This link has been bookmarked by 2 people . It was first bookmarked on 09 Mar 2012, by Rey Rodriguez.
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10 Mar 12Todd Suomela
"What I want to write about here, though, is the connection between political views and attitudes toward economic foundations."
economics foundation scale explanation psychology politics liberal conservative ideology
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This correlation between political attitude and intellectual orientation makes sense: rational choice is related to the idea that people are making the best choices for themselves, which in turn is related to the conservative ideas of minimal taxation and redistribution. This is not a strict logical relation—it could well be that redistribution could improve the outcomes from individuals’ rational decisions—but I see the connection. The liberal argues that the government should do X (for example, provide free preschool), the conservative retorts that parents who don’t send their kids to preschool are making an informed choice and the government shouldn’t interfere.
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This all seems natural—but I could also imagine the correlation going the other way. A key theme of conservative thinking, now and in the past, is skepticism of systematizers, utopians, and “isms” in general. It would make a lot of sense to me if a liberal such as Paul Krugman (following the example of his liberal and technocratic forebear, Paul Samuelson) to lean heavily on a rational-actor model (perhaps tweaked a bit via prospect theory etc), and conversely for a conservative to distrust the clean simplicity of utility theory and, as a conservative, feel more comfortable with the real-world ambiguities of decision making as revealed by psychology research. Similarly, I could well imagine a pragmatic conservative resisting the rationalists’ backstop claim that, even if people are not individually rational, in aggregate they act as if they are behaving according to a utility function.
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09 Mar 12
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