Hello, fellow readers! Through our Common Ground Initiative, the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies will be hosting Jane Coaston, David French, and Matthew Yglesias this weekend at our annual Progressive Conservative Summit. You can register to join us, in-person or over Zoom, using the following link: https://www.gvsu.edu/hc/2021-progressiveconservative-conference-449.htm
I wonder about the impact of assortative mating on this kind of thing, in particular driven by the growth of women attending college over the last 40 years.
Political views have a substantial hereditary component, and people choose mates with similar views:
"attitudes on political and social items are quite likely to be shared by mate pairs. ..." The individual attitudes showing the largest additive genetic influences appear to be those directed toward school prayer and X-rated movies, with heritability being responsible for roughly two-thirds of the variationin these particular attitudes (for males and for females).
And there's also evidence that assortative mating is a driver of income inequality:
"if matching in 2005 between husbands and wives had been random, instead of the pattern observed in the data, then the Gini coefficient would have fallen from the observed 0.43 to 0.34"
Anyone else think it's crazy that Substack still doesn't let you collapse subthreads? Today's comment section is almost unreadable without that feature.
WOW. I used to constantly use the line on the left to collapse things in Roam Research but had no idea it works here. They really do need something more discoverable though.
I am chemistry professor—neither democrat nor republican—and my colleagues pretty much take it for granted that everyone in the room (e.g., at a faculty meeting or conference) is a very liberal democrat. I feel borderline right-wing (or at least libertarian) by comparison to my median colleague, even though I consider myself pretty liberal.
Looking at the charts (the first is party registration, right? I think there is a typo.) I cannot even imagine how insufferably homogeneous a English department must be. Also, is the second chart (political donations) from 2020? Because it is not hard to imagine why academics might have skewed Democrat with their donations in the last election.
Elite students are probably just more likely to have political views in the first place. If you'd asked me if I were conservative or liberal as a high school senior, I would have said "I don't know and I don't care." I notice that the Harvard political affiliation numbers add up to 100%, and none of the answers are "I don't give a shit."
In other words, the differences here may reflect differential political awareness among elite students, more so than a significant difference in opinions themselves. Bad colleges may appear to have a more diverse range of political opinions just because those kids don't care about politics and answer randomly when somebody asks them who they'd vote for.
They're literally dying to own libs. They will do the opposite of "elite" college class opinion even if it kills them. Not sure there is a way to fix this.
It seems to me that this is being driven by ever-growing Republican / "movement conservative" hostility to the concept of objective truth, which has been growing for decades. Go back and look at Reagan trying to prevent C. Everett Koop from publishing true results about the health harms of cigarettes, or the safety of abortion procedures. (My dad was an officer of the Public Health Service, and noted that Koop was himself a quite "morally conservative" Christian, but he was also a good doctor and a good scientist, and was unwilling to _lie_ for political allies.)
The GOP has turned itself into the capitalist equivalent of the Soviet regime that wanted to sweep Chernobyl under the rug. A disaster would embarrass the party, therefore there can be no disaster.
They like to accuse liberals of "political correctness", but that's a form of projection. They are in fact master practitioners of political correctness as practiced in the regime that originated that term. It is inconvenient for coal and oil donors that climate change is a thing? Fine, climate change is a hoax. Or maybe it's real, but it's caused by some solar cycle, not by humans. Or if it's caused by GHG emissions, then doing something about it would be economically ruinous. Oh, solar and wind are cheaper than coal now? Well, wind is responsible for the Texas blackouts. (narrator: Gas plants under-performed and wind over-performed relative to utility projections for this scenario.)
Trump turns this stuff up to eleven -- he can never fail, only be failed -- but it long pre-dates him. Conservative media outlets have long been funded by laughably dishonest marketing for snake oil, or get-rich-quick schemes. You see high ranking Republicans like Paul Ryan shilling for faddish exercise or diet plans.
It is impossible to be a person who cares about rational inquiry of any kind, and retain respect for people like this. It didn't have to be this way. Tucker Carlson is not a stupid man -- back when he was bemoaning the fact that the NYT skews liberal, and talking about founding a serious conservative media outlet, he was absolutely correct. But he _didn't_ found a conservative response to the NYT. He founded the Daily f***ing Caller, because flattering people's false assumptions, by nut-picking stories to misrepresent weird fringe cases as the norm, or just giving people outright-false information, _is profitable_. Conservative media has a "Market for Lemons" problem, or a Gresham's Law problem. A large, profitable audience has been trained to only accept outlets that confirm their biases as legitimate, so an outlet that ever lets reality intrude will be cast out in favor of something crazier, as we're seeing now with NewsMax and OANN starting to eat into Fox's market share, because Fox has not always 100% acquiesced to Trump's delusions.
I would be thrilled to see a party, and accompanying media ecosystem, that stood in meaningful opposition to the Democrats. Something that would be a comfortable fit for the Davids French, Aviks Roy, and Reihans Salam of the world. There absolutely are "conservative" ideas worth having in the public debate. Chesterton's Fence is a good principle to keep in mind! But if we cannot have a conversation in which both sides agree that their own claims are falsifiable, and everyone has to bring evidence, then what is even the point? How can academia possibly accommodate people who want to ban academics from studying things, rather than accept that their preferred policies might have costs? (It's not even like knowing the costs would be the end of the conversation -- maybe you can make an argument that the cost is worth it. But they want to just suppress the evidence, because they're afraid if people understood the stakes, they might lose.)
Generally, monocultures are bad. Education doesn't prevent group-think or confirmation bias, in many ways those are enhanced.
There is a real realignment going on and this is part of it. These cultural swings also historically come in waves, with the pendulum eventually swinging back. The left and right today are far different from what they were when I was in school.
Speaking of the 1950s and before, I think it was Jonah Goldberg who suggested that the left is currently remaking the modern version of the Eisenhower coalition while the right is remaking the modern version of the New Deal coalition.
"this [left bias of incoming Freshmen] appears to simply be a feature of who has the highest SAT scores rather than a dramatic transformation taking place on campus.
Probably mostly [and one could ask why THAT might be true], but could it not also be the kind of "holistic" other things that students put on their applications (volunteered at a homeless shelter/worked at daddy's Merceedes dealership :)) + high SAT evangelicals not wanting to go to what they think of as a "hostile" environment?
"the conservative critique of academia is that there is too much free speech on campus, with leftist faculty given too much running room to criticize the established order of things."
Don't be disingenuous, Matt. The critique is that "only" those with "left wing" views have "free speech" on campus, that through selection or intimidation only "left wing" views can be expressed. And for conservatives, left wing views ARE the "established order of things" that cannot be criticized.
We have a lot of theory here as to why people vote *for* a party, but I think a huge number of us are usually voting *against* a party. I’m voting exclusively for Democrats but, really, I’m just voting against Republicans.
There’s a group that the Hidden Tribes study referred to as the “exhausted majority”. The term fits nicely, I think. Would love to see less choosing of sides in a culture war, and more of a return to intellectual integrity. Wish I weren’t working at the moment and had more time to explain, but the salt mine calls.
It's an IQ problem. There is simply no longer any credible way for an intelligent person to support Republican policy ideas. We can dance around it and talk in euphemisms, but the GOP has suffered a total collapse of its ideas. It's that collapse which created a yawning emptiness on the Right and gave an opening to the Tea Party and MAGA. How do you bridge the gap between smart and not smart? Damned if I know.
Damn, I am late to the party. As a semi-conservative, here are my thoughts.
1. I'm not sure that Trump is a good representation of conservative leanings, since... well he was a pretty horrible conservative. Assuming these Ivy League dudes are all smart (despite what we see on Twitter.... kidding), I assume that if conservative, they would be more logical conservatives, and less likely to have voted for Trump.
2. I used to call myself Republican/Conservative, but quite frankly, Trump embarrassed me so much that I don't really identify as that anymore. I was always a swing voter, but I am a lot swingier than I was pre-Trump.
3. Anyway, this whole conservative/liberal things is going to balance out sooner or later. Positions will get adjusted naturally.
4. Anyway, my daughter who is elite college bound is Vice President of the Young Democrats Club. Her best friend is the President. I've had a few conversations with them, and their liberalism doesn't run super deep. At least she will fit in with whatever University she ends up at.
5. I suspect that 20% of all Democratic Professors and students are really conservative anyway if you got them pinned down on the issues.
Hell, 20% of the time, I am pretty sure our own Matty here is conservative.
I'm only conservative by academia standards, but you'll appreciate that I kind of upset my fellow professor today by telling him that I don't support mask mandates. Note that I've been happily working in person the entire pandemic whereas he only comes in once in a blue moon.
I hate masks. People are surprised that I support vaccine mandates but not mask mandates. I justify it by saying that vaccines are way more effective, but the truth is… I just fucking hate them so much. Besides, I’m vaccinated so I really don’t care about other people. Anyone who is not vaccinated at this time yes taking their own risk. And anyone under the age of 12 is at less risk than a vaccinated adult.
I've been kind of ambivalent about them (seeing them as mostly pointless but annoying at worst), until I recently went on an in-person visit to another university. I had to wear a mask the entire day while talking to others, and I ended up hoarse and with a sore throat that took about a day to get over.
I feel your pain. I’m in Argentina, and they have 100% mask mandate everywhere. Even outside. I hate when I exert myself a little bit, it’s super hot here, it just makes me feel like I’m suffocating
I'm watching our fair host give a talk* and he just said "turns out to be hard to talk at length in a mask - I hadn't really tried it." I feel vindicated! 😂
#maskmadateprivilege The people saying its no big deal work in offices or cubicles where they can remove it when no one is around. They wear it into the restaurants and then remove it. They wear it during their 25 minute shopping trip. But they expect the servers and janitors and cooks and cashiers and stockers to wear it full time.
When they complain... wearing a mask is no big deal, it doesn't bother me.
Does the data support “Time in school causes left-drift”?
We’ve got two data points in this article.
1) students entering elite universities are skewing heavily left, in a way that is different from 100 years ago
2) college professors continue to lean left
Not sure what this can say about “education causes liberalization.”
———
The study cited is somewhat interesting. Based on Haidt’s moral foundation work, they’ve said “here’s 3 moral ideas that tend to breakdown across politically polarized lines.”
These 3 ideas are:
1) moral concern for order
2) moral progressivism
3) moral relativism
Now, these 3 ideas do seem to map well onto our left/right divide. And the study found that students exiting higher education had moved left along two of these spectrums. Perhaps this does mean education causes Democrats
However, they also note that for Moral Relativism, education has the opposite effect: it causes a Conservative move towards Moral Certainty, away from relativism, for students exiting school.
So higher education definitely makes one more confident in the morality of one’s views, it I’m not sure (from this data) if you can say those views directly to a different in voter outcome?
In fact, an increase in certainty of one’s position correlating with higher education would seem to explain some part of the increased polarization we’ve seen in the US over the last decades of a push for “everyone gets a degree”
Matthew, it seems to me like one of the problems we deal with is also that once you have a high educational attainment you end up working in a small handful of big cities because that’s where the jobs are. This is a half-baked whim so maybe this makes no sense, but, can you see a path where Democrats could prioritize getting a larger share of high education jobs moved to “red state” areas and thus helping stir the pot so to speak? For example I would guess that if you looked not at Ivies but at state colleges in smaller towns, those would tend to be “purple” places. Maybe we should be trying to fund more public universities in smaller towns outside the major metros?
Changing our copyright laws is concrete thing Republicans can do to make the base respected in our culture. Ghostbusters is 35 years old back in the day copyrights where 14 years. Think of a world where anyone could redo ghostbusters. Or for that matter the Star Wars Prequels. Like anyone can do Snow White.
Hello, fellow readers! Through our Common Ground Initiative, the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies will be hosting Jane Coaston, David French, and Matthew Yglesias this weekend at our annual Progressive Conservative Summit. You can register to join us, in-person or over Zoom, using the following link: https://www.gvsu.edu/hc/2021-progressiveconservative-conference-449.htm
I wonder about the impact of assortative mating on this kind of thing, in particular driven by the growth of women attending college over the last 40 years.
Political views have a substantial hereditary component, and people choose mates with similar views:
"attitudes on political and social items are quite likely to be shared by mate pairs. ..." The individual attitudes showing the largest additive genetic influences appear to be those directed toward school prayer and X-rated movies, with heritability being responsible for roughly two-thirds of the variationin these particular attitudes (for males and for females).
-- http://www.matthewckeller.com/16.Hatemi.et.al.2010.Nuc.fam.ajps.pdf
And there's also evidence that assortative mating is a driver of income inequality:
"if matching in 2005 between husbands and wives had been random, instead of the pattern observed in the data, then the Gini coefficient would have fallen from the observed 0.43 to 0.34"
-- https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w19829/w19829.pdf
And that's just income and doesn't account for the effect of parental education level on children's education/income.
Anyone else think it's crazy that Substack still doesn't let you collapse subthreads? Today's comment section is almost unreadable without that feature.
You can. Click on the line to the left of a comment to collapse the discussion spawned by that comment.
WOW. I used to constantly use the line on the left to collapse things in Roam Research but had no idea it works here. They really do need something more discoverable though.
Yep. I've given up. I read the first few comments I see (which today was yours) and stop.
See Jacob's comment above, apparently it IS possible, just basically hidden.
I am chemistry professor—neither democrat nor republican—and my colleagues pretty much take it for granted that everyone in the room (e.g., at a faculty meeting or conference) is a very liberal democrat. I feel borderline right-wing (or at least libertarian) by comparison to my median colleague, even though I consider myself pretty liberal.
Looking at the charts (the first is party registration, right? I think there is a typo.) I cannot even imagine how insufferably homogeneous a English department must be. Also, is the second chart (political donations) from 2020? Because it is not hard to imagine why academics might have skewed Democrat with their donations in the last election.
Elite students are probably just more likely to have political views in the first place. If you'd asked me if I were conservative or liberal as a high school senior, I would have said "I don't know and I don't care." I notice that the Harvard political affiliation numbers add up to 100%, and none of the answers are "I don't give a shit."
In other words, the differences here may reflect differential political awareness among elite students, more so than a significant difference in opinions themselves. Bad colleges may appear to have a more diverse range of political opinions just because those kids don't care about politics and answer randomly when somebody asks them who they'd vote for.
They're literally dying to own libs. They will do the opposite of "elite" college class opinion even if it kills them. Not sure there is a way to fix this.
It seems to me that this is being driven by ever-growing Republican / "movement conservative" hostility to the concept of objective truth, which has been growing for decades. Go back and look at Reagan trying to prevent C. Everett Koop from publishing true results about the health harms of cigarettes, or the safety of abortion procedures. (My dad was an officer of the Public Health Service, and noted that Koop was himself a quite "morally conservative" Christian, but he was also a good doctor and a good scientist, and was unwilling to _lie_ for political allies.)
The GOP has turned itself into the capitalist equivalent of the Soviet regime that wanted to sweep Chernobyl under the rug. A disaster would embarrass the party, therefore there can be no disaster.
They like to accuse liberals of "political correctness", but that's a form of projection. They are in fact master practitioners of political correctness as practiced in the regime that originated that term. It is inconvenient for coal and oil donors that climate change is a thing? Fine, climate change is a hoax. Or maybe it's real, but it's caused by some solar cycle, not by humans. Or if it's caused by GHG emissions, then doing something about it would be economically ruinous. Oh, solar and wind are cheaper than coal now? Well, wind is responsible for the Texas blackouts. (narrator: Gas plants under-performed and wind over-performed relative to utility projections for this scenario.)
Trump turns this stuff up to eleven -- he can never fail, only be failed -- but it long pre-dates him. Conservative media outlets have long been funded by laughably dishonest marketing for snake oil, or get-rich-quick schemes. You see high ranking Republicans like Paul Ryan shilling for faddish exercise or diet plans.
It is impossible to be a person who cares about rational inquiry of any kind, and retain respect for people like this. It didn't have to be this way. Tucker Carlson is not a stupid man -- back when he was bemoaning the fact that the NYT skews liberal, and talking about founding a serious conservative media outlet, he was absolutely correct. But he _didn't_ found a conservative response to the NYT. He founded the Daily f***ing Caller, because flattering people's false assumptions, by nut-picking stories to misrepresent weird fringe cases as the norm, or just giving people outright-false information, _is profitable_. Conservative media has a "Market for Lemons" problem, or a Gresham's Law problem. A large, profitable audience has been trained to only accept outlets that confirm their biases as legitimate, so an outlet that ever lets reality intrude will be cast out in favor of something crazier, as we're seeing now with NewsMax and OANN starting to eat into Fox's market share, because Fox has not always 100% acquiesced to Trump's delusions.
I would be thrilled to see a party, and accompanying media ecosystem, that stood in meaningful opposition to the Democrats. Something that would be a comfortable fit for the Davids French, Aviks Roy, and Reihans Salam of the world. There absolutely are "conservative" ideas worth having in the public debate. Chesterton's Fence is a good principle to keep in mind! But if we cannot have a conversation in which both sides agree that their own claims are falsifiable, and everyone has to bring evidence, then what is even the point? How can academia possibly accommodate people who want to ban academics from studying things, rather than accept that their preferred policies might have costs? (It's not even like knowing the costs would be the end of the conversation -- maybe you can make an argument that the cost is worth it. But they want to just suppress the evidence, because they're afraid if people understood the stakes, they might lose.)
Generally, monocultures are bad. Education doesn't prevent group-think or confirmation bias, in many ways those are enhanced.
There is a real realignment going on and this is part of it. These cultural swings also historically come in waves, with the pendulum eventually swinging back. The left and right today are far different from what they were when I was in school.
Speaking of the 1950s and before, I think it was Jonah Goldberg who suggested that the left is currently remaking the modern version of the Eisenhower coalition while the right is remaking the modern version of the New Deal coalition.
"this [left bias of incoming Freshmen] appears to simply be a feature of who has the highest SAT scores rather than a dramatic transformation taking place on campus.
Probably mostly [and one could ask why THAT might be true], but could it not also be the kind of "holistic" other things that students put on their applications (volunteered at a homeless shelter/worked at daddy's Merceedes dealership :)) + high SAT evangelicals not wanting to go to what they think of as a "hostile" environment?
"the conservative critique of academia is that there is too much free speech on campus, with leftist faculty given too much running room to criticize the established order of things."
Don't be disingenuous, Matt. The critique is that "only" those with "left wing" views have "free speech" on campus, that through selection or intimidation only "left wing" views can be expressed. And for conservatives, left wing views ARE the "established order of things" that cannot be criticized.
We have a lot of theory here as to why people vote *for* a party, but I think a huge number of us are usually voting *against* a party. I’m voting exclusively for Democrats but, really, I’m just voting against Republicans.
There’s a group that the Hidden Tribes study referred to as the “exhausted majority”. The term fits nicely, I think. Would love to see less choosing of sides in a culture war, and more of a return to intellectual integrity. Wish I weren’t working at the moment and had more time to explain, but the salt mine calls.
It's an IQ problem. There is simply no longer any credible way for an intelligent person to support Republican policy ideas. We can dance around it and talk in euphemisms, but the GOP has suffered a total collapse of its ideas. It's that collapse which created a yawning emptiness on the Right and gave an opening to the Tea Party and MAGA. How do you bridge the gap between smart and not smart? Damned if I know.
Damn, I am late to the party. As a semi-conservative, here are my thoughts.
1. I'm not sure that Trump is a good representation of conservative leanings, since... well he was a pretty horrible conservative. Assuming these Ivy League dudes are all smart (despite what we see on Twitter.... kidding), I assume that if conservative, they would be more logical conservatives, and less likely to have voted for Trump.
2. I used to call myself Republican/Conservative, but quite frankly, Trump embarrassed me so much that I don't really identify as that anymore. I was always a swing voter, but I am a lot swingier than I was pre-Trump.
3. Anyway, this whole conservative/liberal things is going to balance out sooner or later. Positions will get adjusted naturally.
4. Anyway, my daughter who is elite college bound is Vice President of the Young Democrats Club. Her best friend is the President. I've had a few conversations with them, and their liberalism doesn't run super deep. At least she will fit in with whatever University she ends up at.
5. I suspect that 20% of all Democratic Professors and students are really conservative anyway if you got them pinned down on the issues.
Hell, 20% of the time, I am pretty sure our own Matty here is conservative.
I'm only conservative by academia standards, but you'll appreciate that I kind of upset my fellow professor today by telling him that I don't support mask mandates. Note that I've been happily working in person the entire pandemic whereas he only comes in once in a blue moon.
I hate masks. People are surprised that I support vaccine mandates but not mask mandates. I justify it by saying that vaccines are way more effective, but the truth is… I just fucking hate them so much. Besides, I’m vaccinated so I really don’t care about other people. Anyone who is not vaccinated at this time yes taking their own risk. And anyone under the age of 12 is at less risk than a vaccinated adult.
Mask mandate privilege
I've been kind of ambivalent about them (seeing them as mostly pointless but annoying at worst), until I recently went on an in-person visit to another university. I had to wear a mask the entire day while talking to others, and I ended up hoarse and with a sore throat that took about a day to get over.
I feel your pain. I’m in Argentina, and they have 100% mask mandate everywhere. Even outside. I hate when I exert myself a little bit, it’s super hot here, it just makes me feel like I’m suffocating
I'm watching our fair host give a talk* and he just said "turns out to be hard to talk at length in a mask - I hadn't really tried it." I feel vindicated! 😂
*https://www.gvsu.edu/hc/module-events-view.htm?siteModuleId=2C5125A7-B7A9-5FEB-4D1655B86DF0EF04&eventId=1A5FFED8-9EBB-8E55-A06414DFD971D67C
#maskmadateprivilege The people saying its no big deal work in offices or cubicles where they can remove it when no one is around. They wear it into the restaurants and then remove it. They wear it during their 25 minute shopping trip. But they expect the servers and janitors and cooks and cashiers and stockers to wear it full time.
When they complain... wearing a mask is no big deal, it doesn't bother me.
Does the data support “Time in school causes left-drift”?
We’ve got two data points in this article.
1) students entering elite universities are skewing heavily left, in a way that is different from 100 years ago
2) college professors continue to lean left
Not sure what this can say about “education causes liberalization.”
———
The study cited is somewhat interesting. Based on Haidt’s moral foundation work, they’ve said “here’s 3 moral ideas that tend to breakdown across politically polarized lines.”
These 3 ideas are:
1) moral concern for order
2) moral progressivism
3) moral relativism
Now, these 3 ideas do seem to map well onto our left/right divide. And the study found that students exiting higher education had moved left along two of these spectrums. Perhaps this does mean education causes Democrats
However, they also note that for Moral Relativism, education has the opposite effect: it causes a Conservative move towards Moral Certainty, away from relativism, for students exiting school.
So higher education definitely makes one more confident in the morality of one’s views, it I’m not sure (from this data) if you can say those views directly to a different in voter outcome?
In fact, an increase in certainty of one’s position correlating with higher education would seem to explain some part of the increased polarization we’ve seen in the US over the last decades of a push for “everyone gets a degree”
Matthew, it seems to me like one of the problems we deal with is also that once you have a high educational attainment you end up working in a small handful of big cities because that’s where the jobs are. This is a half-baked whim so maybe this makes no sense, but, can you see a path where Democrats could prioritize getting a larger share of high education jobs moved to “red state” areas and thus helping stir the pot so to speak? For example I would guess that if you looked not at Ivies but at state colleges in smaller towns, those would tend to be “purple” places. Maybe we should be trying to fund more public universities in smaller towns outside the major metros?
We could distribute highly educated federal jobs out of DC and around the country. Target poorer states in the the South and Midwest.
Changing our copyright laws is concrete thing Republicans can do to make the base respected in our culture. Ghostbusters is 35 years old back in the day copyrights where 14 years. Think of a world where anyone could redo ghostbusters. Or for that matter the Star Wars Prequels. Like anyone can do Snow White.
“Like anyone can do Snow White.”
You mean like a porn video entitled “Do Snow White”?