Politics

Abolishing Prisons

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Petition your state legislatures to pardon every convict in their several penitentiaries: blessing them as they go, and saying to them in the name of the Lord, go thy way and sin no more. Advise your legislators when they make laws for larceny, burglary or any felony, to make the penalty applicable to work upon roads, public works, or any place where the culprit can be taught more wisdom and more virtue; and become more enlightened. Rigor and seclusion will never do as much to reform the propensities of man, as reason and friendship. Murder only can claim confinement or death. Let the penitentiaries be turned into seminaries of learning, where intelligence, like the angels of heaven, would banish such fragments of barbarism: Imprisonment for debt is a meaner practice than the savage tolerates with all his ferocity. “Amor vincit omnia.” Love conquers all. – Joseph Smith, 7 Feb. 1844[ref]Hat-tip to Russell Stevenson for pointing this out.[/ref]

As reported by Vox,

Image result for prison reformAmerica should abolish prisons. Perhaps not all of them, but very close to it.

That’s the argument in a recent, provocative paper by Peter Salib, a judicial clerk to Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Frank Easterbrook.

According to Salib, the idea behind the criminal justice system should be to punish and deter crimes. But prisons are arguably a very inefficient way to do that. The research shows that long prison sentences have little impact on crime, and a stint in prison can actually make someone more likely to commit crime — by further exposing them to all sorts of criminal elements. At the same time, prisons are incredibly costly, eating up funds that could go to other government programs that are more effective at fighting crime.

So why not, Salib suggests, consider alternative approaches to punishment that can let someone actually pay their debt back to society without forcing taxpayers to shoulder the burden of paying for his full confinement?

Salib gave the example of an accountant who burned down an office building. Instead of locking him up for potentially decades, Salib suggests keeping an eye on him through other means, such as GPS monitoring, and forcing him to work as an accountant to pay back the cost of the office building. This would, he argues, be much better for everyone involved; the office building owner gets paid back for the damage, and society has to pay much less to confine this person.

…Salib makes one of the clearer cases for how this change would be better not just for prisoners, but for society as a whole. You should read the full paper for more detail. 

Check it out

Researchers claimed conservatives are more hostile and socially withdrawn; turns out they read the data exactly backwards.

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In 2012 the American Journal of Political Science published a study that, in part, measured correlations between political attitutes and personality traits such as being “uncooperative, hostile, troublesome, and socially withdrawn.” The original article stated upfront that the authors expected such traits to correlate to conservative political attitudes, and that was the result the study found. I remember when the study came out and several of my friends reposted it as evidence of how backward and problematic conservatives can be.

But it turns out the article had interpreted the data incorrectly. In 2015 the journal published an erratum to correct the mistake, stating:

The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed. Thus, where we indicated that higher scores in Table 1 (page 40) reflect a more conservative response, they actually reflect a more liberal response. Specifically, in the original manuscript, the descriptive analyses report that those higher in Eysenck’s psychoticism are more conservative, but they are actually more liberal; and where the original manuscript reports those higher in neuroticism and social desirability are more liberal, they are, in fact, more conservative.

[Emphasis added.]

According to The Washington Times:

The error was first spotted by Dr. Steven Ludeke, a researcher at the University of Southern Denmark, who said it is significant, pointing to the frequency at which the study was cited.

“The erroneous results represented some of the larger correlations between personality and politics ever reported; they were reported and interpreted, repeatedly, in the wrong direction; and then cited at rates that are (for this field) extremely high,” Dr. Ludeke told Retraction Watch.

Given social science’s apparent pattern of pathologizing conservatives, this kind of mistake is unfortunate but not particularly surprising.

Are Asylum Seekers Economically Beneficial?

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From Reason:

MigrantsJobsSilverblackDreamstime
Nope

Migrants and asylum seekers provide big net benefits to their host countries reports a new study in Science Advances by three French economists. The researchers used 30 years of data on migrant and asylum seeker flows into 15 western European countries. They were seeking to find what effect permanent migrants including refugees who sought and obtained asylum between 1985 and 2015 have had on subsequent GDP per capita, unemployment rates, government spending and tax collections in those countries.

Flows of asylum seekers and migrants varied between countries. For example, Austria received 2.35 asylum seekers and 4.06 migrants per 1,000 residents; Germany 1.51 and 3.79; France 0.68 and 1.14; Italy 0.27 and 2.56; and the United Kingdom 0.63 and 2.36 respectively. Portugal received the lowest of both at 0.03 and 0.47 per 1,000 residents. Over all, the flow of asylum seekers and migrants into the 15 countries averaged 1.13 and 2.57 per 1,000 residents respectively.

Once the economists crunched the numbers they found that migrant flows during the past 30 years have had substantial positive effects on European economies. Specifically, the researchers report that migrants “significantly increase per capita GDP, reduce unemployment, and improve the balance of public finances; the additional public expenditures, which is usually referred to as the ‘refugee burden’, is more than outweighed by the increase in tax revenues.”

…This new study bolsters the results of similar research on refugees and migrants in this country, including a review reportedly suppressed by the Trump administration last year, that finds that they increase incomes and are a net fiscal benefit.

The evidence stacks up.

Can Americans Distinguish Factual Statements From Opinions?

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From Pew Research Center:

In today’s fast-paced and complex information environment, news consumers must make rapid-fire judgments about how to internalize news-related statements – statements that often come in snippets and through pathways that provide little context. A new Pew Research Center survey of 5,035 U.S. adults examines a basic step in that process: whether members of the public can recognize news as factual – something that’s capable of being proved or disproved by objective evidence – or as an opinion that reflects the beliefs and values of whoever expressed it.

The findings from the survey, conducted between Feb. 22 and March 8, 2018, reveal that even this basic task presents a challenge. The main portion of the study, which measured the public’s ability to distinguish between five factual statements and five opinion statements, found that a majority of Americans correctly identified at least three of the five statements in each set. But this result is only a little better than random guesses. Far fewer Americans got all five correct, and roughly a quarter got most or all wrong. Even more revealing is that certain Americans do far better at parsing through this content than others. Those with high political awareness, those who are very digitally savvy and those who place high levels of trust in the news media are better able than others to accurately identify news-related statements as factual or opinion.

…Trust in those who do the reporting also matters in how that statement is interpreted. Almost four-in-ten Americans who have a lot of trust in the information from national news organizations (39%) correctly identified all five factual statements, compared with 18% of those who have not much or no trust. However, one other trait related to news habits – the public’s level of interest in news – does not show much difference.

In addition to political awareness, party identification plays a role in how Americans differentiate between factual and opinion news statements. Both Republicans and Democrats show a propensity to be influenced by which side of the aisle a statement appeals to most. For example, members of each political party were more likely to label both factual and opinion statements as factual when they appealed more to their political side.

Political awareness, digital savviness and trust in the media all play large roles in the ability to distinguish between factual and opinion news statements

No comment.

UPDATE: I lied. Here’s a comment from Jason Brennan, who has some pointed and insightful critiques of the study’s design:

First, this trades on a questionable and controversial view about whether normative statements are objective and provable. American K-12 schools dogmatically teach the view that all normative statements are subjective and mere opinion, but that’s in fact (and this is not mere opinion) a highly controversial philosophical claim. See this NY Times blog complaining about this: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/02/why-our-children-dont-think-there-are-moral-facts/

Second, the normative statements in the bottom are what we might call “thick” rather than “thin” normative claims. A thin claim simply offers an evaluation, e.g., “Crooked Timber is bad.” A thick claim contains both normative components but also encapsulates, presupposes, encompasses, or in some way contains background descriptive claims. For example, “Corey Robin is intellectually dishonest” or “Michael Huemer is brave.”

Most of these statements are “thick” in that sense.

Is government wasteful and inefficient? I’m not sure if that is to be interpreted entirely as an opinion claim, or whether it is not entirely provable. “Efficiency” has multiple descriptive meanings in economics. “Wasteful” can be seen as a slightly normatively loaded version of “inefficient”; e.g., “This engine is less efficient than that engine, so it’s wasteful.” Economists regularly make claims like this when studying various institutions, and they see themselves as doing descriptive, positive work.

Are immigrants a big problem? Again, this question presupposes some normative commitments. However, we also tend to summarize descriptive claims in normative ways when the background normative commitments are shared. Someone reading this might think the statement is–as it often would be in conversational English–a way of summarizing a longer statement: “Immigrants cause crime, undermine social cohesion, and strain government budgets by consuming public goods, schooling, and social insurance.” (Note that I do not endorse these descriptive claims.) Similarly, if a medical doctor said, “Jason, your cancer is a aggressive and is going to be a big problem,” I wouldn’t think to respond, “Just give me the facts, doc.” Instead, it’s a way of summarizing such things as “The cancer has metastasized and is unlikely to respond to common treatments.”

Similar comments apply to the other opinion statements. Yes, they contain normative components, but nevertheless, the study both A) presupposes a problematic view about the objectivity of normative statements and B) seems to ignore or have questionable views about the pragmatics of thick normative statements.

DR Editor in Deseret News: The LDS Church and Immigration

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Back when I published my immigration article in BYU Studies Quarterly, I was asked to write a condensed version for Deseret News as part of their “Faith & Thought” column. It was initially meant to provide more publicity for the latest issue of the journal. However, the article apparently ran into a few hiccups along the way. But with the LDS Church’s latest statement on immigration policy in the US, it looks like the article was able to be pushed through. Though my critical tone was muted a bit by the editors (I come off as far more moderate than I actually am on the matter), I’m happy to see it in print. A few highlights:

A cursory acquaintance with LDS history and scripture shakes up caricatures of migrants by reminding the faithful that many revered prophets in LDS scriptures were themselves migrants. It’s easy to forget that the story of migration is the story of holy writ. God’s biblical people were often displaced and migrating, often due to persecution or war. Consider the exile of Adam and Eve, Abraham’s overland journeys, Jacob and his family’s famine-driven journey into Egypt, the Exodus, the deportations under the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Jewish dispersions under the Greeks and Romans, Christ’s status as a refugee in Egypt and the early Christian scatterings.

The Book of Mormon contains similar accounts, detailing numerous mass migrations, including the departure of Lehi’s family from Jerusalem to the New World and that of the Jaredites from Babel to the promised land. Even the early years of the LDS Church started with several interstate migrations (often due to local persecution and governmental hostility), from New York to Ohio to Missouri to Illinois until the Saints’ eventual settlement in what was then Mexican territory (Utah). As recent events have revealed, it can be easy to assume the worst about migrants from a comfortable, settled position. However, the scriptures and Mormon people’s own history disturb any negative, simplistic ideas about the worth and dignity of migrants in God’s eyes.

Furthermore, one of the most prominent and consistent themes throughout the Judeo-Christian scriptural canon is the obligation to care for those in need. Included among the list of the disadvantaged classes in need of provisions and protection — widows, orphans and the poor — are also “strangers” and “sojourners.”

The biblical tradition warns God’s people against “vexing” or “oppressing” the stranger. The book of Exodus reminds, “ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” As many scholars have noted, hospitality was considered one of the highest virtues in antiquity, and the violation of this virtue through the mistreatment of the stranger seeking refuge is given in the Bible as one reason for the destruction of Sodom.

…Beyond religious and scriptural commitments, LDS statements acknowledge the positive economic impact of immigrants. The Utah Compact underscores the contributions immigrants make to their communities.

A 2011 meta-analysis by economist Michael Clemens found that dropping all current immigration restrictions would result in a doubling of world GDP. A more recent analysiscorroborated these findings, concluding that lifting all migration restrictions would increase world output by 126 percent. Similarly, a 2013 study found that dropping all immigration barriers would result in an additional income of $10,798 per worker (migrant and non-migrant alike); doubling the income of the world’s most deprived.

Despite these economic benefits, many rich country natives worry that an overabundance of immigrants will make things worse. Some accuse immigrants of stealing native jobs, depressing native wages, undermining native culture and institutions, bloating the welfare state, and/or being criminals and terrorists. The vast majority of empirical studies, however, contradicts these arguments. Several large literature reviews — including two from the National Academy of Sciences and one from Oxford University — find that the long-term effects of immigration on jobs, wages and the fiscal budget tend to be neutral to slightly positive. Immigrants also assimilate rather well into their host countries and even appear to boost the economic freedom of their institutions.

…In 2011 the church stated that “The history of mass expulsion or mistreatment of individuals or families is cause for concern especially where race, culture, or religion are involved.” The church called for “immigration reform” that adopts a “balanced and civil approach to a challenging problem, fully consistent with its tradition of compassion, its reverence for family, and its commitment to law.” Seven years later, perhaps the United States is now ready to listen.

Read the whole thing here.

Do Minimum Wage Hikes Decrease Non-Wage Benefits?

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Image result for fight for 15

Economist Art Carden writes at Forbes,

A recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research by the economists Jeffrey Clemens, Lisa B. Kahn, and Jonathan Meer should make us pause and question the wisdom of higher minimum wages. The economists explore how minimum wages affect the probability of employer-provided health coverage and find that a chunk of the increased earnings for workers who get higher wages will be offset by a reduction in employer-provided health coverage.

…[T]here’s a lot more to a job than wages. People want work that is meaningful or enjoyable. They might especially value safety, comfort, or flexibility. People can also get a lot of non-wage benefits like health coverage, scholarship opportunities, and paid vacation. Workers can (and do) “buy” these perks by accepting lower wages than they would require if the job weren’t as pleasant, meaningful, or safe or if the fringe benefits weren’t as good.

In short, workers don’t live on wages alone, and minimum wages might not change what workers get paid but rather how they get paid. Minimum wages mandate that cash wages take up a bigger part of employee compensation.

He continues,

Clemens, Kahn, and Meer are limited by available data, so they can’t measure everything comprehensively. They narrow their focus to the relationship between minimum wages and employer-provided health coverage and find that for Very Low wage workers (e.g. food service), about 9% of increase in earnings due to a $1 per hour increase in the minimum wage is offset by the lower probability of employer-provided health coverage. For Low Wage workers (e.g. retail sales), its 16%. For Modest Wage workers ( clerks and food service supervisors), it’s 57%—which is unsurprising since workers with higher wages get a smaller bump from minimum wage increases.

When it comes to worker pay, total compensation must be considered, not just wages.

Does Political Ideology Taint Perceptions About Expertise?

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Need more evidence for political hooliganism? Check out the findings from a recent working paper:

Here, we ask whether (dis)similarity in political views interferes with the ability to learn about another person’s competency in an unrelated task (specifically categorizing [geometric] shapes) in a situation in which it is in people’s best interest to learn who excels in the task in order to turn to them for assistance. In the first part of our experiment, participants had an opportunity to learn whether others (i) had similar political opinions to theirs and (ii) how well they did in a task that required learning about shapes. After rating others on these two characteristics, they completed the second part of the experiment, where they decided to whom to turn to for advice when solving the shape task. They were rewarded for accuracy on the task and thus had an economic incentive to turn to the participant who was most skilled at the task. 

We find that (dis)similarity in political views interferes with the ability to make an accurate assessment of people’s expertise in the domain of shapes, which leads to two central outcomes. The first is that people chose to hear about shapes from others who are politically like-minded, even though those people are not especially good at the shape task, rather than to hear from people who excel at the shape task but have different political opinions. The second is that people are more influenced by those with similar political opinions, even when they had the opportunity to learn that those by whom they are influenced are not especially good at the task they are solving. We suspect that these findings are replicated in the real world of political behaviour, and that they help explain a range of phenomena, including the spread of fake news (Friggeri, Adamic, Eckles, & Cheng, 2014; Kahne & Bowyer, 2017), conspiracy theories (Del Vicario et al., 2016), polarization (Druckman, Peterson, & Slothuus, 2013; Prior, 2007), and insufficient learning in general (Yaniv & Kleinberger, 2000; Yaniv & Milyavsky, 2007) (pg. 3-4).

Perhaps this is another contributor to the death of expertise.

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Says the liberal/conservative layman to the conservative/liberal astrophysicist.

Is Partisanship Driven By Misperceptions About Party Makeup?

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Hooligans = the rabid sports fans of politics

Georgetown philosopher Jason Brennan describes political “hooligans” in this way:

Hooligans are the rabid sports fan of politics. They have strong and largely fixed worldviews. They can present arguments for their beliefs, but they cannot explain alternative points of view in a way that people with other views would find satisfactory. Hooligans consume political information, although in a biased way. They tend to seek out information that confirms their preexisting political opinions, but ignore, evade, and reject out of hand evidence that contradicts or disconfirms their preexisting opinions. They may have some trust in the social sciences, but cherry-pick data and tend only to learn about research that supports their own views. They are overconfident in themselves and what they know. Their political opinions form part of their identity, and they are proud to be a member of their political team…Most regular voters, active political participants, activists, registered party members, and politicians are hooligans.[ref]Against Democracy, pg. 5.[/ref]

What’s more, voters are overwhelmingly—at times astonishingly—ignorant. Here’s another study demonstrating this sad state of affairs (from an earlier draft):

Across five studies, we find that people overestimate the degree to which partisans belong to party-stereotypical groups, often vastly so. Even in cases where these groups comprise just a sliver of the population, people report that these groups constitute upwards of 40% of the party they “fit.” And when people are given information about these groups’ shares in the population, the bias in their estimates doesn’t decline, suggesting that people rely on representativeness when making judgments about party composition.

Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, all overestimate the share of party-stereotypical groups in both the major parties. Partisan differences, although statistically significant, are relatively small compared to the overall magnitude of these misperceptions. Even more strikingly, those most interested in politics hold the most skewed perceptions of party composition. One plausible explanation for both of these results is that mediated, impersonal information drives these misperceptions. However, all the evidence we have presented on this point is descriptive. Additional research is needed to assess the extent to which media shape these perceptions.

These misperceptions are also consequential. Experimental evidence suggests that beliefs about out-party composition affect perceptions of where opposing-party supporters stand on the issues. These findings provide a potential explanation for why people tend to overestimate the extremity of opposing partisans. In future extensions, we plan to further investigate whether beliefs about party composition explain the striking finding that people also overestimate the extremity of co-partisans (Ahler 2014; Levendusky and Malhotra 2015). Misperceptions about out-party composition also lead partisans to feel more socially distant from the opposing party. Building on work by Hetherington and Weiler (2009) and Mason and Davis (2015), who find that partisan animus is related to party composition, we experimentally show that people’s beliefs about party composition affect their feelings towards the opposing party.

…The experimental findings support the notion that orientations toward constituent social groups affect how people feel toward the parties, among other things. However, they also show that beliefs about shares of various groups in the parties matter. Thus, while the group identity account makes a compelling case that partisanship is a relatively stable, affective attachment, work in this tradition must grapple more thoroughly with the social cognitions (and cognitive biases) that are relevant to how people reason about politics.

This is especially the case because partisans overestimate the share of party-stereotypical groups in their own party. For instance, many lower- and middle-class Republicans think that their party contains far more rich people than it actually does. This suggests that many partisans like their own parties to the extent they do—a great deal, with average ratings exceeding 80 on the thermometer scale (Iyengar, Sood and Lelkes 2012)—despite believing that the party has a greater share of groups to which they tend not to belong than it actually does. Green, Palmquist and Schickler (2002, p. 8) suggest that partisans choose parties based on “which assemblage of groups” looks like them. While this may still be true, the data suggest that people identify with parties based on which groups they like.

Finally, and most broadly, this research furthers our understanding of people’s perceptions of mass collectives and how these perceptions shape individuals’ own political attitudes. Mutz (1998) describes impersonal influence as the effect of people’s perceptions of what others are experiencing, or what others believe, on their own attitudes and behaviors. We take this one step further and assert that people’s perceptions merely of who belongs to a collective can be a source of impersonal influence—and in this case, a catalyst for partisanship in American politics (pg. 27-28).

I’ll say it again: politics makes us mean and dumb.[ref]Vox agrees.[/ref]

Does Economic Marginalization Breed Radicals?

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A few years ago, I linked to a Wall Street Journal op-ed by economist Hernando de Soto that declared “economic hope” to be “the only way to win the battle for the constituencies on which terrorist groups feed.” A couple years later, I discussed the possibility that strict labor laws–and the unemployment it produces–was a major contributor to radicalization in Europe. In short, the lack of economic opportunity breeds extremism.

Recent evidence appears to support this hunch.

Many point to U.S. drone strikes as a causal factor in Islamic radicalization. However, a brand new study argues the contrary, concluding,

Although U.S. drone strikes in Muslim countries might play a role in the radicalization or violent extremism of co-religionists around the world, the available evidence does not support the assertion that drones are “fueling the fires of homegrown radicalization” in Western societies or that these unmanned aerial vehicles are the new Guantánamo.

…The radicalization of individuals in the Somali diaspora, especially in the state of Minnesota, illustrates the role of U.S. policies targeting Muslim communities at home; personal factors, such as conflicted identities among young Somali Americans; and their nationalist desire to evict foreign troops from Somalia, a desire that recruiters from the al-Qaida affiliate al-Shabaab have been able to exploit. My brief examination of the social science literature on the drivers of Islamist militancy among Muslims in European countries similarly points to domestic factors such as an identity crisis among some young Muslims, state policies of marginalization and discrimination, and the role of radical preachers and terrorist recruiters who leverage these vulnerabilities for recruitment (pg. 83-84; emphasis mine).

This is further confirmed by a recent World Bank paper:

Exploiting individual-level education information for these fighters, we link the size of a contingent of fighters to the economic conditions faced by workers in their countries of residence who have the same level of education, by distinguishing primary, secondary and tertiary education. Beginning non-parametrically, we document a correlation between the within-country relative unemployment rate faced by workers from a specific country and education level and the corresponding relative number of recruits. We then conduct panel regressions in which we estimate the impact of unemployment on the propensity to join the terrorist group, controlling for country and education-level fixed effects. The estimated coefficients indicate that higher unemployment rates are a push factor towards radicalization, especially for countries at a shorter distance to Syria, with an elasticity of 0.25; a one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate leads to 42 additional Daesh recruits. The elasticity steeply decreases further away from Syria and becomes both economically and statistically insignificant past the average distance of 2,500 km. The results are robust to the inclusion of education-specific wage rates, strengthening the case for a causal interpretation of these results (pg. 1-2).

I’m reminded of the famous quote by Nobel laureate Robert Lucas: “The consequences for human welfare involved in questions [of economic growth] are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else” (pg. 5).

Identity Politics and Happiness

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Image result for yelling protester
I know they don’t look it, but they’re probably pretty happy people.

Now for something not the least bit surprising. From a recent working paper:

Results show that political affiliations of national politicians, especially the president, have an effect on reported happiness while there is no effect of state, gubernatorial or legislative, party control. Individuals report being happier when the president is a member of their own party, has conservative ideology, and an ideology that matches their individual tastes. Throughout all specifications, republicans and those holding conservative political values report higher happiness. Shockingly, regardless of liberal or conservative political values, those who hold extreme political values report higher levels of happiness. The large effect of partisanship and extreme views support the view that partisanship is a result of social identity and provides a psychological need for certainty and structure.

Economist Arthur Brooks, the soon-to-be-former president of the American Enterprise Institute, made this point years ago in his book Gross National Happiness:

Americans who describe themselves as holding extreme political views–somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the population–are among the happiest people in America. All of those angry protesters who denounce Dick Cheney as a murderer; all of the professional political pundits who use the rhetoric of rage and misery to get on cable television–it turns out they’re not miserable at all. On the contrary, they’re enjoying themselves rather a lot. 

In 2004, 35 percent of people who said they were extremely liberal were very happy (versus 22 percent of people who were just liberal). At the same time, a whopping 48 percent of people who were extremely conservative gave this response (compared with 43 percent of nonextreme conservatives). Indeed, the gusto with which Bill Clinton’s attackers in 1998 went after him was really a clue that they were having a grand old time. George W. Bush’s harshest critics–those who have felt the predations of the Bush administration to the very depths of their soul–are quite likely to be a great deal happier than more moderate liberals. 

Why are ideologues so happy? The most plausible reason is religion–not real religion, but rather, a secular substitute in which they believe with perfect certainty in the correctness of their political dogmas. People want to hold the truth; questioning is uncomfortable. It is easy to live by the creed that our nation’s ills are because of George W. Bush; it is much harder to acknowledge that no administration is perfect–or perfectly awful. True political believers are martyrs after a fashion willing to shout slogans in public for causes they are sure are good, or against causes they are convinced are evil. They are happy because–unlike you, probably–they are positive they are right. No data could change their minds (pgs. 33-34).

In other words, being a political hooligan feels really good, which makes change very unlikely. Unfortunately, as Brooks points out,

the happiness of political extremists is an unhappy fact for America. They may themselves be happy, but they make others unhappy–that is, they actually lower our gross national happiness. In many cases, extremists actually intend to upset people–it is part of their strategy…Extremists are happy to stir up their own ranks, but they are even happier when they cause misery for their political opponents. For people on the far left and right, people who do not share their views are not just mistaken, but bad people, who are also stupid and selfish. They deserve to be unhappy…Extremists thrive on dehumanizing their opponents (pgs. 34-35).

Politics makes us mean and dumb.