Hmmm… this was a well-cited scholarly work published in a peer-reviewed academic journal, a journal that happens to have an exceptionally diverse international representation on the editorial board. Furthermore, the author is an internationally renowned social psychologist who recently received American sociology’s highest award for lifetime contributions. Based on this alone, accusations of extreme bias seem less than plausible.
So what is it about the content that would lead you to the highly implausible conclusion that it was a “wildly politicized piece”? Most of its basic points have been made elsewhere based on a plethora of evidence. “Relative deprivation” is a sociological concept that seems perfectly appropriate given the respondents’ own stated concerns. The other stated motivators of Trump’s base – and we’re talking here about the core base that propelled him to the nomination and not Republican moderates who got reluctantly dragged along – revolve around bigotry, xenophobia, and the “social dominance” factor that is really thinly veiled white supremacy. This, again, is not really new or surprising and has been widely covered elsewhere, like here and here.
As a general rule, I think pieces of work in the social psychology field that purport to be scholarly and peer-reviewed deserve an asterisk.
You’ve tried, very inelegantly, to pull a switch-a-roo here. This section from the OP makes it clear that we’re discussing Trump’s ~63 million general election voters:
If that wasn’t clear enough for you, in your post that triggered this discussion, you made these statements: “Would you really dispute that this is NOT typical of that side?” and “Relative deprivation is an interesting one because Trump supporters as a whole are not a particularly deprived group, and in fact had a higher average household income than Hillary supporters.”
Now you want to claim “we’re talking here about the core base that propelled him to the nomination and not Republican moderates who got reluctantly dragged along”, but in this thread, your earlier posts, and the article you cite, that wasn’t the case.
When you ask, ‘who would really want to…’, isn’t this basically the same thought process as ‘if you knew what I knew, you’d act differently?’ My point is that generally, people can’t know the relative utility curves for different people. In extremes as Voyager notes (bank robbing, etc. then sure), but for the things we’re talking about who am I to say that X is better for a person than Y? I am comfortable making those evaluations for myself, and for those I’m responsible for sure. But for others, no. So I totally agree with the sentiment of wishing voters were more informed in general. I do not take disagreement with me as evidence of not being informed or that they are voting against their own interests.
I didn’t reject the examples you gave out of hand. I rejected them because they didn’t comport with the point you were trying to make. The idea is voting against one’s interests and I agree it could be demonstrated by folks basing their votes on lies, which is the scenario you offered. None of the examples you gave met that criteria.
I think you are misreading that paper. Those are not a list of concerns of Trump voters, in the sense that a survey was done to determine what the concerns were. Those were psychological attributes the researches discerned by asking questions in order to develop a psychological profile of the group they were studying. In fact, the paper clearly states that:
IOW, Trump supporters tend to have the enumerated psychological traits addressed in the paper, but they also have key political concerns separate and apart from these traits that are key to understanding why they voted as they did. The paper does not address those key political concerns.
And if they voted for a guy because he said that he would improve it, that he would make it great, that it would be lower cost, higher coverage? Repeal was not the only option, repeal and replace was the mantra. It’s true, people didn’t like Obamacare, it certainly had problems, but they wanted it improved, not removed.
There are those who do not benefit from the ACA, people with good employer based coverage or enough personal wealth that insurance isn’t an issue to them that do want to see healthcare coverage removed from millions of people, but it is other people they want it removed from, not themselves. It’s not odd that people vote in the worst interests of others.
Why would it? P.J. O’rourke isn’t one the left.
It hit highs before it crashed as well. The stock market is an investor bubble, speculation driving up p/e ratios. There is tons of money in the hands of investors, and not enough demand for goods and services to invest in any new supply capacity. Banks are sitting on trillions in reserves that they can lend out at a 10-1 ratio. There really is no where for the money of the investor class to go in the US other than into the market. This is driving the indices to new highs, but it’s just paper until you sell the underlying stocks.
I don’t see that as sustainable. If you are close to retirement, I’d strongly suggest moving some of your recent gains into more stable investments, like beenie babies.
This gets into the distinction between his core base of supporters – the ones who are wildly enthusiastic about kicking out immigrants and banning Muslims and anyone who looks like one and restoring the societal supremacy of the white man – and the larger group of everyone who voted for him.
I agree that much of this larger group is motivated by political partisanship, and many of this mainstream group probably find Trump himself and his core constituency distasteful. But they voted for him anyway, and it remains to be seen whether these mainstream voters will deeply regret it since the level of mendacity and incompetence that they elected is virtually unprecedented.
You are confusing self-interest, altruism, and malice. The notion that Republicans want to repeal Obamacare because they want to hurt brown people is wrong.
There are three groups of people in the US.[ol][li]Those who benefit, overall, from Obamacare []Those who are harmed, overall, by Obamacare []Those who neither benefit nor are harmed by Obamacare. [/ol]The third group is not a significant source of opposition to Obamacare - nobody (practically) wants other people to die just because. [/li]
The first group wants to keep Obamacare, and Dems want the first group to vote for them. The second group wants to repeal it, because their taxes and premiums and deductibles all went up, and their range of choices went down. And Republicans want the second group to vote for them. The third group doesn’t care.
Obviously all three groups want affordable, high-quality health care available to everyone, but that’s what Obamacare was supposed to do, and it didn’t. Whatever replaces Obamacare probably won’t either, but that will just swap people around among the three groups.
Not at all, And I don’t see any altruism at all in denying healthcare to others. There is a mix of self-interest, along with malice for others, that informs the conservative platform. Altruism need not apply.
That is not true at all of the last group. Bricker has said that he doesn’t want to pay for other’s healthcare, even in the scenario where his own healthcare is cheaper because everyone is covered. Hd has said similar. It is a very common mantra from those on the right. That it is the principle of the thing, and their principle is that they don’t want to pay for other people.
Now, I will agree that nobody wants other people do die, just because, and it is nice that you bring it up, as no one else has. However, there are many who don’t care if other’s die, not at all, even when preventing their deaths doesn’t help or harm. And to me, that’s not all that much better.
True, with you so far.
Their taxes went up? Whose taxes went up for the same income? If their taxes went up because they had higher income, that’s great, but you are implying that the ACA raised their taxes, as if it increased the marginal rates.
Premiums went up sure, but they went up in 2008 before ACA was passed, and in 2007 before that, and 2006 before that. Premiums were going up, and were going to continue to go up. The ACA was a way of stemming that. We can debate on how successful it has been, but just dismantling the ACA isn’t going to get your premiums back to pre-ACA levels.
Deductibles did go up on alot of plans, and that is a bit of an issue that would be great to look into in a replacement bill to the ACA. The plans covered more, didn’t deny pre-existing conditions (which also meant that they couldn’t find a pre-existing condition in your medical history to deny you from the treatment you are expecting to have covered now), and didn’t have caps.
Really, the ACA plans are far superior to most of the plans that people got on the individual market, and many plans through tier employers, so the fact that they cost more and take more before coverage kicks in is understandable.
But, still, these are certainly things that we should address in reforming the american healthcare system. It is good that you bring those up.
Obviously. But they can’t tell their constituents that they want to actually remove the ACA without replacing it with anything. Their constituents like having healthcare coverage, so promising to take it away would make them less likely to vote for the republican.
So they lie to get those votes.
Go on…
Not accurate. The third group is courted by republicans, and told to care, and told that they will be affected by the ACA, even if they are not, or even if the effects are positive. The republicans still want to lie and scare them into voting for them as well.
This is not correct. The first group does, obviously. The second group does not. They want affordable high-quality health care for themselves, and their families, but they do see out there many other americans that don’t deserve affordable high-quality healthcare, and would vote against their own access to it in order to deny it to others.
I agree that the ACA didn’t do as well as it could have. It was essentially a first draft that ended up being forced into law because of political considerations. (Kennedy dying and leaving dems without a 60 majority, required because republicans vowed to vote against any healthcare bill.)
The replication issues in experimental psychology have absolutely nothing to do with this discussion and are not grounds for calling a sociological survey “wildly politicized” – all the more so when it reflects facts independently established elsewhere, as I noted.
“Switch-a-roo”? No. I was being careful not to smear all Trump voters with the “bigot” stigma because, as I noted in #66, many of them were reluctant voters who just wanted an “R” in the White House, apparently at any cost.
But I agree that some clarity is needed here. What I believe is the following.
There is a core base of wildly enthusiastic supporters who are indeed bigots, xenophobes, and even outright white supremacists who helped to get him elected and, most importantly, which Trump recognizes as a core constituency.
There is a much larger base of more moderate supporters who nevertheless entertain some hostilities about “foreigners”, who are economically disaffected relative to their traditional expectations, and who ascribe some level of blame for this to immigration policy and to minorities. You get some flavor for this demographic from this quote from a cite that I already previously linked:
Sixty-eight percent of white working-class voters said the American way of life needs to be protected from foreign influence. And nearly half agreed with the statement, “things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.” Together, these variables were strong indictors of support for Trump: 79 percent of white working-class voters who had these anxieties chose Trump, while only 43 percent of white working-class voters who did not share one or both of these fears cast their vote the same way.
Finally there is another group who simply voted for Trump for partisan ideological reasons like tax cuts and Supreme Court appointments or just simply not having a “D” in the White House.
I think two things need to be recognized here in terms of self-interest. One is that whether those who elected him are themselves bigots or not, by electing him they have empowered bigotry. And they’ve empowered it not just in the shadows of society where it can do great damage, but in official capacities like the attitudes of immigration officials, at least judging from some pretty disturbing anecdotal stories that have been appearing in the media. And by other accounts, these policies are dissuading talented foreign graduate students and scientists from pursuing their research work in the US. Meanwhile, as a side note, this administration is cutting science funding and appointing incompetent political cronies to important scientific bodies like the science organization at the USDA and science-driven policy bodies like the EPA, Department of Energy, and NASA. Just whose interests are served by rampant incompetence except those who simply want to shut down government by stealth?
The second question of self-interest is whether the economic concerns of mainstream “R” voters will be served over the next three-and-something years. That remains to be seen, but mendacity and incompetence doesn’t generally do too well.
To answer the question in the first sentence, it depends entirely on the scenario in question. In this case, my hypothetical scenario was “lying self-serving politician beholden to special interests who will act against the best interests of the voter”. This seems to me to carry the same self-evident answer as the bank robbery analogy, and I don’t think it’s arrogant to suggest that a rational voter would not want such a politician running his government. Nor do I think it’s arrogant to suggest that more informed voters would be more likely to recognize such politicians when they lie to them. Or to suggest that more informed voters would be happier with their governments, and with how their best interests are being served. When the latest Gallup poll for Oct 5-11 has the Congressional approval rating at 13% (and Trump at 35%), voters are evidently not happy with the government that they elected.
Obviously? You seem to be ignoring the Republican governors who refused the expansion of Medicaid, paid for by the federal government for the first years. This would not have hurt you category 2 and might have helped them in reducing the number without insurance who tend to increase costs for the rest of us.
Their justification was that after a while they would have to pay a small fraction of the cost.
So they must be against any government funding of healthcare, which means they should be against Medicare and all Medicaid. Not likely. Or they know that the beneficiaries of this are mostly Democratic voters. Or Republican voters who vote against their self interest. Don’t blame ACA for those without healtcare in these states. It is more Republicans saying drop dead to their constituents.
I think just the opposite. You can’t really talk about people making decisions against their own best interests if they are acting on false information. 300 years ago bleeding was a supposed cure. That was against the best interests of the patient, but they didn’t know any better. If we find out that yogurt is a horrible carcinogen, you can’t really blame today’s yogurt eaters.
My 401K example is one where all the facts are there and people still act against their best interests. Healthcare for those now covered who weren’t before, or those with preexisting conditions is another good example. Or those who could stay on their parents’ insurance.
Yeah Trump claimed to have a better solution, but that was on the level of Nixon’s secret plan to end the war.
BTW, we are all susceptible to acting against our best interests. Knowing that helps. I have a financial planner in large part because I know I am amenable to loss aversion (not wanting to sell a falling investment because it locks in the loss) and he isn’t - at least for my money. It has worked out quite well.
Then I think the criteria for evaluating whether a person is voting against their interests needs to be clarified. I’m taking the position that it’s very rare for that to be true. I don’t isolate this to economics either since a vote represents the aggregation of all interests. A person who is a social liberal may vote for a person that would raise their taxes and think that’s a worthwhile tradeoff if they are more supportive of non-economic issues, and vice versa.
Please. In order to even begin to believe that such a statement has any chance at all of being even remotely true, one has to assume that said person is at least a reasonably informed voter. This is the rock-bottom minimum. We have to further assume that this informed voter is voting based on a realistic calculated assessment of his preferred outcomes. This is what you say you believe actually happens.
But we’re talking here about the average American voter. Of whom barely 34% can even name the three branches of government, let alone understand what they do. To say that you’re being wildly optimistic is an understatement.
This makes the point nicely:
Democracies rest on the ability of the general public to hold their elected officials accountable. But what happens when a large segment of voters knows very little about today’s policy debates or even the basic workings of American government?
…
Jared Meyer: You provide a lot of numbers in your book to show just how clueless Americans are when it comes to what is happening in Washington. I have some of my favorite examples (one third of Americans think that foreign aid is the government’s largest expense, and nearly half of Americans think cap and trade has to do with healthcare or financial regulation instead of the environment), but what do you think is the most powerful statistic to back up your central thesis?
Ilya Somin: No one survey question is all that important by itself. What matters far more is the cumulative weight of widespread political ignorance across a wide range of issues. But one good example of the extent of public ignorance is that only about 34% of Americans can even name the three branches of the federal government: executive, legislative, and judicial . It is not that familiarity with these terms is absolutely essential—it’s that anyone who follows politics even moderately closely is likely to know them. The fact that most people do not know is a strong indication of their ignorance about politics and public policy generally.
… But while political ignorance is often rational behavior for individuals, it can lead to terrible collective outcomes. It does not matter much if any one voter is ignorant, but it does matter if we have an entire electorate that is that way. The situation is comparable to air pollution: one gas-guzzling car makes little difference, but thousands or millions of them could potentially cause great harm to the environment. Similarly, widespread voter ignorance is a kind of pollution of the political process.
I agree that this is complicated. But to say that a person never votes against his best interests, you’d have to claim that he constructs a careful analysis of the costs and benefits of each candidate to him, and evaluates on that basis. But no one really does that.
Say a racist (of either party) votes for a corrupt and useless candidate of his race and against a candidate of the other race who will improve the voter’s prospects in every way. You can construct a utility model explaining this quite easily, but is he really voting for his best interests? This is hardly a rare case.
And even if you have an issue with voting, do you agree that people frequently act against their own best interests at least?
In your example, it depends on how much utility they derive from their advancing racism vs. how much utility they derive from their improved prospects. By making that choice, we can say the racism won out over the prospects. So I’m not saying never, just rare enough, and difficult enough to assess that the claim itself is not useful or informative.
To the question of whether people act against their own best interests, I would take the same position. The extreme as you mentioned upthread about bank robbery I’ll grant, for the vast majority of the times. But in more normal circumstances, I think people are complicated and often have conflicting wants which manifest in different actions. If a person wants A and B, but those are conflicting, when they choose A I think that’s evidence that they valued A more than B, in that moment. By choosing A, they are also not choosing B.
If someone says that person is acting against their own interests because they want B but chose A instead, I would disagree. Multiply that by all the permutations of people’s different preferences and that’s why I think it’s rare to be able to say that a person is acting against their own best interests. Their interests are expressed by their actions. Their interests can be dumb, but they are what they are.
I don’t think this is sufficient to make that assessment for a number of reasons. First, there could be other interests that are greater or conflicting. Second, they could legitimately believe this was a viable outcome. Third, they could have not believed it, but thought the potential for other things they supported were better advanced. Fourth, they could have opposed the alternative more than they supported the active choice. Fifth, they could have heard the promise with no expectation that it be followed through with, and liked the rhetoric. You get the idea.
I don’t think so. A voter may say, I really want Democrats to win and that is their #1 priority regardless of their policy positions. They derive great utility from seeing Democrats win because they come from a long family of Democrats and they subscribe to familial piety, or they think the name “Democrats” just sounds better. The point is, it doesn’t matter what the reason is. If that’s their #1 priority sufficient to overwhelm all other things, they don’t need to be informed about anything. Let’s say that person also hates the ACA, wants tax cuts only for the rich, etc. If a they vote for a Democrat because that’s what they want, they wouldn’t be voting against their interests. And that’s really the point - people have their own individual utility curves and that isn’t something that can be imposed by an outsider.
Maybe I’m reading you wrong, but you seem to be saying that best interests is equivalent to perceived utility. If so, the statement that people never act against their best interests is trivially true. But even in this case a person, after the events happen, might even say that they acted against their best interests. They may have had the evidence, but did not process it for some reason.
Again, the 401K example is one where the person who made a bad choice, if this is pointed out, would probably agree. And there is no great utility in choosing the default. The studies show that this is not an outlier. Default organ donation is kind of similar. I’m sure many people who take the default, either way, would have preferred the other choice once it is made explicit.
Group 2 includes federal taxpayers, so the notion that “the federal government pays for it so it won’t hurt you” doesn’t work.
Plus, it’s the same problem as always - now people don’t have insurance, so I have to pay for their care thru increased charges for hospitals and doctors. Put them under Medicaid, and I have to pay for their care thru increased taxes. So either Medicaid patients get less care than they do now, and I will save money. Or they get the same level, and I don’t save anything, or they get more (or the demand increases) and I pay more.
And, as mentioned, increasing the number of people with coverage did not reduce costs for the rest of us. Obama said it would, but now that we know that he didn’t mean it, it is that much harder to believe that it will this time.
I’ll give you two reasons why that argument fails.
First, it’s really a kind of semantic sleight-of-hand that is true only in the most shallow and unrealistic interpretation of what “utility” means; IOW, to the extent that it’s true, it’s trivially true and strikes me as a semantic artifice to evade the question.
Perhaps I can clarify with an analogy: someone is driving a car and hopes to reach some destination. If he reaches a crossroads and wishes to turn right, it can be said to serve his interests to do so – by definition! The car, in responding to the wheel, is certainly serving his interests by going to the right. Later on he might feel he wants to turn left, and his interests are served once again.
But none of this achieves anything whatsoever towards his real interest of getting to where he’s going if he is ignorant of where he is, of where the roads lead, and where his destination is in relation to all this. He may get some satisfaction out of the car responding to his whims but it’s unlikely to get him to where he wants to be and is likely to get him even more lost. Whereas the fellow who is informed by a GPS or a map and compass is going to get there.
Sure, people have all kinds of subjective personal values and individual goals and metrics, but ignorance is independent of that. Ignorance is an objective quality that measures one’s knowledge of the world and thus how well one’s actions comport with reality.
And that leads to the second reason that your argument fails. Ignorance is an objective failing that, when applied to voting on a large scale, creates collective damage that undermines democracy by creating failure and dysfunction in government and by elevating crooks, incompetents, and self-serving frauds and charlatans to powerful high offices. Here I can do no better than to repeat my earlier quote:
… But while political ignorance is often rational behavior for individuals, it can lead to terrible collective outcomes. It does not matter much if any one voter is ignorant, but it does matter if we have an entire electorate that is that way. The situation is comparable to air pollution: one gas-guzzling car makes little difference, but thousands or millions of them could potentially cause great harm to the environment. Similarly, widespread voter ignorance is a kind of pollution of the political process.
This aspect relies on the person not knowing what their actual goals are. Are you comfortable concluding that you would know what a person’s goals are more than they know themselves? I’m not. But sure, if you have the ability to know the recesses of a person’s mind and all their subjective wants and desires stack ranked against all other things, and then evaluate whether they are truly trying to achieve those things, then sure. The authoritarian, more government is better beliefs share this idea that they know what’s better for people than the people themselves, that people can’t be trusted to make good choices. I reject it.
I want dysfunction in government. So good?
Both you and wolfpup acknowledge the point I’m making is true. Though you and he call it trivially true, etc. It’s more than just semantics - it’s the idea that we can never know the mind of someone else. It’s the exercise of humility that says we could be wrong, we have no way to know. But yes, if a person says they acted against their best interests, I’ll believe them.