Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

#171

Post by panglott » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 8:02 PM UTC

throwaway7312 wrote: post #139

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have also considered this question, my answer is that the party on the "right" will have a core mission of maintaining the power and wealth of the powerful and wealthy. This is, unsuprisingly, not a great vote winner for the masses. So around this core mission they need to build a platform, and so they pick the easiest way to attract voters to this cause up until the point when they get a majority that's able to ac…

You’re assuming poor American working class voters vote against their interests by voting conservative. Leaving aside the social issues for now and looking solely at economic ones, let’s ask the question whether that’s true to them in their own minds. The American liberal party (Democrats) brands itself as the party that’s going to help you out. It’ll leverage redistribution (taxes) to take money from rich people and…

Nope, "liberals" are by far the group who favors limited government and individual freedom. Conservatives are the ones who advocate torturing people, legislating womens' medical care, and otherwise intruding government into peoples' lives and bodies.

Re: Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

#172

Post by dragonwriter » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 8:03 PM UTC

wl wrote: post #166

dragonwriter wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, religion in the same bucket (and largely responsible for the existence of the bucket itself). Why look for answers when they all are in THE BOOK? Within Christianity (much less religion more generally), the idea that the answers are all "in the book" (the doctrine of sola scriptura ) is a doctrine of a distinct subset of the larger body of believers.

The doctrine of sola scriptura does not mean all the answers are in the Bible. It means that when it comes to issues of faith and morals, the Bible is authoritative above all else. The doctrine makes no claim that the Bible contains everything anyone would ever need to know.

> The doctrine of sola scriptura does not mean all the answers are in the Bible.

Yeah, immediately after I posted that, I wondered if I should clarify that sola scriptura actually doesn't mean that itself, and the "all answers are in the book" approach is actually at best a not-infrequent corruption of a minority approach to what is, itself, within Christianity a minority doctrine, rather than the doctrine itself.

But I figured that the clarification was probably not necessary, and that it was tangential to the point that "the answers are all in the book" isn't some kind of universal, or even general, trait of religious belief.

Still, its well taken.

> It means that when it comes to issues of faith and morals, the Bible is authoritative above all else.

While this is getting a bit far afield, the mere authoritative above all else on matters of faith and morals approach is the doctrine of prima scriptura, which is an alternative to sola scriptura held in some branches of Protestantism.

Re: Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

#173

Post by ZeroGravitas » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 8:04 PM UTC

throwaway7312 wrote: post #139

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have also considered this question, my answer is that the party on the "right" will have a core mission of maintaining the power and wealth of the powerful and wealthy. This is, unsuprisingly, not a great vote winner for the masses. So around this core mission they need to build a platform, and so they pick the easiest way to attract voters to this cause up until the point when they get a majority that's able to ac…

You’re assuming poor American working class voters vote against their interests by voting conservative. Leaving aside the social issues for now and looking solely at economic ones, let’s ask the question whether that’s true to them in their own minds. The American liberal party (Democrats) brands itself as the party that’s going to help you out. It’ll leverage redistribution (taxes) to take money from rich people and…

Yeah, that all sounds really noble, yet it doesn't really mesh with the modern Republican party successes being built on the "Southern Strategy" which sought to attract white Democrats by playing on racial fears.

I mean that's a double whammy, the voters were previously democratic, putting them on the opposite side of your dichotomies, and various members of the Republican party are on record as using race as a wedge issue, trying to convince white voters that equality was not in their interest (which the chairman of the RNC later apologized explicitly for).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

Re: Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

#174

Post by panglott » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 8:05 PM UTC

drexel wrote: post #100

realusername wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh interesting, I'm indeed French and it's interesting to see that it does not mean the same thing, I've misinterpreted parts of the article then. Actually, even on wikipedia, the content between the same pages is completely different, interesting to see !

Liberal basically means the opposite of what it used to mean in the U.S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism

"Liberal" means exactly what it always meant: there have always been different strains of liberalism. It's just the conservatives and libertarians who are picky about what they call themselves, defining themselves in opposition.

Re: Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

#175

Post by eli_gottlieb » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 8:08 PM UTC

vowelless wrote: post #75

This has always confused me. There are some rich texts based on beautiful rigor on the side of the conservatives like freidman and Hayek. Goldwater also approaches things in a very principled manner. Arthur brooks' latest book is similar. On the other than, I have not come across any liberal text, yet, that makes a good convincing case for liberalism. I would love to get some recommendations. I'm interested in princi…

I think there's a terminological confusion here. "Liberal" in its American, Hillary-Clinton-esque sense is of course going to be favored by highly-educated professionals: it's designed for us. It's our class ideology.

If you like immigration because it brings in competitive STEM workers and only eliminates jobs Americans don't want to do, it might be because you view yourself as educationally and professionally advantaged enough to afford to suppress wages for everyone else.

If you like the idea of piecemeal reform packages crafted by lobbyists and haggling (like Obamacare), it might be because you've been trained to think of committees of experts as the best way of accomplishing, well, anything.

If you want to tax smokestack industries out of existence because blue-collar workers can just learn to code, it might be because you've spent so much time among people with postgraduate degrees that you've come to think of yourself as normal rather than as belonging to an identifiable class.

And so on and so forth.

Re: Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

#176

Post by eli_gottlieb » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 8:10 PM UTC

harrumph wrote: post #164

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You actually sound more like a social-democrat than a liberal. Liberals do not refer to property as a mere social construct.

" Liberals do not refer to property as a mere social construct." Excellent point. Liberals are de facto capitalists.

Liberals are capitalists with a heart. Social democrats are capitalists with a heart and a brain.

And personally, I think social democracy worked pretty ok except for the fact that it required a pretty strict anti-socialism, which meant that when the '70s arrived and the elite decided to "restore growth" by clawing back every concession to the working class and the human heart that they'd ever made under social democracy, nobody could stop them.

Re: Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

#177

Post by internaut » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 8:10 PM UTC

13years wrote: post #96

Higher education both attracts and produces mindsets which solve problems through planning, engineering and designing. There is a natural tendency to use your methodology of problem solving on all problems. So we tend to produce a greater collection of social engineering and central economic planning advocates. We want to design a greater society. We want to design a greater economy. Even when you look at highly educ…

> There is a potential fallacy that should be evident that you can not necessarily and simply equate more education with always producing the correct perspectives and therefore liberal view points are the correct positions.

This. If there existed a world in which only liberals were right all the time conservatism would have been selected out of the gene pool by now. That's not a metaphor. Political tribes have been battling for probably tens of thousands of years.

There is too much world for one true path.

Re: Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

#178

Post by lujim » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 8:11 PM UTC

fab13n wrote: post #72

I'm an upper-middle class, over-educated professional expert, and I'm strongly liberal for selfish reasons: mostly, I want to live in a climate of social peace, and would prefer to be surrounded by people who foster a mood of solidarity and benevolence, rather than a cut-throat and ever-worsening competitive mindset. So sure, one way is to protect myself and those I love behind a gated community. But that's pretty mu…

You're also devastatingly modest ;)

Re: Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

#179

Post by patrickg_zill » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 8:12 PM UTC

It never seems to occur to anyone that maybe, just maybe ... there is an anti-conservative selection pressure or bias?

Look at the "nomenklatura" in USSR times - they were all good Party members, and they too, had the higher university degrees.

If you weren't a Party member or in other ways, indicated disloyalty to the prevailing political worldview ... you didn't get admitted to the choice spots.

How many "Western-style free market" (however defined) professors with tenure, were there in Moscow, in 1987? Must mean that as an economic perspective it was wholly discredited, right?

Re: Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

#180

Post by panglott » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 8:12 PM UTC

These kinds of threads tend to be self-congratulatory, and obviously the answer is "self-selection". But I'll bite. Most of the conservative professors I have known in the Humanities have been in (military) history and classics, where they are likely drawn to classical or martial virtues. Economics professors are generally some variety of libertarian. Many Humanities professors are devout Christians.

But I've never known a professor to be an intolerant, hard-core social conservative. And perhaps that's because the only personality trait that has a correlation with intelligence is "openness to experience". A certain kind of liberality is necessary in academia.