ARNOLD KLING
August 14, 2011
The Top Political Contributors
August 11, 2011
Gender and the New Commanding Heights
August 11, 2011
Jamie Galbraith Makes an Assumption
August 11, 2011
Macroeconometrics: The Science of Hubris
August 10, 2011
Real and Nominal Bond Yields
BRYAN CAPLAN
August 14, 2011
The Effect of Thumb Sucking on Income
August 12, 2011
The Voice of Cold, Hard Truth to All Would-Be Educators
August 12, 2011
Ability, Morality, and Prosperity: A Paper and a Report
August 11, 2011
The Theory of Time and Frittering
August 10, 2011
Male Variance and the Remnants of the Gender Gap
DAVID HENDERSON
August 9, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken", Part Two
August 8, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken"
August 5, 2011
James Bovard on the Peace Corps
August 4, 2011
Summers Way Off on FDR and 1941
August 3, 2011
The "Amazon" Tax
SHARE
This jives with my personal experience. I'm very libertarian because I've noticed that when other people try to make decisions for me, they do an absolutely terrible job of it.
This may be a better topic for OB, but maybe we should be skeptical of the truthfulness of beliefs which highly correlate with our personality?
I've found zip code (or other residence info) to be a great predictor of ideology. I think most people are using ideology to gain or maintain peer acceptance rather than analyzing the issues.
Maybe I'm confused. It sounds like the argument is as follows: X has an almost negligible effect. Y has a more negligible effect than X. Hence: X is awesome.
Call them for what they are: Noise.
You need a cleaner study where the effects of class, ethnicity, region, religion, parental views, etc. on ideology are out of the picture.
You should look for studies of brother pairs raised in the same household, and see how much effect personality has on ideology then. That would give you a pretty good "all else being equal" approach to the question.