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But the really surprising thing about the no-more-tax consensus is how much of an outlier it makes the United States compared both with the rest of the world and with itself in recent history. When it comes to foreign policy or to global economic dominance, American exceptionalism may indeed be in jeopardy. But when it comes to taxes, the United States is quite different from most other Western industrialized economies.
Criticism of The Republican Brain by Chris Mooney
"Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 is an important book that will have large influence. It is unfortunately not a good book—but its lack of merit in no way detracts from its importance. If anything, the book's flaws add to its power, by enhancing the book's appeal to the audience for whom it is intended. Coming Apart is an important book less because of what it says than because of what it omits; less for the information it contains than for the uses to which that information will be put."
"Indeed, the growing science of politics has uncovered a variety of interventions that can shift liberal people temporarily to the political right. And notably, none of them seem to have anything substantive to do with policy, or with the widely understood political differences between Democrats and Republicans.
Here is a list of five things that can make a liberal change his or her stripes:"
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Distraction. Several studies have shown that “cognitive load”—in other words, requiring people to do something that consumes most or all of their attention, like listening to a piece of music and noting how many tones come before each change in pitch —produces a conservative political shift.
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Drunkenness. Alcohol intoxication is not unlike cognitive load, in that it cuts down the capacity for in-depth, nuanced thinking, and privileges economical, quick responses. Sure enough, in a recent study of 85 bar patrons, blood alcohol content was related to increased political conservatism for liberals and conservatives alike.
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"Getting back to ideology, then, Geertz supposed that it was a template for understanding and action at times when existing templates had failed, “where institutionalized guides for behavior, thought, or feeling are weak or absent” (63). It could certainly be negative and pathological, but it might also be inevitable, and, indeed, positive in times of social and political uncertainty."
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Getting back to ideology, then, Geertz supposed that it was a template for understanding and action at times when existing templates had failed, “where institutionalized guides for behavior, thought, or feeling are weak or absent” (63). It could certainly be negative and pathological, but it might also be inevitable, and, indeed, positive in times of social and political uncertainty.
Ideology was definitively not the same as a world-view, because it only arose in situations where stable patterns and “unexamined prejudices” (63) were disrupted. But once these patterns were disrupted, it might be impossible to return to a non-ideological state, except through a long period of adjustment. Thus, in the wake of the French Revolution — “at least up to its time, the greatest incubator of extremist ideologies, ‘progressive and ‘reactionary’ alike” (64) — Edmund Burke’s appeal to “ancient opinions and rules of life” was an ideology, simply because it was no longer an unarticulated assumption. Ideology, then, was a response to “strain”, but the strain was cultural (when the meaning of words and concepts is threatened), at least as much as it was social and psychological.
"Geertz divided diagnostic accounts of ideology into the “interest” theory and the “strain” theory"
"An analysis of 36 years' worth of polling data indicates that confidence in science as an institution has steadily declined among Americans who consider themselves conservatives, while confidence levels have been at steadier levels for other ideological groups."
"So the battle over Keynesianism may be over, with the New Old Keynesians fought to a bloody standstill, but the wider Macro Wars have only begun. As for how this affects the blogosphere and the rest of econ's public face, one thing is for sure - we're not going back to talking about how abortion affects crime rates."
"What I want to write about here, though, is the connection between political views and attitudes toward economic foundations."
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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.
"Adam Smith and the ‘invisible hand’ are nearly synonymous in modern economic thinking. Adam Smith is strongly associated with the invisible hand, understood as a general rule that people in realising their self-interests unintentionally benefit the public good. The attribution to Smith is challengeable. Adam Smith’s use of the metaphor was much more modest; it was re-invented in the 1930s and 1940s onwards to bolster mathematical treatments of capitalism (Samuelson, Friedman) and to support innovative analysis by associating the metaphor with ‘spontaneous order’ (Hayek). The effect has been to ignore insightful explanations about how markets function as a process in favour of semi-mystical beliefs in imagined outcomes, wrapped in an isolated 18th-century literary metaphor, which does not explain anything."
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So, when did we start thinking of Smith as being the “theorist of the invisible hand” (and, around the same time, forget all his opposition to strict laissez-faire)? Gavin Kennedy’s historical work places the disjuncture in an oral tradition in England and the US in the late 19th to early 20th century. The myth remained somewhat confined until the publication of Samuelson’s extremely influential undergraduate text, Economics in 1948, which brought the myth to the masses (Kennedy 2010).
"I could, of course, put this more crudely. Economics is performative when it serves the interest of the powerful, and not performative when it doesn’t. In this sense, the problem is not with economics, but with a class structure that causes the “real world” to be a corrupted and perverted form of a market economy."
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If economics were always per formative, you would therefore expect there to be at least widespread markets in major contingencies.
And there are not. There’s a market for my labour (I hope), but not a market for my labour, contingent upon there being a great depression. Although I can insure my house losing value because of fire, I cannot insure against it losing value because of a fall in demand for houses in Rutland. I can insure against inflation, thanks to index-linked gilts, but not against recession or inequality. As Robert Shiller pointed out in his wonderful books, Macro Markets and The New Financial Order, markets for coping with major economic risks are lamentably under-developed.
I have often remarked in the past how libertarianism - at least, its modern American manifestation - is not really about increasing liberty or freedom as an average person would define those terms. An ideal libertarian society would leave the vast majority of people feeling profoundly constrained in many ways. This is because the freedom of the individual can be curtailed not only by the government, but by a large variety of intermediate powers like work bosses, neighborhood associations, self-organized ethnic movements, organized religions, tough violent men, or social conventions. In a society such as ours, where the government maintains a nominal monopoly on the use of physical violence, there is plenty of room for people to be oppressed by such intermediate powers, whom I call "local bullies."
"To summarize the thesis: ordinary people hate partisanship, and elites hate ideology. Hence the elite is constantly attempting to misrepresent the latter as the former. And the masses sometimes respond by repudiating ideology when they mean to reject partisanship. "
"Editor’s Note: We have closely followed the Occupy movement and welcome both the attention it has drawn to societal problems and its potential to re-democratize American politics. As part of our continuing engagement with the protests, we are publishing a series of opinion essays by Stanford University professors exploring key issues raised by Occupy. The following statement from the group introduces the series."
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