This gives the impression that the upper-middle class support wealth redistribution at higher rates than the lower-middle class. I’m open minded but I would be quite surprised if that were actually true. That doesn’t mean there is nothing to explain—the lower-middle class still seems to oppose measures that would objectively make them richer at surprisingly high rates. But it isn’t as if self-interest doesn’t explain a great deal of voting behavior.
Some things to consider:
Does opposition to redistribution usually increase during bad economic times? The answer is no for many examples that come to my head. But what I do know is an effect of a bad economy is animosity toward whomever is in power. It is plausible the recession simply correlates with “disputing positions associated with Barack Obama”.
Now, one of the most interesting things about pre-fabricated political identities is that they come as package deals. There is no logical connection whatsoever between supporting a woman’s right to abort an unwanted fetus and supporting subsidies for alternative energy. The strong cultural correlation between these stances creates an illusion of ideological coherence. Since most of us aren’t political theorists, we tend not to see that the force determining the various planks in our favoured party’s platform is the drive to craft a winning coalition cobbled together from diverse and sometimes conflicting interest groups, not Truth.
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I think the paradox, or the irony, is that the evolution of partisan coalitions can lead to bizarrely incoherent partisan worldviews. Easy money in a recession is the objectively pro-business position. However, the rising preeminence on the right of the idea that inflation, like taxation, is largely a mechanism of unjust big-government expropriation can, through mere association, make this viewpoint seem like the “pro-business” one, even if it isn’t. It’s this kind of drift in the composition and ideology of partisan coalitions that can make even debate over economic policy seem like just one more front in the culture war.
The Farmer-forager binary. In particular consider that fear made farmers. If egalitarianism is associated with forager thinking then fear caused by economic uncertainty would trigger farmer-type anti-egalitarianism and an emphasis on self-reliance. Those with the most precarious economic situations are the ones most likely to oppose egalitarianism as the economy gets worse.
In particular, the farmer-forager thesis explains the following puzzle that the signaling theory does not. If opposition to welfare is driven by people signaling that they don’t need it we should expect the people most likely to oppose welfare to be those most likely to be mistaken for being on welfare. In particular, we should expect lower-middle class African Americans to be especially worried about looking like they’re on the dole and therefore especially vociferous in their opposition to welfare. But we in fact we find the opposite: African Americans overwhelming support welfare programs relative to whites. And this response is exactly what one would expect with the “more for mine” attitude associated with farmer norms. Fearful occasions of resource uncertainty cause us to shrink or sphere of moral concern, be less willing to share and be more suspicious of strangers especially those who look different. Also note that the rates of redistribution in more homogeneous European states—particularly Scandinavia—vastly outstrip rates in more diverse countries like the US.
Does opposition to redistribution usually increase during bad economic times? The answer is no for many examples that come to my head. But what I do know is an effect of a bad economy is animosity toward whomever is in power. It is plausible the recession simply correlates with “disputing positions associated with Barack Obama”.
This was one of my first thoughts, too. Most people are uninformed about politics and economics, and do not go much beyond “blaming the government (and by extension the policies associated with it) when stuff goes badly, and credit it when it goes well”. One could in principle test it by making similar polls about attitudes to redistribution in countries that have had right-wing governments during most of the recession. In general, one must first check that effects of this kind are independent of contingent, local political cicumstances, before seeking explanations in terms of universal psychological mechanisms.
Most people are uninformed about politics and economics, and do not go much beyond “blaming the government (and by extension the policies associated with it) when stuff goes badly, and credit it when it goes well”.
This has been historically validated, at least to the extent of a significant swing of a few percent (which is usually enough to tip an election if it happens nationally).
In particular, we should expect lower-middle class African Americans to be especially worried about looking like they’re on the dole and therefore especially vociferous in their opposition to welfare. But we in fact we find the opposite: African Americans overwhelming support welfare programs relative to whites. And this response is exactly what one would expect with the “more for mine” attitude associated with farmer norms. Fearful occasions of resource uncertainty cause us to shrink or sphere of moral concern, be less willing to share and be more suspicious of strangers especially those who look different.
While I am a fan of the farmer vs. forager paradigm myself you are forgetting that wealth redistribution is not perfectly efficient, and it requires a bureaucracy to support it.
For US Blacks government jobs are a major source of middle and even lower upper class employment. The status boost from those and a whole bunch of policies usually clustered with wealth redistribution due to political gains more than offset any such loss.
Also mistaking a middle class Black for a underclass Black carries heavier penalties for non-Black Americans than say mistaking a middle class White or Asian for a member of the underclass. Since non-Blacks form a grand majority of the US middle and upper class, there is far less need for status competition among Blacks of the same status.
This gives the impression that the upper-middle class support wealth redistribution at higher rates than the lower-middle class. I’m open minded but I would be quite surprised if that were actually true.
I wouldn’t. It also depends a lot on what one means by wealth redistribution. Which programs? Bank bailouts? Medicare? Medicaid? Social Security? Foodstamps? Mortgage interest deduction?
I’d bet that the bank bailouts were only supported by a minority of the population, and that minority was clustered in the higher incomes.
That doesn’t mean there is nothing to explain—the lower-middle class still seems to oppose measures that would objectively make them richer at surprisingly high rates.
The lower middle class opposes measures that supporters claim will make them better off. If they don’t believe that government redistribution will make them better off, there is very little to explain.
I wouldn’t. It also depends a lot on what one means by wealth redistribution. Which programs? Bank bailouts? Medicare? Medicaid? Social Security? Foodstamps? Mortgage interest deduction?
Well, we mean
policies that redistribute wealth to the poor
So I’m not sure why you picked the bank bailouts as an example. They were widely seen as the exact opposite of what we’re talking about. Medicaid, food-stamps, higher minimum wage, state welfare, progressive taxation etc. is what we’re talking about. You’re welcome to try to find issue polls with demographic breakdowns but absent that I don’t know why we’d expect the publics views on redistributing wealth to the poor to differ that substantially from the degree to which they support political parties associated with redistributing wealth to the poor. See the family income section.
The lower middle class opposes measures that supporters claim will make them better off. If they don’t believe that government redistribution will make them better off, there is very little to explain.
We’re trying to figure out why people believe what they do. If someone is in a tax bracket that would have a lower rate in plan A than in plan B it is a good hypothesis that the reason they support A over B is self-interest. Now it may be the case that B would actually be better for this person for obscure, hard-to-explain reasons. If the person grasps those reasons and gives those reasons then we have a good explanation. But if this person insists that B will make them better off but does not seem to have good reasons or merely parrots partisan economists it seems like there is still quite a bit to explain—even if their beliefs are correct. This goes for the poor as well as the rich.
So I’m not sure why you picked the bank bailouts as an example. They were widely seen as the exact opposite of what we’re talking about.
Uh huh. Granting the government power to redistribute wealth “for the public good” had the consequence of the poor getting saddled with trillions in debt. Maybe they don’t believe they benefit from such a system.
“Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”
Frederic Bastiat
Maybe the working poor believe that the wealth redistribution game is a negative sum game, and advocate that we don’t play it. Yes, they might fight and claw at the trough, and get some portion of the slop. Why should they believe they’ll be more successful in that fight than the rich and well connected, particularly after just witnessing the rich and well connected walk off with trillions?
It’s like free speech. There is a lot of speech that offends me. I wish people didn’t believe that rubbish. But I wouldn’t want to empower the government to ban such speech, because having granted the government such power, why would I believe that would never be turned against speech I approve of?
This has always been the puzzle of the Revolutionary Vanguard. Why don’t the Proles support us, when our policies benefit them? Maybe, the Proles think the policies of the Revolutionary Vanguard won’t benefit them. There’s no puzzle to solve unless you just can’t conceive that the Revolutionary Vanguard may be wrong.
The only position I’m arguing against is that it is a mystery why the working poor don’t support government wealth redistribution. It isn’t a mystery to me, and I gave my solution to the supposed conundrum. I think that’s responsive.
This has always been the puzzle of the Revolutionary Vanguard. Why don’t the Proles support us, when our policies benefit them? Maybe, the Proles think the policies of the Revolutionary Vanguard won’t benefit them. There’s no puzzle to solve unless you just can’t conceive that the Revolutionary Vanguard may be wrong.
This is a very good argument. But on the other hand those pushing for wealth redistributions are (today) far from radical, basically they echo establishment sentiments. And the same people look back on history and see that this same establishment has always eventually “made the right choice” (or at least that is the publicly accepted narrative).
This is a very good argument. But on the other hand those pushing for wealth redistributions are (today) far from radical, basically the establishment. People look back on history and see that this establishment has always eventually “made the right choice” (or at least that is the publicly accepted narrative).
I didn’t mean to imply that I thought they were revolutionaries. It’s a bit of black comedy that the people who style themselves as radicals speaking truth to power are completely orthodox defenders of The Man. It’s a similar scene with Christians on Fox News, feeling persecuted and martyred in the US for their faith whenever there is the tiniest pushback against them having their way. They’ve both got their narratives playing as the soundtrack to their lives, no matter how incongruous to reality.
With the Revolutionary Vanguard cracks, I was getting at the heads I win, tails you lose nature of the Vanguard’s faith in their program. If the Proles don’t agree that the Vanguards program, the obvious reason, that the Proles don’t think it’s good for them, is overlooked, and instead theories about the “false consciousness” of the Proles sprout like mushrooms on a rotting tree stump.
This gives the impression that the upper-middle class support wealth redistribution at higher rates than the lower-middle class. I’m open minded but I would be quite surprised if that were actually true. That doesn’t mean there is nothing to explain—the lower-middle class still seems to oppose measures that would objectively make them richer at surprisingly high rates. But it isn’t as if self-interest doesn’t explain a great deal of voting behavior.
Some things to consider:
Does opposition to redistribution usually increase during bad economic times? The answer is no for many examples that come to my head. But what I do know is an effect of a bad economy is animosity toward whomever is in power. It is plausible the recession simply correlates with “disputing positions associated with Barack Obama”.
Ideological stickiness or coalition logic
...
The Farmer-forager binary. In particular consider that fear made farmers. If egalitarianism is associated with forager thinking then fear caused by economic uncertainty would trigger farmer-type anti-egalitarianism and an emphasis on self-reliance. Those with the most precarious economic situations are the ones most likely to oppose egalitarianism as the economy gets worse.
In particular, the farmer-forager thesis explains the following puzzle that the signaling theory does not. If opposition to welfare is driven by people signaling that they don’t need it we should expect the people most likely to oppose welfare to be those most likely to be mistaken for being on welfare. In particular, we should expect lower-middle class African Americans to be especially worried about looking like they’re on the dole and therefore especially vociferous in their opposition to welfare. But we in fact we find the opposite: African Americans overwhelming support welfare programs relative to whites. And this response is exactly what one would expect with the “more for mine” attitude associated with farmer norms. Fearful occasions of resource uncertainty cause us to shrink or sphere of moral concern, be less willing to share and be more suspicious of strangers especially those who look different. Also note that the rates of redistribution in more homogeneous European states—particularly Scandinavia—vastly outstrip rates in more diverse countries like the US.
I agree that self-interest explains a great deal of voting behavior. It explains the non-voters.
This was one of my first thoughts, too. Most people are uninformed about politics and economics, and do not go much beyond “blaming the government (and by extension the policies associated with it) when stuff goes badly, and credit it when it goes well”. One could in principle test it by making similar polls about attitudes to redistribution in countries that have had right-wing governments during most of the recession. In general, one must first check that effects of this kind are independent of contingent, local political cicumstances, before seeking explanations in terms of universal psychological mechanisms.
This has been historically validated, at least to the extent of a significant swing of a few percent (which is usually enough to tip an election if it happens nationally).
While I am a fan of the farmer vs. forager paradigm myself you are forgetting that wealth redistribution is not perfectly efficient, and it requires a bureaucracy to support it.
For US Blacks government jobs are a major source of middle and even lower upper class employment. The status boost from those and a whole bunch of policies usually clustered with wealth redistribution due to political gains more than offset any such loss.
Also mistaking a middle class Black for a underclass Black carries heavier penalties for non-Black Americans than say mistaking a middle class White or Asian for a member of the underclass. Since non-Blacks form a grand majority of the US middle and upper class, there is far less need for status competition among Blacks of the same status.
I wouldn’t. It also depends a lot on what one means by wealth redistribution. Which programs? Bank bailouts? Medicare? Medicaid? Social Security? Foodstamps? Mortgage interest deduction?
I’d bet that the bank bailouts were only supported by a minority of the population, and that minority was clustered in the higher incomes.
The lower middle class opposes measures that supporters claim will make them better off. If they don’t believe that government redistribution will make them better off, there is very little to explain.
Well, we mean
So I’m not sure why you picked the bank bailouts as an example. They were widely seen as the exact opposite of what we’re talking about. Medicaid, food-stamps, higher minimum wage, state welfare, progressive taxation etc. is what we’re talking about. You’re welcome to try to find issue polls with demographic breakdowns but absent that I don’t know why we’d expect the publics views on redistributing wealth to the poor to differ that substantially from the degree to which they support political parties associated with redistributing wealth to the poor. See the family income section.
We’re trying to figure out why people believe what they do. If someone is in a tax bracket that would have a lower rate in plan A than in plan B it is a good hypothesis that the reason they support A over B is self-interest. Now it may be the case that B would actually be better for this person for obscure, hard-to-explain reasons. If the person grasps those reasons and gives those reasons then we have a good explanation. But if this person insists that B will make them better off but does not seem to have good reasons or merely parrots partisan economists it seems like there is still quite a bit to explain—even if their beliefs are correct. This goes for the poor as well as the rich.
Uh huh. Granting the government power to redistribute wealth “for the public good” had the consequence of the poor getting saddled with trillions in debt. Maybe they don’t believe they benefit from such a system.
“Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”
Frederic Bastiat
Maybe the working poor believe that the wealth redistribution game is a negative sum game, and advocate that we don’t play it. Yes, they might fight and claw at the trough, and get some portion of the slop. Why should they believe they’ll be more successful in that fight than the rich and well connected, particularly after just witnessing the rich and well connected walk off with trillions?
It’s like free speech. There is a lot of speech that offends me. I wish people didn’t believe that rubbish. But I wouldn’t want to empower the government to ban such speech, because having granted the government such power, why would I believe that would never be turned against speech I approve of?
This has always been the puzzle of the Revolutionary Vanguard. Why don’t the Proles support us, when our policies benefit them? Maybe, the Proles think the policies of the Revolutionary Vanguard won’t benefit them. There’s no puzzle to solve unless you just can’t conceive that the Revolutionary Vanguard may be wrong.
This is both non-responsive and arguing against a position I don’t actually hold. I lean ‘liberaltarian’, you’re not arguing with Thomas Frank.
The only position I’m arguing against is that it is a mystery why the working poor don’t support government wealth redistribution. It isn’t a mystery to me, and I gave my solution to the supposed conundrum. I think that’s responsive.
This is a very good argument. But on the other hand those pushing for wealth redistributions are (today) far from radical, basically they echo establishment sentiments. And the same people look back on history and see that this same establishment has always eventually “made the right choice” (or at least that is the publicly accepted narrative).
Don’t forget people do have a progoverment bias.
I didn’t mean to imply that I thought they were revolutionaries. It’s a bit of black comedy that the people who style themselves as radicals speaking truth to power are completely orthodox defenders of The Man. It’s a similar scene with Christians on Fox News, feeling persecuted and martyred in the US for their faith whenever there is the tiniest pushback against them having their way. They’ve both got their narratives playing as the soundtrack to their lives, no matter how incongruous to reality.
With the Revolutionary Vanguard cracks, I was getting at the heads I win, tails you lose nature of the Vanguard’s faith in their program. If the Proles don’t agree that the Vanguards program, the obvious reason, that the Proles don’t think it’s good for them, is overlooked, and instead theories about the “false consciousness” of the Proles sprout like mushrooms on a rotting tree stump.