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Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

nytimes.com

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Re: Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

#211

Post by Joof »

internaut wrote: post #177
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 b…

Honestly, there is too much world for 2 true paths. A multiparty system sounds nice from here.

Re: Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

#213

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

newacct23 wrote: post #8

51% of college graduates voted for Romney in 2012 while only 48% for Obama Romney actually lost with highschool educated only and he lost significantly with postgraduate studies only getting 42% of the vote with Obama getting 55%. So really the trend is that academics are liberal, not the highly educated. (That 3% gap in college grads likely accounts for a larger percentage of the population than the massive 13% gap…

> 51% of college graduates voted for Romney in 2012 while only 48% for Obama

What happens when you control for race and gender (c.f. the difference in electoral votes that election when you look only at white men (I think the only state Obama would have won was Washington) )

Re: Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

#214

Post by xbmcuser »

tim333 wrote: post #207
ArkyBeagle wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're wrong ( and oh so many are ) , "Adam Smith's sycophants" have a fundamental reading comprehension problem. He's nominally a tepid-right, Virginia school economist, but Russ Roberts frames "Wealth of Nations" as a drill down of "Theory of Moral Sentiments". Smith spends barrels of ink decrying rents. Many, many people who espouse Smith just cherry-pick reinforcement from him. Now: having said that, I am no…

In practice altering the distribution of wealth and income doesn't usually involve taking from A and giving to B. It usually is more taking from the rich and spending the money on free education and the like. You can also put taxes on large estates, give subsidised houses / loans to the less well off and so on. There used to be quite a lot of that between WW2 and Thatcher getting in in the UK with tax rates as high a…

Overall even the rich benefit from higher taxes if the middle class had more income today most of them would have been spending it on things the rich provide. Today by squeezing the middle class and lower middle class they might be making money but over long term with the middle class having lower disposable income they will be spending less so hurt the higher classes as well.

Re: Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

#215

Post by current_call »

rubyfan wrote: post #130
Kurtz79 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." That's mostly my rationale for being in favor of (moderate) wealth redistribution, which on surface…

Is resource redistribution the only way to solve income inequality? I always believed we weren't playing a zero sum game. It's likely that when we are all working for a living and prospering then we all prosper a little more. I don't believe that means someone rich has to lose a little more so someone poor can win.

Is resource redistribution the only way to solve income inequality?

You're asking the wrong question. Why is income inequality a problem?

Re: Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

#216

Post by burfog »

syats wrote: post #93

The article isn't very well written, but it does raise an interesting question. However, this question requires a clear definition of what is meant by liberal, which is a non trivial matter: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/02/the-orig... My to cents: Let's start by defining "liberal" as those who hold the belief that the current Trend in social, economic or political developments will result in them…

"some of us who are now highly educated but who's parents were not [...] results in better standards of living for us than for our parents. So, locally, the trend, seems for us to be moving in the right direction."

Say what?

In the 1950s, you graduated from high school (or even dropped out) and then went to work in the steel mill or car factory. (there were no robots and we didn't trade with China) You could support a family on that one income: house, car, wife, kids, etc.

Lately, you get your BA and then work 3 different part-time jobs. If you get the MA, and find somebody else who does, then the two of you can both work jobs and get a place of your own. Your student loans will be huge. Forget about kids.

Re: Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

#217

Post by gallonofmilk »

antisthenes wrote: post #150
gallonofmilk wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GOP is the party of creationists and climate deniers... how is this statement different than e.g. "the democratic party is the party of socialists and communists"? they're both bold assertions on a large group of people that are unlikely to be true for the majority... to be honest it just sounds smug

> how is this statement different than e.g. "the democratic party is the party of socialists and communists"? Because socialists and communists does not actually carry the negative connotations you ascribe it, while creationists and climate deniers does. One is a valid policy stance, while the other is just flat out rejection of reality.

> Because socialists and communists does not actually carry the negative connotations you ascribe it

Tell that to North Korea, Venezuela, China, the Soviet Union, etc etc

Your statement is purely subjective which was my original point that classifying an entire group based on what a fraction of that group says isn't really valid. In the US we only have two major political parties so chances are people will either fall into one or the other based on various factors and influences including but not limited to education.

Re: Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

#218

Post by lake99 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #165
lake99 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post confuses me, no offense intended. Friedman and Hayek called themselves liberals, not conservatives. The American progressive movement co-opted the word "liberalism". Before that, they called themselves "progressives". Is that what you're looking for? Todd8's comment below confuses me for the same reason. Rawls could be considered to be on the US-left. The other people he mentioned, except Gross and Levitt,…

> Friedman and Hayek called themselves liberals, not conservatives. True. > The American progressive movement co-opted the word "liberalism". No, they didn't. For quite some time, the American left [0] (called "liberal" dominantly for some decades, some adopted the moniker "progressive" when it was perceived that the right had created bad associations with "liberal" a few decades ago, but with very little in common,…

> called "liberal" dominantly for some decades, some adopted the moniker "progressive" when it was perceived that the right had created bad associations with "liberal" a few decades ago

This is not supported by history in any way. This wikipedia article [1] is a good place to start. There are other explanations on Quora [2] [3]. These are not primary sources, but they have the relevant references.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism_in_the_United_State...

[2] https://www.quora.com/When-did-the-term-liberalism-come-to-d...

[3] https://www.quora.com/How-did-it-come-to-be-that-in-the-USA-...

Re: Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

#219

Post by r2dnb »

I think I'll be heavily down-voted for posting that on HN but in my opinion the reason most college graduates are liberal is that - whether we want to admit or not - colleges teach liberalism. I'm not saying that Big Brother is behind this, I think it "just happened" for many reasons.

As a consequence while most liberals think that they have the answer for life, the universe and everything and that they are objective, independent and "scientific" thinkers, they are more often than not just regurgitating packaged values that have been impressed on them.

You'll always see that 80% of the people are followers. The system teaches liberalism, so 80% of the people going through the system will be liberal just by following - often unconsciously. 10% of the remaining will choose to be liberal out of true critical thinking while the 10 remaining percents won't be. Those who haven't been through the system (drop outs, high school graduates, etc.) are more likely to have more diverse opinions. Which are then dismissed by flagging them as "opinions mostly held by uneducated people".

But what I've found is that education systems barely teach anything. For all the knowledge we've been presented, we just "really know" a ridiculous tiny fraction of it. This is why nowadays, you don't even need to be "smart" in the academical sense of the term to be in the top 5%, you just need to be a critical thinker in your field and think out of the box. Because it is indeed an extremely hard thing to do once you've been through college, as you've been nurturing the illusion that you learned most of the things you actually memorized. Many packaged values and referentials have thereby been patterned on your mind.

For all these reasons, it is in my opinion unlikely that most people won't feel liberal after going through college.

Re: Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

#220

Post by rubyfan »

antisthenes wrote: post #147
rubyfan wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is resource redistribution the only way to solve income inequality? I always believed we weren't playing a zero sum game. It's likely that when we are all working for a living and prospering then we all prosper a little more. I don't believe that means someone rich has to lose a little more so someone poor can win.

> I always believed we weren't playing a zero sum game. It's likely that when we are all working for a living and prospering then we all prosper a little more. I don't believe that means someone rich has to lose a little more so someone poor can win. If you studied economics, you'd very quickly realize that many areas that people compete for and responsible for inequality are zero-sum (at least in the short-run and m…

I don't believe that the laborer and the software developer are competing for the same resources in most cases. They are not playing a zero sum game. Their resource accumulations are based on market conditions, the market allocates toward value of utility in a mostly efficient manner.

Why would we move from a set of natural laws that govern allocation to a central authority based one? Ie, why should government take from the software developer some of his resource so that the laborer has more than what the market would allocate?

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