(Despite using Trump voting as the example, this thread is not about Trump/Trump-voters specifically - it is about the overall broader question of whether people know what’s good for them on a particular issue - abortion, sexual orientation, political candidate, etc. - or not.)*
One common refrain about Trump voters is that “Trump voters voted against their own self-interest.”
I’m not a Trump voter, but I would like to challenge this on two grounds:
Usually, people who make this claim, do so purely on the basis of economic grounds. (i.e., Democrats might bring jobs back to the Rust Belt better than Trump, or Democrats would provide better healthcare and a social net, or Democrats understand that the Rust Belt’s heyday is over while the GOP doesn’t.) But they don’t take factors like psychological pleasure into account - for instance, many Trump voters, undoubtedly, get a powerful dopamine kick of schadenfreude out of seeing Trump win the presidency - not just on Election Night 2016, but also every day that he’s in the Oval Office and Hillary isn’t. Indeed, some Trump voters may enjoy that psychological pleasure so much that it, to them, outweighs whatever economic drawbacks they may suffer from Trump’s policies. If that is the case, then weren’t such Trump voters, in fact, indeed, voting for their self-interest when they elected Trump?
It’s usually argued that a pregnant woman knows what’s best for her and her uterus (i.e., abortion,) or that people know what’s best for them on their sexual orientation, etc. If we go by the “Trump voters voted against their own self-interest,” then what’s the rebuttal against someone who claims that “Women who get an abortion do so against their own self-interest because abortion causes psychological trauma,” or “If gay people knew what was best for them, they’d seek gay-conversation therapy, since they’d be happier off straight than gay?”
People seldom know, instead they make guesses. Just now I was reading an article mentioning a coin toss between Richie Valens and Tommy Allsup. Richie Valens “won” the flip–undoubtedly thinking it was in his best interests. The win meant that Richie Valens got to ride in an airplane while Tommy Allsup had a long, cold bus ride. The result was Richie Valens died in an airplane crash in 1959 while Tommy Allsup lived a long life, dying just a few months ago. The plane crash was the one discussed in Don Mcleans “The Day the Music Died”
For clarification, I’m not comparing criticism of Trump voters (in which very few people argue that Trump supporters should be denied the opportunity to vote) with abortion (in which people want abortion banned.) Rather, asking if both sides know/knew what is “in their own interest.”
This is about voting for people who are LYING to you about what they are intending to do with the power you give them. Not about openly choosing something that you KNOW is bad for you.
So the answer to the thread title question is, yes, in general, people do know what is good for them. What they aren’t so bright about is recognizing when they are being led to think they are going to GET what they want,when they are not.
The Richie Valens story only shows that we can never know all of the consequences of our actions; something unforeseen can always screw up the calculation.
Yes, you should invest for your retirement – but a nasty recession, or an insurance company failure, or a Ponzi scheme might wipe out your savings. It doesn’t mean you were “wrong” to invest. It is generally wise to invest in real estate – but your nice house might get flattened by a tornado.
Another sad fact is that we are very good at acting against our known self-interests. People smoke, knowing damn well they shouldn’t. People drink, or are obese, or gamble, or take dangerous street drugs. They know better, at least in most cases. But they do it anyway.
And, yeah, it gets more complicated when people in positions of authority lie to you. Cigarette companies lied for decades. That only shows that there’s a lot of evil in the world.
What about the claims of thevoters in question? If someone says they voted for Trump just for the schadenfreude effect (the “sweet, sweet liberal tears” approach), that’s one thing. I find that attitude loathsome, but presumably the person espousing it is being honest. But what about the people who say they voted for economic or other self-interest? I don’t see a problem with taking them at face value, and then pointing out how the person they voted for can’t deliver returns that were promised. They may have schadenfreude in their hearts, I’ll never know; all I have to go on are their words, and the words often don’t add up.
Another aspect is that people will sometimes go against their own self-interests if that prevents people they don’t like from benefiting as well. Most of US social policy seems to be based on “Wait - other people would get this too? Then I don’t want any.”
A heroin addict gets a powerful kick out of shooting heroin into their system. Is doing heroin, in fact, indeed, in their self-interest?
In his case, you have competing interests. You have the possibility of having a child who holds you back from your path in life, leaving you poorer, and the child with fewer opportunities, as well as a possible resentment of the child, against a possibility that they may regret it later in life. I know many women who had abortions who have no psychological trauma about it, so you are telling them to base a possible negative against a near certain negative. In that situation, a woman’s best interest is the abortion of the child.
As far as being gay goes, well, that was the choice that gay people made for centuries. Hide your true self and be miserable, or come out and be reviled. It was a hard choice, and those who made the choice to live their lives should get respect for that. Society eventually changing to where they no longer reviled the gay person was the change that made it possible for gay people to not have to make that decision, or at least, makes the consequences less severe. Go back a bit to where homosexuality was a crime, and I could agree that coming out would be against your best interest.
Beyond all of that… You also have the fact that there are those who do not consider their self interest to be the short reaching and short term effects of their decisions, but instead look at longer term, and larger consequence. Things like voting for a school levy are against my self interest, I’m not in school, I don’t even have kids in school. But, I do want there to be educated populace to hire employees from, I do want knowledgeable people to take care of me as I get older.
From a philosophical standpoint, caring about others is still selfish. I don’t have kids, but I have around tree(3) nieces and nephews these days. I think a grand nephew/niece is on the way, but I haven’t gotten the official news on that yet, just rumors…
Now, between all these nieces and nephews, you could find and rebuild my DNA. (You’d have to start with it and match it, not build it up from scratch, obviously, but the point is that all of my genetic sequences should be represented. So, that’s my genetic legacy.
I don’t know where these kids will end up, I don’t know who they will marry, I don’t know what type of job they will take. So, I cannot be short sighted when I look at improving the world. It all needs to get better, or parts of my legacy will suffer.
That’s an interesting example. When enrolling in a 401K was not the default, enrollment rates were reasonably low, which is what led Thaler to recommend that enrollment be made the default - which indeed raised the rates, which was definitely in the best interest of the employees. However to be “safe” they chose the default for matching to be 2% instead of 6% - and the average matching rate fell - also not in the best interests of the employees.
It is obvious that people do not act in their own best interests many times, from propaganda like in politics, from biases, and from misinformation as well as from our inbuilt psychology. (Loss aversion is another.)
These aren’t good examples, since I think it has been shown that abortion does not necessarily cause trauma (and does not for the majority) and would cause even less without the anti-choicers calling it murder.
I don’t recall seeing studies on gay conversion therapy, but it is basically brainwashing in an environment where the person has strong incentives to claim it works, and I suspect does not make people better off - especially in today’s society.
I bet someone could come up with religion conversion therapy, in which evangelicals are browbeaten into admitting they believe in a myth, with significant savings in time and money spent on religion. Bet they wouldn’t think that was such a great idea.
The rebuttal against those examples is that none of them are true.
Yes, that’s part of it. The other part is lying to the voters about the effects of the policies they advocate, or the politicians themselves being deluded about it – e.g.- invading Iraq will bring a welcome democracy, trickle-down effects of tax cuts for the wealthy, corporate tax cuts create jobs, “repeal and replace” Obamacare is going to improve health care, etc.
A perfect political example is when those who are on government programs that benefit them vote for politicians sworn to cutting those programs.
Plenty of people act against their economic self interest viewed narrowly - like anyone donating to charity - so you have to view self interest more widely. The 401K example I gave is pretty pure. If those on Medicaid who vote against Medicaid said that they were willing to suffer to keep Democrats out of office I might say that is not against their broader self interest, but I’ve not seen much evidence they’ve thought through the implications of their vote.
Well, nothing’s perfect and sometimes people will unwittingly act against their own self interests.
Allowing people to make these decisions anyways is preferable to allowing others who will often and intentionally act against the self interests of these people do so.
The Trump voters who were motivated by social interests knew what was in their best interests. Others may not agree with them, but they voted their interests.
As far as Trump and economics, on paper I can see some reasons why the white working class would support him economically.
[ul]
[li]His plan to deport latino immigrants would drive up wages and increase the number of jobs for the white working class[/li]
[li]His efforts to remove regulations would make coal more cost competitive[/li]
[li]His talk of cracking down on China for currency manipulation, etc would make US manufacturing more cost competitive.[/li][/ul]
So in that regards yes some Trump voters voted for their own economic interests. Trump hasn’t done these things mind you, but he did run on them.
However the Trump voters who are on ACA or medicaid who voted Trump, they voted against their own best interests.
Considering that intelligence is a continuum that extends far beyond what any of us are capable of perceiving, arguably we all do things not in our best interest because we can’t see the bigger plan or understand issues on more than a superficial level.
The short version of that is “democracy is good”. I think we can all agree on that. Democracy is terrific! The problem is that when a wealthy plutocracy controls most of the channels of information and communication and hence the public mindset, you no longer have democracy. What you have is a plutocracy where self-interested oligarchs own the politicians and often and intentionally act against the interests of the majority of the population.
The usual argument against this is that “people are smarter than that”. No, they’re not. I would think that the Trump era would finally put an end to that kind of nonsensical pollyannaish thinking.
Of course, I do agree that the plutocracy has found ways to become more blatant on how they control enough people to get the results we see now. But we should never forget that there are enough people that makes it worthy to fight on.
Trump is just the icing on the cake – the unbelievable actually come to life, something that even the most cynical would not have believed possible just a few years ago. But the phenomenon has been in the works for many decades – the Gilens/Page study on the American oligarchy was published two years before anybody could have believed Trump could be elected and chronicled decades of plutocratic ascendancy in American politics. So did Jane Mayer in her book and columns, and so did many others. In fact Wendell Potter’s exposé on how the health care industry’s iron grip on the legislative process makes meaningful health care reform like single-payer impossible in the US predates all of that.
A great example. From here There were 50,000 miners employed in 2014, and about 76,000 in the entire coal industry. That is less than those employed by amusement parks or car washes. And, as the article says, the jobs are not coming back. Natural gas is cheaper.
Add to that the fact that the hated regulations helped clean up our air, and people believing this are believing a lie.
Trump, on his website, did promise to stop allowing vast numbers of Latinos to take all the low end jobs. If he could have accomplished that, and if he had been serious about keeping his promises, it is true that it could have maybe worked.
White and black low tier workers would have benefited from increased wages.
Higher end tech workers will benefit if the H1B program is fixed. Giving the visas out in order of salaries would benefit both H1Bs and American workers. It would drive both their wages up. This is actually an example of just about the only policy I agree with Trump’s position on. Not that I think the odds are great that he will deliver on this promise…
What it comes down to is that for a bunch of working class, uneducated voters, if they paid attention to the good things Trump was saying and ignored the bad, it sounded like a good move.
In reality, it turns out that the man is not just developing dementia, he’s basically a gladhandler, a con-man. He just says whatever he thinks you want to hear, and all his promises are basically hot air. He’s not going to remember even making them a few days after he promises to do something for you.
He’s not going to get Mexico to pay for the wall. (if it even gets funded at all). He didn’t drain the swamp, he found it more convenient to bring in extremely rich friends for his cabinet instead. He made a colossal strategic error by firing the FBI director - that will probably turn out to be the makings of his downfall. You don’t fuck with the FBI, if they have a reason to investigate you, they’re gonna find something. And the Federal courts are going to take their side.
