Educated voters’ leftward shift is surprisingly old and international
economist.com
economist.com
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_and_Ideology
(His earlier Capital in the Twenty-First Century is more well-known.)
> Thomas Piketty, an economist, became famous for a book that analysed 200 years of data on wealth inequality in a wide range of countries. This month he published a paper, co-written by Amory Gethin and Clara Martínez-Toledano, which applies a similar approach to the relationship between demography and ideology. Its findings imply that the electoral victories of Donald Trump and the Brexit campaign in 2016 were not an abrupt departure from precedent, but rather the consequence of a 60-year-old international trend.
Opening credentials
> In 1955 both the richest and the most educated voters tended to support conservative parties. Conversely, both poorer and less-educated people mostly chose labour or social-democratic ones. Today, wealthy people still lean to the right. In contrast, the relationship between education and ideology began to reverse as early as the 1960s. Every year, the 10% of voters with the most years of schooling gravitated towards left-wing parties, while the remaining 90% slid the other way. By 2000, this had gone on for so long that, as a group, the most educated voters became more left-wing than their less-educated peers. The gap has only grown since then. This trend is strikingly consistent. It developed just as fast in the 20th century as in the 21st, and appears in almost every Western democracy studied. This includes both two-party systems and proportional ones, in which green parties now lure educated voters, and nativist parties attract the less educated.
This isn't just because of trump and while current right-wing narratives hate on universities for being echo chambers, the research says this shift has been occurring for a long time.
> Although the authors do not identify a cause for this trend, the simplest explanation is that it stems from growing educational attainment. In 1950 less than 10% of eligible voters in America and Europe had graduated from college.
This makes sense, institutions have largely had a consistent mission (we could maybe argue with the access to federal loans there's been more change to cash in while they can), however access has been increasing significantly over the last 70ish years.
The man whose name is now synonymous with “smart” has a nice essay about this:
“Why Socialism?”, by Albert Einstein https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
In my opinion, it's a dangerous read, because it will turn you into a fire breathing totalitarian if you don't see the subtle flaws in it.
The horrors are so shocking that you're willing to suspend disbelief and accept the remedy.
So as you go through life, I would make one observation - just because someone can point out the flaws, doesn't make their proposed remedy nesessarily correct.
The subtle flaw in state enforced collectivism is that people will only work so much for 'the common good' - people want to see some benefit to themselves for their hard work and will basically 'shut-down' if they don't. To combat this, the state now has to force the people to work - with the threat of bodily harm. That ability to force people becomes a source of corruption and you suddenly have a totalitarian state run by despots.
All because Marx though people would happily and selflessly work for the common good. It would be nice if he was correct, but he isn't and we have to deal in reality.
If a person is not a liberal when he is twenty, he has no heart; if he is not a conservative when he is forty, he has no head.
https://freakonomics.com/2011/08/25/john-adams-said-it-first...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywal...
But still, thanks for the link.
How about the Great Wall of Paying Journalists?
Ironically, one of the best ways to monetize without actually have people moving money would be advertising; too bad it got rapidly out of control and what could have been say a page with 1/10 or its surface occupied by advertising is now filled with junk because there is no control over it, so people start using adblockers to remove it and we're soon back to square one.
You can see their behavior on these comment thread, meticulously down voting comments that are not in their favor.
If they spent that kind of effort in actual doing some good for the poor, nobody would complain.
Universities are churning out champagne socialists.
T
The terms "left" and "right" appeared during the French Revolution of 1789 when members of the National Assembly divided into supporters of the king to the president's right and supporters of the revolution to his left. One deputy, the Baron de Gauville, explained: "We began to recognize each other: those who were loyal to religion and the king took up positions to the right of the chair so as to avoid the shouts, oaths, and indecencies that enjoyed free rein in the opposing camp".
Beginning in the early twentieth century, the terms "left" and "right" came to be associated with specific political ideologies and were used to describe citizens' political beliefs, gradually replacing the terms "reds" and "the reaction". The words Left and Right were at first used by their opponents as slurs.
What we call liberalism nowadays is probably better called progressivism.
Leftists are interested in an ideal society, according to leftist political thought that's generally thought to have originated with Marx. Though individuals may have different ideals, they're all organized around certain lines. The ideal communist society and the ideal anarchist society both lie in a direction we call 'left', and the same sets of political tactics move in that direction. Leftists are more interested in the direction than in the philosophy.
The big political divide in the 17-1800s was monarchy over republic. Republics won that fight, now we're in the tail end of the fight between conservatism and progressivism. Now the left has to decide just what sort of course to chart to get to a better world.
Our system requires an unprecedented level of cooperation between orgs and governments which appears to be more the left wing style of thinking (sort of). It’s difficult to have these growing nations with resource scarcity and still have a “hands off” policy.
To me this is a sign of these institutions failing in their duties. It this situation does not get remedied it will lead to the creation of new institutions which welcome those who do not wish to align themselves with the current dogma, something akin to the way the Protestant church was founded out of disagreements with Catholic dogma.
not sure what you mean here, what exactly are you postulating? Is it that there's a bias in any university curriculum? Is it that a large group of a younger (primarily 18-25) demographic create an echo chamber or that there's peer pressure to a specific ideology?
There's a lot to unpack in your comment, and it all appears that it isn't really in good faith.
If you disagree I'd like you to explain where I am wrong instead of just downvoting this post. Explain it in clear terms, using words which were in use in the 90's, which can be looked up paper copies of dictionaries from that time. This seemingly strange request stems from the recent trend for dictionaries to change the definition of terms to fit a narrative, Merriam-Webster being one of the examples of a dictionary guilty of this transgression.
Dude, language evolves... this is such a weird thing to be hung up on.
This is not language evolution but language revolution - or revolutionary language - and it is not a natural process.
Yes, the university curriculum - and especially the humanities - is a left-wing echo chamber. If you do not agree I'd like you to show me some proof in the form of neutral or conservative courses in these fields. Why do you even try to deny this fact, seeing as to how this is so obvious? If there were to be a place for a "not in good faith" accusation it would be far more towards your reply than to my original comment.
Also, there is nothing to "unpack", the message is clear and honest: universities are currently - and have been for a long time - largely left-leaning, especially in the humanities but more recently also more in other fields.
fair
>> Yes, the university curriculum - and especially the humanities - is a left-wing echo chamber. If you do not agree I'd like you to show me some proof in the form of neutral or conservative courses in these fields.
you're asserting something, why shouldn't i be asking you for proof?
>> . Why do you even try to deny this fact, seeing as to how this is so obvious? If there were to be a place for a "not in good faith" accusation it would be far more towards your reply than to my original comment.
What's obvious about it?
We can go back and forth just asking open questions with specificity and being unmoved by any answers OR we can discuss what might be the roots of those arguments, e.g., what i brought up in a previous comment about empathy. The former is not in good faith. Like in the original comment:
>> Have a look around the average university campus, look at the curriculum. Is it any surprise that those who went through these institutions come out ideologically lopsided? This is true for most of the countries I have experience with, it even holds true for a large part of pre-university education. Add to this the more recent phenomenon of trying to label all those who do not keep within the (narrow and shifting) window of allowed opinions and the recipe for producing an ideological monoculture is complete. To me this is a sign of these institutions failing in their duties. It this situation does not get remedied it will lead to the creation of new institutions which welcome those who do not wish to align themselves with the current dogma, something akin to the way the Protestant church was founded out of disagreements with Catholic dogma.
my reasoning for assessing the comment isn't in good faith: you're prescribing your assumptions as truth to reach a biased conclusion. Whether or not you're correct is inconsequential, just like with your comment here, you're saying this situation is "obvious" and if not there needs to be proof. The original article actually says that it isn't "obvious", only that there's been some changes occurring over the last 70+ years and they're getting more prevalent (not that they're extreme in one direction or the other, where the 'simplest explanation is due to more access to higher education'). You're not discussing anything with respect to what the numbers are showing, how much 'liberal bias' is actually occurring? Is it 10%, 20%, ...do you know? Instead you're broad-brush approach to saying it's "obvious" that university curriculum is producing an "ideological monoculuture" is purely speculation based on your own bias. Change the words from where anecdote is your defense to a larger discussion on where your perception stems from and we'll have a real discussion about the topic.
Sociology: 3% R, 26% L, 72% D
Literature: 6% R, 21% L, 74% D
History: 8% R, 29% L, 63% D
Philosophy: 10% R, 30% L, 60% D,
Political Science: 16% R, 36% L, 48% D
Only economics has an under-representation of D with 33% R/33% L /33% D - as far as I know the general population is not 33% L.
When looking for "conservative" professors the division is even more bleak with 8% in Sociology, 3% in Literature, 7% in History, 4% in Philosophy, 2% (!) in Political Science and, again, 27% in Economics.
Don't believe that source? Here's The Harvard Crimson with the same message:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/4/9/disappearance-co...
Your reasoning for calling my argument not good faith is as biased as you ascribe my intentions to be. Again, please, show some proof of your statements. I can only assume that you do not have any proof - which would be difficult given the actual facts - and therefore take to the method of trying to discredit my intentions. This is a well-worn but ineffectual tactic when there is actual proof of the facts.
What I do not see mentioned, that experts of propaganda clearly know that more educated people are more susceptible to propaganda.
For those who want sources for this, please refer to Jacques Ellul: Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes.
This is my own wording (and like a poor one): for propaganda to work, the population must be educated. There is little room to inject your machinations to the simple and straightforward thought processes of less educated men.
Those who deal with more abstract and complex thought, the more educated, are easier to lead astray with minutiae.
For a contemporary example, just look at MMT and the mother of all bubbles forming right now. A simple man might say if you print more money, money will be worth less. He would be at a high level quite right. Even if he gets many details wrong. The more educated mind might be more inclined to try to understand QE, money velocity, money supply etc, to the point where in the end he is probably less wise than the simple man.
"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
In this sense, middle-class is often uneducated, despite receiving education. For example, neoclassical economics was (and still is) often taught in economic schools at the expense of economic history and political economy, which are more colorful. How many basic economic textbooks talk about Cambridge Capital Controversy before using word "capital"?
> For a contemporary example, just look at MMT and the mother of all bubbles forming right now. A simple man might say if you print more money, money will be worth less. He would be at a high level quite right.
A simple man might think that MMT is the cause, but it is rather an explanation of these bubbles. In MMT, money are endogenous, and the bubble originates outside of the government control. The people who applied QE knew very well, that the neoclassical monetarist theory is no use, because they came from praxis (central banks). They were educated in the practice, not in theory, and it told them that theory is useless (and dangerous). Of course they could have used helicopter money than QE to banks with the same or even greater effect (as Steve Keen recommended), but it wasn't quite in their self-interest.
So the problem with "simple man" is that he assumes there are only two sides in the argument. The crisis of 2008 itself shows there are not - there was neoclassical monetarists and people believing in them, despite this being empirically wrong; then there was central bankers (and other politicians at the revolving door), who knew better, wanted to save the economy, but didn't care about the common man; and finally, there was a common man, who got into debt, because he was told so, and now was confused why banks are being saved and not him. So he opened economic textbook, found about Friedman and Hayek, and was like, ha, I knew you're doing something nefarious!