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Center Right nation, Center Left nation, or just stupid nation? permlink

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Posted on: November 14, 2008 10:24 PM, by Razib Khan

In the latest bloggingheads.tv Conn Carroll and Bill Scher have an argument where they brandish dueling public survey results to make the case that the public is to the Left or the Right. How can they do this without totally fabricating their data? Because the average human being is not very smart, ergo, they aren't consistent. If you want a slim little volume which collects all the survey data confirming this hypothesis, just read The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. Americans are conservative because they want smaller government and lower taxes, and liberal because the want more services...at the same time! Since this is a democracy where politicians have to pander to voters, and a market economy where pundits and the media in general have to sell their services to the consuming public, no one has the heart to go Mencken. Of course, privately it's a totally different game, as intellectuals on both the Right and the Left understand that the average human is a total ignoramus and there is a reason that direct democracy is used only sparingly in the modern world. Candor breaks out on both the Right and the Left when it comes to undecided voters because these inhabitants of the left tail of the Bell Curve aren't big readers of mass media, and are a small enough constituency that the dull public doesn't feel bad when pundits point and laugh....

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If you look at that bell curve as a function of IQ the shaded part corresponds to 130 and higher.

Only the top 2% of people are fit to run society.

Posted by: Katharine | November 14, 2008 11:04 PM

Only the top 2% of people are fit to run society.

i offer no objection. though such an IQ may be necessary, it is not sufficient. in fact, i was remiss in my post in not adding that the average is not simply stupid, they are also very ignorant. so if you put a smart but ignorant person in charge of something, they also can indulge willy-nilly in their inner 'tard.

Posted by: razib | November 14, 2008 11:09 PM

A good decisionmaker would need smarts, quite a bit of factual knowledge, sound motives. He'd have to be sane. Last but not least, he would have to be fairly immune to the madness of crowds. For example, if someone told him that Iraq was a strategic threat in 2002 and needed to be invaded, or that loaning $720,000 to a strawberry picker in the Central Valley making 14k was a good idea, he should have fallen out of his chair laughing.

Who, in public life, passes this bar?

Posted by: gcochran | November 15, 2008 2:42 AM

Of course, it just might be possible that "Left" and "Right" are a bit of an oversimplification. Projecting the entire multidimensional space of political issues onto a single line is going to end up with some pretty silly results.

Example: where do you put someone who advocates reality-based planning for the boomer/geezer explosion of retirees, including means-testing of benefits? The very notion of touching Social Security -- or even discussing the demographics -- is anathema on the Left, and means-testing is anathema on the Right.

The sad fact is that too much of the political discourse is straightjacketed into "pick one of these two" package deals which don't allow for any discussion of third alternatives and assume that once you've decided one issue (e.g. gun ownership) then all of the rest follow without further choice.

Posted by: D. C. Sessions | November 15, 2008 8:17 AM

Unlike those currently pushing the "center-right nation" argument, I'm not arguing that America is always a "center-left nation." You are correct that many Americans have conflicting desires (this does not make them "stupid," but only indicates they don't spend every moment of their lives dwelling on politics and reconciling all their views.) But they can react to reality. Eight years of failed conservative policies have undermined key conservative arguments (regulation bad, tax breaks for the wealthy good), and the country has moved leftward in response.

Posted by: Bill Scher | November 15, 2008 8:57 AM

I have an IQ of 150 and live in Boulder, repeatedly named the Smartest City, etc. But I reject elitism like yours.

1. Americans just voted liberal, not conservative. Pay attention to facts not your ingenious theories.

2. "Representative" democracy, not direct democracy, gave us perpetual wars and debt, torture, warrantless domestic spying, bailouts for the perps, etc.

3. Ballot initiatives are the origin of most reforms, such as women's suffrage (passed in 13 states before Congress went along), direct election of Senators (4 states), publicly financed elections (passed by initiative in 6 of 7 states with them), medical marijuana ( in 9 of 13 states) and increasing minimum wages (in all 6 states that tried in 2006). See http://Vote.org/initiatives for more examples and references. The media have seized on the problem initiatives. They generally kiss up to politicians.

4. Checks and balances are good. So most people want direct AND representative democracy. Except politicians, the people who buy them, and the lobbyists between. And sneering bloggers.

5. "You know everyone is ignorant, only on different subjects...It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we know that just ain't so." -Will Rogers

6. The ignorance and stupidity you dwell on are a result of generations of deliberate propaganda, marketing and manipulation of people. This can be undone.

7. You can spend your spare time sneering at people who are ignorant of what you know, or you can help dispel their ignorance. One huge way of educating people is to put ideas on the ballot. Then everyone discusses it. If they don't vote the best way the first time, they suffer for it, and correct their votes next time.

Democracy is evolutionary. Contempt for others, mostly less fortunate than you, is a dead end.

Posted by: Evan Ravitz | November 15, 2008 10:47 AM

Americans just voted liberal, not conservative. Pay attention to facts not your ingenious theories.

look, the rest of your comment is OK, so i let this through the mod queue, but this is retarded. i'm responding to two people arguing based on survey data. no shit they voted liberal. and, since you have an IQ of 150 you can grok that one can vote X and still be stupid. or one can vote liberal and be too stupid to understand that they did just that (that's kind of a feature of my model here).

Democracy is evolutionary. Contempt for others, mostly less fortunate than you, is a dead end.

no it isn't. you can make a lot of money by taking advantage of human stupidity and ignorance. you can also accrue a lot of power that way.

and i'm from oregon, don't lecture me how great ballot initiatives are. the are great. but they suck too. the question is whether great - suck > 0.

Posted by: razib | November 15, 2008 11:02 AM

also, intelligence != (empathy || sympathy || or goodness broadly construed). the point about how progressive direct democracy can be is irrelevant. the american people might be good, or bad. but they are stupid, as most humans are. at least when judged by the rational & empiricial criteria which people presuppose in most discussions (e.g., "what do the american people think about mandates vs. non-mandates in healthcare?").

Posted by: razib | November 15, 2008 11:21 AM

Nowhere did I say that high intelligence was sufficient. It is, I think, a minimum criterion, though. People with high intelligence are at least more apt to learn.

And this 'elitism' accusation is bullshit. We prefer competence rather than the stupid Average Joe.

Posted by: Katharine | November 15, 2008 11:37 AM

Control and rule by, inevitably for, the upper 2%. Sounds like the tax code we already have.

Then again the very very smart and highly educated people have clearly done such a fine job. Everything they touch has just come up roses. Major corporations, stock market, financial system, foreign relations, war. Yep, they are doing fine.

Maybe the upper two percent aren't as smart or as effective as they think they are.

Unfortunately, as with a lizard, if you want to advance rapidly you have to lift the tail. Much of our present problems has to do with dragging the least of society through the mud. Telling people they are stupid, making sure they think of themselves as stupid, and doing everything possible to make sure they remain uninformed and uneducated is how we got here.

Until you find a way to get 'all the children above average' your going to have to deal with that tail by either lifting it up or dragging it.

Posted by: Art | November 15, 2008 1:37 PM

Do people like Scher actually think in partisan slogans as suggested by the above comment? "Eight years of failed conservative policies", "regulation bad, tax cuts for the wealthy good", etc. Those are campaign attack ad slogans, not thoughts. I understand (even though I don't respect) why people like Scher write like that during a campaign, but the election is over.

As to the inconsistency of voters .. that's true on the high end as well. Very few people, on the left or right, hold remotely consistent political beliefs, and I don't think that's such a horrible thing. The high-IQ crowd should at least be able to acknowledge their contradictions.

(Especially the men -- I always give women the "aww, puppy" excuse when it comes to thinking about the harsh realities of the world. I don't really mind when women are willfully ignorant of unintended consequences, but I cut men no slack. In fact, most of the women I've dated are high-IQ liberals who've studiously avoided learning any economics. Of course, if a girl is pretty enough then she can believe just about anything and I won't care -- at least for the first 6 weeks.)

Most elite liberal whites I know claim they want to help poor people, but also favor sharply higher energy costs to "save" the planet. Few things would lower the standard of living of the poor more than higher energy costs.

Posted by: jim | November 15, 2008 3:36 PM

Mayor to town folk: You're too stupid to work with

ST. ANTHONY, Idaho (AP) -- You can't call Bill Beck the mayor of "stupid" town anymore. The former St. Anthony mayor resigned from his post at a city council meeting Wednesday night, but not before telling off the townspeople and his fellow city council members.

Councilman Bryan Fullmer told the Standard Journal that Beck walked into the start of the meeting and announced his surprise resignation to the audience. Fullmer said Beck then told the audience that he was tired of people who were too stupid to understand, and turned and told council members that they were too stupid to work with, too.

Fullmer said Beck continued by telling the town to go to hell.

I know nothing of the politics of Saint Anthony Idaho, but you got to applaud an honest politician.

Posted by: B.B. | November 15, 2008 4:07 PM

Evan Ravitz aptly demonstrates that a high IQ score and high functional intelligence are not at all the same thing.

If you're not smart enough to recognize that you can have a genius-level IQ and still be a complete moron, you're not smart enough to have any input into the way any society is run.

Posted by: Caledonian | November 15, 2008 4:15 PM

I view W as a Democrat-in-all-but-name, because his characteristic policies were Big Government, extravagant expenditure and aggressive war.

Posted by: dearieme | November 15, 2008 4:26 PM

Dearieme: You're half right, since half the Democrats failed to oppose W when the chips were down. But all of the Republicans gave him almost total support.

By your logic, America is one big Democratic Party, with no second party. One the other hand, there may be differences between the parties which you haven't considered. It's almost as if you declared that the Democrats are the stupid party, and since the Republicans are stupid, they're really Democrats. That isn't a very penetrating analysis.

Razib, what was at issue in the Blogginheads debate was an attempt by the defeated party to claim that they didn't really lose the election. It wasn't a sophisticated debate about polls and public opinion, even though it was framed that way. As soon as Obama and the Democrats in Congress won, the people who had been calling them Socialists for six months started saying that what the voters really were voting for was a center-right platform. This was a pretty transparent spin-doctoring joke. Effectively the majority of Americans voted for someone who was clearly a center-left candidate. That's what elections are for. Scher was just trying to knock down the spin.

For a long time voters verbally supported liberal policies in polls but effectively voted against them in elections. When Democrats claimed that the voters were "really" liberal, no one took it terribly seriously because the Democrats couldn't elect a President and, during part of thattime, lost control of Congress too. But in the last two elections, all that changed.

Your big point is a valid one when framed as a criticism of majoritarian representative democracy, but in the context of the system we have, Scher was pretty much right, and Carrol was blowing smoke.

More later on IQ etc. Short answer, if I don't get around to it: a lot of the unintelligibility and craziness of politics comes from trying to respond to mixed overlapping demands made by enormous, heterogenous groups in the context of an enormous, unweildy, unresponsive governmental apparatus. I don't think that there'd be an enormous improvement if every voter had an IQ of 120+ and spent two hours a day reading political media.

Posted by: John Emerson | November 15, 2008 4:55 PM

i didn't say smart people knew what they were doing. rather, stupid people are guaranteed not to know what they are doing. the main problem with the smart is that when they are wrong, they are quickly and radically wrong, and when they are evil they do a lot of damage because of their competence. most people would prefer rule by good but stupid people rather than smart but evil people.

Telling people they are stupid, making sure they think of themselves as stupid, and doing everything possible to make sure they remain uninformed and uneducated is how we got here.

you don't have to tell people they are stupid, just like it is rude to tell the lower 50% in attractiveness that they're uglier than average. the point is that elite public discourse needs to not pretend that most of the human race habitually uses the rational-abstractive mode of thinking. i've shown on this weblog before that the stupid are the most politically 'moderate,' while the intelligent tend to be more polarized. people who don't think through the implications of their premises, or, whose premises are vacuous, will of course agree find moderation plausible.

a very specific point i would like to make is that fiscal policy is something the public just isn't equipped to have an informed opinion on. when it comes to "normative/value" issues with fewer moving parts they can have an opinion on, because to a great extent differences in opinion are based upon personal priors as opposed to a host of dynamic contingent conditions.

Posted by: razib | November 15, 2008 5:32 PM

I tried to figure out what politics would be like if all players were intelligent and well-informed. My guess is that it would be a politics of feints, bluffs, disinformation, logrolling, treachery, and shifting coalitions, and that a lot of the differences would be between the issues and interests that individuals and groups chose to prioritize. I suspect that interest would tend to fall toward smaller, more concrete issues where success would be possible for a medium-size group, with a lot of mumbling around about the big issues like fiscal and tax policy, war and peace, etc.

Posted by: John Emerson | November 15, 2008 6:06 PM

john, one issue is that there's social science evidence that on the more intelligent exhibit things like more logical consistency and reduced time preference, no matter their political orientation. additionally, there is evidence that the attitudes of the less intelligent aren't all randomly distributed, they exhibit some biases. e.g., the less intelligent tend to be more more nativist & anti-globalist. this tendency cuts into both the american left and right in different ways.

Posted by: razib | November 15, 2008 6:09 PM

What I just described looks like Israeli multi-party politics. There you have a lot of small parties making big demands but inevitably compromising most or all of them for smaller, more attainable demands which are often porkbarrelish.

I'm not really saying that there would be no difference at all with a brighter populace, but any system of aggregating millions of preferences has to be messy, as I said. A nation is a rather odd beast, and the idea that 49% should obey 51% historically takes a long time to get used to. The confusion of the voters and the unresponsiveness of the bureaucracies actually buffers the system somewhat. (Imagine a nation that started a war with 51% support and then ended it when it fell to 49%. The problem would be the same for any long term project.)

The factor that I suspect would wreak havoc if there were a high IQ well-informed public would be echo chamber groups obsessing about particular issues.

Posted by: John Emerson | November 15, 2008 6:28 PM

It's not a matter of intelligence, it's a matter of courtesy. We are are a courteous species, and we don't like hurting other people's feelings. To get a true picture of what people are thinking you have to pay attention to what they do, not to what they say.

Posted by: Alan Kellogg | November 15, 2008 8:40 PM

"though such an IQ may be necessary, it is not sufficient."

Quite so. If the faculty of my department were given absolute power as a Parliament of the United States, we'd be living in desolate squalor in a week.

Posted by: Matt Springer | November 16, 2008 1:02 AM

We're not a center-left nation

I can prove it.
http://jumpinginpools.blogspot.com/2008/11/america-is-not-center-left-nation.html

Posted by: Matthew Avitabile | November 16, 2008 5:20 PM

matt, if you want to define blacks and hispanics as not center-left, well, yeah, obviously we're not center-left ;-) but saying blacks as a whole are not left basically debases the terminologies. it's like saying many libertarians are not center-right; that's an argument you can make, but most people who say that any definition of the "right" which leaves socially moderate/liberal libertarians out of the right isn't very useful.

Posted by: razib | November 16, 2008 7:46 PM