Partisanship

Some Folk Are Never Satisfied

Back in the early sixties when I was a college student one of the world's great problems was third world poverty. According to the then conventional wisdom, countries such as India could never develop by their own efforts, as the currently developed countries had done, within a market system. The only alternatives were central planning plus massive foreign aid, the recommended course for India, or still more central planning ferociously enforced, the course that was supposedly turning the Soviet Union, and would turn China, into modern economies.

Time passed, a handful of small poor countries in Asia became not-poor countries through market processes — further from laissez-faire than I would have recommended, but further still from the prescriptions of the conventional wisdom — and it was noticed that the Soviet Union, despite all its forced sacrifices, was still, for most of its population, a third world country. India and China got the message, shifted away from centralized planning in the direction of markets and began to get less poor.

Problem solved? Not exactly.

As poor and hungry people get less poor they get less hungry. With enough food to survive no longer a problem, some of them get fat. Voila — the growth of global obesity. It was brought to my attention by a radio interview with an expert who attributed the problem to increased consumption of vegetable oils and sugars. For some reason he didn't mention the obvious relation between increasing real income and increasing consumption or that some of the increased calories whose consumption he deplored were being consumed by people who needed them.

That is not the only problem. As the Chinese get richer they, naturally enough, want more stuff, consume more raw materials, oil, power. Voila—new worries for those who are afraid we are about to run out of everything, either just before or just after we roast or drown. I have not yet heard any of them wishing aloud that the Chinese and Indians would go back to poverty and starvation but that seems at least a muted subtext to the complaints.

Some of the concern may be legitimate, although it requires a serious effort to see the problems of too much food as comparable to those of too little. More can be attributed to ideological hostility to capitalism, people unwilling to recognize its striking success in dealing with old problems and so eager to focus on new problems created by that success. Partisanship.

And some is just the human taste for gloom.

Partisanship, Global Warming and Immigration

I have been involved in a number of online threads on global warming. An interesting and depressing pattern is the way in which the arguments are dominated, on both sides, by partisanship.

One example is the way in which, if anyone posts anything critical of the conclusion that we ought to be taking strong action to slow warming, he is promptly labeled a "denier" and accused of denying that warming is happening. Those responding are lumping everyone who disagrees with them together, assuming that any argument made by anyone on the other side must be supported by everyone on the other side.

A second example is the way in which threads on climate online tend to morph into disagreements on other and unrelated issues, with each side seeing the other not in terms of their view on the subject being argued about but as part of a broader enemy, roughly speaking "left" vs "right." In at least one case, people on both sides turned it into atheism vs Christianity.

None of this is surprising, only depressing. Humans seem to have a strong, probably hard wired, tendency to see the world in terms of us and them, ingroup and outgroup.

For a still more striking example, consider arguments about immigration. One common argument for restricting it, coming from people who think of themselves as egalitarians, is that a flood of poor immigrants would depress the wages of the present poor. That conclusion may or may not be correct. But if it is, that means that people who think they are in favor of equality are willing to block an enormous improvement in welfare for people who currently live on two or three dollars  a day, the foreign poor who would come, in order to avoid a smaller decrease in the welfare of people who currently make about ten dollars an hour.  That is explainable only on the grounds that the foreign poor, being members of the national outgroup, don't really count.

My standard proposal for dealing with the conflict between free immigration and a welfare state, the danger that immigrants will come not to work but to live off free money, is that immigrants should be freely allowed in but not provided with any form of welfare. I don’t expect it to happen. Ideology and rhetoric require that hungry people be fed, the homeless housed, the sick treated — provided they are ours.

Not a Conspiracy

Someone on the Facebook Climate Change group, back before I gave up on arguing with people there, asked a reasonable question:

I'm trying to understand this big conspiracy everyone keeps hinting at, but never explains, now lets say AGW is a complete Hoax and Obama has somehow tricked the world to help him to trick americans to pay more taxes and put solar panels on their roof, now can someone explain how this evil conspiracy works, like who wins, who profits from this con, , what is the end game...?

I thought my response might be of interest to readers here:

"Conspiracy" is too simple. There are a variety of reasons why different people greatly exaggerate the implications of AGW. They include:

Politicians in poor countries who want to use claims of harm to their countries to get rich governments to give them money.

Politicians in rich countries who want arguments for subsidizing firms run by their supporters, passing regulations that give them power, collecting taxes, and a variety of other things.

News media that want clicks. "Global warming is going to flood New York City" is a better story than "Global warming has raised sea levels by eight inches over the past century and might raise them by another couple of feet by the end of this century."

People who want to pretend to themselves and others that they are part of the intellectual elite, know important things that others deny.

People who see climate catastrophe as an argument for policies they already favor for other reasons.

People who like imagining catastrophe. You see the same pattern on the other side of the political spectrum with survivalists, more generally with collapse of civilization science fiction.

The combined effect has been to convert positions on global warming from a scientific dispute to an identity marker for ideology, rather like wearing, or not wearing, masks during the pandemic. An N95 mask worn carefully to cover mouth and nose was evidence of prudence, perhaps paranoia if you were under fifty, but any mask, however carelessly worn, was sufficient to signal blue tribe affiliation — or at least to avoid signaling its opposite.

Once you have a linkage to group membership, there is strong pressure on either side to take more extreme positions. Believing that global warming is a problem marks you as a loyal member of the blue tribe; believing that it is a really big problem marks you as a very loyal member. Suggesting that it might be a minor problem marks you as a possible traitor. Similarly on the other side. Doubting catastrophic global warming is all very well but it's a stronger signal of red tribe loyalty to claim that warming is a fraud due to doctored figures, or that you have a scientific proof that AGW is wrong, or ... .

As Dan Kahan has pointed out, it is rational to hold beliefs that identify you with your preferred identity group — even if they are false.

What an ordinary person does—as consumer, voter, or participant in public discussions—is too inconsequential to affect either the climate or climate-change policymaking. Accordingly, if her actions in one of those capacities reflects a misunderstanding of the basic facts on global warming, neither she nor anyone she cares about will face any greater risk. But because positions on climate change have become such a readily identifiable indicator of ones’ cultural commitments, adopting a stance toward climate change that deviates from the one that prevails among her closest associates could have devastating consequences, psychic and material. Thus, it is perfectly rational—perfectly in line with using information appropriately to achieve an important personal end—for that individual to attend to information in a manner that more reliably connects her beliefs about climate change to the ones that predominate among her peers than to the best available scientific evidence. (Dan Kahan, “Climate-Science Communication and the Measurement Problem”)

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