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November 10, 2008

I stand by my position that the left is also anti-intellectual

In my post of the same title, I discussed that while the Republicans (or the right) catch most of the flack for it, [b]oth parties are firmly tied to anti-intellectualism.

One of my readers pushed back, articulating for me the position of one of his friends upon hearing about my piece. He said there was a qualitative difference of degree between the two parties. Essentially, the position the Republicans take on evolution is absurd know-nothingism, and that their position on global warming is almost as bad. Finally, on the free trade issues I raised, he said that many on the left view tariffs as a temporary measure, a deviation from from a free market that they know works well normally to allow time for workers in those industries to be retrained and switch to new jobs.They know this isn't efficient but they are willing to suffer that inefficiency in order to reduce the pain of those involved.

Contrary to the claim, the left is the predominate home to those who do not believe that free markets and free trade are generally the most efficient methods of arranging social production. Yes, there are all sorts of moderate Democrats and lefties who say that they generally advocate for trade and markets. Nevertheless, when it comes time to discuss and specific policy consequences of that advocacy, their policy positions seem to inevitably be hostile to the interests of property rights, markets, and trade. Or course as an economist I know all about externalities, market failures, monopoly power, transaction costs, and undefined property rights, but a scientific approach to solving these problems would revolve around addressing these deviations not the bizarre smorgasbord of health care, unionization, subsidized green energy, tariffs, fair trade, minimum wages, detailed regulation, and targeted tax policy that the left puts forward as economic policy. There also is strand of economic ignorance or anti-intellectualism, again more home to the left than the right, that holds that exports are good and imports are bad, and so tariffs are a good policy tool to encourage the former and discourage the latter.

Worse than this marginal miss-allocation, the left is home to most who believe that we would all be richer if countries were self sufficient. The American political party home to those who are least likely to use the lessons of economics and simple accounting in policy making is the Democrats and the friends on the left.

For another example, remember it was a serious Democratic challenger from president that said:

When asked this morning by ABC News' George Stephanopoulos if she could name a single economist who backs her call for a gas tax holiday this summer, HRC said "I'm not going to put my lot in with economists."

Clinton Gas Tax Holiday: Hillary Attacks Economists
And yes, I know McCain proposed something similar, but only one took this hostile attitude to their economists. Unless you count Obama's hostility to NAFTA.

Evolution may be mouthed more on the left than the right, but I think in terms of having an understanding of the idea such that you can bring it to bare on policy, there isn't much of a difference. Much of left is highly skeptical of ability inheritance in the face of significance evidence to the contrary. Evolutionary biology and psychology have taught us a lot about how to design human institutions and what attributes of the human condition are more and less difficult to modify with institutions. Yet much of the left believe that humans are tabula rasa, and if we could only educate people well enough and early enough we could get them to behave as we like. Again, a premise I believe is rejected by modern science. Further, to hold evolution as an intellectual position, don't you have to understand evolution and not just believe it? Most Americans, including our leaders, do not understand evolution. For example, if asked to explain natural and sexual selection, they would be helpless. Or, better yet, see that most view evolution as improvement rather than adaption. Most will say that we are more advanced than simpler creatures rather than just larger or more complex. Really we are just as advanced from that same primordial soup.

As for global warming, I don't know much about the subject, but every time I see a group of scientists say that it is horrible and imminent, I see another skeptic scientist stand up and challenge that. As a member of a discipline that his much better at after the fact analysis than prognostication and similarly dependent on models for inference, color me skeptical about the external validity of climate modeling. I certainly can see that global climate change remediation is a pet project of the left and the seemingly the majority opinion of climate scientists.

But again, you only get credit for holding a scientific opinion here if you hold it for scientific reasons. And if you view pollution as an intrinsic evil, hold American consumption levels as grotesque, and prefer small families and urban living as a manner of ascetics, that puts you in a cognitive frame to want global warming to be true because if jives with your values and encourages remediation that would tax lifestyles you don't like.

I know that many Republicans and right-wingers are guilty of similar failings, but my point is that both parties are guilty of anti-intellectualism. Just as there are many religious voters who believe in creationism found in the Democratic party. Plenty of global warming skeptics operate in the Democratic party. You often find them from rust belt or coal mining states. Ideally, a comparison of the relative power of reason within parties would find an issues under which their ideologically suggests one position and reason the other. Global warming doesn't strike me as that issue. Nor evolution.

It would be an interesting to audit the beliefs among our political leadership in search of positions that were 1) the intellectual one and 2) painful and costly for them to hold. My prediction is that there is no significant difference between the parties.

Posted by OneEyedMan at November 10, 2008 8:44 AM

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