Chris Rock on Economics

by publius

Megan McArdle has an interesting response to the “irrationality” argument below. She raises several interesting points (including that it’s perhaps not all that irrational), but I want to focus specifically on the observation that liberals act irrationally too. For instance, if it’s irrational for working class people to support Republican economic policies, then surely it’s just as irrational for rich liberals to support Democratic policies. Emotional loyalties run both ways, after all.

That’s a fair point. One reason, though, why I think the rich liberals’ behavior is relatively more rational is because of the concept of diminishing marginal utility of wealth. As people’s wealth increases, the utility of the added dollar becomes worth progressively less. For instance, increasing a salary from $40K to $60K adds far more utility than increasing a salary from $10 million to $10.02 million. Thus, for wealthier people, advocating for higher taxes in exchange for better services doesn’t strike as directly at one’s financial well-being.

To see another example of this concept, check out Chris Rock’s take on alimony and OJ beginning at about 3:00 (not safe for work, though hopefully you already know that):

Comments

[Jason Williams]

"...then surely it’s just as irrational for rich liberals to support Democratic policies."

Only if you're talking solely about egoistic self interest. However I'm sure many rich liberals think more on a "what's right" policy judgment perspective. It can be plenty rational to support the most ethically sound policies even if they don't give you the most money in the pocket.

[nanook]

Point taken, but .01 million is only $10,000 - so of course its smaller than $20,000.

[ajay]

Well, there's also 1) the social stability argument - the main benefit the rich get from government is a social structure that allows them to continue being rich, rather than running into either the rise of an extremist government which seizes all their property and distributes it to the poor, or order completely breaking down and the looters coming over the walls. It might even be worth paying an extra 1% of total wealth (rather than income) if this significantly reduces the chance of losing the other 99%.

Or: 2) for many of the very rich, part of what allows them to keep being rich is the public's perception of them (especially true of entertainers, but not exclusively; a 'controversial' CEO might find it more difficult to get jobs, for example) and you might create this perception by eg supporting liberal causes. (Or you might not, depending on your target audience - look what harm it did the Dixie Chicks, for example.) People might not go to see movies with Meg Astar in them if they knew Meg was a right-wing screw-the-poor type.

Or, of course, 3) they may derive utility from the personal satisfaction and feeling of moral rectitude that comes with supporting liberal causes, which would outweigh the (small, because of diminishing returns) loss of utility that paying higher taxes causes. Why might a 1960s (white) actor have supported civil rights, rather than spending the time doing something else and getting paid for it? No financial gain involved (absent 2 above), but maybe feeling like a morally good person is worth it.

4) Or it may be a version of Henry Ford's argument that he should pay his workers enough that they can afford to buy his cars - a multi-millionaire author has a vested interest in a literate public, for example.

[Brett Bellmore]

"Thus, for wealthier people, advocating for higher taxes in exchange for better services doesn’t strike as directly at one’s financial well-being."

Doesn't particularly benefit them, either, given that those services are almost exclusively to benefit somebody else. I suspect it's more of an "I've got mine, now it's time to keep down the competition." thing: Those who are already wealthy will not be impoverished by high marginal taxes, because they can shelter their wealth, but people busy climbing the ladder are fully exposed, so the wealthy by advocating higher marginal taxes are really trying to keep anybody else from entering their ranks.

[publius]

thanks nanook - fixed

[Bruce Baugh]

Contra Brett, a whole lot of what the government does primarily benefits those with lots of assets. The more you have and the more widely your connections range, the more important things like reliable infrastructure and enforcement of contracts are.

Ajay's first point is of course Bismarck's rationale for an extensive social service system, and the argument is just as sound now.

[someotherdude]

Chris Rock: Before I started comedy, I used to work at McDonald's making minimum wage. You know what that means when someone pays you minimum wage? You know what your boss was trying to say? It's like, "Hey if I could pay you less, I would, but it's against the law."

[hilzoy]

Plus, Obama's argument was: people in small towns see that they can't have any actual effect on economic policy, since the government doesn't take their views into account anyways. This is not true for rich people, who are quite empowered, thank you very much. So it wouldn't apply to them, I think.

[Jason Bridges]

Publius, I think you concede too much when you describe as a "fair point" the claim that the irrationality of the working class who support Republican economic policies is matched by the irrationality of the rich who support Democratic economic policies.

To be "irrational", in the context of this discussion, is to support policies that are opposed to one's interests. We can't know whether someone is irrational, in this sense, unless we know her interests.

To believe that working class people are irrational in supporting Republican economic policies, we need to assume that these working class people have strong interests (interests that trump other potentially competing interests) in job protections and stability, income sufficient to afford health care and other basics, etc.

To believe that rich people are irrational if they support Democratic economic policies, we need to assume that these people have strong interests (interests that trump other potentially competing interests) in...what? Clearly, the only possibility is maximizing wealth. This interest must be greater, for all these people (who already have comfort, economic stability, etc. in their lives), than an interest in, say, justice. How does McArdle know this to be so of the psychology of rich Democrats? Presumably, they would claim otherwise. Would they be lying?

In fact, I don't think it's a dubious empirical assumption at the bottom of McArdle's claim. It's a conceptual equation of the idea of interest with the idea of self-interest, with the latter category drawn narrowly to include, in effect, only material acquisition. Given that equation, one counts as "irrational" insofar as one supports any policy that doesn't contribute the most, among the alternatives, to increasing one's wealth. So understood, rich Democrats are indeed "irrational". That's fine to acknowledge so long as we don't let the normative connotations of the ordinary English word "rational" trick us into caring about this near-truistic observation.

[FlyOnTneWall]

"Thus, for wealthier people, advocating for higher taxes in exchange for better services doesn’t strike as directly at one’s financial well-being."

By and large, among the affluent, it's the professional classes which increasingly lean toward Democrats, and business people who remain staunchly Republican. A partner at a law firm who earns $300k/annum is far more likely than a small businessman earning the same amount to vote for a Democratic candidate. Similarly, a school teacher (even in a non-unionized district) is more likely to vote for a Democrat than a retail worker, even if they're bringing home the same pay. I can rig up economic models and rationales in an effort to explain why the folks who think the way I do are 'rational,' and those who disagree deluded (or victim to a false consciousness). But I really think that's fundamentally misleading. When two sets of actors with the same economic incentives are acting in diametrically opposed ways, there's something more interesting at play: culture.

Why is it, Publius, that you exhibit such penetrating insight into the social valences of cultural issues - and yet insist on treating economic views differently?

I'd contend that there's no fundamental divide among these issues. To use your example, if I believed that abortion constituted the ending of a life, I'd oppose it. But here's the key point - I'd oppose it even if that ran contrary to my own self-interest. That's the way morality works; it's often inconvenient. Yet we rarely ask why religious Catholics oppose abortion even when they'd be better off with the flexibility to end inconvenient pregnancies. We don't try to rig models to explain why opposing abortion really is in their best interest. We have no trouble accepting that they've made a moral judgment, and are prepared to shoulder the consequences in the service of an important ideal.

Yet somehow, because a bunch of rational-choice theorists have been running around for decades insisting that people ought to be profit-maximizing machines, we don't apply the same insights to financial affairs. There's an abundance of evidence that people will forego the chance to maximize their own gain under a wide variety of different circumstaces. to extend our example, a Catholic physician may decline an offer of a huge payment to perform an abortion on moral grounds. We all understand and accept that. Yet if a blue-collar worker votes against unions because he feels they constrain his individual freedom, we assume he's been misled or deluded. We don't grant similar respect to his expression of ideals. If a working-class voter opposes progressive taxation, on the grounds that the government shouldn't be punishing people for success, we assume he's been misled by propoganda. But what if that voter actually believes that a flat tax is fairest, even if it will hit him relatively hard?

To push this a step further, we rarely have similar qualms about people who agree with us. If a rich person decides to support progressive taxation, we're happy to ascribe all sorts of motivations - none of them involving delusion or false consciousness. I happen to think that 'declining marginal utility' is bunk. Perhaps a few affluent folks actually think that way. But the declining marginal utility of their wealth hasn't constrained any number of executives from pursuing exorbitant pay packages nor from committing fraud to vest them. It hasn't stopped, say, the Waltons from funding an anti-tax crusade, despite having more money than they can spend in a lifetime. People's love for money is not a function of rational assessments - it is an expression of personal convictions and values. Thus, the Waltons are as greedy as Warren Buffet is generous. That's not a function of their roughly commensurate wealth - rather, the ways in which they use and approach wealth are shaped by their underlying values.

So let's abandon, once and for all, the chimera of "false consciousness." The only falsehood at play here is that notion that people always act to maximize monetary profit when they have the full information available. In fact, people tend to act in accordance with their underlying beliefs. When those beliefs allow them to profit, they do. When those beliefs constrain them, they forego profit. It's true of the rich, as well as the poor. And it suggests something interesting. Perhaps we ought to stop trying to persuade voters to support Democrats because we'll help them economically - and begin to argue that our policies are fundamentally fair and right. Obama's started to do that - it's part of his frame of 'hope' and 'change' - and he's had some substantial measure of success selling swing voters on essentially the same set of policies pushed by Dems for a generation. You'll note that Republicans almost always frame their proposals in terms of American values and fairness - that a 'death tax,' for example, is just wrong. Countering, as Dems often have, that the tax only hits the wealthy is remarkably inneffective. (That's the economic interest argument.) Saying instead that the tax helps level the playing field and limits the entrenchment of privilege might work a lot better, particularly if we gave it a catchy name - the "Inherited Fortunes Tax," for example. It's a thought.

[Sebastian]

Hmm, just riffing here, but there here are some thoughts:

Safety Net/Welfare entitlement distinction.

Democrats frame many of their systems as saving you if through no fault of your own you run into trouble. That system clearly (at least to me) seems to be in their best interest. But the flip side is that at least among the working class people I know (and no I don't have polls) there is an INTENSE dislike for the people who work the system so they can skate by without working. They all have an uncle or brother or sister who lives at home and leaches the life out of their harder working mother or father or whatever. Republicans have long tried to make distinctions between safety nets and giving money to people like that. For many of the people I know (again I don't know of any polls), they aren't even remotely interested in paying taxes to help their deadbeat brother/uncle/sister live an even better life while mooching off their father/mother/wife's sister.

[Gus]

"Megan McCardle has an interesting response..." I had to read those words a few times to make sure I read them correctly.

[Sebastian]

Interestingly, right after I wrote my previous comment I clicked over to this by Kevin Drum:

The second point is a more interesting one: namely that working class communities are more concerned about the breakdown of traditional mores because it's working class communities that are most seriously affected by the breakdown of traditional mores.

...

Middle class whites don't care much about rising divorce rates, for example, because (a) divorce rates aren't that high among middle class whites and (b) divorce isn't all that catastrophic when it does happen. Working class communities, however, have much higher divorce rates and are therefore naturally more sensitive to its effects. That's especially true since the economic effects of divorce are far more dire for low-income families than they are for higher-income families.

I think this is in the same vein as my comment. The working class responds to appeals about deadbeat abusers of government entitlements because they see them more. So from the point of view of Democrats they vote 'against their own interest' because they see the negative effect of certain government programs more acutely than your average person in the middle class. (They are also more likely to be served by a crappy and overcrowded DMV and a horrific school system than a middle class liberal in the 'burbs and thus less likely to be thrilled with how the government actually operates).

[Ugh]

They are also more likely to be served by a crappy and overcrowded DMV and a horrific school system than a middle class liberal in the 'burbs and thus less likely to be thrilled with how the government actually operates.

I'm not sure this is exclusive to government services, as anytime I've been in a Target, or Home Depot, Toys 'R Us, or whatever, in a working class neighborhood it's been much sh!ttier, in terms of products, service, and appearance, than the same brand store in well off neighborhoods.

[magistra]

So let's abandon, once and for all, the chimera of "false consciousness."

Is it a chimera when people in polls think that they will be affected by inheritance tax at much lower earnings levels than is the case? Or the vast number who are wrong about such facts as whether they're in the top 1% of earners or what the median wage is or how many immigrants there are in the country? It is been posible repeatedly to show that a large proportion of people (in the US and elsewhere) are wrong about such facts, and they are almost always wrong in the direction that the media/politicans have pushed the argument (e.g. they don't get the number of immigrants too low). When polls show most people actually know facts like this, then it's time to say we can abandon 'false consciousness'.

[someotherdude]

The abortion issue and gays-causing-divorces (or whoever is the latest cause of divorces) issue wouldn’t bother me so much, if I believed the Republican Party was really going to do something about it. It seems obvious that Republicans bang that drum with no intention about doing much about it. Poor women in Mississippi may have a tougher time getting an abortion and gay’s will get blamed for all the sexual confusion straights are experiencing, however it’s only tax-cuts and right-wing welfare which seems to get Republican attention.
Before the last election Bush came out and announced that he would be fighting for a marriage protection clause to the Constitution, where did that go?
Right-Wing economic theories seems to be the only thing Republicans actually do stuff about, spending is only curtailed when it deals with the poor. This is what upsets working-class folks in communities of color who have been staunchly pro-Democratic. The Reagan Democrats handed over manufacturing jobs to folks who were itching to get rid of unions, and conservative Dems embraced right-wing economic theories when they saw where the wind was blowing.

[KCinDC]

What magistra said. The use of "death tax" isn't just clever marketing. It's a lie, because it spreads the false idea that everyone who dies pays it.

It's not elitist to notice that large portions of the voting public have beliefs that are incontrovertibly false, to fear that those false beliefs affect their voting, and to want to remedy that situation.

[Sebastian]

"It's not elitist to notice that large portions of the voting public have beliefs that are incontrovertibly false, to fear that those false beliefs affect their voting, and to want to remedy that situation."

Excellent. Let's talk about the fact that Roe doesn't allow 2nd trimester restrictions. ;)

[cityyear95]

"Excellent. Let's talk about the fact that Roe doesn't allow 2nd trimester restrictions."

Yes, let's. To me, progressivism is first and foremost about the dissemination of accurate information so that voters can make informed choices. To the extent that any Democrats seek to hinder this type of education, I don't see them as progressive.

Ultimately, I believe that Democrats will win on the merits on virtually every issue, so long as voters have all the _accurate_ information and good-faith arguments in front of them to work with. There are certainly some exceptions, but overall I think that the vast majority of information suppression and misinformation comes from conservative end of the spectrum. And there's no better example than the right-wing approach to sex-ed.

[Phil]

But here's the key point - I'd oppose it even if that ran contrary to my own self-interest. That's the way morality works; it's often inconvenient. Yet we rarely ask why religious Catholics oppose abortion even when they'd be better off with the flexibility to end inconvenient pregnancies. We don't try to rig models to explain why opposing abortion really is in their best interest. We have no trouble accepting that they've made a moral judgment, and are prepared to shoulder the consequences in the service of an important ideal.

Adorable.

How many of those who are apparently voting against their self-interest merely sneak off to the abortion clinic anyway? Or leave their babies in dumpsters or in piles of sheets in the basement? Jesurgislac, I believe, has some interesting statistics on that matter.

Consequences are something people generally want other people to suffer; when it comes to themselves, they'll look for the loophole every time. Weaseling out of things is, after all, what separates us from the animals. (Except the weasel.)

[hf]

Saying instead that the tax helps level the playing field and limits the entrenchment of privilege might work a lot better, particularly if we gave it a catchy name - the "Inherited Fortunes Tax," for example. It's a thought.

We've been talking about the Paris Hilton Tax for a long time. But I think millionaire pundits have avoided this term, doubtless for some compelling moral reason.

[Sebastian]

"Consequences are something people generally want other people to suffer; when it comes to themselves, they'll look for the loophole every time."

And taxes are what progressives want rich people to pay.

Or maybe these types of generalizations are something that isn't very helpful.

[Turbulence]

"Consequences are something people generally want other people to suffer; when it comes to themselves, they'll look for the loophole every time."

And taxes are what progressives want rich people to pay. Or maybe these types of generalizations are something that isn't very helpful.

That seems like a non-sequitur. Everyone wants the rich to pay taxes, right? Do you think non-progressives believe the rich should pay no taxes at all?

A coherent comparison would have been if you said that progressives want other people to pay taxes but don't want to pay taxes themselves. That's probably even correct -- no one wants to pay taxes. But what people want is much less important that what they do. In the real world, people who oppose abortions categorically, like evangelical protestants, actually have abortions quite often*. In contrast, I'm aware of no evidence that progressives are more prone to tax evasion than any other political group. I'd like to see some evidence on that score if you have it.

*Specifically, consider this study from 1995 showing that born again or evangelical white protestants comprised 3.2% of abortion patients while white catholics comprise 13.5% of abortion patients.

[Anarch]

And taxes are what progressives want rich people to pay.

But that's actually true.

We just don't want them to be the only ones paying.

[Richard]

I usually like this blog a lot, but this post is just bizarre. As Jason Williams and FlyOnTheWall point out, there's nothing "irrational" about voting for what you think is the right policy, as opposed to what's in your narrow self-interest.

Cf. Anthony Appiah:

"How, in the first Bush administration, did the movement to repeal the estate tax prevail? Not just because it was craftily renamed the "death tax." The number of Americans who told pollsters that they opposed the "death tax" was just a few percentage points higher than the number who said they opposed the "estate tax." As Yale scholars Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro have shown, it mattered more that proponents of repeal made a moral argument (however specious): that the tax was unfair because, for one thing, it involved taxing earnings twice.

Defenders of the tax typically countered with an appeal to self-interest: But you're not paying it, because it applies to just 2 percent of households. They didn't quite grasp how powerful appeals to fairness are. In fact, when the barnstorming Teddy Roosevelt proposed the tax a century ago, he made the case for it precisely in terms of fairness: He talked about what the wealthy owe to a nation that made their success possible."

[russell]

there's nothing "irrational" about voting for what you think is the right policy, as opposed to what's in your narrow self-interest.

I think this is right on, and a very accurate characterization of actual voting behavior.

There are definitely lots of folks who vote strictly in their own, narrow interest, but there are also lots who do not. My guess is that the latter are the larger group.

It's also not all-or-nothing in either direction. Folks vote for different things, and different people, for different reasons.

Most people are not motivated purely by an economic calculus.

Thanks -

[Dan S.]

Quoted from K-Drum: "The second point is a more interesting one: namely that working class communities are more concerned about the breakdown of traditional mores because it's working class communities that are most seriously affected by the breakdown of traditional mores."

Of course, this is one more reason why it's deeply irrational for working-class folks to support GOP economic policies, since it's these policies that constantly undermine and grind down traditional mores; in fact, they're one reason working class communities are so seriously affected by such issues.

"If a working-class voter opposes progressive taxation, on the grounds that the government shouldn't be punishing people for success, we assume he's been misled by propoganda. But what if that voter actually believes that a flat tax is fairest . . .?"

As everyone's been pointing out, these are by no means mutually exclusive; indeed, they're often mutually inclusive. To bounce off what magistra and KCinDC said, just look at the marketing strategies used by the early Bush II admin and its allies to push tax cuts mainly for the upper-upper class. The big-print message wasn't that large chunks of our country's revenue was to be funneled back to the richest of the rich - so much so that the merely quite wealthy have become increasingly resentful - as was only fair, given their great contributions and hard work. It was that the tax cuts were going to help the 'middle class,' the average joes and janes, both directly and through boosting 'the economy.

Likewise, the big print message for getting rid of the estate tax (my term, 'the diamond doggy collar tax,' somehow never caught on, sigh . . .) wasn't that idle heirs and heiresses were going to be rewarded for their hard work & good judgement in ancestor-selection by additional multi-million dollar inheritance windfalls that could otherwise go to things like roads, defense, schools, libraries, police, or even social security - after all, what could be fairer? Nope, it was that the big bad gubmint was destroying good ol' family farms and family-owned businesses through an wide-reaching, rigid and incredibly burdensome 'death tax' (and quite possibly spending the money on brown-skinned welfare cheats, but this wasn't made explicit, iirc, ). The double taxation/fairness stuff - Grover Norquist's incredibly offensive rantings about how the morality of the estate tax is the morality of the Holocaust on down - was a necessary, desperate, and often successful attempt to muddy the issue, given how vulnerable it is on this score - not the main strategy.

[now_what]

Megan McArdle has an interesting response

Sadly, no. No she doesn't. She has a response that contains such nuggets of wisdom as:

Small communities are also extremely attuned to property rights, because things like property lines matter to them in ways that they don't matter to city dwellers

Property lines don't matter to city dwellers? You mean the city dwellers that pay tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of parking their car in a certain space? Property lines don't matter to them? The city dwellers that trade in the rights to the view above a building? WTF? This is interesting to you? In what way?

No, she does not have an interesting response, unless you have an unusual, and probably unhealthy, interest in poorly argued disinformation.

Most people are not motivated purely by an economic calculus.

Not purely, but primarily. The best predictor for the success of incumbent politicians is the health of the economy a few months prior to elections.

So no, voters are not attempting to project which politicians ideas are likely to be most lucrative for them, since most of the politicians' ideas aren't going to make it into law, and it is impossible to predict precisely the manner in which the laws that do get enacted will affect a voter a few years out. They are simply voting thumbs up or thumbs down on the recent past.

Now if you were a really smart incumbent politician, you could arrange it so the best financial impacts of your policies were felt a few months before an election. So, which is it...was Bush unable to do this, or were past instances of good economic performance immediately prior to an election with a Republican in office random occurrences, or was Bush too incompetent to pull the trick off, or does Bush think that since he isn't running for election, why bother, or is he so principled that he refuses to entertain such a Rovian suggestion?

[Gary Farber]

Small communities are also extremely attuned to property rights, because things like property lines matter to them in ways that they don't matter to city dwellers

Property lines don't matter to city dwellers?

Regardless of the rest of anyone's argument, one immediately notes that that's not what she wrote.

"...in ways that they don't matter" does not, in fact, mean "don't matter at all."

It does not mean "this thing doesn't matter."

It means "in ways that matter differently," or "this thing matters to those people in other ways that [allegedly] don't matter to city dwellers."

The claim can most certainly be argued with, but it's not the claim you're arguing with.

[bad Jim]

I'm a rich liberal, and I find it's in my interest to support Democrats. For one thing, the economy does better when the president is a Democrat, which means I make more money from my investments. So what if my taxes are higher? My income is higher as well.

Back when I was in business, our company had a department whose main task was to administer things like health care and retirement. Every year the health plan became more expensive and more restrictive. Having good benefits was critical to being the sort of company we wanted to be - we worked there too - and it was not helpful to have to announce the annual downgrade in the health plan. A glance at the policies of our trading partners makes it painfully obvious that better alternatives are easily available.

Lastly: as a rich liberal, I make charitable contributions to numerous organizations whose aims, in a more sanely constituted country, would be considered general obligations and funded through taxes. I'd much prefer bestowing my ill-gotten gains on random acts of kindness and senseless beauty, secure in the knowledge that public health and education were adequately funded.

[Xeynon]

Late to the party this time, and several of the points I would have made have already been made as well as is possible by others. Just to add my two cents:

There are definitely lots of folks who vote strictly in their own, narrow interest, but there are also lots who do not. My guess is that the latter are the larger group.

I think that's right. I'm a teacher by profession and make less than 30K a year, but I can't say that really enters into my thought process when I think about tax policy.

Of course, this is one more reason why it's deeply irrational for working-class folks to support GOP economic policies, since it's these policies that constantly undermine and grind down traditional mores; in fact, they're one reason working class communities are so seriously affected by such issues.

This is an excellent point. Economic distress pretty clearly does contribute to drug use, crime, high divorce rates, and the like. While I don't think the stock liberal playbook is necessarily the way to reinvigorate economically depressed communities, liberals are absolutely correct in diagnosing the problem. The problem is, they don't make this point clearly or frequently enough.

A lot of the battle is lost by how issues are framed. Many liberals are inclined to discuss problems like the drug epidemic or teen pregnancy by doing things like denouncing high incarceration rates for young black men or the insisting on the right to unfettered access to abortion for pregnant 15 year olds. This is exactly the wrong tack to take, because it makes liberals come across as either Marxist determinist types arguing that people aren't responsible for their own actions, or libertines. Both impressions push the buttons of culturally conservative voters, who generally very much hold to the American ideals that where you are in life is largely a function of where you choose to be, and that you ought to be responsible for the consequences of your own decisions. IMO, Dems would have more success with Reagan Democrats if they emphasized the connection not between poverty and social pathology, but rather the connection between economic prosperity and solving social pathology, and framed their policies on poverty as "we'll do things to make jobs and opportunities more plentiful in your communities and give you the tools to fix problems like drug use and teen pregnancy" rather than "we'll raise taxes on those nasty rich people" and "we'll give you services that other people pay for". Of course, it wouldn't hurt for the big city wing of the party to be a bit less stridently self-righteous about hot button issues like religion and guns.

[Jesurgislac]

Xeynon: Many liberals are inclined to discuss problems like the drug epidemic or teen pregnancy by doing things like denouncing high incarceration rates for young black men or the insisting on the right to unfettered access to abortion for pregnant 15 year olds. This is exactly the wrong tack to take, because it makes liberals come across as either Marxist determinist types arguing that people aren't responsible for their own actions, or libertines.

"Come across" to whom?

When I hear of someone arguing that a 15-year-old girl should be forced through pregnancy and childbirth against her will, I think of child abuse: a girl that age ought to be strongly encouraged to protect her health and her future ability to bear children whom she will be able to care for, by terminating a pregnancy that resulted from statutory rape. Certainly she ought not to be forced to endure a pregnancy she wants to terminate. Your suggestion that she should be so forced, that only a libertine would refrain from forcing a 15-year-old girl in that position, strikes me as exactly backwards.

That is to say, of course I support "unfettered access" to abortion for girls too young to safely bear children and far too young to be able to economically support a child. To argue that this is "libertine" or "irresponsible" seems not merely an ugly way of framing a principled opposition to child abuse, but a profoundly immoral frame.

[Jesurgislac]

Oh, and I hardly think it's "irresponsible" or "Marxist" to say that there's something severely wrong with a country where 1 in 138 people is in jail (BBC, 2005) and where (HRW, 2002)

· In twelve states, between 10 and 15 percent of adult black men are incarcerated.

· In ten states, between 5 and 10 percent of black adults are incarcerated.

· In twelve states, black men are incarcerated at rates between twelve and sixteen times greater than those of white men.

· In fifteen states, black women are incarcerated at rates between ten and thirty-five times greater than those of white women.

· In six states, black youth under age eighteen are incarcerated in adult facilities at rates between twelve and twenty-five times greater than those of white youth.

The US has the highest prison rate in the world, and really remarkable racial disparities in imprisonment rates.

Either Americans are just wickeder, nastier, more violent, more criminal, than the citizens of any other country in the world, or else...

And you know: I go for the "or else". Anti-American socialist leftie bitkah though I am, I do not believe that Americans are so much violently worse than anyone else: I think your government just likes to lock you up more often.

[Phil]

And taxes are what progressives want rich people to pay.

Or maybe these types of generalizations are something that isn't very helpful.

How amusing that I make a general observation about "people," and you respond with what you imagine is a trenchant partistan political observation. (Albeit one easily refuted, as seen in Turbulence's response.)

Unfortunately for you, the helpfulness of what I said has no bearing on whether it is correct, which it is. And which one has to look no further than our political class to confirm.

John McCain attempts to wiggle out from under campaign finance laws he himself helped enact.

Hillary Clinton positions herself as champion of the working people while her campaign stiffs small business owners all along the campaign trail.

Then there was the infamous opinion piece by . . . oh, geez, someone at Red State? . . . that argued that there's no such thing as hypocrisy because moralist demagogues -- and specifically anti-gay activists and legislators -- are at least attempting to keep others from sinful activity even if they themselves fall short.

You usually see this stuff manifest itself in the statement, "I generally believe in X, but . . . " when one finds oneself on the wrong end of a policy he or she professes to believe in. Like when a tough-on-crime person gets pulled over doing 70 in a 35.

Are you really, really, going to argue against the proposition, Sebastian, that a significant percentage of people more often than not will attempt to evade the consequences of acts that they publicly profess that people should suffer for those acts.

Lotsa luck.

[ajay]

Brett: Doesn't particularly benefit them [the rich], either, given that those services are almost exclusively to benefit somebody else.

In Brett's world, you see, the rich never use the toilet, drink tap water, drive on roads, eat food (food safety inspectors), fly (air traffic control), use money, enter into contracts, call the police, use the law courts, breathe air, buy anything (product safety and consumer rights), exercise copyright, or put money in banks. They live in little hermetically sealed bubbles packed with all their gold coins.

[Anarch]

Like when a tough-on-crime person gets pulled over doing 70 in a 35.

Or when a "abstinence until marriage" type meets someone they really, really like. And gets knocked up.

[FlyOnTneWall]

Richard:

Thanks for bringing the Appiah quote to my attention - hadn't seen that before, and I'm grateful to have some empirical backing for my purely intuitional claims.

I'm struck that so many commenters seem to assume that if only Americans could be made aware of the real facts, they'd all vote for Democrats. I'm not sure that's so. For one thing, it assumes that everyone will freight a given piece of data with equal significance. In my experience, however, we typically invest those facts which accord with our presuppositions with the greatest weight. So if you present a smorgasbord of facts to your average voter, they'll tend to seize upon those which support their point of view, and discount those which do not.

So it's not just a matter of telling voters that only a tiny fraction of the most affluent taxpayers end up shouldering the estate tax - it's about convincing them that that fact is significant, even controlling. We tend to assume that others will interpret factual data the same way that we ourselves do. We think of ourselves, after all, as perfectly logical, and have difficulty perceiving that we filter our perceptions of the world through a whole array of beliefs and values.

Recognizing that people aren't paying attention to the facts that we ourselves find most important not simply because they've been bamboozled is the first step to persuading them of our point of view. That acknowledgement suggests that we need to give them not just a new set of facts, but a new frame of reference with which to interpret those facts. And that gets back to Appiah's point. People didn't like the estate tax because it seemed unfair - why should you have to pay a second round of taxes on earnings just because someone dies? That sense of unfairness left them predisposed to certain arguments - that the tax hurt small-businesses and family farms, for example. You can't counter that by pointing to the small number actually affected by the tax - that's mistaking the symptom for the cause. The way to counter the argument is to make the case for its fairness: by pointing out that the rich got that way because America endowed them with opportunity, and that the tax preserves the chance for others to have similar opportunities.

And that's broadly true of voters who cast ballots "against their economic interests." They do so not because they're stupid, and not because - as Drum would have it - social values are somehow more important in their lives than in the lives of Democratic voters. We're not going to win them back by telling them they're stupid, that they've been fooled, or that the facts contradict their beliefs. We'll win them over by showing how our policies actually accord with their beliefs. That if they care about preserving family, gay marriage is a boon and not a curse. That progressive taxation is about ensuring a fair playing field, and not about penalizing the succesful. That not waging ill-advised wars overseas will actually strengthen our national security. In other words, by abandoning the futile quest to provide them with 'facts' that will change their beliefs to match our policies, and demonstrating that our policies actually accord with those beliefs.

[just me]

I live in and work in a school in a poor, low income community. One portion of the community is working class the other portion is "doesn't work at all"

There is real dislike and disdain from those who works for those, they view as gaming the system. I think in a working class community, the working class don't really see the wealthy, so much as those who are, from their perspective at least, getting something for nothing. They come in contact far more in their day to day lives with the "not working" rather than the wealthy.

I think resentment can easily build up, when you feel like you are busting your butt everyday working to support your family and pay your bills and pay your taxes, while the guy who does nothing for a check from the government doesn't bust anything.

Maybe some of that resentment is misplaced, but when the "program" or government solution seems framed tomake things easier for the non working person, I can see voting against the guy proposing it.

I remember back in the 90's when they wanted to reform welfare, Bill Clinton was drug kicking and screaming to sign the bill. In the end he did it, because it had huge support, especially among working class people.

I also think a lot of these arguments boil down to "working class people are too stupid to vote the way we want them too" and that isn't going to win brownie points either.

I agree that appeals to fairness work among working class people, and I think in general they work among everyone.

You also have to account for the fact that sometimes the right solutions from either party to a given problem aren't necessarily right and wrong or black and white-and there should be room for healthy debate without calling one group stupid, naive, or whatever.

[Gregory]

I'm struck that so many commenters seem to assume that if only Americans could be made aware of the real facts, they'd all vote for Democrats. I'm not sure that's so.

Why? The Republican propaganda machine certainly seems to think so. The dishonesty of the "death tax" trope has already been addressed, but your point about so-called "double taxation" is yet another example of the kind of dishonest framing Republicans have used to fix this policy. The person receiving the inheritance has never paid taxes on it, and it's no more of a "double taxation" to have that transfer of wealth taxed than any other transaction. (See also: the bogus argument over so-called "partial birth abortion", a fabricated and emotionally loaded term that the so-called "liberal media" dutifully adopted.)

It isn't "elitist" or "condescending" to call out the flagrant dishonesty of Republican positions, and it's been a serious mistake, over the past few decades, for Democrats to concede that the Grover Norquist / New Gingrich crowd argues in anything like good faith.

If the GOP has to resort to flagrantly dishonest framing to push their agenda -- and we can see that they do nothing but -- it's a tacit admission even on the part of the Democrats' political opposition that the progressive cause does indeed win on the merits.

[Gregory]

Italico begonus!

By the way, I also was baffled by the construction "Megan McArdle has an interesting response." I wish I'd thought of Roy Edroso's brilliant characterization "lipstick libertarian."

[Jesurgislac]

FlyOnTheWall: People didn't like the estate tax because it seemed unfair - why should you have to pay a second round of taxes on earnings just because someone dies?

People didn't like the estate tax because they were told it was unfair.

The sales tax is explicitly a second round of taxes on earnings, and hits everyone: the poorest people are the most affected by it. When was the last time you saw anyone complain that the sales tax was unfair? And when was the last time you saw someone complain that "some people" in the US don't pay any tax?

Complaints about the estate tax from the few people affected by it, arguing that it was not fair that just because they would inherit more money than most people see in a lifetime they would be expected to pay a tax on that inheritance, would sound pathetically self-obsessed and greedy.

But the few people affected by the estate tax are disproportionately more powerful than the many people affected by the sales tax: they've orchestrated a very successful spin campaign to claim that it's not fair that when they inherit large sums, they have to pay tax on those large sums. Part of that spin campaign includes a stack of lies and misleading statements to make the vast majority of people, who never will see anything like the sums which those affected will receive after tax, feel somehow included in the troubles of the very richest.

[Slartibartfast]

People didn't like the estate tax because they were told it was unfair.

Oh, sure. No one thinks anything is unfair until they're told to think that. And, likewise, nothing is unfair if you're told that it is, before figuring it out for yourself. It's kind of a constantly-shifting landscape of fairness goalposts.

[Sebastian]

"Are you really, really, going to argue against the proposition, Sebastian, that a significant percentage of people more often than not will attempt to evade the consequences of acts that they publicly profess that people should suffer for those acts."

Nope.

I'm going to argue that the case is generalizable well beyond that.

People in general want 'others' to pay the costs for almost anything you can discuss. If I politically have problems with divorce, I may not feel so strongly if my husband is beating me. If I politically want a new program, I'm also statistically likely to be interested in having the rich pay for more of it than I do. A huge part of the libertarian critique is based on that insight so of course I'm not really, really, really going to argue against it.

I'm arguing against the utility of pretending that very human mode is largely restricted to conservatives. I'm arguing that that very human instinct has very little explanatory force in explaining the differences between conservatives and liberals. So comments like "Consequences are something people generally want other people to suffer; when it comes to themselves, they'll look for the loophole every time." don't really explain why conservatives have different views than liberals. It would be like mentioning that the sky is blue or that grass is green when watered and brown when not.

[bc]

a girl that age ought to be strongly encouraged to protect her health and her future ability to bear children whom she will be able to care for, by terminating a pregnancy that resulted from statutory rape.

A girl that age should be strongly encouraged to not be having sex at 15. You just proved Xeynon's point. He says "teen pregnancy" and you argue for unfettered access to abortion apparently thinking any restriction is akin to child abuse.

By extension to what Xeynon said, I generally agree that many liberal policies come across to conservatives as fixing the symptom and not the problem (the problem often, but not always, being "choice" related). Too much teen pregnancy, provide abortion. Don't solve the underlying cause of crime, reduce the rate of incarceration. Don't provide economic opportunity, redistribute the income.

I realize that this is a gross oversimplification and not a very accurate one at that as to the actual merits of many policies. But I think the perception is accurate on a broad scale.

[Jesurgislac]

bc: A girl that age should be strongly encouraged to not be having sex at 15.

Irrelevant.

A girl that age, or any age, ought to be able to access contraception and to have been brought up with self-confidence and self-awareness to have sex only when she wanted to. That's the policy in the Netherlands, and that's why they have the lowest rate of teen pregnancy and teenage abortion in the world.

But, irrelevant.

Xeynon said: or the insisting on the right to unfettered access to abortion for pregnant 15 year olds.

We were discussing a pregnant 15-year-old girl. Telling her she ought not to have sex isn't going to help one whit.

bc: You just proved Xeynon's point. He says "teen pregnancy" and you argue for unfettered access to abortion apparently thinking any restriction is akin to child abuse.

Of course, bc. How is forcing a 15-year-old girl to have a baby against her will not child abuse? Isn't a 15-year-old girl a child? Isn't it abusive to force her through pregnancy and childbirth when she wants to have an abortion?

Too much teen pregnancy, provide abortion.

For any teenage pregnancy, provide access to abortion, yes. Otherwise, you have a policy that amounts to child abuse.

Too much teen pregnancy means: teenagers are having sex, as they will, and are not being given access to good sex education ("abstinence education" is strongly correlated with teenage pregnancy) and do not have access to contraception. The solution is to require schools (and parents, for homeschooled kids) to provide sex education, and to legally mandate free access to contraception.

Don't solve the underlying cause of crime, reduce the rate of incarceration.

If people are being unjustly imprisoned - and either the US is the most criminal nation in the world, or they are - then yes, you need to reduce the rate of incarceration.

Do you think the US is the most criminal nation in the world, bc?

[Phil]

I'm arguing against the utility of pretending that very human mode is largely restricted to conservatives.

Who here claimed that it was? Yes, I responded to a particular case regarding Catholics and abortion, but I generalized it back out and very specifically used the word "people." If you have trouble understanding what the word "people" means, and believe it somehow means "conservatives," I can probably have my ten-year-old niece draw you a picture or something.

I'm arguing that that very human instinct has very little explanatory force in explaining the differences between conservatives and liberals.

Who here claimed that it does?

So comments like "Consequences are something people generally want other people to suffer; when it comes to themselves, they'll look for the loophole every time." don't really explain why conservatives have different views than liberals.

Who here claimed that it does?

Seriously, you're arguing with phantoms, man. Nobody here -- particularly me -- has claimed any such thing. Or anything even close.

[Jesurgislac]

Slartibartfast: Oh, sure. No one thinks anything is unfair until they're told to think that.

You really think so, Slarti? Because it's not what I said.

And, likewise, nothing is unfair if you're told that it is, before figuring it out for yourself.

You really think so, Slarti? Because it's not what I said.

I think that the notion that it's unfair for people who are inheriting over $2 million from their parents to pay 40% of every dollar above the two million (given the proper exemptions to prevent loss of small family businesses and farms) is something that doesn't actually stand up to close examination. Why is it unfair for people who are about to receive over 2 million dollars to be taxed on the amount they will receive above 2 million dollars?

If this is a spontaneous feeling of "it's unfair!" why is it that so many of the people who claim it is don't have the least idea what the threshold is, how many households pay it, that no small family business or family farm has ever been lost because of estate tax, or that it only applies to the estate above the threshold mark?

They have not looked up how the estate tax works and spontaneously decided that how it works is unfair, because they don't know how the estate tax works: they know what they've been told, which is a bunch of lies and distortions intended to present a picture of an unfair tax.

You may see a difference, but it escapes me. I know only one person who did have a clear idea of how the estate tax works and who did think it was unfair: he claimed (I don't know if it was true) that his estate was going to reach the $2M mark within two years, he had two daughters, and he wanted his daughters to be able to inherit everything from him without paying the government any tax at all. I admit the sincerity and honesty of his feelings. I just don't think much of someone who sincerely and honestly does not want their kids to have to pay their share.

[SamChevre]

They have not looked up how the estate tax works and spontaneously decided that how it works is unfair, because they don't know how the estate tax works: they know what they've been told

In my very limited observation, they know what they've experienced.

Remember--the tax is on the estate, not the recipient, and the threshhold was $600,000 until quite recently. A fair number of people had to deal with figuring out how to pay estate tax on their parents/grandparents estate, which consisted of a small house in the NY suburbs, a car, and a savings account, and was divided up among 10 people. Even if the tax was only $50,000, figuring out how to pay it and how much it was took a massive amount of time and effort and money.

[Sebastian]

Also you should remember that you are talking about the FEDERAL estate tax. Almost every state had an estate tax, and many of them had no or a very low minimum threshold. So the idea that people don't experience estate taxes is wrong.

[Sebastian]

Bold begone!