Tastes are a point in space | Hacker News Reader

Tastes are a point in space

dynomight.substack.com

63 pointshave_faith49 comments

> Richer people are more often Republicans.

I'm confused. According to this graph, at each income, there are always more Democrats than Republicans, no? How does this get interpreted as "Richer people are more often Republicans"?

The slope of the increase for democrats also appears steeper than the slope for republicans as wealth increases past 100k. So the graph's title "richer people are increasingly republican" doesn't seem accurate either. There is a clear inflection point in the graph around 100k.

The wording is a bit confusing. They mean that as income increases, the number of republicans increases, while democrats remain more or less constant across income levels.

In other words, poor people tend to be D and rich people are more like to be R (but there are still many Ds) - *according to this graph*

> They mean that as income increases, the number of republicans increases, while democrats remain more or less constant across income levels.

According to the graph, this is only true until $100k, which is when the number of Democrats increases faster again

Sure, and that in itself is an interesting observation, but they’re obviously speaking to the entirety of the graph. I’m not the author and I think the correlation is relatively weak, I’m just trying to explain what they were going for.

The wording is not confusing, unless you mean that the author is confused. This statement is just false.

The graphs aren’t very clear and the wording could be better. The author isn’t coming out of left field, but the correlation isn’t that strong per the graph. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting observation and I’m glad they highlighted it.

One of the more interesting political splits is within the beer industry which in this analysis has only one point. Beer brewers tend to be extremely left of left while beer distributors tend to be strongly right leaning.

What is particularly interesting about this combination is that it appears to be the case that both sides are required for business success. Without good brews distributors lose market share and without good distributors brewers lose market share. Maybe in this analysis the brewers are smarties and the distributors are capital rich but that doesn't match my limited personal experience.

where do you get the data for beer industry ?

This is from a study on politics and employment that found strong associations between left and right and certain jobs. Sorry, no link at hand.

I once worked in a small business. The business was struggling , sometimes it made good money, sometimes not, and the work wasn't particular fun, but the owner looked at money as the main source of status.

On the other hand , his technical manager, who wasn't a smartie, was great at the technical side,derived status from doing,building,solving problems ,etc . Also from money but a lot from his profession.

Sorry to be that person, but let me give a small writing tip: there is always a space after the comma/period, never before. Same with question-/exclamation marks. It is not the most important thing in the world, but it sends off a bad signal that you may be unaware of.

Nods in agreement

Beer distributors aren't needed any more than car dealerships. It's a racket and serves no purpose.

Isn't this a matter of distribution. Like the amount of republican richer people might be small and so doesn't impact the metric for more educated people are more democrat, even though more richer people are educated.

Since every graph is just a ratio of itself?

Though I'm not sure how to properly visualize all that.

Yes, e.g.

                |less rich|more rich|
  less educated |    25   |    2    | democrat
       (60)     |    25   |    8    | republican
  --------------+---------+---------+-----------
  more educated |    15   |    8    | democrat
       (40)     |    10   |    7    | republican
  --------------+---------+---------+-----------
                |    75   |   25    |

1. More educated people (40) are more often Democrats (23).

2. Richer people (25) are more often Republicans (15).

3. Richer people (25) tend to be more educated (15).

Yup, classic Simpsons paradox

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

I saw the HN title a couple times before clicking, and was sure it was a neuroscience article on how taste perception was modeled in the brain. Needless to say, I was disappointed.

> As you may recall, Bourdieu thinks we acquire tastes based on our life trajectories, and this helps perpetuate class. Upper-class people get access to upper-class culture early in life, which helps them appreciate upper-class stuff, fit in with upper-class people, do well in life, and repeat the cycle with the next generation.

This may apply to acquired tastes where causality can be from a desire to fit into group(s). Devoid of caring what others think there are personal tastes such as flavor likes/dislikes which can be arbitrarily distributed at a very early age. I recognized this when I found out BMW drivers are considered to be a-holes and statistically likely. I didn't stop liking their form/function but may not own one (unless it's a small convertible, they're for fun-loving people).

BMW drivers is such an old trope maybe from 90s or early 2000s, its almost 2024 so these days its mostly Tesla drivers (or expensive Mercedes for some reason, at least around here).

Here in Switzerland they distinctly fall into 2 categories - either driving too slowly for whatever reason, I presume for saving battery, so that on every drive hundreds of drivers have to overtake them since they become an obstacle that even trucks take over. Or classical tailgating, aggressive drive, way too quick acceleration compared to rest of participants, so they keep popping up in places folks don't expect them.

RE: Teslas - their autopilot (or FSD for those that have it) is one of the best features on the car, but the top speed is capped according to internal logic.

Outside the US, this internal logic can often be wrong / lower than what a human driver would use. Some examples include always following time-limited speed limits (e.g. using "school hours only" limit during the weekend) and overly reducing speed due to limited visibility in fog.

Funny enough, none of these issues pop up in California.

As someone who travels a fair bit in Europe, I would say the BMW trope is very much alive and kicking. I would say it's mostly in specific subcultures though.

Interesting charts. I like the one that shows that there's less republicans than democrats at every income bracket. I think it shows that republicans are not really equally strong power in american democracy as democrats and they are propped up as one only due to intentional retention of very flawed, antique elections system. Basically republican party is allowed by democrats to exists just so they can have mock opposition (supposedly representing half of the people, which it really doesn't) so that they can swap out with them ever n years and it all seems like two party system on the surface.

Basically way more than half of the people are democrats and they are denied proportional representation because if they had it either USA would become one party system with a perpetually disgruntled minority opposition that would need to be controlled or it would have to have an actual multipolar democracy but that would interfere with making money the usual way too much.

You’d see the parties change views if the electoral system were more fair. Democrats would likely become more left wing and Republican politicians more moderate, at least on the national stage. The two party system would continue.

> Democrats would likely become more left wing

Is this supposed to be a good thing?

Considering the degree to which America lags behind the rest of the developed world in things like medical access, vacation, worker protections, etc. That would probably be a good thing.

If politicians representing the will of the people is a good thing then I guess yes.

The will of some smaller part of the 51% they currently do, you mean?

For context, the early comment setting up this hypothetical was:

> if the electoral system were more fair.

So no.

Ok, so we'll stipulate to some arbitrarily "fair" electoral system:

What makes it obvious that a leftward shift would grow today's Democratic base to that left _more_ than it might shrink it on the right?

It wouldn’t, long term IMO. The parties would end up roughly with similar overall proportions. Their positions would change. Democrats, with greater electoral power, will focus on internal competition for who is more ideologically pure & thus experience a leftward shift, to the point of probable over-reach (while Republicans, losing a lot of their in-built electoral advantage, will focus more on electability and thus will moderate, making them more palatable for marginal/independent voters), which is the mechanism for restoring the balance of power.

There does seem to be some mechanism at work that creates a stable 49/51 vote split. My theory is that this is somehow related to maximizing the income of the professionals who work in politics. Fall off that cusp and it's less easy to raise funds and hence...no new boat this year.

Both parties are attempting to publicly track popular opinion while simultaneously protecting the economic interests of their patrons. It’s not surprising that they track each other’s performance fairly closely. That’s kind of the point.

Duverger's Law. Make the system a proportional Parliamentary one instead of a winner-take-all system, and you'd see multiple parties.

> Basically way more than half of the people are democrats and they are denied proportional representation because if they had it either USA would become one party system with a perpetually disgruntled minority opposition that would need to be controlled or it would have to have an actual multipolar democracy but that would interfere with making money the usual way too much.

If you had e.g. approval voting then you would have a multi-party system even using the existing districts etc. If you had districts all of equal size (and didn't have the Senate) but still used first past the post, you would still have a two party system and they would still each hold about half the seats, but the positions of the parties would change to reflect the change in the electoral map.

Democrats like to think this would benefit them, but it's not as simple as "left gets more representation" at all. It would change what Democrats are (and what Republicans are).

For example, the current system causes rural areas to be over-represented, but rural areas have lower incomes, and changing that would increase the representation of higher income people. A large proportion of US federal spending exists to transfer wealth from under-represented populations to over-represented populations as political arbitrage of the difference in representation, so changing it could plausibly cause government programs to be cut as you increase the representation of the people currently paying for them at the expense of the current recipients.

Not all of that is necessarily bad but it's definitely not simple or anything that cleanly aligns with traditional notions of right vs. left.

Obvious example: Ideologically, agricultural subsidies are textbook socialism but are currently held in place by Republicans and might be the first thing on the chopping block.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_eras_of_the_United_S...

thus it has ever been

Some clever guy, can't remember who it was, once said that if there is a simple reasoning for something then it is more likely to be the correct one.

This whole article seems to miss the most obvious reasoning and that is that the education sector is absolutely dominated by left leaning people, therefore the more time you spend there the more likely you adapt to this or also the other way around, if you don't adapt to it well you are more likely to leave education as soon as possible for whatever you try to achieve.

Then there is also the fact that the highest education does not give the most wealth, in fact the most wealth comes from inheritance and for self made people more relevant than education is the time at which they started to "collect" wealth, which is later in life if they get higher education so they had less time.

> Some clever guy, can't remember who it was, once said that if there is a simple reasoning for something then it is more likely to be the correct one.

Dont know if you're being serious but for brevity I think that's Occam's razor!

I do not think that your 'indoctrination' theory is either the most obvious, or correct.

My (equally simple, imo) explanation is that critically thinking about the world and the people in it is both the main purpose of academia and far more of a left wing ideal.

The "those who support my political opponents don't just have a different perspective/ideology, they are also uncritical and stupid" has seldom been useful - or accurate. It's basically self-congratulatory.

Leftist scholars have thoroughly documented how class position and material interests leads to generalized political positions. Liberals keep rediscovering this over and over like its new. (This is because if they get too into it they get called socialists and banned from the mainstream.)

This article confuses the Democrats with "the left" when they represent a different face of capitalism and the rich that is rhetorically more likely to pitch social equality (but never economic equality).

So the chart does not express real preferences accurately.

Very interesting. But at the top of the square, the boundary curve should shift to the right as left wing ideas become dominant among the ultra rich or high status. This "high + low vs middle" phenomenon can slightly be seen in the second figure, so I'm not sure why it isn't remarked on.

This is cherry picking and salatious writing on those graph interpretations.....I couldn't be bothered to read past and see what else they misinterpreted

Thanks for letting us know that you didn't read it.

If you like this, you may like W David Marx's Status and Culture.

Three charts are a rant, not a study, and slim to even point anything, let alone draw any conclusion.

So taste is ... multi-faceted, multi-dimensional? Who claimed otherwise? Next...

It's almost as if these studies are inherently flawed. Leaning democrat according to what? This also doesn't factor in cost of living, type of education, etc.

Kind of a banal observation. Every study is inherently flawed because one can never fully isolate a system, can't go back in time to repeat the experiment under identical circumstances, can't measure precisely what you want to measure because of uncertainty or circumstance, etc, etc, etc.

Knowledge production is very hard, very incremental. It is a messy, human, endeavor, even in the hardest of sciences. It is fine, even virtuous, to point out its limitations, but glib dismissals can sometimes just be a cognitive stop or rhetorical device.

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