Does self-interest explain individuals' political views? Surprisingly, political science's standard answer is No. While self-interest occasionally plays a role, it poorly predicts both issue positions and voting behavior.
Unlike most economists, I strongly endorse political scientists' consensus. Their research doesn't just look solid. I've also personally played with the data for over a thousand hours, confirming that their basic approach is correct. When I teach this material, I make my graduate students hunt for counter-examples - exceptional cases where self-interest ishighly predictive of political views. Most return from this quest empty-handed, or nearly so.
Jason Weedon and Robert Kurzban's new The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind: How Self-Interest Shapes Our Opinions and Why We Won't Admit It (Princeton University Press, 2014) frontally attack the academic consensus against political self-interest. Since they charmingly paint me as a leading voice in this consensus, it is in my self-interest for their book to be widely-read. Unfortunately, Weedon and Kurzban are basically high-brow conspiracy theorists. They trumpet a strong, incredible thesis, then "interpret" virtually every fact to fit it...
Econlog
Conspiracy Theory: The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind
Conspiracy Theory: The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind
Bryan Caplan | Professor of Economics, George Mason University
4 comments:
Very useful. The pdf linked in that article has a very enlightening description on the way free market libertarians operate to push their ideology.
Anyone who doubts human proclivity to willingly sacrifice self for group (or infinitely deferred "good") need only look at religions.
It's amazing how little biology or anthropology political scientists & economists read.
physics/chem/biology all describe how competition & autocatalysis both fall out of interaction statistics
and anthropologists have noted for centuries how peer competition grows - with population pressure - into institutional momentum to over-tax & under-fund classes perceived as competitors
Bad enough that all that is mostly ignored in most policy/economics disciplines.
What's worse is the even greater lag in appreciating or acknowledging the return-on-coordination, aka aggregate autocatalysis.
Do they really think that phenomenon of Social Species suddenly went away, with the advent of Homo Economicus NeoLiberalicus?
Right, Roger. Those of us from other disciplines are gobsmacked by the nonsense that some of these "scientists" of economics spout.
Economists tend to think that they don't have to look beyond their field and outside their own minds to explain human action and interaction. Ludwig von Mises at least set forth is position pretty straightforwardly, e.g., in Human Action, but most economists just make assumptions as if they were self-evident truths.
Even philosophers of the past, who are usually criticized as pre-scientific, thought that principles needed to be argued rather than merely assumed. Economists, not so much. They are blinkered by their own ideological biases.
No wonder that most of what passes for the "science" of economics is quackery, albeit "high brow" as Prof. Caplan aptly characterizes it, since it is formalized.
This reminds me of medieval medicine that draped itself in Latin to conceal the ignorance behind it. Now economists have come up with austerity as the correlate for bloodletting, and using "high brow" leeches to do it.
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