Math makes you more conservative

Notice that business and nursing are on the right. I wonder if my theory is more explanatory than yours?

Of course, there is a big overlap. Verbal skills are probably an important component of political skills, while mathematical skills, in today's world, are economically valuable.

Four of the five most conservative groups (Education, Nursing, Engineering, and Business) are hands-on practical and are taken by people with immediate financial goals. (Education and nursing aren't where you'd expect at all, given those fields' dependence on government money -- I think that that can be explained by a combination of more religious people in those fields, and more people with totally material motivations.)

Economics is the fifth, and the only one of the four which directly studies the subject matter of politics, and (along with engineering) the only one with much mathematical background. History, sociology, and Poli Sci are on the high liberal end.

I also have trouble believeing that even 50% of people in economics and business are liberal. Perhaps the test is skewed toward social liberals.

I suspect you've overinterpreted the data.

But I'm a very verbal high-IQ liberal mathematician!

I know, I know. Anecdotal.

Hey, it sure doesn't look like academic theologians are part of the religious right.

What should be noted is that conservatives don't dominate any field. Barring 'Business', liberals are in a majority in all fields. Contrast this with the distribution in the overall population (18% liberal, 33% conservative).

"i also have trouble believeing that even 50% of people in economics and business are liberal. Perhaps the test is skewed toward social liberals"

that must be it. there is no way over 1/2 of economists are economically liberal. so its probally just that they are socially liberal.

these are academics. private sector economists are probably a lot less liberal i'm sure. the key isn't to focus on how liberal everyone supposedly is, these are professors. focus on the disciplinary differences....

Hey, it sure doesn't look like academic theologians are part of the religious right.

note the sample sizes. i'm sure they didn't survey "the moody bible institute." but yes, theologians aren't conservative, though biblical scholars might be.

oh, and john, this isn't the only study i'm going off of

1) i have personal experience (even within chemistry, physical chemists seem more likely to be republican than biochemists)

2) there are plenty of studies on this in JSTOR, just no time to collate them now

3) elite technical schools (MIT) tend to be more conservative than elite liberal arts schools (harvard)

Even granted that, Razib, you're saying that people who don't study history, politics, and society have more conservative opinions than people who do (except for economists).

I've heard technically-trained people talking conservatively, but what they said was often just the seat-of-the-pants common sense stuff that the average TV-watching guy says -- It's not that they'd applied their reasoning skills to political affairs. (I'm not saying that that's the rule, but it's something I've experienced enough times.)

Even granted that, Razib, you're saying that people who don't study history, politics, and society have more conservative opinions than people who do (except for economists).

well, in the most general sense, i suppose.

now, what i gather from what you just said as a follow up is that perhaps technical people are expressing basal conservatism, while social scientists & humanists become liberal? my own inclination was to assume there was an initial selection bias into fields, but i'm open to other explanations.

also:
I've heard technically-trained people talking conservatively, but what they said was often just the seat-of-the-pants common sense stuff that the average TV-watching guy says -- It's not that they'd applied their reasoning skills to political affairs.

my personal exp. is that biologists & physicists are no more sophisticated in their greater liberalism than engineers are in their greater conservatism.

also everyone, don't take the title too seriously. just had to put a tag line, it isn't a conclusion/assertion.

Bourdieu's "Homo Academicus" was an examination of this kind of question. I've only looked at it, but I think that it would be worth reading.

In the "For What It's Worth/Anecodotal" category: I wonder if it's anything to do with habits of mind and what you actually study in your education. I've gone out with a couple MBAs and even a computer engineer, and it was always stunning to me is how untrained they are in thinking critically about social or cultural or even biological issues. So they are very intelligent and have well-honed mental skills in what they do, but have never moved beyond a sort of college freshman level criticism (in the academic sense) of their own society and values. I'm not sure what the overall affect of academic training in say a social science might have on politics (and who knows, political orientations may keep individuals out of those disciplines in the first place), but it seems to me that there must be some connection.

(Full disclosure: I'm a sociologist and pretty far to the left politically (quelle surprise.)

I remember seeing another survey of political beliefs that found four "clusters". Establishment liberals, radical/"new" leftists, conservatives and libertarians. In the general public there are far fewer libertarians than conservatives, but in academia they are about equal. Oddly enough, the radical left was closer to the libertarians in many respects than the establishment liberals.

A lot of people think economists are right-wingers, but apparently they (at least the academic ones) are moderate democrats. It should be remembered that Marxism was basically a method of analysis focusing on economics and that many people went into the economics field as socialists (from Ludwig von Mises to Thomas Sowell) because they wanted to fix what seemed to be obvious defects in the free-market.

Just a sheepish apology for the stupendous gramatical errors in the above post. Mea culpa.

A lot of people think economists are right-wingers, but apparently they (at least the academic ones) are moderate democrats.

yes. economists aren't that conservative. an MBA is more practical than getting an econ doctorate if you want bang-for-your-buck. so you are probably seeing a selection bias in that economists are people interested in the science of $$$ as opposed to $$$ itself.

(back when krugman was less famous i went to a talk he gave and he addressed this point)

In the article, there's a table that shows percent Liberal next to percent Conservative -- the Excel table just shows % Liberal, but you also have to check the L to C ratio, so you get an idea of skew. In descending order of L to C ratios (given as X to 1, rounded to integers):

Poli 41
Engl 29
Theo 17
Philo 16
Psych 11
Fine 10
Socio 9
Mus 9
Hist 8
Phys 6
Ling 6
Perf 5
Comm 5
Math 4
Bio 4
Comp 3
Engin 3
Chem 2
Ed 2
Econ 1
Nurs 1
Bus 1

Ideologically, rather than by political affiliation, for once linguists need not have physics envy...

Someone with an econ BS is probably conservative. He might go on to an MBA or a PhD, but if not, he'll probably end up in the business world.

Have a very broad sample of economists & mathematicians been studied? also, I would imagine that Philosophers, while being strong in verbal, would be quite strong in math/logic as well. If this is the case (i.e., that math brains are more conservative) I wonder what the mechanisms behind that would be -- the common causal factor influencing the relationship between the two variables.

Interesting post.

Razib--

First this is a quite interesting data presentation and question for explanation.

Second, I think there are several things operating here, which could be described as several layers of causation.

Proceeding to describe those layers, first I would say, as you several times have noted, this is a finding of political orientation among academics, so that setting, the academy, is skewing the whole thing way left compared to the general population - in all fields (to different degrees, which is the next layer, or derivative, or whatever).

Now to add something. I think one has to place a considerable emphasis upon the social history of department progression in the US since the 70's. I have in particular mind English Literature. I don't know that this field is inherently attractive to leftists. It used to appeal to many conservative traditionalists. But perhaps it is inherently attractive to women. And the history is, it WAS captured by feminists in the 70s. Totally. It became the "you could nearly always count on it being a feminist and then soon post-modernist deconstructionist Derrida worshiping fount of anti-rationalism" on most "better" (and a great many lesser as well) university campuses by the mid 80's. What progress!!!

Of course nearly all the "studies" departments are exercises in leftist advocacy, instead of following up on some new method of intellectual exploration, which accounts for the birth of most traditional (and I would argue more neutrally and legitimately founded) academic disciplines, such as for example molecular biology or astronomical physics, or economic history.

To a considerable degree this full leftist takeover had already happened by the late sixties (or in the case of anthropology and sociology decades earlier) in most social science faculties. History retained some centrists and even conservatives for awhile but they weren't replaced, instead leftists were substituted through the 70's and 80s and since. Social anthropology was pretty much born as a cultural or soft Marxist (Boasian) discipline in this country in the late 20's in some places and then broadly in the 1930's, and sociology soon had a similar takeover, after partially Weberian beginnings.

In direct response to the title, I don't think math "makes you more conservative".

I think math tends to leave you the way you were politically.

Whereas in contrast, coming to think you are a member of the verbal intellectual elite, skilled at manipulating the opinion of those that will listen to you, tends to make you think that everyone should be listening to you and you should be at the top of the heap economically, status wise, and every which way.

Anyway that you and your similarly placed confrers aren't getting the money and highest status you deserve makes you feel you have an issue that you can profitably agitate around and try to influence public opinion about in your favor. Certainly your academic or other intellectual confrers will agree and be supportive, and that helps to keep the whole disguntlement enterprise going.

I'll second what douginn said about EngLit. It wasn't always what it is today. It was in fact taken over by primarily political people (PPPs) and not just feminists in the '70s -- I was there, I saw it happen. Of course "standards" in soft subjects are much more soft than in harder subjects, and help make these subjects easy pickins for politically-motivated people. Incidentally, the radicals of the time had a lot of legit criticisms of how the arts were usually conceived-of and presented, IMHO. So far as the criticisms went, I was probably even more radical than they were. But they didn't really want to reform and revive the subject, they wanted to take it over and turn it into a form of PC indoctrination. As Camille Paglia and Harold Bloom often point out, they didn't really like the arts.

As to why people in the arts might be more "liberal" than people in engineering ... Well, the arts are automatically about ambiguity, emotional tone, creativity, human elements, intuition and imagination ... It's hard for me to imagine being drawn to the arts without a taste for soft, fuzzy, and glowing qualities. Ambiguities and paradoxes ... Unresolvable things ... You don't really have "art experiences" if you're too literal-minded, or if you're too cut-and-dried about a lot of life. People who are really into the arts generally fall for art the way that a normal guy might fall for a woman: he sees something magic (divine, special, moving, touching, poetic) in her. Reverence plays a role, and so does fantasy. (So, often, does narcissism, alas.) You start off with and then cultivate a capacity for being responsive, and for being swept away. It genuinely is helpful in the arts to cultivate openness, dreaminess, generosity, etc. The mistake artsies often make is to project these virtues into practical politics, where they often don't belong.

Of course people who really understand math, and especially math applied to understanding the world, know that you have to look past the numbers to what they mean.

Some people think that polarisation between "liberal" and "conservative" has increased. But in fact what has happened is that petty lifestyle disagreements (What car do you drive? What food do you eat? Do you go to church? How do you bring up your kids?) have been turned into rancorous matters of public dispute. It's rather childish, and I'm not sure that asking people what label they put on themselves tells you much.

The bigger story is that older, more substantial, ideas of left and right have collapsed. The terms "left" and "right" have little to do with what they might have meant 25 years ago. Instead both sides seem to have bought into their own versions of "political correctness".

Getting anywhere with understanding this more important development definitely requires intepretative and historical study. As a physicist I certainly find that the humanities and social sciences are undoubted capable of producing mountains of unclear waffle. But I also find that when quantitative people blunder into social science thinking that a little math will clear up all the problems the stupid people couldn't figure out, they invariably make even bigger fools of themselves. They never come close to the best work produced by great historians and social social scientists.

Speaking as another old-timer, in the English and history departments of the 50s and 60s there was considerable sympathy (via Ransom, Tate, indirectly Pound and Eliot, and perhaps Faulkner) for the gentlemanly ways of the old Confederacy, and a real hatred of the abolitionists. Students rebelled against this, and there was a big change. But it wasn't simply a movement from apolitical to political.

My own beef is with the takeover of the left by sexual and identity politics around 1972-5.

Joe, there's really a lot more at stake than you think. Cultural politics is often or usually fake or trivial on both sides, and often it's a form of deliberate deception, but big things are being decided about America's place in the world (and the structure of the world system), the role of the state in American life, and the reward-structure of the American economy. I oppose pretty much everything Bush does, and I suspect him of being too rash and ignorant to succeed even on his own terms, but I'd never say that he's not trying to do something big. He's really a right-wing revolutionary -- he's made a lot of big changes already, and he's still going for more.

Here is the pdf I discussed before: http://www.sofi.su.se/wp/WP05-8.pdf

What big changes has Bush made? I view him as rather ineffectual. He hasn't vetoed a single bill, even ones he speaks out against before they're passed. He did try to do something about Social Security, but that went nowhere. He did have some impact in that he nominated some Supreme Court judges, but that was by virtue of being there and I don't know how differently any other Republican President would act.

He's completely changed the tax code and plans to do more. He rewrote bankruptcy law. He's worked to establish new principles of executive autonomy, and not only in foreign policy -- that's what his unchallengable "signing statements" are about. He's rewritten criminal law, allowing the executive to hold American citizens incommunicado without charges or hearings for a period of years.

**Of course** Bush doesn't veto Republican bills -- come on, guys! The runaway corruption and fiscal irresponsibility are something Bush helped make happen, not something that Bush failed to stop.

One more Supreme Court Justice will change American life massively. He's got four on his side right now.

And then there's that teentsy thing called "Foreign and Military Policy".

You might repphrase your statement, because I really don't know what you were trying to say.

Michael,

I have a lot of artists in my family (this is one). There are lots of good artists in the world, but the ones that really make it are good at something else: self-promotion - in other words, they have political skills. I think that's why they tend left, their utopia is one in which status is gained through political skills rather than economic skills.

The whole idea that a political meritocracy is more humane and moral than an economic meritocracy is an example of the persuasive powers of the politically adept.

@David, that makes sense in terms of the economic left / right.

But says little about the social liberals vs social conservatives.

Being smart and educated, in western society, probably makes one more liberal socially. The mistake smart people make is assuming that everyone has, or is capable of, the same degree of moral/ ethical/ philosophical sophistication as themselves.

Knowledge of math has a tendency to stem that impulse, however this may only serve to make one more leftist economically(1), rather than rightist socially (2).

(1) For instance in a government interventionist sense, people are too dumb to stop being mindless consumers and start saving for social security and the government should force them through taxation even at the cost of lower efficiency.

(2) This is particularly if they have studied some of the negalive impacts of traditional religion on things like science over the years.

The only way that math makes you more conservative socially is if you don't know of / don't care about / doubt the relevance of the problems that have arisen from social conservatism in the past.