To veer to the left or to veer to the right

[liv]

Someone on Twitter linked to this 2019 survey about what political opinions are regarded as "left" or "right" wing. The research is two years old and UK politics has basically imploded since then, but it seemed interesting. Particularly the fact that there is no opinion agreed by more than half of those surveyed to belong on one wing or the other. Pull-quote:

Even for the very most stereotypically left- and right-wing policies, half of the population do not identify them as such.

So the obvious conclusion from this survey, as pointed out by the person on Twitter, is that "left" and "right" are meaningless labels because there is no sensible consensus about which policies are on which side! But I'm also interested in the detail of specific views.

I'm most fascinated by the scatter plot of overlaps and divergences in opinions. At the time of the survey the key division in society wasn't left v right, it was Leave v Remain. I don't know that that would still hold true because the numbers of people of any political views at all who still think Brexit was a good idea are rapidly dwindling. But at the time, two thirds of people who identified as right-wing supported Brexit, whereas four fifths of people who identified as left-wing thought the UK should remain in the EU. Which makes the 2019 election even more incomprehensible; were Labour seriously hoping to pick up Leave votes from people whose political identity is right wingers?

I'm also slightly horrified by the top right of the plot. More than 4 out of 5 people, of any political views, think doctors should have the legal right to kill their patients. I am not going to turn this post into a rant about euthanasia, but that is really scary to me. It's bad enough going through life knowing that doctors are likely to refuse to treat me because I'm fat, mouthy, female but not hot or a mother of cute children, but the overwhelming majority of my fellow citizens want doctors to be able to actively kill me? Let alone people who are even more despised by doctors than I am, such as racially minoritized people and people with intellectual disabilities. Likewise I'm really unhappy to see such a strong consensus for Malthusianism. To me there's no point "saving the environment" unless we can save the humans who live on the planet.

The whole point of the article is that we're looking at left v right rather than the two-dimensional system that includes the authoritarian-liberal axis. And I already knew that pretty much the entire electorate and all the parties are more authoritarian than I am. The so-called left in this country want stricter schools, more punishment for crimes (including even the damn death penalty *sigh*), just more "discipline" and "authority" in general, and the so-called right want these things even harder (though aren't prepared to fund the criminal justice or educational systems properly to achieve it, they just vaguely fantasize about bad people suffering). But I think there's another hidden axis here, which is how much you hate foreigners and minorities. Half of left-wing identifying people think we should restrict immigration, and a third think we should be politically incorrect (ie racist), and shouldn't have schemes to improve the life-chances of ethnic minorities. I'm guessing this may in fact be the tendency underlying the Brexit split.

The people in the survey consider "favour a powerful government over individual freedoms" to be a broadly right-wing view held by nearly half of left-wing people. To me "small government" is a pretty defining right-wing opinion. But like pretty much all the statements, we're as a population almost more split on the classification of opinions as right or left, than we are on the opinions themselves!

I think part of the problem is the tendency for some people to equate 'left' and 'right' with 'good' and 'bad' or perhaps 'nice' and 'selfish'. So people who basically want to make the world a better place consider themselves 'left-wing' but they hold some 'right-wing' views because most people have some element of selfishness / self-interest / cruelty in their politics. Support or opposition to nuclear weapons really doesn't feel like it can be classified on a left-right axis, but people in the survey who think of themselves as left-wing reckon that their support for nuclear weapons is a right-wing view. Right-wingers seem to think that both 'isolationist foreign policy' and 'financial aid for poorer nations' are left-wing views (which many of them agree with anyway).

Part of it is that people form an identity with one of the political wings, and then don't really consider whether any specific political view is actually consistent with that identity. Anyway, the somewhat dated survey is interesting; it sort of reinforces my view that I'm in a right-libertarian minority among a population that is almost entirely left-authoritarian, even though it isn't using the two-axis system. People vote for the party they think is most likely to give them a "strong" government, punish the bad people they don't like, and also provide a decent welfare system and public services. Since none of the existing political parties actually offer that as a platform, people end up voting on factors other than policies, or vote single-issue on non-partisan questions like Brexit (likewise Scottish independence, acceptance of trans people, whether we should have Covid mitigations, and a few other things like that).

I have no idea what this means for the current maelstrom in a shitbucket that calls itself a Conservative government. But anyway.

Comments

There's an off-ramp or two, from Spaghetti Junction

[hairyears]

Take two statements about economics:

"...There are economic and social activities which are best organised as a service for the common good, rather than arising and existing as competing economic enterprises pursuing profit."

And, (say):

"Actually it’s because there are goods which are non-rivalrous and non-excludable.

There's a lot overlap between these two remarks: your non-rivalrous and non-excludable categorisation catches most and maybe all of what we call 'the common good' which, in most successful economies, is provided as state-owned or state-directed services.

But the elephant in the room is that I say "economic activity", not "goods".

Much of the economy consists of activity which is difficult, or impossible, to capture in observable flows of goods and services.

Services, in particular, are difficult to observe and measure. Or even define.

And:

Not all economic activity is denominated in terms of monetary exchanges.

But far, far too many economic commentators have fallen into the trap of framing 'Economics' in the limited terms of "A science concerned solely with observable monetary exchanges".

And you can't exclude activity involving non-monetary exchanges and not even motivated by pursuit of monetary gain from 'economics'.

Even, or especially, when there's an observable monetary exchange, too.

The American healthcare system only works, at all, because millions of people who aren't monetarily motivated are working, day and night, to subvert or circumvent the damaging commercial 'incentives' and constraints imposed by managers and insurance accountants: and the end result is that frustrated and overworked and underpaid people actually provide health care.

Much of it is altruistic. Arguably, all of it that's beneficial to the patient, is.

It's still economic value.

Arguably, the only creation of value in the entire disastrous enterprise.

And they get paid a wage which is not, at all, aligned with the value they create in the economy.

Their motives are not 'pure' in any sense; 'service ethos' does not exclude a need for money and you can, indeed, work your way from healthcare to any number of public enterprises and find very, very self-serving people who are entrenched in a 'producer capture' process.

And that, too, is economics: it's just harder economics to analyse and reframe in a workable view of the incentives - monetary and non-monetary - that facilitates effective management and maximises all forms of value.

'Harder' is no reason not to try: and a shallow shuffle-around of the 'forms of organisation' argument is just one of many, many ways to fail.

I work on a trading floor in London's largest bank. It is most difficult place that there can possibly be, to stand and formulate an integrated view of 'monetary' and 'non-monetary' economics: but, even here, the altruistic 'service ethos' coexists with mathematically precise and perfectly-modelled profit maximisation.

There would be no value-creation at all, here, if both were not in play.

This is true where you are, too.

Reframe your economic analysis to include this, and set to work with a richer model that looks more like the real world, and the real people who are economic actors in it.

And then you'll understand why seeking a service ethos and centering 'the common good' in the frame may be the key to achieving a functioning, value-creating economy in those non-rivalrous and non-excludable goods.

Re: There's an off-ramp or two, from Spaghetti Junction

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, I didn't mean to exclude services; I hoped that was obvious both because the definition of 'public good' includes services (see for example https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/public-good.asp ) and because one of the main non-rivalrous, non-excludable goods that a government exists to provide is the defence of the Realm, which is literally called 'the Services'. But apparently is wasn't obvious. Still, glad to clear it up.

Likewise I am aware that 'the economy' is just the name given to the whole sphere of life in which individuals transact with each other, and that it doesn't always involve monetary compensation. For example in a socialist country the inevitable shortages of goods in the official channels will always bring into existence a black market where people exchange goods on the basis of non-currency trades like corrupt favours, etc, and this just as much part of the economy as the part which is denominated in currency.

But the laws of the market apply just as much to the black market (hence the name…) as to the open market. And none of this seems to make any difference to my point, though, so I'm not sure why you bring it up?

For example, you can't base a society on the assumption that there will always be enough people willing to provide a service out of a 'service ethos' to fulfil demand. But the market, if it is allowed to operate freely, includes a feedback mechanism to deal with that, which is that whenever demand exceeds supply the price goes up, so people who would not provide the service out of a 'service ethos' will do so out of self-interest. This is clearly superior to relying on a 'service ethos' because that will inevitably lead to a shortage in the service when not enough people are willing to do it just out of a 'service ethos'.

I wouldn't deny that such an altruistic 'service ethos' exists. But you can't base a society on it.

And to try, is like someone who says 'democracy is inefficient; we should just have all decisions made by a beneficent dictator, or perhaps some kind of committee of experts that we could call a 'political bureau'. It seems fine in principle; but quickly runs into the problem that most people are lazy and stupid and venal, so even if you were to find one industrious and clever and virtuous person to be your dictator, you'd be unlikely to find enough to fill a committee; and even if you did, what would you do when that person retired or died? Chances of you being able to find someone else with the qualifications to take their place are virtually nil.

The greatness of the market is that it works with flawed, corrupt human nature to make a society which more-or-less works, rather than trying to build a Utopia by pretending that human nature is perfectable — a project which, every time it has been tried, has ended in famine, killing fields, or (more usualy) both.

Re: There's an off-ramp or two, from Spaghetti Junction

[(Anonymous)]

Mr Chesterton put it in his usual pithy style in Herestics ('Mr Wells' is Herbert George):

'Mr. Wells, however, is not quite clear enough of the narrower scientific outlook to see that there are some things which actually ought not to be scientific. He is still slightly affected with the great scientific fallacy; I mean the habit of beginning not with the human soul, which is the first thing a man learns about, but with some such thing as protoplasm, which is about the last. The one defect in his splendid mental equipment is that he does not sufficiently allow for the stuff or material of men. In his new Utopia he says, for instance, that a chief point of the Utopia will be a disbelief in original sin. If he had begun with the human soul—that is, if he had begun on himself—he would have found original sin almost the first thing to be believed in. He would have found, to put the matter shortly, that a permanent possibility of selfishness arises from the mere fact of having a self, and not from any accidents of education or ill-treatment. And the weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones. They first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are very ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by motor-car or balloon.'

Re: There's an off-ramp or two, from Spaghetti Junction

[(Anonymous)]

Sorry, Heretics.