias, and support for various efforts to reduce it (e.g., education) were assessed. Taken together, the results suggest that perpetrators of discrimination are held less accountable and often seen as less worthy of punishment when their behavior is attributed to implicit rather than to explicit bias. Moreover, at least under some circumstances, people express less concern about, and are less likely to support efforts to combat, implicit compared with explicit bias. Implications for efforts to communicate the science of implicit bias without undermining accountability for the discrimination it engenders are discussed.
Keywords: Implicit biasBias attributionAccountabilityScience communication
The Terrifying Rise of Authoritarian Populism
The Terrifying Rise of Authoritarian Populism. Tom G. Palmer. Cato, Jul 24 2019. https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/terrifying-rise-authoritarian-populism
This article appeared in the September 2019 Issue of Reason.
Governments described as populist are now in power in Poland, Hungary, Mexico, and Turkey. Italy and Greece are governed by multiparty populist coalitions, while populists of the left or right are partners in coalition governments in seven other European Union countries. Venezuela is in free fall thanks to the confiscationist policies of a populist government. Brazil has an outspoken populist president. And the ongoing Trumpist takeover of the Republican Party isn’t just a populist spectacle in itself; it has also helped fuel a surge of left-wing populism among the Democrats. Those movements espouse a variety of programs across a wide range of political landscapes. What do they have in common?
Historians and political scientists have argued for decades about what exactly populism is, and they haven’t always come to the same conclusions. The political theorist Isaiah Berlin warned in 1967 that “a single formula to cover all populisms everywhere will not be very helpful. The more embracing the formula, the less descriptive. The more richly descriptive the formula, the more it will exclude.” Nonetheless, Berlin identified a core populist idea: the notion that an authentic “true people” have been “damaged by an elite, whether economic, political, or racial, some kind of secret or open enemy.”
The exact nature of that enemy—“foreign or native, ethnic or social”—doesn’t matter, Berlin adds. What fuels populist politics is that concept of the people battling the elite.
The Princeton political scientist Jan-Werner Müller proposes another characteristic: “In addition to being antielitist, populists are always antipluralist,” he argues in 2016’s What Is Populism? (University of Pennsylvania Press). “Populists claim that they, and they alone, represent the people.” In that formulation, the key to understanding populism is that “the people” does not include all the people. It excludes “the enemies of the people,” who may be specified in various ways: foreigners, the press, minorities, financiers, the “1 percent,” or others seen as not being “us.”
Donald Trump casually expressed that concept while running for president, declaring: “The only important thing is the unification of the people, because the other people don’t mean anything.” During the Brexit campaign, Nigel Farage, then-leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, predicted “a victory for real people.” Apparently, those who voted against Brexit didn’t just lose; they weren’t real people to begin with.
Not every formulation of populism looks like that. The historian Walter Nugent, for example, argued in 1963’s The Tolerant Populists that America’s historical Populist Party was no more anti-pluralist than its opponents. In Populism’s Power, released the same year as Müller’s book, the Wellesley political scientist Laura Grattan offered a definition of populism that has room for pluralist, inclusive movements. But it is the Berlin-Müller brand of populism that is currently surging in Ankara, Budapest, and Washington, threatening individual liberty, free markets, the rule of law, constitutionalism, the free press, and liberal democracy.
The policies promoted by those governments vary, but they reject two related ideas. One is pluralism, the idea that people are variegated, with different interests and values that need to be negotiated through democratic political processes. The other is liberalism—not in the narrow American sense of the political center-left, but the broader belief that individuals have rights and the state’s power should be limited to protect those rights.
Populists can be “of the left,” but they need not be motivated by Marxian ideas of class conflict or central planning. They can be “of the right,” but they are distinctly different from old-school reactionaries who yearn for a lost world of ordered hierarchies; if anything, they tend to dissolve old-fashioned classes and social orders into the undifferentiated mass of The People. Or they can reject the left/right spectrum altogether. As the French populist leader Marine Le Pen put it in 2015, “Now the split isn’t between the left and the right but between the globalists and the patriots.”
Populists frequently believe that the true will of the authentic people is focused in one leader. Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s late populist president, put it bluntly: “Chávez is no longer me! Chávez is a people! Chávez—we are millions. You are also Chávez! Venezuelan woman, you are also Chávez! Young Venezuelan, you are Chávez! Venezuelan child, you are Chávez! Venezuelan soldier, you are Chávez! Fisherman, farmer, peasant, merchant! Because Chávez is not me. Chávez is a people!” Turkey’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, once responded to a lone opposition voice by thundering, “We are the people! Who are you?” And then there’s Donald Trump’s less dramatic declaration that “I am your voice!”
Populists may seek power by democratic means, but that does not make them liberal. They often campaign against limits on the power of the people, especially independent judiciaries and other checks on the executive. Populists can be socialist or nationalist or both, they can be “pro-business” (crony capitalist) or “pro-labor” (crony unionist), but they share the idea that society must be put under some sort of control, exercised by a leader or a party that represents the true people and is fighting against their enemies.
The Children of Carl Schmitt
Antagonism, thus, is foundational to the populist mentality. And the central theorist of antagonism was Carl Schmitt, a German philosopher of the Nazi era—he is sometimes called the “crown jurist of the Third Reich”—who has had a strong influence on both the hard left and the hard right.
In The Concept of the Political (1932), a relentless critique of classical liberalism and constitutional democracy, Schmitt sought to displace the ideal of voluntary cooperation with the idea of conflict. The “specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced,” Schmitt wrote, “is that between friend and enemy.” The contemporary theorists who have taken this notion up include the left-wing populist Chantal Mouffe and her husband, Ernesto Laclau, author of On Populist Reason (2005).
Laclau, whose ideas have influenced populist governments in Greece and Argentina and populist opposition movements across Latin America and Europe, applies Schmittian thinking directly. Indeed, he goes further than Schmitt, treating enmity per se as the very principle of power. Where Schmitt, a virulent anti-Semite, identified the Jews as the perpetual enemy, Laclau’s hostility can be directed against anyone.
For Laclau, a populist movement is a collection of otherwise unrelated unmet “demands” aggregated by manipulative populist leaders. The demands are all different, but they are unified in a movement that constitutes “the people.” The designation of “the enemy of the people” is a strategic matter, a means of assembling a coalition powerful enough to be united under a leader for the purpose of seizing state power.
The final and most toxic ingredient is “affective investment”—that is, emotional engagement. What unites the otherwise disparate and inchoate demands, Laclau says, is the group’s adoration of the leader and hatred of the enemy.
Íñigo Errejón, a leader of the leftist Podemos populist party in Spain and an enthusiastic defender of Venezuela’s regime, builds his populism explicitly on the idea that collectivities are created by positing an enemy against which the people must struggle. In his case, the enemy is “the casta, the privileged.” When asked who the casta are, Errejón responded: “The term’s mobilizing power comes precisely from its lack of definition. It’s like asking: Who’s the oligarchy? Who’s the people? They are statistically undefinable. I think these are the poles with greatest performative capacity.”
Mouffe described the choice of target as essential to building the “sort of people we want to build.”
It’s Not the Economy, Stupid
The old standby explanation of populism is that it is a predictable response to economic oppression. Thus, the socialist pundit John Judis argues in 2016’s The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics that populism rose in response to “the skewed distribution of jobs and income that neoliberal economics had created over the prior decades.”
Yet populists have surged in popularity or come to power in countries with very dissimilar economic conditions, including some with low unemployment and relatively high economic growth. Nor is the rise of populism a matter of age, with older people supporting right-wing nationalist populists and younger people supporting liberal cosmopolitanism: Plenty of young people have been voting for populist parties and candidates. Nor is the populist vote explained robustly by income levels.
The British political scientists Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin point out in their 2018 book National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy (Pelican) that a common driver in “national populism” is not falling wages but “relative deprivation—a sense that the wider group, whether white Americans or native Brits, is being left behind relative to others in society, while culturally liberal politicians, media and celebrities devote far more attention and status to immigrants, ethnic minorities and other newcomers.” Rapid change in the status of groups, notably through immigration, causes many people to experience relative downward mobility and to feel that the status of their group is threatened. When Britain voted to withdraw from the European Union, Eatwell and Goodwin write, polling data showed Remainers “talking endlessly about economic risks while Leavers were chiefly concerned about perceived threats to their identity and national groups.” (Brexit is a complex question, of course, and some classical liberals supported it because they feared an unaccountable E.U. bureaucracy. But the movement for Brexit was driven far more by populist concerns than by liberal ones.)
In the U.S., a deciding factor in Trump’s victory was the estimated 9 percent of voters who cast ballots for Obama in 2012 and then switched to Trump, according to survey data analyzed by George Washington University political scientist John Sides. Among white Obama voters who had not been to college, the share who later voted for Trump was a whopping 22 percent. As that past support for Obama suggests, their votes for Trump can’t be reduced to a simple story of racial backlash. Nor was it a simple matter of economics: For the most part, those voters’ incomes and living standards are higher than those of their parents.
But a common motivation for their support for Trump seems to be insecurity about their social status. A 2016 Brookings Institution survey showed that 66 percent of non-college-schooled American whites “agree that discrimination against whites is as big a problem today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.” Anxiety about status—in this case a perception of an inversion of the status quo—seems to be a major factor, certainly much bigger than ideological racism. As political scientist Karen Stenner argued based on extensive data in her 2005 book The Authoritarian Dynamic, threats to “collective rather than individual conditions” trigger authoritarian “groupiness,” i.e., populism.
Here’s where classical liberals need to do some serious thinking. A mainstay of arguments for free markets is that when people’s incomes rise at different rates, the important thing is that they’re all rising. Even most left-wing egalitarians accept some inequality, as long as it’s necessary for the poor to become less poor. The philosopher John Rawls argued in A Theory of Justice, for instance, that inequalities can be just if they are to the “greatest benefit of the least advantaged,” because then, even the least well off could not complain. But human beings are concerned about more than how well they’re doing relative to how well they did in the past. They also care about how well they’re doing compared to others. They care about hierarchies and social status.
Relative status is quite different from absolute well-being. Libertarians have for many years celebrated the rise in status of women, racial minorities, immigrants, openly gay people, and others who had for very long periods of time suffered from low social status. Well, when it comes to relative social status, if some rose, others had to fall. And who perceived themselves as falling? White men without college degrees.
It isn’t just onetime outsiders rising in comparative status. As Charles Murray lays out in his 2012 book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, a decline in our collective emphasis on certain traditional virtues—hard work, marriage, and the like—has opened a gulf between college-schooled elites and high-schooled nonelites. The resentment felt by one side of the divide is, unfortunately, often matched by the arrogance and condescension shown by the other, which merely accentuates the resentment.
Similar divisions are happening in other countries as well, and they seem to be a major driver of populist sentiment. Pew Research Center surveys conducted in 2017 in 15 countries identified ethnocentrism and perceptions of national decline as characteristic of populist voters. In Germany, for example, 44 percent of the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party’s supporters say that life is worse than it was 50 years ago for people like them, compared to only 16 percent of other Germans. While data vary across countries and, as Berlin pointed out in 1967, no one factor can explain all populist movements, such fears of national decline and group status are common, especially in Europe and the U.S. The most important driver in Europe and the U.S. seems to be immigration and what Eatwell and Goodwin in National Populism call “hyper ethnic change”—that is, rapid change in the ethnic mix of a society, with multiple ethnicities joining the social order. (Some Americans have experienced feelings of dislocation and threat to their place in society upon seeing that their old Piggly Wiggly store has been replaced by a mercado with Mexican flags. It’s not the experience of ethnic pluralism that seems to be the problem but the fear that other ethnicities will eventually displace them.)
The percentage of U.S. residents who were foreign-born reached 13.7 percent in 2017, the highest percentage since 1910, when it was 14.7 percent. Moreover, since the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, which abolished national quotas and favored family reunions, higher percentages of immigrants have been coming from Asia, Africa, Central America, and the Middle East, accentuating ethnic differences with the native-born population.
The Alternative for Germany, which started as a movement against the euro and has morphed into a populist anti-immigrant party, has drawn increasing support from less-schooled voters from the former states of East Germany. Such voters perceive their status as having fallen in recent decades, and they fear immigration far more than do more-schooled voters and those in the Western part of the country, which has seen far more immigration. In fact, the AfD support was strongest in those regions of the East that had seen the least population growth due to migration; people in those places feel that they are being left behind, and they blame immigrants, whom they see more on television than in their neighborhoods.
Similar analyses can be applied to Britain, France, Sweden, and other democracies that have seen surges of populism.
Hyper ethnic change is profoundly unsettling to many people, and it is helping to drive populist political responses. One can dismiss such reactions as irrational or small-minded, but many people feel them nonetheless. Moreover, many people are not satisfied with improvements in their conditions if they perceive others—especially outsiders—as doing even better. Envy and resentment have long been drivers of anti-libertarian movements, and they seem to be back in a big way. The problem is exacerbated by the increase of welfare-state transfer payments and benefits, which outsiders are believed to exploit or threaten.
I fear that we may be entering an age of authoritarian “groupiness” and that the consequences will be terrible for freedom and prosperity. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the rise of far-right and far-left authoritarian populist movements today is more than a little reminiscent of Europe in the 1930s.
The Libertarian Response
To take on such populist ideas, we must start by understanding them. If fear regarding immigration trends is driving a larger fear of liberal democratic capitalism, one response is to ensure that immigration procedures are (accurately) perceived as orderly rather than as invasive. Attitudes toward both the Syrian refugees fleeing a catastrophic war and the current situation on the United States’ southern border have arguably been shaped for the worse by a failure to fashion more systematic and orderly solutions, entailing a right to work legally, for example.
The reason so many people choose to cross into the U.S. illegally, and in risky ways, is that it’s extraordinarily difficult to obtain a visa at an American consulate and travel by bus or car through a legal port of entry. Those who enter without permission or overstay their visas are less likely to go home, as was previously common, when they are not sure they’ll be able to return to work again in the future. A functioning and efficient guest worker program—one that allows people to easily take temporary jobs in the United States and then return home to their families with the wealth they’ve rightfully acquired—could help calm the worries of American citizens who balk at the idea that throngs of foreigners are forcing their way across the border.
But is there anything libertarians, the vast majority of whom remain outside the halls of power where immigration policy is set, can do?
One idea is to push back against the idea that trade is a zero-sum game. Your benefit need not come at my expense. What is good for Germany can be good for France, if Germans and Frenchmen trade goods and services rather than bullets and bombs. Immigrants who arrive to work enrich the people among whom they work. Negative-sum games can be transformed into positive-sum games by establishing the right institutions: property, contract, and voluntary trade. Trade has improved the well-being of Americans, of Germans, of Kenyans, of everyone.
Libertarians also need to take a hard look at our own rhetoric. Trying to divide humanity into taxpayers and tax eaters, as if there were some easy way in a modern society to distinguish the two groups neatly and unambiguously, feeds into populist hatred and rage. By all means cut subsidies, but demonizing the recipients as enemies of the people, as mere parasites, contributes to a climate of resentment, hatred, revenge, and conflict that undermines the framework for peaceful, voluntary cooperation on which liberty rests.
Thinking about the world in terms of friends vs. enemies channels energy into collectivism and demagoguery. To stop authoritarian populism, it’s important not to promote the mentality of enmity that enables it.
Tom G. Palmer is a senior fellow of the Cato Institute and the vice president for International Programs of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation.
This article appeared in the September 2019 Issue of Reason.
Governments described as populist are now in power in Poland, Hungary, Mexico, and Turkey. Italy and Greece are governed by multiparty populist coalitions, while populists of the left or right are partners in coalition governments in seven other European Union countries. Venezuela is in free fall thanks to the confiscationist policies of a populist government. Brazil has an outspoken populist president. And the ongoing Trumpist takeover of the Republican Party isn’t just a populist spectacle in itself; it has also helped fuel a surge of left-wing populism among the Democrats. Those movements espouse a variety of programs across a wide range of political landscapes. What do they have in common?
Historians and political scientists have argued for decades about what exactly populism is, and they haven’t always come to the same conclusions. The political theorist Isaiah Berlin warned in 1967 that “a single formula to cover all populisms everywhere will not be very helpful. The more embracing the formula, the less descriptive. The more richly descriptive the formula, the more it will exclude.” Nonetheless, Berlin identified a core populist idea: the notion that an authentic “true people” have been “damaged by an elite, whether economic, political, or racial, some kind of secret or open enemy.”
The exact nature of that enemy—“foreign or native, ethnic or social”—doesn’t matter, Berlin adds. What fuels populist politics is that concept of the people battling the elite.
The Princeton political scientist Jan-Werner Müller proposes another characteristic: “In addition to being antielitist, populists are always antipluralist,” he argues in 2016’s What Is Populism? (University of Pennsylvania Press). “Populists claim that they, and they alone, represent the people.” In that formulation, the key to understanding populism is that “the people” does not include all the people. It excludes “the enemies of the people,” who may be specified in various ways: foreigners, the press, minorities, financiers, the “1 percent,” or others seen as not being “us.”
Donald Trump casually expressed that concept while running for president, declaring: “The only important thing is the unification of the people, because the other people don’t mean anything.” During the Brexit campaign, Nigel Farage, then-leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, predicted “a victory for real people.” Apparently, those who voted against Brexit didn’t just lose; they weren’t real people to begin with.
Not every formulation of populism looks like that. The historian Walter Nugent, for example, argued in 1963’s The Tolerant Populists that America’s historical Populist Party was no more anti-pluralist than its opponents. In Populism’s Power, released the same year as Müller’s book, the Wellesley political scientist Laura Grattan offered a definition of populism that has room for pluralist, inclusive movements. But it is the Berlin-Müller brand of populism that is currently surging in Ankara, Budapest, and Washington, threatening individual liberty, free markets, the rule of law, constitutionalism, the free press, and liberal democracy.
The policies promoted by those governments vary, but they reject two related ideas. One is pluralism, the idea that people are variegated, with different interests and values that need to be negotiated through democratic political processes. The other is liberalism—not in the narrow American sense of the political center-left, but the broader belief that individuals have rights and the state’s power should be limited to protect those rights.
Populists can be “of the left,” but they need not be motivated by Marxian ideas of class conflict or central planning. They can be “of the right,” but they are distinctly different from old-school reactionaries who yearn for a lost world of ordered hierarchies; if anything, they tend to dissolve old-fashioned classes and social orders into the undifferentiated mass of The People. Or they can reject the left/right spectrum altogether. As the French populist leader Marine Le Pen put it in 2015, “Now the split isn’t between the left and the right but between the globalists and the patriots.”
Populists frequently believe that the true will of the authentic people is focused in one leader. Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s late populist president, put it bluntly: “Chávez is no longer me! Chávez is a people! Chávez—we are millions. You are also Chávez! Venezuelan woman, you are also Chávez! Young Venezuelan, you are Chávez! Venezuelan child, you are Chávez! Venezuelan soldier, you are Chávez! Fisherman, farmer, peasant, merchant! Because Chávez is not me. Chávez is a people!” Turkey’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, once responded to a lone opposition voice by thundering, “We are the people! Who are you?” And then there’s Donald Trump’s less dramatic declaration that “I am your voice!”
Populists may seek power by democratic means, but that does not make them liberal. They often campaign against limits on the power of the people, especially independent judiciaries and other checks on the executive. Populists can be socialist or nationalist or both, they can be “pro-business” (crony capitalist) or “pro-labor” (crony unionist), but they share the idea that society must be put under some sort of control, exercised by a leader or a party that represents the true people and is fighting against their enemies.
The Children of Carl Schmitt
Antagonism, thus, is foundational to the populist mentality. And the central theorist of antagonism was Carl Schmitt, a German philosopher of the Nazi era—he is sometimes called the “crown jurist of the Third Reich”—who has had a strong influence on both the hard left and the hard right.
In The Concept of the Political (1932), a relentless critique of classical liberalism and constitutional democracy, Schmitt sought to displace the ideal of voluntary cooperation with the idea of conflict. The “specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced,” Schmitt wrote, “is that between friend and enemy.” The contemporary theorists who have taken this notion up include the left-wing populist Chantal Mouffe and her husband, Ernesto Laclau, author of On Populist Reason (2005).
Laclau, whose ideas have influenced populist governments in Greece and Argentina and populist opposition movements across Latin America and Europe, applies Schmittian thinking directly. Indeed, he goes further than Schmitt, treating enmity per se as the very principle of power. Where Schmitt, a virulent anti-Semite, identified the Jews as the perpetual enemy, Laclau’s hostility can be directed against anyone.
For Laclau, a populist movement is a collection of otherwise unrelated unmet “demands” aggregated by manipulative populist leaders. The demands are all different, but they are unified in a movement that constitutes “the people.” The designation of “the enemy of the people” is a strategic matter, a means of assembling a coalition powerful enough to be united under a leader for the purpose of seizing state power.
The final and most toxic ingredient is “affective investment”—that is, emotional engagement. What unites the otherwise disparate and inchoate demands, Laclau says, is the group’s adoration of the leader and hatred of the enemy.
Íñigo Errejón, a leader of the leftist Podemos populist party in Spain and an enthusiastic defender of Venezuela’s regime, builds his populism explicitly on the idea that collectivities are created by positing an enemy against which the people must struggle. In his case, the enemy is “the casta, the privileged.” When asked who the casta are, Errejón responded: “The term’s mobilizing power comes precisely from its lack of definition. It’s like asking: Who’s the oligarchy? Who’s the people? They are statistically undefinable. I think these are the poles with greatest performative capacity.”
Mouffe described the choice of target as essential to building the “sort of people we want to build.”
It’s Not the Economy, Stupid
The old standby explanation of populism is that it is a predictable response to economic oppression. Thus, the socialist pundit John Judis argues in 2016’s The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics that populism rose in response to “the skewed distribution of jobs and income that neoliberal economics had created over the prior decades.”
Yet populists have surged in popularity or come to power in countries with very dissimilar economic conditions, including some with low unemployment and relatively high economic growth. Nor is the rise of populism a matter of age, with older people supporting right-wing nationalist populists and younger people supporting liberal cosmopolitanism: Plenty of young people have been voting for populist parties and candidates. Nor is the populist vote explained robustly by income levels.
The British political scientists Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin point out in their 2018 book National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy (Pelican) that a common driver in “national populism” is not falling wages but “relative deprivation—a sense that the wider group, whether white Americans or native Brits, is being left behind relative to others in society, while culturally liberal politicians, media and celebrities devote far more attention and status to immigrants, ethnic minorities and other newcomers.” Rapid change in the status of groups, notably through immigration, causes many people to experience relative downward mobility and to feel that the status of their group is threatened. When Britain voted to withdraw from the European Union, Eatwell and Goodwin write, polling data showed Remainers “talking endlessly about economic risks while Leavers were chiefly concerned about perceived threats to their identity and national groups.” (Brexit is a complex question, of course, and some classical liberals supported it because they feared an unaccountable E.U. bureaucracy. But the movement for Brexit was driven far more by populist concerns than by liberal ones.)
In the U.S., a deciding factor in Trump’s victory was the estimated 9 percent of voters who cast ballots for Obama in 2012 and then switched to Trump, according to survey data analyzed by George Washington University political scientist John Sides. Among white Obama voters who had not been to college, the share who later voted for Trump was a whopping 22 percent. As that past support for Obama suggests, their votes for Trump can’t be reduced to a simple story of racial backlash. Nor was it a simple matter of economics: For the most part, those voters’ incomes and living standards are higher than those of their parents.
But a common motivation for their support for Trump seems to be insecurity about their social status. A 2016 Brookings Institution survey showed that 66 percent of non-college-schooled American whites “agree that discrimination against whites is as big a problem today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.” Anxiety about status—in this case a perception of an inversion of the status quo—seems to be a major factor, certainly much bigger than ideological racism. As political scientist Karen Stenner argued based on extensive data in her 2005 book The Authoritarian Dynamic, threats to “collective rather than individual conditions” trigger authoritarian “groupiness,” i.e., populism.
Here’s where classical liberals need to do some serious thinking. A mainstay of arguments for free markets is that when people’s incomes rise at different rates, the important thing is that they’re all rising. Even most left-wing egalitarians accept some inequality, as long as it’s necessary for the poor to become less poor. The philosopher John Rawls argued in A Theory of Justice, for instance, that inequalities can be just if they are to the “greatest benefit of the least advantaged,” because then, even the least well off could not complain. But human beings are concerned about more than how well they’re doing relative to how well they did in the past. They also care about how well they’re doing compared to others. They care about hierarchies and social status.
Relative status is quite different from absolute well-being. Libertarians have for many years celebrated the rise in status of women, racial minorities, immigrants, openly gay people, and others who had for very long periods of time suffered from low social status. Well, when it comes to relative social status, if some rose, others had to fall. And who perceived themselves as falling? White men without college degrees.
It isn’t just onetime outsiders rising in comparative status. As Charles Murray lays out in his 2012 book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, a decline in our collective emphasis on certain traditional virtues—hard work, marriage, and the like—has opened a gulf between college-schooled elites and high-schooled nonelites. The resentment felt by one side of the divide is, unfortunately, often matched by the arrogance and condescension shown by the other, which merely accentuates the resentment.
Similar divisions are happening in other countries as well, and they seem to be a major driver of populist sentiment. Pew Research Center surveys conducted in 2017 in 15 countries identified ethnocentrism and perceptions of national decline as characteristic of populist voters. In Germany, for example, 44 percent of the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party’s supporters say that life is worse than it was 50 years ago for people like them, compared to only 16 percent of other Germans. While data vary across countries and, as Berlin pointed out in 1967, no one factor can explain all populist movements, such fears of national decline and group status are common, especially in Europe and the U.S. The most important driver in Europe and the U.S. seems to be immigration and what Eatwell and Goodwin in National Populism call “hyper ethnic change”—that is, rapid change in the ethnic mix of a society, with multiple ethnicities joining the social order. (Some Americans have experienced feelings of dislocation and threat to their place in society upon seeing that their old Piggly Wiggly store has been replaced by a mercado with Mexican flags. It’s not the experience of ethnic pluralism that seems to be the problem but the fear that other ethnicities will eventually displace them.)
The percentage of U.S. residents who were foreign-born reached 13.7 percent in 2017, the highest percentage since 1910, when it was 14.7 percent. Moreover, since the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, which abolished national quotas and favored family reunions, higher percentages of immigrants have been coming from Asia, Africa, Central America, and the Middle East, accentuating ethnic differences with the native-born population.
The Alternative for Germany, which started as a movement against the euro and has morphed into a populist anti-immigrant party, has drawn increasing support from less-schooled voters from the former states of East Germany. Such voters perceive their status as having fallen in recent decades, and they fear immigration far more than do more-schooled voters and those in the Western part of the country, which has seen far more immigration. In fact, the AfD support was strongest in those regions of the East that had seen the least population growth due to migration; people in those places feel that they are being left behind, and they blame immigrants, whom they see more on television than in their neighborhoods.
Similar analyses can be applied to Britain, France, Sweden, and other democracies that have seen surges of populism.
Hyper ethnic change is profoundly unsettling to many people, and it is helping to drive populist political responses. One can dismiss such reactions as irrational or small-minded, but many people feel them nonetheless. Moreover, many people are not satisfied with improvements in their conditions if they perceive others—especially outsiders—as doing even better. Envy and resentment have long been drivers of anti-libertarian movements, and they seem to be back in a big way. The problem is exacerbated by the increase of welfare-state transfer payments and benefits, which outsiders are believed to exploit or threaten.
I fear that we may be entering an age of authoritarian “groupiness” and that the consequences will be terrible for freedom and prosperity. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the rise of far-right and far-left authoritarian populist movements today is more than a little reminiscent of Europe in the 1930s.
The Libertarian Response
To take on such populist ideas, we must start by understanding them. If fear regarding immigration trends is driving a larger fear of liberal democratic capitalism, one response is to ensure that immigration procedures are (accurately) perceived as orderly rather than as invasive. Attitudes toward both the Syrian refugees fleeing a catastrophic war and the current situation on the United States’ southern border have arguably been shaped for the worse by a failure to fashion more systematic and orderly solutions, entailing a right to work legally, for example.
The reason so many people choose to cross into the U.S. illegally, and in risky ways, is that it’s extraordinarily difficult to obtain a visa at an American consulate and travel by bus or car through a legal port of entry. Those who enter without permission or overstay their visas are less likely to go home, as was previously common, when they are not sure they’ll be able to return to work again in the future. A functioning and efficient guest worker program—one that allows people to easily take temporary jobs in the United States and then return home to their families with the wealth they’ve rightfully acquired—could help calm the worries of American citizens who balk at the idea that throngs of foreigners are forcing their way across the border.
But is there anything libertarians, the vast majority of whom remain outside the halls of power where immigration policy is set, can do?
One idea is to push back against the idea that trade is a zero-sum game. Your benefit need not come at my expense. What is good for Germany can be good for France, if Germans and Frenchmen trade goods and services rather than bullets and bombs. Immigrants who arrive to work enrich the people among whom they work. Negative-sum games can be transformed into positive-sum games by establishing the right institutions: property, contract, and voluntary trade. Trade has improved the well-being of Americans, of Germans, of Kenyans, of everyone.
Libertarians also need to take a hard look at our own rhetoric. Trying to divide humanity into taxpayers and tax eaters, as if there were some easy way in a modern society to distinguish the two groups neatly and unambiguously, feeds into populist hatred and rage. By all means cut subsidies, but demonizing the recipients as enemies of the people, as mere parasites, contributes to a climate of resentment, hatred, revenge, and conflict that undermines the framework for peaceful, voluntary cooperation on which liberty rests.
Thinking about the world in terms of friends vs. enemies channels energy into collectivism and demagoguery. To stop authoritarian populism, it’s important not to promote the mentality of enmity that enables it.
Tom G. Palmer is a senior fellow of the Cato Institute and the vice president for International Programs of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation.
At least superficially, conservative political and religious ideology is thought to be associated with rule following and morality; the opposite was found at least in relation to bullying behavior
The curious link between politics, religion, and bullying behavior. Kilian James Garvey. Human Behavior and Evolution Society 31st annual meeting. Boston 2019. http://tiny.cc/aa1w6y
Abstract: In the current stratified political and religious era, many accusations of who is more likely to engage in bullying behavior have been tossed about. Conservatives and religious populations claim that liberals and secular populations engage in more, and vice versa. In this study, demographic data from all 50 US states were analyzed to find relationships among ideology and bullying behavior. The predictor variables of poverty, church attendance, and political ideology were entered into a linear regression model with bullying behavior as the outcome variable. The results of the model indicated that while all predictors were associated with bullying behavior, only state wide conservative political ideology could account for state variation (R2 =.406, F(1,46)=28.67, p<.001). At least superficially, conservative political and religious ideology is thought to be associated with rule following and morality. However, in this analysis of the data, quite the opposite was found at least in relation to bullying behavior. It will be suggested that in-group preferences of conservative political and religious populations may react to the increasing diversity of the US population with bullying behavior.
Abstract: In the current stratified political and religious era, many accusations of who is more likely to engage in bullying behavior have been tossed about. Conservatives and religious populations claim that liberals and secular populations engage in more, and vice versa. In this study, demographic data from all 50 US states were analyzed to find relationships among ideology and bullying behavior. The predictor variables of poverty, church attendance, and political ideology were entered into a linear regression model with bullying behavior as the outcome variable. The results of the model indicated that while all predictors were associated with bullying behavior, only state wide conservative political ideology could account for state variation (R2 =.406, F(1,46)=28.67, p<.001). At least superficially, conservative political and religious ideology is thought to be associated with rule following and morality. However, in this analysis of the data, quite the opposite was found at least in relation to bullying behavior. It will be suggested that in-group preferences of conservative political and religious populations may react to the increasing diversity of the US population with bullying behavior.
Wednesday, July 24, 2019
Women are less competitive than men in most contexts; men are more likely to believe that competition improves performance, builds character, and leads to creative problem-solving
Lay beliefs about competition: Scale development and gender differences. Selin Kesebir, Sun Young Lee, Andrew J. Elliot, Madan M. Pillutla. Motivation and Emotion, July 24 2019. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11031-019-09779-5
Abstract: Women are less competitive than men in most contexts studied. This difference has been linked to the gender gap in socio-economic outcomes. To examine whether this gender difference is linked to differential beliefs about competition, we developed a scale measuring lay beliefs about competition and tested whether these beliefs account for gender differences in competitive attitudes and behaviors. A mini meta-analysis (N = 2331) of responses to this scale shows that men attribute more positive outcomes to competition than women. In particular, men are more likely to believe that competition improves performance, builds character, and leads to creative problem-solving. In contrast, the gender differences are smaller, less robust, and inconsistent for the different negative outcomes attributed to competition, such as encouraging unethical behavior, hurting self-esteem, and damaging relationships. We also show in two studies that only positive lay beliefs about competition predict competitive attitudes and behaviors, and account for (some of) the gender difference in competitiveness. We discuss possible reasons that women and men hold different beliefs about competition and the implications of these differences for the optimal design of social and organizational structures.
Keywords: Competitiveness Gender Lay theories Gender gap
Abstract: Women are less competitive than men in most contexts studied. This difference has been linked to the gender gap in socio-economic outcomes. To examine whether this gender difference is linked to differential beliefs about competition, we developed a scale measuring lay beliefs about competition and tested whether these beliefs account for gender differences in competitive attitudes and behaviors. A mini meta-analysis (N = 2331) of responses to this scale shows that men attribute more positive outcomes to competition than women. In particular, men are more likely to believe that competition improves performance, builds character, and leads to creative problem-solving. In contrast, the gender differences are smaller, less robust, and inconsistent for the different negative outcomes attributed to competition, such as encouraging unethical behavior, hurting self-esteem, and damaging relationships. We also show in two studies that only positive lay beliefs about competition predict competitive attitudes and behaviors, and account for (some of) the gender difference in competitiveness. We discuss possible reasons that women and men hold different beliefs about competition and the implications of these differences for the optimal design of social and organizational structures.
Keywords: Competitiveness Gender Lay theories Gender gap
HAHAHAHAHA: Apparently genuine cases of ghost possession (in this case, patient's criminal behavior was due to episodic ghost possession) can be exorcism-resistant; clopenthixol may relieve symptoms
Exorcism-resistant Ghost Possession Treated with Clopenthixol. Anthony S. Hale and Narsimha R. Pinninti. The British Journal of Psychiatry, Volume 165, Issue 3. September 1994, pp. 386-388. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.165.3.386
Abstract
Background: An Indian man now in Britain explained his criminal behaviour as episodic ghost possession. Traditional exorcisms failed to help.
Method: ‘Western’ diagnosis of dissociative state or paranoid schizophrenia was made. Treatment commenced using trifluoperazine and clopenthixol.
Results: The patient underwent remission during neuroleptic treatment, despite previous evidence of genuine possession.
Conclusions: Many cultures give rise to apparently genuine cases of ghost possession. Neuroleptics may relieve symptoms of exorcism-resistant possession.
---
A 22-year-old unemployed Hindu Indian male, in Britain with his family since the age of six, was interviewed while remanded for theft of a taxi, robbery, and kidnap of the driver. [...]
His parents initially would not listen, fearing stigma, but eventually consulted local religious leaders. They sent him to holy places in India where he was exorcised, by a Hindu priest and later a Moslem peer. Impatient with the failure, which seemed to increase the ghost's anger, he unsuccessfully consulted Christian priests. During the periodof remand, the patient displayed periods of nocturnal anxiety, withdrawal, depersonalisation and apparent response to hallucinations. Routine physical examination and blood chemistry, haematology and endocrinology were normal. The patient was apyretic, although complained of being hot. Blood and urine screens for illicit drugs were negative. EEG and computerised tomography scans were normal. Family relationships seemed comfortable and supportive. We were disturbed by a telephone call from the prison chaplain who described seeing the ghost possess the patient in prison, seeing a descending cloud and an impression of a face alarmingly like a description of the dead woman given to us by the patient, of which the chaplain denied prior knowledge. Similar reports came from frightened cellmates. He and our hospital chaplain concurred on genuine possession. This is an acceptable belief within the context of pastoral counselling (Isaacs, 1987). Western medical belief systems led us to a differential diagnosis of dissociative state or paranoid schizophrenia. However, we were conscious that the beliefs of at least four priests from three different religions cast doubt on the delusional nature of the phenomena. Exorcism having failed, we prescribed trifluoperazine (4mg daily) producing apparent remission. Following return to remand prison, he was commenced on a depot neuroleptic, zuclopenthixol decanoate, remaining in remission 12 weeks later following hospital transfer.
Abstract
Background: An Indian man now in Britain explained his criminal behaviour as episodic ghost possession. Traditional exorcisms failed to help.
Method: ‘Western’ diagnosis of dissociative state or paranoid schizophrenia was made. Treatment commenced using trifluoperazine and clopenthixol.
Results: The patient underwent remission during neuroleptic treatment, despite previous evidence of genuine possession.
Conclusions: Many cultures give rise to apparently genuine cases of ghost possession. Neuroleptics may relieve symptoms of exorcism-resistant possession.
---
A 22-year-old unemployed Hindu Indian male, in Britain with his family since the age of six, was interviewed while remanded for theft of a taxi, robbery, and kidnap of the driver. [...]
His parents initially would not listen, fearing stigma, but eventually consulted local religious leaders. They sent him to holy places in India where he was exorcised, by a Hindu priest and later a Moslem peer. Impatient with the failure, which seemed to increase the ghost's anger, he unsuccessfully consulted Christian priests. During the periodof remand, the patient displayed periods of nocturnal anxiety, withdrawal, depersonalisation and apparent response to hallucinations. Routine physical examination and blood chemistry, haematology and endocrinology were normal. The patient was apyretic, although complained of being hot. Blood and urine screens for illicit drugs were negative. EEG and computerised tomography scans were normal. Family relationships seemed comfortable and supportive. We were disturbed by a telephone call from the prison chaplain who described seeing the ghost possess the patient in prison, seeing a descending cloud and an impression of a face alarmingly like a description of the dead woman given to us by the patient, of which the chaplain denied prior knowledge. Similar reports came from frightened cellmates. He and our hospital chaplain concurred on genuine possession. This is an acceptable belief within the context of pastoral counselling (Isaacs, 1987). Western medical belief systems led us to a differential diagnosis of dissociative state or paranoid schizophrenia. However, we were conscious that the beliefs of at least four priests from three different religions cast doubt on the delusional nature of the phenomena. Exorcism having failed, we prescribed trifluoperazine (4mg daily) producing apparent remission. Following return to remand prison, he was commenced on a depot neuroleptic, zuclopenthixol decanoate, remaining in remission 12 weeks later following hospital transfer.
Let's stop the unfairness of having the same rights! 18–27yr olds: 6x voting weight; 68+yr olds: 1x voting weight
Age-Weighted Voting. William MacAskill. Jul 12 2019. https://medium.com/@william.macaskill/age-weighted-voting-8651b2a353cc. Crossposted from the Effective Altruism Forum.
If we’re trying to positively influence the long-run future, we immediately run into the problem that predicting the future is hard, and our best-guess plans today might turn out to be irrelevant or even harmful depending on how things turn out in the future. The natural response to this issue is to instead try to change incentives — in particular, political incentives — such that people are encouraged take actions that are better from the perspective of the long-run future. As a comparison: the best action for feminist men in the 19th century wasn’t to figure out how best to help women directly (they probably would have failed dismally, especially if they were aiming at long-term benefits to women); it was to campaign to give women the vote, so that women could represent their own interests.
The trouble with the analogous reasoning when if comes to future people is that, being not-yet-existent, future people can’t represent their own interests. So ‘give future people the vote’ isn’t a viable option.
But there’s an alternative path. Generations overlap, and so by doing more to empower younger people today, we give somewhat more weight to the interests of future people compared to the interests of present people. This could be significant. Currently, the median voter is 47.5 years old in the USA; the average age of senators in the USA is 61.8 years. With an aging population, these numbers are very likely to get higher over time: in developed countries, the median age is project to increase by 3 to 7 years by 2050 (and by as much as 15 years in South Korea). We live in something close to a gerontocracy, and if voters and politicians are acting in their self-interest, we should expect that politics as a whole has a shorter time horizon than if younger people were more empowered.
So one way of extending political time horizons and increasing is to age-weight votes. The idea is that younger people would get more heavily weighted votes than older people, very roughly in proportion with life expectancy. A natural first pass system (though I think it could be improved upon) would be:
18–27yr olds: 6x voting weight
28–37yr olds: 5x voting weight
38–47yr olds: 4x voting weight
48–57yr olds: 3x voting weight
58–67yr olds: 2x voting weight
68+yr olds: 1x voting weight
Later edit: Note that, even with such heavy weights as these, the (effective) median voter age (in the US) would go from 55 to 40. (H/T Zach Groff for these numbers). Assuming that the median voter theorem approximately captures political dynamics of voting, weighting by (approximate) life-expectancy would therefore lengthen political horizons somewhat, but wouldn’t result in young people having all the power.
As well as the potential benefits from extending political time horizons, I think this proposal looks promising on some other dimensions too:
It would be fair. In this scenario, all citizens get equal voting weight, it’s just that this voting power is unequally distributed throughout someone’s life.
In fact, there are arguments that it would be fairer than the current system. First, it’s fairer insofar as there’s a closer association between who has power over which policies are enacted and who has to bear the benefits and costs of those policies. It avoids scenarios where some people can vote for short-termist policies that benefit them even though they don’t have to live with the long-run consequences. Second, the current system gives less voting power to people who have the misfortune of dying young. The age-weighted system mitigates this to an extent. Finally, if it does succeed in encouraging policies with better long-term consequences, it would be fairer to future generations, who are currently completely disenfranchised; though these generations still wouldn’t be able to represent themselves, they would at least be benefitted to a greater degree.
It would mitigate intertemporal inconsistency. In the UK’s European Union membership referendum, the voting pattern was heavily correlated with age: older people were much more likely to vote to leave the EU than younger people. My current (poorly informed) understanding is that, in terms of the correlation between age and conservatism, both aging itself and cohort effects play a role. If the latter is significant in this case, this suggests that, in twenty years’ time, most of Britain’s electorate will be in favour of being part of the EU. If so, then a huge amount of time and effort will have been wasted in the transition costs of leaving and rejoining.
There are, however, a number of open questions regarding age-weighting of voting, including:
Do younger people actually have more future-oriented views?
Does extending political horizons by 20 years provide benefits from the perspective of much longer timescales?
Are younger people less well-informed, and so apt to make worse decisions?
Is this just a way of pushing particular (left-wing) political views?
What would actually happen if this were put in place, and how good or bad would those effects be?
What’s the best mechanism for implementing age-weighting voting?
What would be the best plan for making age-weighting voting happen in the real world?
Some brief notes on these:
Age and future-orientation: One could argue that older people are more likely to consider the long run. They have less at stake in terms of personal interest, so therefore might weigh altruistic concerns comparatively more highly than self-interested concerns. (Imagine, at the limit, someone who was voting on their deathbed. They would only have moral concerns to guide their decision. Thanks to Christian Tarsney for this point). And, in general, voting behaviour isn’t well-explained by the ‘self-interested voter’ model. However, empirically there’s evidence that generations do tend to vote in their self-interest when it comes to issues that have different costs and benefits across time. Here’s Gabriel Ahlfeldt summing up some results from a recent paper:
“[O]lder voters are less likely to support measures that protect the environment, promote sustainable use of energy or improve transport. Older voters are also less likely to support expenditures on education or welfare policies, such as unemployment benefits, but they are more likely to support expenditures on health systems. The reasons for these tendencies can be different in every category. But it is difficult to find a singular explanation other than generational self-interest, which would explain why older voters tend to be generally less supportive of expenditures that benefit other generations and projects that have positive expected effects in the long run, but costs in the short run. It fits the bill that where it is harder to think of generational-specific interests such as on questions related to animal protection, women’s rights or urban development, there is also no evidence of a generation gap.”
(Thee authors have a follow-up article here.) However, more work on this seems crucial.
Age-weighted voting and the very long term. It’s hard to know to what extent extending political time horizons by a decade or two provides benefits for the very long term. My initial assumption would be that extending political horizons is somewhat beneficial for very long-term outcomes, though only weakly so. When I think through particular issues — in particular worries about risks from technologies that will only be developed in the coming decades, like advanced AI and advanced synthetic biology — politics having a longer time horizon tends to look pretty good. There is enormous willingness-to-pay to avoid existential catastrophes (over a trillion dollars to mitigate 0.1 percentage points of risk, even just looking at US citizens’ willingness to reduce chance of their own deaths [1]), so if we think technological risks are currently neglected, we need some debunking explanation of why this is so, and myopic political decision-making seems plausible. But more work on this seems crucial, too.
Age and wisdom: I suspect that this isn’t a major consideration in the choice between these voting systems: if we wanted a more epistocratic system, we would move quite far away from either of the current system or the age-weighting system.
But, if we are going this route, there are at least some reasons for thinking that younger voters would make better decisions. Education levels are rising, so younger people are on average better educated; they also have a more recent education, so are therefore more likely to be more up-to-date on contemporary knowledge. The Flynn effect means that IQ scores are rising, and this may be due in part to genuine increases in intelligence (though the Flynn effect has stalled in the US in recent years). As a counterargument, crystallised intelligence increases with age and, though fluid intelligence decreases with age, it seems to me that crystallised intelligence is more important than fluid intelligence for informed voting.
(Later Edit). Again, we should bear in mind that, even with the approximate life-expectancy weighting, the effective median voter age would move from 55 to 40. So, if we are thinking through epistocratic considerations, the key issue is whether 40 year olds make better decisions than 55 year olds, rather than whether 60 year olds make better decisions than 20 year olds.
Pushing particular political views: One might worry that this proposal would have major partisan consequences — if so, then proponents of the idea might be biased in favour of it if it is a way of sneaking in their favoured political views, and it would decrease political feasibility. And certainly, in the US at the moment, age-weighting voting would cause a one-time leftward swing. But this isn’t true across all generations. From a Pew Research report:
“As the Pew Research Center has often noted, it is not always the case that younger generations are more Democratic. Two decades ago, the youngest adults — Generation X — were the most Republican age cohort on balance, while the oldest — the Greatest Generation– were the most Democratic. In 1994, 47% of Gen Xers (then ages 18–29) identified with or leaned toward the Republican Party, while 42% identified as Democrats or leaned Democratic. And members of the Greatest Generation (then ages 67–81) — favored the Democratic Party over the GOP (49% to 42%)”
Other age-related positions can be surprising. Though younger people in the UK referendum were much more likely to vote in favour of remaining in the EU, younger people in the Scottish independence referendum were more likely to vote in favour of Scottish independence.
Political feasibility: It seems hard to believe that some voters would voluntarily give up power. But it’s happened before via suffrage movements. And there are ways we could taper in the voting weights such that no-one ever has less voting power than they would have had otherwise. Alternatively, we could delay the implementation of the age-weighting, exploiting time biases: if age-weighting only begins in twenty years’ time, then the older generation have little to lose by voting in its favour.
Thanks to Aron Vallinder, Zach Groff, Ben Grodeck, the other Global Priorities Fellows and staff at the Global Priorities Institute for helpful discussion of this idea.
[1] The value of a statistical life in the US is in the range of $3-$9 million dollars. Using the low estimate, among 350 million citizens, the US as a whole should be willing to spend over $1 trillion to mitigate an extinction risk by 0.1 percentage points.
If we’re trying to positively influence the long-run future, we immediately run into the problem that predicting the future is hard, and our best-guess plans today might turn out to be irrelevant or even harmful depending on how things turn out in the future. The natural response to this issue is to instead try to change incentives — in particular, political incentives — such that people are encouraged take actions that are better from the perspective of the long-run future. As a comparison: the best action for feminist men in the 19th century wasn’t to figure out how best to help women directly (they probably would have failed dismally, especially if they were aiming at long-term benefits to women); it was to campaign to give women the vote, so that women could represent their own interests.
The trouble with the analogous reasoning when if comes to future people is that, being not-yet-existent, future people can’t represent their own interests. So ‘give future people the vote’ isn’t a viable option.
But there’s an alternative path. Generations overlap, and so by doing more to empower younger people today, we give somewhat more weight to the interests of future people compared to the interests of present people. This could be significant. Currently, the median voter is 47.5 years old in the USA; the average age of senators in the USA is 61.8 years. With an aging population, these numbers are very likely to get higher over time: in developed countries, the median age is project to increase by 3 to 7 years by 2050 (and by as much as 15 years in South Korea). We live in something close to a gerontocracy, and if voters and politicians are acting in their self-interest, we should expect that politics as a whole has a shorter time horizon than if younger people were more empowered.
So one way of extending political time horizons and increasing is to age-weight votes. The idea is that younger people would get more heavily weighted votes than older people, very roughly in proportion with life expectancy. A natural first pass system (though I think it could be improved upon) would be:
18–27yr olds: 6x voting weight
28–37yr olds: 5x voting weight
38–47yr olds: 4x voting weight
48–57yr olds: 3x voting weight
58–67yr olds: 2x voting weight
68+yr olds: 1x voting weight
Later edit: Note that, even with such heavy weights as these, the (effective) median voter age (in the US) would go from 55 to 40. (H/T Zach Groff for these numbers). Assuming that the median voter theorem approximately captures political dynamics of voting, weighting by (approximate) life-expectancy would therefore lengthen political horizons somewhat, but wouldn’t result in young people having all the power.
As well as the potential benefits from extending political time horizons, I think this proposal looks promising on some other dimensions too:
It would be fair. In this scenario, all citizens get equal voting weight, it’s just that this voting power is unequally distributed throughout someone’s life.
In fact, there are arguments that it would be fairer than the current system. First, it’s fairer insofar as there’s a closer association between who has power over which policies are enacted and who has to bear the benefits and costs of those policies. It avoids scenarios where some people can vote for short-termist policies that benefit them even though they don’t have to live with the long-run consequences. Second, the current system gives less voting power to people who have the misfortune of dying young. The age-weighted system mitigates this to an extent. Finally, if it does succeed in encouraging policies with better long-term consequences, it would be fairer to future generations, who are currently completely disenfranchised; though these generations still wouldn’t be able to represent themselves, they would at least be benefitted to a greater degree.
It would mitigate intertemporal inconsistency. In the UK’s European Union membership referendum, the voting pattern was heavily correlated with age: older people were much more likely to vote to leave the EU than younger people. My current (poorly informed) understanding is that, in terms of the correlation between age and conservatism, both aging itself and cohort effects play a role. If the latter is significant in this case, this suggests that, in twenty years’ time, most of Britain’s electorate will be in favour of being part of the EU. If so, then a huge amount of time and effort will have been wasted in the transition costs of leaving and rejoining.
There are, however, a number of open questions regarding age-weighting of voting, including:
Do younger people actually have more future-oriented views?
Does extending political horizons by 20 years provide benefits from the perspective of much longer timescales?
Are younger people less well-informed, and so apt to make worse decisions?
Is this just a way of pushing particular (left-wing) political views?
What would actually happen if this were put in place, and how good or bad would those effects be?
What’s the best mechanism for implementing age-weighting voting?
What would be the best plan for making age-weighting voting happen in the real world?
Some brief notes on these:
Age and future-orientation: One could argue that older people are more likely to consider the long run. They have less at stake in terms of personal interest, so therefore might weigh altruistic concerns comparatively more highly than self-interested concerns. (Imagine, at the limit, someone who was voting on their deathbed. They would only have moral concerns to guide their decision. Thanks to Christian Tarsney for this point). And, in general, voting behaviour isn’t well-explained by the ‘self-interested voter’ model. However, empirically there’s evidence that generations do tend to vote in their self-interest when it comes to issues that have different costs and benefits across time. Here’s Gabriel Ahlfeldt summing up some results from a recent paper:
“[O]lder voters are less likely to support measures that protect the environment, promote sustainable use of energy or improve transport. Older voters are also less likely to support expenditures on education or welfare policies, such as unemployment benefits, but they are more likely to support expenditures on health systems. The reasons for these tendencies can be different in every category. But it is difficult to find a singular explanation other than generational self-interest, which would explain why older voters tend to be generally less supportive of expenditures that benefit other generations and projects that have positive expected effects in the long run, but costs in the short run. It fits the bill that where it is harder to think of generational-specific interests such as on questions related to animal protection, women’s rights or urban development, there is also no evidence of a generation gap.”
(Thee authors have a follow-up article here.) However, more work on this seems crucial.
Age-weighted voting and the very long term. It’s hard to know to what extent extending political time horizons by a decade or two provides benefits for the very long term. My initial assumption would be that extending political horizons is somewhat beneficial for very long-term outcomes, though only weakly so. When I think through particular issues — in particular worries about risks from technologies that will only be developed in the coming decades, like advanced AI and advanced synthetic biology — politics having a longer time horizon tends to look pretty good. There is enormous willingness-to-pay to avoid existential catastrophes (over a trillion dollars to mitigate 0.1 percentage points of risk, even just looking at US citizens’ willingness to reduce chance of their own deaths [1]), so if we think technological risks are currently neglected, we need some debunking explanation of why this is so, and myopic political decision-making seems plausible. But more work on this seems crucial, too.
Age and wisdom: I suspect that this isn’t a major consideration in the choice between these voting systems: if we wanted a more epistocratic system, we would move quite far away from either of the current system or the age-weighting system.
But, if we are going this route, there are at least some reasons for thinking that younger voters would make better decisions. Education levels are rising, so younger people are on average better educated; they also have a more recent education, so are therefore more likely to be more up-to-date on contemporary knowledge. The Flynn effect means that IQ scores are rising, and this may be due in part to genuine increases in intelligence (though the Flynn effect has stalled in the US in recent years). As a counterargument, crystallised intelligence increases with age and, though fluid intelligence decreases with age, it seems to me that crystallised intelligence is more important than fluid intelligence for informed voting.
(Later Edit). Again, we should bear in mind that, even with the approximate life-expectancy weighting, the effective median voter age would move from 55 to 40. So, if we are thinking through epistocratic considerations, the key issue is whether 40 year olds make better decisions than 55 year olds, rather than whether 60 year olds make better decisions than 20 year olds.
Pushing particular political views: One might worry that this proposal would have major partisan consequences — if so, then proponents of the idea might be biased in favour of it if it is a way of sneaking in their favoured political views, and it would decrease political feasibility. And certainly, in the US at the moment, age-weighting voting would cause a one-time leftward swing. But this isn’t true across all generations. From a Pew Research report:
“As the Pew Research Center has often noted, it is not always the case that younger generations are more Democratic. Two decades ago, the youngest adults — Generation X — were the most Republican age cohort on balance, while the oldest — the Greatest Generation– were the most Democratic. In 1994, 47% of Gen Xers (then ages 18–29) identified with or leaned toward the Republican Party, while 42% identified as Democrats or leaned Democratic. And members of the Greatest Generation (then ages 67–81) — favored the Democratic Party over the GOP (49% to 42%)”
Other age-related positions can be surprising. Though younger people in the UK referendum were much more likely to vote in favour of remaining in the EU, younger people in the Scottish independence referendum were more likely to vote in favour of Scottish independence.
Political feasibility: It seems hard to believe that some voters would voluntarily give up power. But it’s happened before via suffrage movements. And there are ways we could taper in the voting weights such that no-one ever has less voting power than they would have had otherwise. Alternatively, we could delay the implementation of the age-weighting, exploiting time biases: if age-weighting only begins in twenty years’ time, then the older generation have little to lose by voting in its favour.
Thanks to Aron Vallinder, Zach Groff, Ben Grodeck, the other Global Priorities Fellows and staff at the Global Priorities Institute for helpful discussion of this idea.
[1] The value of a statistical life in the US is in the range of $3-$9 million dollars. Using the low estimate, among 350 million citizens, the US as a whole should be willing to spend over $1 trillion to mitigate an extinction risk by 0.1 percentage points.
Adults demonstrate aesthetic preferences for natural environments over urban ones; children aged 4–11 years do not show that preference for nature; there is a gradual development of that preference
The gradual development of the preference for natural environments. Kimberly L. Meidenbauer et al. Journal of Environmental Psychology, July 24 2019, 101328. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2019.101328
Highlights
• Children aged 4–11 years do not show the preference for nature found in adults.
• With age, children's preferences for urban over natural environments decrease.
• More nearby nature is associated with fewer attention problems in children.
• The observed attentional benefits are unrelated to the children's preferences.
• Children's preferences were not linked to their home, school or play environments.
Abstract: Adults demonstrate aesthetic preferences for natural environments over urban ones. This preference has influenced theories like Biophilia to explain why nature is beneficial. While both adults and children show cognitive and affective benefits after nature exposure, it is unknown whether children demonstrate nature preferences. In the current study, 4-to-11-year-old children and their parents rated their preferences for images of nature and urban scenes. Parents' preferences matched those of a normative adult sample. However, children demonstrated robust preferences for urban over natural environments, and those urban preferences significantly decreased with age. Nature exposure around the home and nature-related activities, as reported by parents, did not predict children's preferences. Children with more nearby nature, however, had lower reported inattentiveness, but interestingly, this was unrelated to children's preferences for nature. These results provide an important step into future research on the role of preference in how children and adults benefit from nature.
Keywords: Nature preferencesChild developmentNature exposureAttention restoration theoryBiophiliaAestheticsCognition
Highlights
• Children aged 4–11 years do not show the preference for nature found in adults.
• With age, children's preferences for urban over natural environments decrease.
• More nearby nature is associated with fewer attention problems in children.
• The observed attentional benefits are unrelated to the children's preferences.
• Children's preferences were not linked to their home, school or play environments.
Abstract: Adults demonstrate aesthetic preferences for natural environments over urban ones. This preference has influenced theories like Biophilia to explain why nature is beneficial. While both adults and children show cognitive and affective benefits after nature exposure, it is unknown whether children demonstrate nature preferences. In the current study, 4-to-11-year-old children and their parents rated their preferences for images of nature and urban scenes. Parents' preferences matched those of a normative adult sample. However, children demonstrated robust preferences for urban over natural environments, and those urban preferences significantly decreased with age. Nature exposure around the home and nature-related activities, as reported by parents, did not predict children's preferences. Children with more nearby nature, however, had lower reported inattentiveness, but interestingly, this was unrelated to children's preferences for nature. These results provide an important step into future research on the role of preference in how children and adults benefit from nature.
Keywords: Nature preferencesChild developmentNature exposureAttention restoration theoryBiophiliaAestheticsCognition
A Closer Look at China’s Supposed Misappropriation of U.S. Intellectual Property
A Closer Look at China’s Supposed Misappropriation of U.S. Intellectual Property. Ana Maria Santacreu and Makenzie Peake. St Louis Fed, 2019, No. 5, Posted 2019-02-08. https://doi.org/10.20955/es.2019.5
The ongoing trade conflict between the United States and China dominates today's news on international trade. Analysts cite China's misappropriation of foreign intellectual property as an important source of bilateral tension that has prompted the United States to impose tariffs on certain Chinese goods.1
Given the growing trade tensions between the United States and China, and the economic implications of tariff increases, it is important to analyze whether China has taken steps to improve its enforcement of intellectual property rights. One way to do so is to look at data on China's royalty payments to the United States.
People and firms pay royalties to use intellectual property, which can be covered under licensing agreements, trademarks, patents, and copyrights. Royalties are recorded as a trade in services in the international balance of payments. For instance, payments for the use of U.S. technology by a Chinese firm are recorded as an import of services by China and an export of services by the United States. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) provides bilateral data on trade in services at the industry level over time and includes data on charges for the use of foreign intellectual property.2
The data show that Chinese royalty payments to the world grew from $1.4 billion in 1999 to $27.2 billion in 2017. In 2016, China ranked fourth in royalty payments to the world, at just under $30 billion, right behind the United States at just over $40 billion. Both countries are listed behind Ireland (just under $80 billion) and the Netherlands (just under $50 billion) in the same year. Ireland and the Netherlands are special cases because low corporate taxes in these countries incentivize profit shifting by multinational corporations located in other countries. For instance, several American companies have opened affiliates in these countries to transfer their technology (i.e., patents) there. The affiliate pays the parent company royalties for the profits obtained using those technologies. These profits are not repatriated to the United States and therefore are taxed at the lower corporate tax rates of Ireland and the Netherlands, where the affiliates are domiciled.3
[two charts, sources are OECD and OECD + World Bank]
In Figure 1A, we look specifically at China's payments for the use of U.S. intellectual property. The payments grew significantly, from $755 million in 1999 to $8.3 billion in 2017—more than 11-fold. Even more interesting, as shown in Figure 1B, is that China's royalty payments to the United States (blue line) grew faster than China's GDP (red line).
These data may suggest improvement of China's enforcement of intellectual property rights. One cannot infer from the data, however, whether China is paying what it would be expected to pay for the use of U.S. intellectual property. The issue of China's potential misappropriation of U.S. intellectual property calls for further research.
Notes
1 Office of the United States Trade Representative. "USTR Finalizes Tariffs on $200 Billion of Chinese Imports in Response to China's Unfair Trade Practices." Press release, September 2018; https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/press-releases/2018/september/ustr-finalizes-tariffs-200.
2 OECD. Trade in Services (indicator). 2019; https://doi.org/10.1787/3796b5f0-en, accessed January 7, 2019.
3 Lardy, N.R. "China: Forced Technology Transfer and Theft?" Peterson Institute for International Economics, April 20, 2018.
© 2019, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect official positions of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis or the Federal Reserve System.
The ongoing trade conflict between the United States and China dominates today's news on international trade. Analysts cite China's misappropriation of foreign intellectual property as an important source of bilateral tension that has prompted the United States to impose tariffs on certain Chinese goods.1
Given the growing trade tensions between the United States and China, and the economic implications of tariff increases, it is important to analyze whether China has taken steps to improve its enforcement of intellectual property rights. One way to do so is to look at data on China's royalty payments to the United States.
People and firms pay royalties to use intellectual property, which can be covered under licensing agreements, trademarks, patents, and copyrights. Royalties are recorded as a trade in services in the international balance of payments. For instance, payments for the use of U.S. technology by a Chinese firm are recorded as an import of services by China and an export of services by the United States. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) provides bilateral data on trade in services at the industry level over time and includes data on charges for the use of foreign intellectual property.2
The data show that Chinese royalty payments to the world grew from $1.4 billion in 1999 to $27.2 billion in 2017. In 2016, China ranked fourth in royalty payments to the world, at just under $30 billion, right behind the United States at just over $40 billion. Both countries are listed behind Ireland (just under $80 billion) and the Netherlands (just under $50 billion) in the same year. Ireland and the Netherlands are special cases because low corporate taxes in these countries incentivize profit shifting by multinational corporations located in other countries. For instance, several American companies have opened affiliates in these countries to transfer their technology (i.e., patents) there. The affiliate pays the parent company royalties for the profits obtained using those technologies. These profits are not repatriated to the United States and therefore are taxed at the lower corporate tax rates of Ireland and the Netherlands, where the affiliates are domiciled.3
[two charts, sources are OECD and OECD + World Bank]
In Figure 1A, we look specifically at China's payments for the use of U.S. intellectual property. The payments grew significantly, from $755 million in 1999 to $8.3 billion in 2017—more than 11-fold. Even more interesting, as shown in Figure 1B, is that China's royalty payments to the United States (blue line) grew faster than China's GDP (red line).
These data may suggest improvement of China's enforcement of intellectual property rights. One cannot infer from the data, however, whether China is paying what it would be expected to pay for the use of U.S. intellectual property. The issue of China's potential misappropriation of U.S. intellectual property calls for further research.
Notes
1 Office of the United States Trade Representative. "USTR Finalizes Tariffs on $200 Billion of Chinese Imports in Response to China's Unfair Trade Practices." Press release, September 2018; https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/press-releases/2018/september/ustr-finalizes-tariffs-200.
2 OECD. Trade in Services (indicator). 2019; https://doi.org/10.1787/3796b5f0-en, accessed January 7, 2019.
3 Lardy, N.R. "China: Forced Technology Transfer and Theft?" Peterson Institute for International Economics, April 20, 2018.
© 2019, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect official positions of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis or the Federal Reserve System.
The peasants, the Guardian class, and trust in institutions and the elites
Notes from a nameless conference. Martin Gurri. July 23, 2019. https://thefifthwave.wordpress.com/2019/07/23/notes-from-a-nameless-conference/
Sometime this year, I found myself at a conference centered around the theme of “regaining trust.” For obvious reasons, I won’t name names, but it was a professional gathering of the old regime: the industrial elites. In their hundreds if not thousands, I was swarmed by people of good will who were also smart, articulate, and hyper-educated. They craved, sincerely, to help the disadvantaged and save the earth. The words “science” and “reason” were perpetually on their lips, as if they held the copyright for these terms – which, in a sense, they did. And if they were a bit defensive, a tad obtuse, their intentions were the purest I could imagine.
So why, by their own admission, do they no longer inspire trust?
I have met their kindred before, in other glittering places. They run the institutions that hold center stage in our society, but look on the world as if from a walled mountain fortress, where every loud noise from beyond is interpreted as risk and threat. They disagree about minutia, but mostly move in lockstep, like synchronized swimmers, with word and thought. They are earnest but extraordinarily narrow. In a typical complaint, one speaker blamed the public for hiding in an “information bubble” – [...]
The same unmodulated whine about present conditions circled around and around, without even the ambition to achieve wit, depth, or originality:
* The internet is the enemy: of rationality, of democracy, of truth. It must be regulated by enlightened minds.
* The public resembles an eight-year-old who is always fooled by tricks and lies. For its own protection, it must be constrained by a Guardian class.
* Populism is the spawn of lies. Even if it wins elections, it is never legitimate, and must be swept away by a higher authority.
[...]
None of this was up for discussion. None of it was uttered with the least semblance of self-awareness. In the same breath, a speaker called for the regulation of the web and the education of children in “tolerance.” If I had pointed out the contradiction, the speaker, I’m certain, would have denied it. Tolerance, for her, meant the obliteration of opinions she disliked.
In fact, each narrative loop I listed above ends with the elites happily in charge, and the obliteration of the wretched present. If we wish to understand why trust evaporated in the first place, consider the moral and political assumptions behind this rhetorical posture
***
The industrial elites have lost their way. In every major profession and institution, they once commanded vast, widely-admired projects that filled their lives with meaning and endowed the entire class with an unconquerable confidence. But the twentieth century couldn’t be preserved forever, like a bug in amber. The elites now face a radically transformed environment – and they are maladapted and demoralized. An inability to listen, an impulse to spew jargon in broadcast mode, a demand for social distance as the reward for professional success: such habits, which in the past placed them above and beyond the mob’s reach, now drag them down to contempt and mockery in the information sphere. Among the public, trust has curdled into loathing. The elites are horribly aware of their fall from grace – hence the conference – but being deaf to the public’s voice, they are clueless about how to respond.
To some extent, this is a family drama: [...]
The senior people, largely white and male, seemed to believe that, in punishment for the sins of their fathers, trust had fractured along identity lines. Women today were thought to trust only women, for example. [...]
For younger elites, trust involves a sort of cosplay of historical conflicts. They put on elaborate rhetorical superhero costumes, and fight mock-epic battles with Nazis, fascists, “patriarchs,” slave-owners, George III, and the like. Because it’s only a game, no one gets seriously hurt – but nothing ever gets settled, either. Eventually, the young cosplayers must put away their costumes, take one last sip of Kombucha, and set off, seething with repressed virtue, to make money in the world as it really is.
I was intrigued by the pathology of mutual dependence between these generational postures. It’s the way abusive relationships are supposed to work – although, in all honesty, I was at a loss to say who was the abuser and who the abused.
***
We are living through the early stages of a colossal transformation: from the industrial age to something that doesn’t yet have a name. Many periods of history have been constrained by structural necessity. This isn’t one of them. Rather than a forking path, we face possibilities that radiate in every direction, like spokes from a hub. Even the immediate future seems up for grabs. We could see the formation of a hyper-connected liberal democracy, or plunge into nihilism and chaos – or we could contemplate arrangements and relations that are, at present, unimaginable.
The future will be determined not by vast, impersonal forces but by an accumulation of individual choices. Ultimately, the elites must lead the way. Whether selected by the public or self-anointed and self-perpetuating, they hold in hand the institutional levers of change: that’s just how the world works in a complex civilization. We will not transcend our petty and immobile present with protests or referendums.
The dilemma is that this present is defined by a radical distrust of the institutions of industrial society, and of the elites that control them, and of their statements and descriptions of reality. The conference organizers got our predicament right. At every level of contemporary social and political life, we are stuck in the muck of a profound crisis of authority. The mass audience of the twentieth century has fractured like a fallen mirror. An angry and alienated public inhabits the broken shards – and nobody speaks for the whole. The elites who should take the first step into the unknown are paralyzed by doubt and fear. They utter the words science and reason like incantations, claim ownership to Platonic truth, and believe, with astonishing unanimity, that they have been overthrown by a tsunami of lies. One need only restore truth to its former throne of glory, with themselves as mediating lords, they imagine, and the masses, as in the golden past, will bend the knee of trust.
But the solid masses are now a fractured public. Truth, for mediated information, is a question of perspective. Today the political and media elites must deal with a huge number of competing perspectives: theirs is but one reedy voice in the uproar. It never occurs to them, as it never did to my conference-goers, that they would profit from understanding the splintered perspectives of the public: why, for example, a devout Christian with eyes wide open might vote for a man like Donald Trump. A canonical explanation for Trump already existed, involving the usual tropes – fake news, Facebook, Putin. Racism took care of the remainder.
The decisive endeavor of our moment – far surmounting, I believe, any specific policy call – is the re-establishment of trust in the institutions of representative democracy. Only after the system has been reformed and the public has been reconciled to it can we again talk about truth as a self-evident proposition. Until then, all we will have is perspectives – fragments of truth circling, randomly, the gravitational power of some opinion. Appealing to tribal identity only compounds the fragmentation. Fighting imaginary fascists and Nazis can be no more rewarding than hugging an imaginary friend. [...]
I left the conference uncertain about the prospects of the good people I had encountered there. They belonged to the class that should take all the forward places in the great migration away from this frozen hour, toward the new. Instead, they were transfixed with longing for a dead past. And the clock, for them, is ticking. [...]
Sometime this year, I found myself at a conference centered around the theme of “regaining trust.” For obvious reasons, I won’t name names, but it was a professional gathering of the old regime: the industrial elites. In their hundreds if not thousands, I was swarmed by people of good will who were also smart, articulate, and hyper-educated. They craved, sincerely, to help the disadvantaged and save the earth. The words “science” and “reason” were perpetually on their lips, as if they held the copyright for these terms – which, in a sense, they did. And if they were a bit defensive, a tad obtuse, their intentions were the purest I could imagine.
So why, by their own admission, do they no longer inspire trust?
I have met their kindred before, in other glittering places. They run the institutions that hold center stage in our society, but look on the world as if from a walled mountain fortress, where every loud noise from beyond is interpreted as risk and threat. They disagree about minutia, but mostly move in lockstep, like synchronized swimmers, with word and thought. They are earnest but extraordinarily narrow. In a typical complaint, one speaker blamed the public for hiding in an “information bubble” – [...]
The same unmodulated whine about present conditions circled around and around, without even the ambition to achieve wit, depth, or originality:
* The internet is the enemy: of rationality, of democracy, of truth. It must be regulated by enlightened minds.
* The public resembles an eight-year-old who is always fooled by tricks and lies. For its own protection, it must be constrained by a Guardian class.
* Populism is the spawn of lies. Even if it wins elections, it is never legitimate, and must be swept away by a higher authority.
[...]
None of this was up for discussion. None of it was uttered with the least semblance of self-awareness. In the same breath, a speaker called for the regulation of the web and the education of children in “tolerance.” If I had pointed out the contradiction, the speaker, I’m certain, would have denied it. Tolerance, for her, meant the obliteration of opinions she disliked.
In fact, each narrative loop I listed above ends with the elites happily in charge, and the obliteration of the wretched present. If we wish to understand why trust evaporated in the first place, consider the moral and political assumptions behind this rhetorical posture
***
The industrial elites have lost their way. In every major profession and institution, they once commanded vast, widely-admired projects that filled their lives with meaning and endowed the entire class with an unconquerable confidence. But the twentieth century couldn’t be preserved forever, like a bug in amber. The elites now face a radically transformed environment – and they are maladapted and demoralized. An inability to listen, an impulse to spew jargon in broadcast mode, a demand for social distance as the reward for professional success: such habits, which in the past placed them above and beyond the mob’s reach, now drag them down to contempt and mockery in the information sphere. Among the public, trust has curdled into loathing. The elites are horribly aware of their fall from grace – hence the conference – but being deaf to the public’s voice, they are clueless about how to respond.
To some extent, this is a family drama: [...]
The senior people, largely white and male, seemed to believe that, in punishment for the sins of their fathers, trust had fractured along identity lines. Women today were thought to trust only women, for example. [...]
For younger elites, trust involves a sort of cosplay of historical conflicts. They put on elaborate rhetorical superhero costumes, and fight mock-epic battles with Nazis, fascists, “patriarchs,” slave-owners, George III, and the like. Because it’s only a game, no one gets seriously hurt – but nothing ever gets settled, either. Eventually, the young cosplayers must put away their costumes, take one last sip of Kombucha, and set off, seething with repressed virtue, to make money in the world as it really is.
I was intrigued by the pathology of mutual dependence between these generational postures. It’s the way abusive relationships are supposed to work – although, in all honesty, I was at a loss to say who was the abuser and who the abused.
***
We are living through the early stages of a colossal transformation: from the industrial age to something that doesn’t yet have a name. Many periods of history have been constrained by structural necessity. This isn’t one of them. Rather than a forking path, we face possibilities that radiate in every direction, like spokes from a hub. Even the immediate future seems up for grabs. We could see the formation of a hyper-connected liberal democracy, or plunge into nihilism and chaos – or we could contemplate arrangements and relations that are, at present, unimaginable.
The future will be determined not by vast, impersonal forces but by an accumulation of individual choices. Ultimately, the elites must lead the way. Whether selected by the public or self-anointed and self-perpetuating, they hold in hand the institutional levers of change: that’s just how the world works in a complex civilization. We will not transcend our petty and immobile present with protests or referendums.
The dilemma is that this present is defined by a radical distrust of the institutions of industrial society, and of the elites that control them, and of their statements and descriptions of reality. The conference organizers got our predicament right. At every level of contemporary social and political life, we are stuck in the muck of a profound crisis of authority. The mass audience of the twentieth century has fractured like a fallen mirror. An angry and alienated public inhabits the broken shards – and nobody speaks for the whole. The elites who should take the first step into the unknown are paralyzed by doubt and fear. They utter the words science and reason like incantations, claim ownership to Platonic truth, and believe, with astonishing unanimity, that they have been overthrown by a tsunami of lies. One need only restore truth to its former throne of glory, with themselves as mediating lords, they imagine, and the masses, as in the golden past, will bend the knee of trust.
But the solid masses are now a fractured public. Truth, for mediated information, is a question of perspective. Today the political and media elites must deal with a huge number of competing perspectives: theirs is but one reedy voice in the uproar. It never occurs to them, as it never did to my conference-goers, that they would profit from understanding the splintered perspectives of the public: why, for example, a devout Christian with eyes wide open might vote for a man like Donald Trump. A canonical explanation for Trump already existed, involving the usual tropes – fake news, Facebook, Putin. Racism took care of the remainder.
The decisive endeavor of our moment – far surmounting, I believe, any specific policy call – is the re-establishment of trust in the institutions of representative democracy. Only after the system has been reformed and the public has been reconciled to it can we again talk about truth as a self-evident proposition. Until then, all we will have is perspectives – fragments of truth circling, randomly, the gravitational power of some opinion. Appealing to tribal identity only compounds the fragmentation. Fighting imaginary fascists and Nazis can be no more rewarding than hugging an imaginary friend. [...]
I left the conference uncertain about the prospects of the good people I had encountered there. They belonged to the class that should take all the forward places in the great migration away from this frozen hour, toward the new. Instead, they were transfixed with longing for a dead past. And the clock, for them, is ticking. [...]
Tuesday, July 23, 2019
The public is more accepting of psychologists’ involvement in national security settings, including involvement in many of the activities highlighted as problematic, than are psychologists
Thornewill, A., DeMatteo, D., & Heilbrun, K. (2019). In the immediate wake of Hoffman’s independent review: Psychologist and general public perceptions. American Psychologist, http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/amp0000497
Abstract: In 2015, the American Psychological Association (APA) commissioned an independent review (IR) to examine APA’s potential involvement with “enhanced interrogation” procedures following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The IR concluded that certain APA officials acted together with the Department of Defense to “align APA and curry favor with” the Department of Defense to allow the involvement of psychologists in such enhanced interrogations (Hoffman et al., 2015, p. 9). Discussion following the IR’s release underscored differences in the views of psychologists regarding the IR’s conclusions. Despite extensive discussion, there is only anecdotal evidence regarding the views of psychologists on many of the questions investigated in the IR. This study examined the opinions of psychologists and the public shortly after the IR’s release regarding the roles of psychologists in national security interrogations and other non-treatment-focused contexts. This survey of psychologists (N = 1,146) engaged in treatment-focused and non-treatment-focused activities, and of the general public (N = 522), sheds light on the broader perceptions of the IR’s conclusions, and is relevant in considering future directions for the profession. Results suggest that the public is more accepting of psychologists’ involvement in national security settings, including involvement in many of the activities highlighted as problematic in the IR, than are psychologists. The perceptions of treatment-focused and non-treatment-focused psychologists regarding the appropriate roles of psychologists in national security settings did not differ significantly. These empirical data should help inform the ongoing discussion in this area. None of the authors is associated with an unequivocal position on the IR or the issues addressed as part of it.
From 2015... Envy would be most strongly experienced in response to others who had highly divisible resources that participants did not believe would be shared
Effects of resource divisibility and expectations of sharing on envy. Yumi Inoue et al. Motivation and Emotion, December 2015, Volume 39, Issue 6, pp 961–972. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11031-015-9498-6
Abstract: In three experiments, we provide evidence that resource divisibility and expectations of sharing influence the degree to which envy arises in response to another’s superior resources. We manipulated the resource divisibility (e.g., 2 coins worth approximately $5.50 each vs. a single note worth approximately $11) and expectations of sharing were measured (Experiments 1 and 2) and manipulated (Experiment 3). Findings in these three experiments supported our hypothesis that envy would be most strongly experienced in response to others who had highly divisible resources that participants did not believe would be shared. These findings offer novel insights into the adaptive function of envy, which may promote sharing of divisible resources.
Keywords: Envy Sharing Divisibility Expectations
Abstract: In three experiments, we provide evidence that resource divisibility and expectations of sharing influence the degree to which envy arises in response to another’s superior resources. We manipulated the resource divisibility (e.g., 2 coins worth approximately $5.50 each vs. a single note worth approximately $11) and expectations of sharing were measured (Experiments 1 and 2) and manipulated (Experiment 3). Findings in these three experiments supported our hypothesis that envy would be most strongly experienced in response to others who had highly divisible resources that participants did not believe would be shared. These findings offer novel insights into the adaptive function of envy, which may promote sharing of divisible resources.
Keywords: Envy Sharing Divisibility Expectations
In recent years, equity-based compensation represents almost 45% of total compensation to high-skilled labor; ignoring such income results in incorrect measurement of the returns to such labor
Human Capitalists. Andrea L. Eisfeldt, Antonio Falato, and Mindy Z. Xiaolan. Stanford Univ, Jul 2019. https://economics.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj9386/f/abstract_5.pdf
Abstract: The widespread and growing practice of equity-based compensation has transformed high-skilled labor from a pure labor input into a class of “human capitalists”. We show that high-skilled labor income in the form of equity claims to firms’ future dividends and capital gains has dramatically increased since the 1980s. Indeed, in recent years, equity-based compensation represents almost 45% of total compensation to high-skilled labor. Ignoring such income results in incorrect measurement of the returns to high-skilled labor, with important implications for macroeconomics. Including equity-based compensation to high-skilled labor cuts the total decline in the labor share since the 1980’s by over 60%, and completely reverses the decline in the high skilled labor share to an increase of almost 1%. Correctly measuring the return to high-skilled labor can thus resolve the puzzling lack of a skill premium in recent data, as well as the corresponding lack of evidence of complementarity between high-skilled labor and new-economy physical capital. Moreover, tackling the capital structure question of who owns firms’ profits is necessary to provide a link between changing factor shares and changing income and wealth shares. We use an estimated model to understand the rise of human capitalists in an economy with declining capital goods prices. Finally, we present corroborating cross section and time series evidence for complementarity between high-skilled labor and physical capital using our corrected measure of the total return to human capitalists.
Abstract: The widespread and growing practice of equity-based compensation has transformed high-skilled labor from a pure labor input into a class of “human capitalists”. We show that high-skilled labor income in the form of equity claims to firms’ future dividends and capital gains has dramatically increased since the 1980s. Indeed, in recent years, equity-based compensation represents almost 45% of total compensation to high-skilled labor. Ignoring such income results in incorrect measurement of the returns to high-skilled labor, with important implications for macroeconomics. Including equity-based compensation to high-skilled labor cuts the total decline in the labor share since the 1980’s by over 60%, and completely reverses the decline in the high skilled labor share to an increase of almost 1%. Correctly measuring the return to high-skilled labor can thus resolve the puzzling lack of a skill premium in recent data, as well as the corresponding lack of evidence of complementarity between high-skilled labor and new-economy physical capital. Moreover, tackling the capital structure question of who owns firms’ profits is necessary to provide a link between changing factor shares and changing income and wealth shares. We use an estimated model to understand the rise of human capitalists in an economy with declining capital goods prices. Finally, we present corroborating cross section and time series evidence for complementarity between high-skilled labor and physical capital using our corrected measure of the total return to human capitalists.
Declines in vocabulary of American adults, 1974–2016: As educational attainment has increased, those at each educational level are less verbally skilled
Declines in vocabulary among American adults within levels of educational attainment, 1974–2016. Jean M. Twenge et al. Intelligence, Volume 76, September–October 2019, 101377, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2019.101377
Highlights
• When controlled for educational attainment, adults' vocabulary skills have declined.
• The vocabulary of U.S. college graduates was lower in the 2010s vs. the late 1970s.
• Vocabulary declined across all levels of educational attainment.
• The decline in vocabulary is primarily a time period effect.
Abstract: We examined trends over time in vocabulary, a key component of verbal intelligence, in the nationally representative General Social Survey of U.S. adults (n = 29,912). Participants answered multiple-choice questions about the definitions of 10 specific words. When controlled for educational attainment, the vocabulary of the average U.S. adult declined between the mid-1970s and the 2010s. Vocabulary declined across all levels of educational attainment (less than high school, high school or 2-year college graduate, bachelor's or graduate degree), with the largest declines among those with a bachelor's or graduate degree. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses separating the effects of age, time period, and cohort suggest that the decline is primarily a time period effect. Increasing educational attainment has apparently not improved verbal ability among Americans. Instead, as educational attainment has increased, those at each educational level are less verbally skilled even though the vocabulary skills of the whole population are unchanged.
Highlights
• When controlled for educational attainment, adults' vocabulary skills have declined.
• The vocabulary of U.S. college graduates was lower in the 2010s vs. the late 1970s.
• Vocabulary declined across all levels of educational attainment.
• The decline in vocabulary is primarily a time period effect.
Abstract: We examined trends over time in vocabulary, a key component of verbal intelligence, in the nationally representative General Social Survey of U.S. adults (n = 29,912). Participants answered multiple-choice questions about the definitions of 10 specific words. When controlled for educational attainment, the vocabulary of the average U.S. adult declined between the mid-1970s and the 2010s. Vocabulary declined across all levels of educational attainment (less than high school, high school or 2-year college graduate, bachelor's or graduate degree), with the largest declines among those with a bachelor's or graduate degree. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses separating the effects of age, time period, and cohort suggest that the decline is primarily a time period effect. Increasing educational attainment has apparently not improved verbal ability among Americans. Instead, as educational attainment has increased, those at each educational level are less verbally skilled even though the vocabulary skills of the whole population are unchanged.
Despite the popularity of the Ancient Greek maxim ‘know thyself’, the importance of self-insight for adjustment, or effective psychological functioning, is not there: There is no better adjustment
Self-insight into emotional and cognitive abilities is not related to higher adjustment. Joyce C. He & Stéphane Côté. Nature Human Behaviour, July 22 2019. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0644-0
Abstract: Despite the popularity of the Ancient Greek maxim ‘know thyself’, the importance of self-insight for adjustment, or effective psychological functioning, remains unclear. Here we examined four perspectives about how cognitive and emotional abilities and self-views about these abilities relate to adjustment. We administered tests of cognitive and emotional abilities and assessed self-views about these abilities. Participants then completed daily diaries for a week to report multiple self-reported indicators of adjustment. We analysed data using polynomial regression and response surface analysis. We found no support for benefits of self-insight. The conditions to infer support for linear or curvilinear associations between abilities or self-views about these abilities and adjustment were also not met. The findings suggest that giving employees and students feedback about their cognitive and emotional abilities in organizations and in schools may not enhance their adjustment. We discuss the limitations of our study and offer suggestions for future research.
Abstract: Despite the popularity of the Ancient Greek maxim ‘know thyself’, the importance of self-insight for adjustment, or effective psychological functioning, remains unclear. Here we examined four perspectives about how cognitive and emotional abilities and self-views about these abilities relate to adjustment. We administered tests of cognitive and emotional abilities and assessed self-views about these abilities. Participants then completed daily diaries for a week to report multiple self-reported indicators of adjustment. We analysed data using polynomial regression and response surface analysis. We found no support for benefits of self-insight. The conditions to infer support for linear or curvilinear associations between abilities or self-views about these abilities and adjustment were also not met. The findings suggest that giving employees and students feedback about their cognitive and emotional abilities in organizations and in schools may not enhance their adjustment. We discuss the limitations of our study and offer suggestions for future research.
Women strongly prefer a highly educated potential partner in dating app Tinder; men have not aversion to a highly educated partner; & there is no preference for a partner with a similar education level
Are Men Intimidated by Highly Educated Women? Undercover on Tinder. Brecht Neyt et al. Economics of Education Review, July 22 2019, 101914. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2019.101914
Highlights
• Women on Tinder are more selective than men on Tinder.
• Women on Tinder have a preference for highly educated men.
• Men on Tinder are not intimidated by highly educated women.
• On Tinder, preferences for educational assortative mating are absent.
Abstract: In this study, we examine the impact of an individual's education level on her/his mating success on the mobile dating app Tinder. To do so, we conducted a field experiment on Tinder in which we collected data on 3,600 profile evaluations. In line with previous research on mating preferences from multiple fields, our results indicate a heterogeneous effect of education level by gender: while women strongly prefer a highly educated potential partner, this hypothesis is rejected for men. In contrast with recent influential studies from the field of economics, we do not find any evidence that men would have an aversion to a highly educated potential partner. Additionally, in contrast with most previous research – again from multiple fields – we do not find any evidence for preferences for educational assortative mating, i.e. preferring a partner with a similar education level.
Keywords: Returns to educationMating successAssortative matingDating appsTinder
Highlights
• Women on Tinder are more selective than men on Tinder.
• Women on Tinder have a preference for highly educated men.
• Men on Tinder are not intimidated by highly educated women.
• On Tinder, preferences for educational assortative mating are absent.
Abstract: In this study, we examine the impact of an individual's education level on her/his mating success on the mobile dating app Tinder. To do so, we conducted a field experiment on Tinder in which we collected data on 3,600 profile evaluations. In line with previous research on mating preferences from multiple fields, our results indicate a heterogeneous effect of education level by gender: while women strongly prefer a highly educated potential partner, this hypothesis is rejected for men. In contrast with recent influential studies from the field of economics, we do not find any evidence that men would have an aversion to a highly educated potential partner. Additionally, in contrast with most previous research – again from multiple fields – we do not find any evidence for preferences for educational assortative mating, i.e. preferring a partner with a similar education level.
Keywords: Returns to educationMating successAssortative matingDating appsTinder
The presence of laughter enhances how funny people find jokes, even recorded laughter; this effect is increased for spontaneous laughter; effect was present for both neurotypical & autistic participants
Modulation of humor ratings of bad jokes by other people’s laughter. Qing Cai, Sinead Chen, Sarah J. White, Sophie K. Scott. Current Biology, Volume 29, Issue 14, July 22 2019, Pages R677-R678. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.05.073
Summary: Laughter is a positive vocal emotional expression: most laughter is found in social interactions [1]. We are overwhelmingly more likely to laugh when we are with other people [1], and laughter can play a very important communicative role [2]. We do of course also laugh at humor — but can laughter influence how funny we actually perceive the humorous material to be? In this study, we show that the presence of laughter enhances how funny people find jokes and that this effect is increased for spontaneous laughter. This effect was present for both neurotypical and autistic participants, indicating similarities in their implicit processing of laughter.
---
This may be due to our autistic participants being high functioning, or perhaps similar performance patterns can rest on distinctly different neural systems 6, 7, or laughter is implicitly processed by autistic individuals in the same way as their neurotypical peers.
Summary: Laughter is a positive vocal emotional expression: most laughter is found in social interactions [1]. We are overwhelmingly more likely to laugh when we are with other people [1], and laughter can play a very important communicative role [2]. We do of course also laugh at humor — but can laughter influence how funny we actually perceive the humorous material to be? In this study, we show that the presence of laughter enhances how funny people find jokes and that this effect is increased for spontaneous laughter. This effect was present for both neurotypical and autistic participants, indicating similarities in their implicit processing of laughter.
---
This may be due to our autistic participants being high functioning, or perhaps similar performance patterns can rest on distinctly different neural systems 6, 7, or laughter is implicitly processed by autistic individuals in the same way as their neurotypical peers.
Monday, July 22, 2019
The potential role of testosterone as a relationship protection mechanism, activated by threats to one's pair-bond (e.g., devaluation of attractive alternatives)
The potential role of testosterone as a relationship protection mechanism. Stefan Mattias-Maria Goetz, Justin M. Carré. Human Behavior and Evolution Society 31st annual meeting. Boston 2019. http://tiny.cc/aa1w6y
Abstract: Testosterone has oft been described as a mating effort hormonal mechanism, and is generally conceived of as promoting promiscuity. However, the environment can at times favor monogamy. The field of social psychology has long recognized a host of relationship protection mechanisms that are activated by threats to one's pair-bond (e.g., devaluation of attractive alternatives). To the degree that testosterone functions to promote mating effort writ large, we hypothesize that it should sharpen these relationship protection mechanisms. To test this hypothesis, we employed a placebocontrol double blind between subject design in which men either received testosterone (Natesto® ) or placebo (N = ~300) before interacting with an attractive female confederate. About half of the men were already in a committed relationship allowing us to test both the effects of testosterone on mate seeking and its effects on fidelity. Behavioral coding of the videos will be undertaken to ascertain men’s mate seeking behaviors, operationalized as self-presentation, behavioral mimicry, attention fixation, and self-reported interest.
Abstract: Testosterone has oft been described as a mating effort hormonal mechanism, and is generally conceived of as promoting promiscuity. However, the environment can at times favor monogamy. The field of social psychology has long recognized a host of relationship protection mechanisms that are activated by threats to one's pair-bond (e.g., devaluation of attractive alternatives). To the degree that testosterone functions to promote mating effort writ large, we hypothesize that it should sharpen these relationship protection mechanisms. To test this hypothesis, we employed a placebocontrol double blind between subject design in which men either received testosterone (Natesto® ) or placebo (N = ~300) before interacting with an attractive female confederate. About half of the men were already in a committed relationship allowing us to test both the effects of testosterone on mate seeking and its effects on fidelity. Behavioral coding of the videos will be undertaken to ascertain men’s mate seeking behaviors, operationalized as self-presentation, behavioral mimicry, attention fixation, and self-reported interest.
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