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
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I would actually argue that workers voting for capitalism and bourgeois/intelligencia voting for Marxism ARE voting in their own rational self interests.
But most workers are not free marketeers and most bourgeois are not Marxists.
The SIVH takes class as given and says political views follow from that. (You're taking political views first and then asking about what class they came from, which isn't the same thing.)
So the SIVH predicts the average worker should be pretty free-market since that's what's raised the bottom during industrialization, and the average bourgeois should have planner views since they would be the planners, there wouldn't be creative destruction to threaten them and their offspring, etc.
But it's more like the other way around, where working class people favor shoot-themselves-in-the-foot policies (which they fortunately don't vote on), while bourgeois people favor policies that don't protect them from competition, that encourage downward as well as upward mobility, etc.
Bryan, The embedded link to Ed Glaeser's paper doesn't work. Would you please post the paper's full bibliographical reference (or at least title)? Thanks!
Hi, John.
Excellent observation that the original Glaeser link from 2006 is now broken.
The full title, plus a link--though the link is to a gated version:
"Myths and Realities of American Political Geography," by Edward L. Glaeser and Bryce Adam Ward. Harvard Institute of Economic Research, Research Paper Series, January 2006. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=874977
HT: Brad DeLong, "Origins of Blue State Culture," May 4, 2006.
Marx was economic determinist, but he didn't believed that people are simply able to recognize the system that suits their economic interests. He was aware that majority of the workers of his time are not communists - that is why he believed that communists are avant-guard. He believed that "ruling ideas are ideas of ruling class" and that is why actual collapse of the economic system - not bare economic interest of the working class - is necessary for revolution in his scheme.