30% of Republicans and 19% of Democrats support bombing Agrabah. You know, Aladdin’s hometown.
44% of Democrats were in favor of allowing refugees from Jasmine’s kingdom to settle in the U.S., while 27% were opposed and 28% were indifferent.
According to a 2007 survey, 35% of Democrats and 12% of Republicans support the “truther” theory of 9/11 (i.e. 9/11 was an inside job).
Only 29% of Republicans believe President Obama was born in the U.S. (the rest said either he wasn’t or they “aren’t sure”).
32% of Democrats and 18 % of Republicans believe “the Jews” deserve substantial blame for the 2008 financial crisis.[ref]For a fascinating read on a lot of the anti-Semitism underlying anti-capitalist sentiments, see Jerry Z. Muller, Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).[/ref]
GMU law professor Ilya Somin recent Washington Post article uses these numbers to explore how ignorance abounds among political partisans on both sides. Check it out.
“We have this large body of evidence covering many, many years that consistently shows if you happen to live in an area with only one hospital you are going to pay a lot more,” [Carnegie Mellon economist Martin] Gaynor said.
That helps explain why a C-Section in one Oregon market costs more than $15,000 and can run for as little as $3,000 in St. Louis, where there’s lots of competition. For years, hospital executives have defended these prices saying it’s about quality, or that they see sicker patients, or lots of folks on Medicare. “That’s just not true,” said co-author Yale economist Zack Cooper.
I mention Pethokoukis’ blog specifically because it provides a number of informative links on the subject, including one from The New York Times appropriately titled “The Experts Were Wrong About the Best Places for Better and Cheaper Health Care.” This is what makes central planning so dangerous: experts are often wrong when it comes to making sweeping societal changes via laws and policies. When the market is allowed to work, as in the case of hospitals, prices drop and quality improves.[ref]For example, recent research suggests that competition between hospitals improves managerial quality and thus hospital performance (e.g. increase in survival rates of emergency heart attacks).[/ref]
My friend Chris Smith recently authored a piece over at Approaching Justiceon how minimum wage opponents get it wrong on economics. As I commented elsewhere, providing nuance to the discussion by pointing out some studies that find no effect on employment or by discussing trade-offs is important. But I think it is quite a stretch to say that minimum wage opponents believe in an “oversimplified economic theory that is not borne out by empirical research.” It’s not just that “many studies” show an increase in unemployment among the least skilled and least educated. That’s what most studies over the last couple decades have shown (as Neumark’s MIT-published book from a few years ago demonstrates as well as his literature reviews) along with plenty of recent research. There is also a difference between low-wage workers and low-income families. Many low-wage workers are not the primary breadwinners and are simply bringing in extra money for middle-class families.
Other studies show that an increased minimum wage causes firms to incrementally move toward automation. Now, this too could be seen as a trade-off: automation and technological progress tend to make processes more efficient and therefore increase productivity (and eventually wages), raising living standards for consumers (which include the poor). Nonetheless, the point is that while unemployment in the short-term may be insignificant, the long-term effects could be much bigger. For example, one study finds that minimum wage hikes lead to lower rates of job growth: about 0.05 percentage points a year. That’s not much in a single year, but it accumulates over time and largely impacts the young and uneducated.
Princeton’s Thomas Leonard has looked at Progressive Era policies and found that the minimum wage was wielded by progressive economists as a form of economic eugenics; a way of ridding the labor force of those considered “unemployable” or “unfit” such as women, immigrants, and blacks. It was a matter of social control rather than social justice, but now it is heralded as the latter.
I was reminded of all this when I read David Neumark’s (mentioned above) new Wall Street Journal article on this very subject. He explains, “Economists have written scores of papers on the topic dating back 100 years, and the vast majority of these studies point to job losses for the least-skilled. They are based on fundamental economic reasoning—that when you raise the price of something, in this case labor, less of it will be demanded, or in this case hired.” He cites some of the same research I mention above. He addresses some of the recent research showing no effect on low-skill employment:
But as Ian Salas of Johns Hopkins, William Wascher and I pointed out in a 2014 paper, there are serious problems with the research designs and control groups of the Dube et al. study. When we let the data determine the appropriate control states, rather than just assuming—as Dube et al. do—that the bordering states are the best controls, it leads to lower teen employment. A new study by David Powell of Rand, taking the same approach but with more elegant solutions to some of the statistical challenges, yields similar results.
Another recent study by Shanshan Liu and Thomas Hyclak of Lehigh University, and Krishna Regmi of Georgia College & State University most directly mimics the Dube et al. approach. But crucially it only uses as control areas parts of states that are classified by the Bureau of Economic Analysis as subject to the same economic shocks as the areas where minimum wages have increased. The resulting estimates point to job loss for the least-skilled workers studied, as do a number of other recent studies that address the Dube et al. criticisms.
Overall, I think all of this is good evidence for a healthy skepticism toward the minimum wage. Future evidence may convince me otherwise (I’ve been known to change my mind), but as of now, I think my position is as empirically grounded as any.
Girls’ rifle team at Central High, Washington, DC. November 1922. (Wikimedia Commons)
I haven’t posted anything about gun control in the middle of this most recent medley of outrage. This is primarily because I haven’t seen anything that looks remotely like a rational debate in which I could participate. It’s also because I’ve written on this topic at great length already[ref]Especially here and here.[/ref], and there is not a whole lot new to add.
It’s not that I’m opposed to considering new policies to solve the problems of widespread gun ownership.[ref]Note that I’m not denying that such problems exist, either.[/ref] Nope, the problem is that I find most of the folks who are calling for greater gun control are suggesting the wrong solutions to the wrong problems.
The degree of irresponsibility this time around has been particularly shocking. The most prominent example of this is the way that the media has adopted a completely baseless definition of “mass shooting” to sensationalize the issue. You’ve probably heard that there have been “more mass shootings than days this year” or something similar. All those articles are using data assembled by the Mass Shooting Tracker website. Their definition is, shall we say, non-standard: it includes any shooting in which at least four people are injured. The FBI definition is more stringent: a shooting in which there are at least 4 fatalities. The database maintained by Mark Follman and Mother Jones[ref]Not exactly a mouthpiece of the NRA.[/ref] is even more narrow: it excludes attacks related to gang violence or domestic violence. Follman explains this logic in a piece for the New York Times[ref]Again: not exactly an NRA-friendly outlet.[/ref]:
While all the victims are important, conflating those many other crimes with indiscriminate slaughter in public venues obscures our understanding of this complicated and growing problem. Everyone is desperate to know why these attacks happen and how we might stop them—and we can’t know, unless we collect and focus on useful data that filter out the noise.
German Lopez of Vox (which uses the Mass Shooting Tracker data) thinks Follman is being silly for caring so much about specific definitions: “this entire debate is ridiculous. A shooting is a shooting.” But of course, if that were true, Lopez would have to deal with the fact that gun deaths in America are in a steep decline. According to the Pew Research Center[ref]Yet another source that has never been accused of being in the NRA’s pocket.[/ref], “Compared with 1993, the peak of U.S. gun homicides, the firearm homicide rate was 49% lower in 2010, and there were fewer deaths, even though the nation’s population grew.” I’m not saying the current level is acceptable, I’m just saying that there is no possible way for a person to simultaneously believe “a shooting is a shooting” and also believe that we’re in some kind of unprecedented crisis. Follman has a point: mass shootings (narrowly defined) are on the rise. Lopez—and anyone else jumping on the Mass Shooting Tracker bandwagon—has nothing but hand-waving and posturing.
So, if gun violence is actually at historical lows and on the decline, why are gun control advocates convinced that we’re facing some kind of massive epidemic? After all, the New York Times ran a front-page editorial for the first time in almost 100 years to support gun-control. What explains such an extreme reaction?
Missing white woman syndrome is a phrase used by social scientists and media commentators to describe the extensive media coverage, especially in television, of missing person cases involving young, white, upper-middle-class women or girls. The phenomenon is defined as the media’s undue focus on upper-middle-class white women who disappear, with the disproportionate degree of coverage they receive being compared to cases of missing women of other ethnicities and social classes, or with missing males of all social classes and ethnicities.
Although missing white woman syndrome is primarily about kidnapping cases, “it is sometimes used to describe the disparity in news coverage of other violent crimes.”
So, to be perfectly plain about it, mass shootings are sensational because the victims are often white, often middle or upper-class, suburban and–relative to homicide rates in general–female.[ref]According to stats collected at Wikipedia, 91% of drug homicide victims are male, 95% of gang homicide victims are male, and 77% of all homicide victims are male. If mass shootings are random, then only about 50% of victims will be male, which means that females make up a much larger proportion of mass shooting victims than they do of overall homicide victims.[/ref] Crime might be down overall, but who cares? If college students and suburban white kids can be killed, then we have a crisis.
It’s not just the perception of the problem that is skewed by race and class, but also the proposed solutions. You see, there are policies that have been tried and found to be effective in combating urban violence. But no one seems to know or care about such initiatives, leading The New Republic to run an article to explain “why no one in Washington—not even President Obama—will embrace a program that could actually reduce gun violence.” Lois Beckett points out that “America’s high rate of gun murders isn’t caused by events like Sandy Hook or the shootings this fall at a community college in Oregon. It’s fueled by a relentless drumbeat of deaths of black men.” He then went on to talk about a program called Ceasefire. It isn’t new and it isn’t sexy, but “in Boston, the city that developed Ceasefire, the average monthly number of youth homicides dropped by 63 percent in the two years after it was launched.” The US Department of Justice has officially labeled it “effective.”
If “a shooting is a shooting”, and if the highest rates of crime are in inner cities, and if the disproportionate rate of murder victims are black Americans, and if we have a proven program to reduce those crimes… why isn’t anyone talking about them?
Timothy Heaphy, a former U.S. attorney quoted in Beckett’s article, has a pretty simple hypothesis:
I think that people in those communities are perceived as not sufficiently important because they don’t vote, they don’t have economic power. I think there’s some racism involved. I don’t think we care about African-American lives as much as we care about white lives.
So the problem is misdiagnosed, and the most promising solutions are ignored. But it gets worse than that. The reality is that the proposed “common sense” gun regulations will have basically no impact on mass shootings whatsoever. For example, Marco Rubio recently stated that “None of the major shootings that have occurred in this country over the last few months or years that have outraged us, would gun laws have prevented them.” The Washington Post fact-checked his claim[ref]Yet again: not an NRA shill.[/ref] and ended up giving out “a rare Geppetto Checkmark.”[ref]Did you even know they gave those out?[/ref]
The idea of “common sense” gun regulation coming to the rescue is a politically convenient fiction. It is designed to appeal to moderate voters, but it’s just an empty slogan. The only kinds of gun laws that would have any kind of impact would have to involve a massive reduction in the number of firearms currently in circulation with a forced buyback and stric enforcement. But those laws are guaranteed to be enforced in unequal ways, a point that Ross Douthat made on Sunday:
I suspect liberals imagine, at some level, that a Prohibition-style campaign against guns would mostly involve busting up gun shows and disarming Robert Dear-like trailer-park loners. But in practice it would probably look more like Michael Bloomberg’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy, with a counterterrorism component that ended up heavily targeting Muslim Americans. In areas where gun ownership is high but crime rates low, like Bernie Sanders’ Vermont, authorities would mostly turn a blind eye to illegal guns, while poor and minority communities bore the brunt of raids and fines and jail terms.
If that sounds at all farfetched you simply need to ask yourself this question: has the War on Drugs had a disproportionate impact on poor and minority communities? Then what makes you think a War on Guns would be any different?
Nor is this hypothetical. The history of gun control is a primarily racist history in which gun control was used as a pretext to disarm African Americans to make them easier targets. The Atlantic covered this thoroughly in an article called The Secret History of Guns, noting that “no group has more fiercely advocated the right to bear loaded weapons in public than the Black Panthers—the true pioneers of the modern pro-gun movement.”
And let me just end with a note about how spectacularly bad some of the proposed new “common sense” regulations are. In his address to the nation, President Obama doubled down on the idea of using the terrorist watch list to screen gun purchases. This sounds entirely reasonable for about a second or two. After that, however, you might remember that—before it was brought up in this context—the terrorist watch list showed up in the news only in story after story of how horrifically mismanaged and unfair it was. This is the same terrorist watchlist that contained 72 Department of Homeland Security employees, a finding that led the DHS director to resign. Even ThinkProgress[ref]Need I point out how much they are not on the NRA’s Christmas list?[/ref] thinks it’s a terrible idea. Aviva Shen quoted Marco Rubio in The Problem With Banning Guns From People On The Terrorist Watch List:
The majority of the people on the no-fly list are oftentimes people that just basically have the same name as somebody else, who doesn’t belong on the no-fly list. Former Senator Ted Kennedy once said he was on a no-fly list. There are journalists on the no-fly list.
It’s not just a matter of plain bureaucratic incompetence, however. Ken White pointed out the philosophical problems with the idea for Popehat:
Do I even need to point out that this list is also guaranteed to skew along ethnic and religious lines? The exact same folks who are horrified by Donald Trump’s bigotry[ref]And they should be horrified. Everyone should be horrified and revolted.[/ref] don’t seem to realize that a proposal like adding the terrorist watchlist to the background check is basically a backdoor method of accomplishing the same kind of religiously-based stripping of civil liberties from American citizens.
This is what passes for “common sense” regulation? Clearly some people are using the phrase “common sense” in novel and fascinating ways.
To recap: gun violence is ignored when it effects primarily young black men, but when it happens in suburban schools or movie theaters it is a crisis that demands swift and thorough response. Anti-violence programs with a proven record of lowering gun crime where it is worst—in inner cities—and thereby saving the lives of young black men are also ignored. Instead, we hear about “common sense” gun regulations that sound reassuring but would help no one and end up (you guessed it) further compounding the systematic inequalities in our society that target the poor and minorities.
The left is very, very good at sniffing out the faintest whiff of white privilege from the right, but—when it comes to handling the gun issue—it’s time to say: physician, heal thyself.
Religious discrimination. Mormons have been there, done that, and got the political cartoons to prove it.
Let’s talk about Donald Trump.
Believe me, I don’t like it any more than you do. I find Donald Trump’s success in the GOP primaries exasperating and depressing. I haven’t written about it very much because I don’t like to think about it very much. I changed my mind when he announced that he thinks we should ban all Muslims from entering the country. The Hill reported:
Trump, in a formal statement from his campaign, urged a “total and complete shutdown” of all federal processes allowing followers of Islam into the country until elected leaders can “figure out what is going on.”[ref]At the time, that statement even included American citizens who happened to be traveling abroad; they wouldn’t have been allowed back into the country. Trump backpedaled on that one.[/ref]
This was very, very far from the first ignorant/crazy/fear-mongering thing that Trump has had to say during this campaign, and I am sure that it will also be far from the last. Up until this point I didn’t see much point in writing about them. If I wrote a blog post every time Trump said something execrable, I”d never write about anything else.
But that one was just so egregiously bad that–much as I dislike bandwagons and outrage porn[ref]It’s a Wikipedia link that is very much safe for work, despite the name. I wouldn’t include any other kind in a post.[/ref]–I made up my mind to go on the record with exactly what I thought of his proposal.
I am a Mormon. My people understand what it is like to be targeted because of our religion. Some of my ancestors survived the massacre at Haun’s Mill, our prophet was murdered by a mob, and in 1838 Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs issued an executive order which read, in part, “The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the state if necessary for the public peace.”[ref]The executive order was not officially rescinded until 1976.[/ref]
So, as a Mormon, I’m sensitive to issues of religious persecution. We’ve been there. We didn’t like it very much, and we don’t think anyone should have to go through it. That’s more than just a matter of bad historical experience, however. For Mormons, religious pluralism and freedom of conscience are matters of doctrine. The 11th of our Thirteen Articles of Faith states:
We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.
After I had already started work on this blog post, I was incredibly happy and proud to see that my Church, which doesn’t often weigh in explicitly on political matters, had found Donald Trump’s statement worthy of formal, public repudiation. In a short, pointed press release the Church quoted Joseph Smith:
If it has been demonstrated that I have been willing to die for a “Mormon,” I am bold to declare before Heaven that I am just as ready to die in defending the rights of a Presbyterian, a Baptist, or a good man of any denomination; for the same principle which would trample upon the rights of the Latter-day Saints would trample upon the rights of the Roman Catholics, or of any other denomination who may be unpopular and too weak to defend themselves. It is a love of liberty which inspires my soul — civil and religious liberty to the whole of the human race.
They also found an ordnance from Nauvoo[ref]Nauvoo was the city that Mormons founded in Illinois before Joseph Smith was murdered and they were forced to leave the United States and seek refuge, eventually, in Utah.[/ref] that specifically mentioned Islam in the context of religious freedom:
Be it ordained by the City Council of the City of Nauvoo, that the Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Latter-day Saints, Quakers, Episcopals, Universalists, Unitarians, Mohammedans [Muslims], and all other religious sects and denominations whatever, shall have free toleration, and equal privileges in this city …
So that is what I think of Donald Trump’s suggested policy on banning Muslims: don’t. And that pretty much sums up most of my responses to his policy proposals. Since I’m writing about Trump now–and since I hope to do that as infrequently as possible–I might as well include some related notions.
1. Is Trump Going to Win?
Short answer: probably not.
Trump’s apparent dominance of the GOP race is very misleading, according to Nate Silver.[ref]This is the Nate Silver who, according to Wikipedia, ” successfully called the outcomes in 49 of the 50 states in the 2008 U.S. Presidential election” and “in 2009… was named one of The World’s 100 Most Influential People by Time.[/ref] He made his view clear in November with: Dear Media, Stop Freaking Out About Donald Trump’s Polls. His main point was that primary polls have very little predictive power (which makes them quite different from general election polls), in part because so many voters are undecided until the last minute. Once you include the undecideds, for example, the poll numbers look more like this:
I had some fun with that 5% number by contrasting it with a report from Public Policy Polling about American opinions on various conspiracy theories. In ascending order, here are the conspiracy theories that have at least as much (or much more!) support among Americans than Donald Trump currently does among GOP voters:
5% believe that contrails are “actually chemicals sprayed by the government for sinister reasons”
5% believe Paul McCartney died in a car crash in 1968[ref]”Well his voice is definitely different,” says Ro unhelpfully.[/ref]
6% of Americans believe Bin Laden is still alive
7% believe the moon landings were faked
9% believe that fluoride is added not for dental health but for “more sinister reasons”
14% believe in Bigfoot.
15% believe that TV broadcast signals contain mind-controlling technology
20% believe there is a link between childhood vaccines and autism
21% believe the US government covered up a UFO crash landing in Roswell, New Mexico[ref]”I bet if Bernie Sanders becomes president, he’ll tell us whether or not Roswell is legit.” My wife Ro, again.[/ref]
In case you’re curious, basically all conspiracy theories have more support among Americans than Donald Trump does among Republicans. In fact, there was only one conspiracy theory that had less support than Trump. That was one the one about “shape-shifting reptilian people” who “control our world by taking on human form and gaining political power to manipulate our societies.” It came in at 4%. And that one isn’t even a real conspiracy theory! It’s just a 1980s TV miniseries.[ref]OK, there were some sequels and a 2009 reboot.[/ref] The primary difference is that, for example, Bigfoot believers don’t attend boisterous rallies and wave signs and get massive, wall-to-wall coverage.
So, writing back in November, Silver said flatly that although Trump’s chances are more than 0, they are “(considerably) less than 20 percent.” Harry Enten (also writing at Silver’s FiveThirtyEight site), took up the issue again on Dec 4: Donald Trump Won’t Win Just Because More Voters Are Paying Attention. Enten was rebutting a theory that–because more voters are paying attention to this primary season–the polls might be more predictive than usual. His response? “The hypothesis is possible, but there’s no evidence to support it.” The FiveThirtyEight gang weighed in again on Dec 8 in a group chat: What If Ted Cruz Wins Iowa? Although the talk wasn’t specifically about Trump (obviously, from the title), they did mention some interesting data points. The conversation starter was this:
A Monmouth survey came out yesterday showing Ted Cruz leading in Iowa — the first poll to show Cruz atop the GOP heap there. And overall, Cruz has crept into second place in the RealClearPolitics Iowa aggregate.
Nate Silver himself pointed out that, although it’s still possible for Trump to pull out a win in Iowa, his chances of bringing home the nomination are slim.
We’ve been saying for months that Trump could win Iowa or another early state. What we’ve said is that he’s quite unlikely to win the nomination. And he’d still probably be an underdog conditional on winning Iowa, although that depends on a lot of things.
Silver also conceded, however, that if Trump pulls off a win in Iowa, “that’s an epistemological game changer.”
So, I doubt Trump wins in Iowa. If he does, I doubt he wins overall in the nominations. There’s no way he wins in New Hampshire, for example. If he does win the race, I still very much doubt he has a majority, and that means we have a contested convention. Instead of just corronating the nominee, which is what most DNC and GOP conventions are about, the GOP convention would actually be a political fight to the death to see who wins the nomination, and I doubt Trump survives that. Even if he passes all these “I doubt it” moments, the reality is that the Republican establishment will not accept him as the nominee, period. If he somehow walks away with the nod, then the Republican Party will run Mitt Romney (or someone else) rather than allow Trump to run uncontested. Make no mistake: Hillary Clinton wins in that scenario so it’s all symbolic, but the GOP will not accept Trump ever. Not after his remarks about banning Muslims from entering the US. That was the final straw for the establishment GOP.
2. What Does Trump Mean? How Did We Get Here?
There are basically two options that matter to me here. Either Trump’s fear-mongering is a genuine reflection of the GOP party, or there is some other explanation for his rise.
Clearly, I’d like to believe the latter. The fact that Trump is only polling at 5% (once undecideds are accounted for) combined with the fact that you can basically find 5% of Americans to poll in favor of any given wacko conspiracy theory makes this plausible. I would also add that a lot of Republicans view Trump as a way to lash out after decades of being pilloried as bigots. There is a very large degree of self-righteousness in left-wing condemnation of the right before and during Trump’s rise. Let me give you one example of this. Here’s a Facebook status from an individual who attended the same high school that I did:
In this case, he was responding to some particular incident in Virginia (I don’t know which) that seems pretty analogous to Trump’s statements. So, I agree with his stance against religious bigotry.
But look at that last, highlighted sentence. Somehow in the space of just 4 paragraphs he manages to make an attack on his Muslim neighbors about him. The mind boggles.[ref]Note: to the extent that “white male privilege” is a thing, it has no more fastidious and devoted maintainers than show-boating allies.[/ref] And yet, on the other hand, this is what an awful lot of the criticism of the GOP looks like to me (and to other conservatives) going back for as long as we can remember. It’s ostensibly about standing up for minorities, but somehow in the end it ends up as a self-righteous ego-trip for the upper-middle class more often than not.
In short, there’s a mixture of immature backlash from the conservative base and also a kind of “boy who cried wolf” dynamic. After being called bigots no matter what they do for 20 years, Republicans seem to have become desensitized to the point where some (at least 5%) are supporting an actual bigot.
But there is also the second, much darker and more depressing possibility. Trump might really represent where a significant portion of the GOP base is located right now. That’s what this poll from Bloomberg Politics seems to indicate:
Nearly two-thirds of Republicans support Trump’s proposed ban. That is way, way more than the 5% who support Trump directly. This is a potential sign that fear might be much more deeply entrenched in the Republican base than I would have believed possible.
I hope that this poll is anomalous. It is, after all, a single poll taken fairly recently after a terrorist attack in a highly toxic political environment about a temporary ban. I’m not defending the folks who answered in favor. I think they were wrong, and I couldn’t be more clear about that. But I’m expressing hope that this is not truly reflective of where the GOP base is at. That this poll reflects symbolic belief and/or a short-term reaction.
More polls will come out in the coming months, and we’ll also have the GOP primary to continue to keep an eye on. We will learn more. If it is an anomaly, then I have hope that the GOP voters will resoundingly reject Trump in the end. He might peel off enough support to spoil the election, but if that’s what it takes to lead this specific fringe out of the GOP tent then it might not be a bad thing in the end. On the other hand, if it is not an anomaly, if it reflects the long-term view of a vast majority of likely Republican primary voters, then I am very disappointed indeed. I’m with Paul Ryan: “This is not conservatism.”
The nature of partisan politics has shifted over the last few decades, transforming political parties into tribal identities and opposing partisans into what philosopher Jason Brennan calls “civic enemies.” This is likely unsurprising to most readers, but now there is intriguing evidence supporting the inkling. Recently, Vox reported on the research of political scientists Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood, which found that America’s two dominating parties have become even more polarized:
The experiment was simple. Working with Dartmouth College political scientist Sean Westwood, Iyengar asked about 1,000 people to decide between the résumés of two high school seniors who were competing for a scholarship.
The resumes could differ in three ways: First, the senior could have either a 3.5 or 4.0 GPA; second, the senior could have been the president of the Young Democrats or Young Republicans club; third, the senior could have a stereotypically African-American name and have been president of the African-American Student Association or could have a stereotypically European-American name.
The point of the project was to see how political and cues affected a nonpolitical task — and to compare the effect with race. The results were startling.
When the résumé included a political identity cue, about 80 percent of Democrats and Republicans awarded the scholarship to their co-partisan. This held true whether or not the co-partisan had the highest GPA — when the Republican student was more qualified, Democrats only chose him 30 percent of the time, and when the Democrat was more qualified, Republicans only chose him 15 percent of the time.
Think about that for a moment: When awarding a college scholarship— a task that should be completely nonpolitical — Republicans and Democrats cared more about the political party of the student than the student’s GPA. As Iyengar and Westwood wrote, “Partisanship simply trumped academic excellence.” It also trumped race.
The whole piece is both fascinating and deeply troubling and provides more reason for me to disengage from politics altogether. As Georgetown professor Peter Jaworski commented on Facebook in light of these findings, “Partisan politics corrupts your character. Instead of trying to get votes for your favoured tribe, try to make money instead. Engaging in markets makes mean people nicer, makes you more trustworthy, more charitable, and more beneficent.”
A recent piece in The Washington Post illuminates an often overlooked obstacle to economic mobility:
In recent years, and especially over the last few months, economists and other public policy experts across the political spectrum have come to realize that zoning rules are a major obstacle to affordable housing and economic opportunity for the poor and lower middle class. By artificially restricting new construction, zoning and other similar land-use restrictions greatly increase the price of housing, and prevents the market from adjusting to increasing demand. This emerging consensus is a good sign, though it may be difficult to translate it into effective policy initiatives.
We’ve highlighted zoning herebefore, especially from more market-oriented economists. Yet, there seems to be a growing bipartisan consensus. Good thing too:
Well someone with more legitimacy (at least in the political world) has picked up my theory that DT is a plant for the Democrats. I believe this theory because he has actually made me consider voting for Hillary, and that is a turn of events I find hard to believe.
Carlos Curbelo, a Republican congressman from Florida, has stated,
“Mr. Trump has a close friendship with Bill and Hillary Clinton. They were at his last wedding, he has contributed to the Clintons’ foundation, (and) he has contributed to Mrs. Clinton’s Senate campaigns. All of this is very suspicious.”
I used to be very frustrated when people I knew and respected who had very well-informed, thoughtful opinions on controversial political issues refused to speak up about them.
Now I get it.
And here are two pretty clear examples of where my sense of frustration comes from. These are two Facebook posts from friends that appeared literally one after another in my Facebook feed. Other than obscuring names, I haven’t changed them at all.
Exhibit A
Exhibit B
So, let’s talk about this.
First observation: 100PERCENTFEDUP.COM and ADDICTINGINFO.ORG. Really, people? Really? These are the sites that you want to post to your FB feed? Look, I understand that no media outlet is purely objective. Everyone has bias. Everyone has an angle. But the reality is that big-name outlets like the New York Times or NPR or the Wall Street Journal depend, at least in part, on their reputations. And that sets boundaries on their crazy. This is even true of outlets that have an openly declared partisan affiliation, like The Nation or National Review. They have a viewpoint, but they also rely on being taken seriously, even by their opponents. Do you think that RAGINGPOLITICALCLICKBAITY-CLICKBAIT.INFO, which has no reputation to protect, is going to exhibit any of that caution or restraint?
The mainstream media certainly roots for one team more than the other, but when CBS majorly screws upDan Rather gets fired and they make a movie about it. When FOAMINGMOUTHPOLITICS-AND-ADREVENUE.NET gets something totally wrong nobody notices and nobody cares. (And, more often than not, people keep linking to it anyway.)
Second observation: let’s just assume for the sake of argument that both the headlines are accurate summaries of the relevant events. Let’s say they are, in simplistic terms, true. Does that mean that the views which the articles are clearly designed to substantiate are reasonable? No. No, it does not. This is what you could call (quite politely) cherry-picking. The most important aspect of cherry-picking is that you don’t have to lie or fabricate to be wrong. Sometimes, every single thing you say can be true and your conclusion can still be so utterly detached from rationality, kindness, and common sense that it has passed “wrong” without stopping on the freeway to Crazyville to accept the keys to the city from Mayor Crazy McCrazyPants.
The point of posting articles like those illustrated above is purely to validate a pre-existing opinion that boils down to simply this: my team is angelic, your team is demonic. These articles come from mutually exclusive parallel realities where the truth is obvious, extreme, and absolute.
The problem with these kinds of articles is not that they are false in the sense in which saying 2+2=5 is false. They are false in the sense in which saying, “Today a stranger stabbed my son with a metal rod” gives a false impression if you’re describing your son getting his vaccination from a pediatrician. What’s lacking is context, perspective, synthesis, and analysis. We might have a couple of facts that are true in the strictest technical sense, but are they complete? Do we have the whole story? Do we understand what it means? Does it actually lead to the implied conclusion once other factors are taking into account?
We’re addicted to outrage. We’re high on the heady feeling of occupying the moral high ground. But that high is really just oxygen deprivation. The world is more and more complex and the way we interact with it is stupider than ever.
The saddest part, for me, is the extent to which people are willing to be mean to each other over these kinds of things. The fact is that the stakes are so incredibly low in a Facebook debate, even when the issue itself is so incredibly important. We confuse the importance of a news story with the importance of our little petty squabbles about it. The refugee crisis is a big deal, with implications that could shape our world for decades or even centuries to come. But your argument with your cousin’s co-worker about that refugee crisis just isn’t a big deal. It’s not worth being rude or unkind.
Now you could say: who cares if some sheltered, Western Facebook denizens get their feelings hurt? What does that matter compared to the plight of refugees fleeing for their lives or the possibility that innocent men and women will be slaughtered by terrorists? But here’s the thing: we cannot hope, as a society, to possibly rise to the challenge of those kinds of high-stakes, big picture questions if we lack the capacity to have even the barest measure of self-control in our conversations about them. One thing we should be able to agree on is this: even if we can’t agree on the right answers to these problems, we should be able to approach to them with maturity and empathy and rationality.
So what can we do?
Read more, and especially from diverse and established sources. Wait longer to write. As I prepare to post this, news is still breaking about a shooting in San Bernadino, California. No one knows anything, except that 1/3rd of my Facebook feed knows that this is caused by lax gun laws[ref]In California? Really?[/ref] and 1/3rd knows that we’re under attack from ISIS[ref]Because one of the killer’s name is Syed Farook. These guys should work for the NSA, with analytical prowess like that.[/ref] I’ve been guilty myself of rushing to post the first and snappiest retort to a developing news story. It’s a bad idea. Resist the urge.
And lastly: cultivate relationships of trust, respect, and even warmth with your friends (real and online). There is truth in the wisdom the united we stand and divided we fall. There is very little that people of good intention working together cannot make better, and very little that people divided by animosity and suspicion cannot make worse.
The Economist has a short piece on climate change and politics that is as obvious as it is interesting. The partisan divide on climate change began in 1997 “when a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, threw his weight behind the UN effort to introduce mandatory caps for greenhouse-gas emissions.” Political support of science often has nothing to do with scientific literacy (as the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale has demonstrated). “Knowledge of science makes little difference to people’s beliefs about climate change,” the article states, “except that it makes them more certain about what they believe. Republicans with a good knowledge of science are more sceptical about global warming than less knowledgeable Republicans.” Climate change also seems to a concern of the privileged:[ref]To be clear: this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be concerned, but people who are comfortable and don’t have to worry much about money, food, education, and employment have time to worry about the climate.[/ref] “The rich are more concerned about climate change than the poor, who have many other things to worry about. A giant opinion-gathering exercise carried out by the United Nations finds that people in highly developed countries view climate change as the tenth most important issue out of a list of 16 that includes health care, phone and internet access, jobs, political freedom and reliable energy. In poor countries—and indeed in the world as a whole—climate change comes 16th out of 16.”
What is perhaps most interesting is that despite the gaps in percentage, the trends tend to be the same for Republicans, Independents, and Democrats.
