Thanks for the tip about Hanania, along with the health warning. It's handy in further researching (reinforcing?) a pet theory I have about education level replacing economic resources as the new class divide. Which, obviously, is off-topic here. But I'm guessing that he's trying to evidence things that *feel* true and maybe those of us who play in this space need actual statistician types who wouldn't care either way to help us.
I think education goes a long way towards explaining the divide, although education in the Caplanian, "measured as time your butt was in a seat" sense as opposed to actual knowledge or understanding. I am not sure if it is because the American educational system is very heavy on indoctrination and low on actual human capital building, and so tends to filter out those who don't like the indoctrination, or if it has to do with personality traits like willingness to accept answers based on authority and just other things that make going through and succeeding at the educational system less miserable, or something.
I suspect that at the margins there are other related factors as well. One that seems salient to me is that once you feel that you have the tools to fix some given problems, you really want to try to fix those problems. If you don't have a very strong prior principle against forcing people to do things to which they haven't agreed, it is probably very tempting to want to use the power of government to make them do what you think it takes to solve the problem. But of course, that is going to happen to all people, whether it is moral panic about reefer or using the right pronouns.
In the end it probably requires a highly multidimensional vector of attributes to map well. It might be worth doing, but I am not certain it is. It might be more efficient to try to and understand what sorts of things are good or bad regardless of party, and then identify whether particular policies and behaviors map to the good or bad. Sort of an anti-faction sort of thing, as opposed to our modern "My faction, right or wrong" model.
Thanks for the tip about Hanania, along with the health warning. It's handy in further researching (reinforcing?) a pet theory I have about education level replacing economic resources as the new class divide. Which, obviously, is off-topic here. But I'm guessing that he's trying to evidence things that *feel* true and maybe those of us who play in this space need actual statistician types who wouldn't care either way to help us.
I think education goes a long way towards explaining the divide, although education in the Caplanian, "measured as time your butt was in a seat" sense as opposed to actual knowledge or understanding. I am not sure if it is because the American educational system is very heavy on indoctrination and low on actual human capital building, and so tends to filter out those who don't like the indoctrination, or if it has to do with personality traits like willingness to accept answers based on authority and just other things that make going through and succeeding at the educational system less miserable, or something.
I suspect that at the margins there are other related factors as well. One that seems salient to me is that once you feel that you have the tools to fix some given problems, you really want to try to fix those problems. If you don't have a very strong prior principle against forcing people to do things to which they haven't agreed, it is probably very tempting to want to use the power of government to make them do what you think it takes to solve the problem. But of course, that is going to happen to all people, whether it is moral panic about reefer or using the right pronouns.
In the end it probably requires a highly multidimensional vector of attributes to map well. It might be worth doing, but I am not certain it is. It might be more efficient to try to and understand what sorts of things are good or bad regardless of party, and then identify whether particular policies and behaviors map to the good or bad. Sort of an anti-faction sort of thing, as opposed to our modern "My faction, right or wrong" model.