Hmm, seems to me that your correlation of Left Wing with 'poorer' hardly seems correct to me. The under-class -- people who don't work; who rely on government subsidies for support -- are indeed ferverently left, but these days, the WORKING CLASS is definitely, strongly right wing (see Daniel Trump-- it is the working class that supports him most ferverently-- and not because he is promising them any free government goodies either ). The working classes choice to vote right seems very logical to me: they don't see govenment subsidies as benefiting THEM, they see government subsidies as benefiting people one social class down from them-- the underclass-- the people who they most clearly differentiate themselves from, and dislike and dispise. And the provision of liberal government subsideis to the under-class, downgrades the working class's own achievment of supporting themselves and their families, of making it on their own, and attacking their own sense of self worth. Possibly even worse, the upper 'cultural capital' class-- the "busybody left"-- is constantly denegrating the working class: their opinions, lifestyle, and beliefs. I think that most of Trump's support comes from the fact that he is openly, blatently, aggressively not polically correct or 'woke'-- merely by openly expressing the views that most working class people actually hold, he makes it more socially acceptable (especially in working class circles) to express those views as well.
Anyway, my point is, today in the US, the under-class, the bottom 5% -10% is definately left; but I'd say the entire rest of the 'bottom third' is now 'right'.
Your anecdotal gut feeling doesn't really match the data, though. Look at the graphs. The underclass is most fervently *independent*, presumably disenfranchised by politics. Democrat views are relatively constant between income levels, and Republican association is pretty much linear. There's a small spike just after the poverty line, which indicates you're not totally wrong here, but even there it doesn't pass the Democrat line.
Also, note that the right's core base is agriculture and the military, which get a ton of government subsidies. Also, the majority of recipients of government-funded healthcare are the "working poor" that you're talking about, so they're still relying on government subsidies.
I think this is basically right. Richer people are increasingly republican, but that's mostly a result of fewer independents rather than fewer democrats.
"The underclass is most fervently *independent*, presumably disenfranchised by politics." The parent's argument still holds, when those of them who do vote, still vote predominantly left (and even those not voting still probably sympathize more with left than the right, even if they don't identify with it and call themselves as holding "independent" views).
"Also, note that the right's core base is agriculture and the military, which get a ton of government subsidies. " The right wing masses, however, do not view those as subsidies wasted for their receivers to slack, but to be more productive (at argiculture and war respectively). So the opposite of how they view welfare kind of subsidies. So, while nominally both types are "subsidies", people can still love one type and hate the other, or say they "hate subsidies" but only mean one of the two.
Authoritarian -> Antiauthoritarian or Level of control is another axis commonly discussed these days. How repressive should policies be [to the other side]?
Open mindedness - this is the hardest to parse and see. Does a person require purity testing for the in-group? Maybe phrase this as Meta-Authoritarian.
Meta-Meta-Authoritarians may require purity testing for open-mindedness. My in-group must be open minded about whether or not purity testing is allowed.
---
It may be very difficult to have empathy for a person or their opinions; but we may find a way to have empathy for how their mind got to the place it is now.
>Everyone seems to blame the internet for our ever-increasing polarization. It would be funny if the true culprit were education and economic growth.
Unless I'm doing my mental coordinate transformation wrong, polarization is correlated with education (total capital) and *anticorrelated* with (distributed) economic growth. That is, if the majority of individuals perceive themselves as having a lower proportion of economic capital, despite a high total capital, that's the peak of polarization. Which tracks well with complaints about the "shrinking middle class".
I think you bring up something that's ambiguous in Boudieu's theory. In terms of cultural or economic capital, do your views depend on your absolute level, or your relative level? And does it depend on your "rank" (insensitive to outliers) or your level relative to the mean (sensitive to high incomes)? I guess the relationship with economic growth depends on how you pin these down.
Hm. So, now that I've had some shower time to turn it over in my head, I think I have a more concrete way to think about it.
There's a pretty well acknowledged phenomenon where people in the first world still feel "poor" despite having objectively more wealth than their ancestors. Even if I have a dead end job, I still have a fridge, access to clean water and running electricity, a miraculous computing device, etc. This can be considered *total capital*, since it meets the basic needs which, if neglected, prevent me from producing labor[1].
But in a real way, this mostly isn't "economic *capital*". I can use my clean water to get me through a workday, but I can't use my landlord-provided fridge to produce widgets. Nothing at that level gives you any advantage at the market, and what little productive capacity they have is already saturated in the market.
This base living-in-the-modern-first-world type capital is not economic, but "cultural" doesn't have quite the right valence; I'd propose calling it "societal capital"
I think this is what Bourdieu was getting by having the primary axes be "Total" and "Economic". It softly implies there are yet more types of capital than just two, but the economic proportion is the one that matters.
In other words, Total is absolute, Economic Proportion is relative. And I think (with less confidence) this reasoning makes it more sensitive to outliers, rather than the median.
[1] I feel like this definition also meshes well with your intuition about low-total-high-cultural being empty; having your basic needs met gives you more time to worry about political signaling.
Yes that's certainly something that wouldn't be true today! Also, my discretization into 3 bins was quite coarse, but if you look at the original diagrams in the book, Bourdieu distinguishes between "farmers" and "farm laborers" with the former somewhat more capital.
This was such an interesting read. I appreciate the revised curves to represent the independents, who are sometimes impossible to place on conventional left-right scale.
I wonder if the weird you lead with could be explained in part by Simpson's paradox.
Wait, in your last graph you put the left as the area with the lowest total capital *and* lowest economic capital. But both getting more economic capital and getting more education (presumably a culture proxy) capital reduces % of independents as per the introductory graphs. Shouldn't the "LEFT" and "INDEPENDENT" area labels be swapped?
Hmmm, I don't think they should be swapped, but it gets quite confusing to reason in terms of these two axes. I think it would probably be clearer to just first draw the curve in "economic capital vs. cultural capital" space and then translate it.
This is an inspiring post. However, I disagree with the suggested revision.
I would like to start with Bourdieu's diagram. It is important to notice that both the lower left and the lower right corner must be empty. If you add the original axes cultural capital and economic capital it would be a v-shape with the origin at the bottom of the total capital-axis (the economic capital axis pointing up right and the cultural axis up left). That makes sense: A person with no total capital has equally neither cultural nor economic capital.
We can spin this a bit further. A diagonal from lower left to upper right has people with about the same amount of cultural capital but increasing economic capital, a diagonal from lower right to upper left has people with about the same amount of economic capital but increasing cultural capital.
Therefore, reading the diagram very roughly, one can say that Bourdieu postulates the rich are tending towards the right and the poor towards the left. On a closer look, one can separate the dashed line into two parts. The upper half is a diagonal of constant economic capital, i.e. no matter how much cultural capital a person has accumulated, above a certain amount of economic capital they will vote conservative. This limit is not shown in the second graph of the survey, if one can assume Democrats are left and Republicans are right. It rather shows the opposite: Democrats attract voters independently of their income.
The lower part of the dashed line means that up to a certain economic capital right voters have less or only a little bit more economical than cultural capital. This seems to be somewhat true.
I would therefore suggest a completely different separation in the Bourdieu diagram. Everything under the horizontal bar (remember, it is a triangle) is independent, the second quadrant is Democrats and the first quadrant is Republicans.
I think this reflects the current situation better. For Democrats cultural values are more important, Republicans mainly want to get richer. Improving the economic situation of poor people is on nobody's agenda.
However, I am neither from nor in the US and so my political insights are limited. Please correct me where I am wrong.
Very intriguing ! I'm trying to map 60s France to 60s Texas in my mind. Not as hard as it might seem. Hunting, horses, ski boats, whiskey...
Hmm, seems to me that your correlation of Left Wing with 'poorer' hardly seems correct to me. The under-class -- people who don't work; who rely on government subsidies for support -- are indeed ferverently left, but these days, the WORKING CLASS is definitely, strongly right wing (see Daniel Trump-- it is the working class that supports him most ferverently-- and not because he is promising them any free government goodies either ). The working classes choice to vote right seems very logical to me: they don't see govenment subsidies as benefiting THEM, they see government subsidies as benefiting people one social class down from them-- the underclass-- the people who they most clearly differentiate themselves from, and dislike and dispise. And the provision of liberal government subsideis to the under-class, downgrades the working class's own achievment of supporting themselves and their families, of making it on their own, and attacking their own sense of self worth. Possibly even worse, the upper 'cultural capital' class-- the "busybody left"-- is constantly denegrating the working class: their opinions, lifestyle, and beliefs. I think that most of Trump's support comes from the fact that he is openly, blatently, aggressively not polically correct or 'woke'-- merely by openly expressing the views that most working class people actually hold, he makes it more socially acceptable (especially in working class circles) to express those views as well.
Anyway, my point is, today in the US, the under-class, the bottom 5% -10% is definately left; but I'd say the entire rest of the 'bottom third' is now 'right'.
Your anecdotal gut feeling doesn't really match the data, though. Look at the graphs. The underclass is most fervently *independent*, presumably disenfranchised by politics. Democrat views are relatively constant between income levels, and Republican association is pretty much linear. There's a small spike just after the poverty line, which indicates you're not totally wrong here, but even there it doesn't pass the Democrat line.
Also, note that the right's core base is agriculture and the military, which get a ton of government subsidies. Also, the majority of recipients of government-funded healthcare are the "working poor" that you're talking about, so they're still relying on government subsidies.
I think this is basically right. Richer people are increasingly republican, but that's mostly a result of fewer independents rather than fewer democrats.
"The underclass is most fervently *independent*, presumably disenfranchised by politics." The parent's argument still holds, when those of them who do vote, still vote predominantly left (and even those not voting still probably sympathize more with left than the right, even if they don't identify with it and call themselves as holding "independent" views).
"Also, note that the right's core base is agriculture and the military, which get a ton of government subsidies. " The right wing masses, however, do not view those as subsidies wasted for their receivers to slack, but to be more productive (at argiculture and war respectively). So the opposite of how they view welfare kind of subsidies. So, while nominally both types are "subsidies", people can still love one type and hate the other, or say they "hate subsidies" but only mean one of the two.
Or a 3d space? Or a 4d space?
Social + Economic are tackled in this article.
Authoritarian -> Antiauthoritarian or Level of control is another axis commonly discussed these days. How repressive should policies be [to the other side]?
Open mindedness - this is the hardest to parse and see. Does a person require purity testing for the in-group? Maybe phrase this as Meta-Authoritarian.
Meta-Meta-Authoritarians may require purity testing for open-mindedness. My in-group must be open minded about whether or not purity testing is allowed.
---
It may be very difficult to have empathy for a person or their opinions; but we may find a way to have empathy for how their mind got to the place it is now.
>Everyone seems to blame the internet for our ever-increasing polarization. It would be funny if the true culprit were education and economic growth.
Unless I'm doing my mental coordinate transformation wrong, polarization is correlated with education (total capital) and *anticorrelated* with (distributed) economic growth. That is, if the majority of individuals perceive themselves as having a lower proportion of economic capital, despite a high total capital, that's the peak of polarization. Which tracks well with complaints about the "shrinking middle class".
I think you bring up something that's ambiguous in Boudieu's theory. In terms of cultural or economic capital, do your views depend on your absolute level, or your relative level? And does it depend on your "rank" (insensitive to outliers) or your level relative to the mean (sensitive to high incomes)? I guess the relationship with economic growth depends on how you pin these down.
Hm. So, now that I've had some shower time to turn it over in my head, I think I have a more concrete way to think about it.
There's a pretty well acknowledged phenomenon where people in the first world still feel "poor" despite having objectively more wealth than their ancestors. Even if I have a dead end job, I still have a fridge, access to clean water and running electricity, a miraculous computing device, etc. This can be considered *total capital*, since it meets the basic needs which, if neglected, prevent me from producing labor[1].
But in a real way, this mostly isn't "economic *capital*". I can use my clean water to get me through a workday, but I can't use my landlord-provided fridge to produce widgets. Nothing at that level gives you any advantage at the market, and what little productive capacity they have is already saturated in the market.
This base living-in-the-modern-first-world type capital is not economic, but "cultural" doesn't have quite the right valence; I'd propose calling it "societal capital"
I think this is what Bourdieu was getting by having the primary axes be "Total" and "Economic". It softly implies there are yet more types of capital than just two, but the economic proportion is the one that matters.
In other words, Total is absolute, Economic Proportion is relative. And I think (with less confidence) this reasoning makes it more sensitive to outliers, rather than the median.
[1] I feel like this definition also meshes well with your intuition about low-total-high-cultural being empty; having your basic needs met gives you more time to worry about political signaling.
I'm baffled to see farmers as the lowest possible capital, under unskilled workers?
Yes that's certainly something that wouldn't be true today! Also, my discretization into 3 bins was quite coarse, but if you look at the original diagrams in the book, Bourdieu distinguishes between "farmers" and "farm laborers" with the former somewhat more capital.
This was such an interesting read. I appreciate the revised curves to represent the independents, who are sometimes impossible to place on conventional left-right scale.
I wonder if the weird you lead with could be explained in part by Simpson's paradox.
Wait, in your last graph you put the left as the area with the lowest total capital *and* lowest economic capital. But both getting more economic capital and getting more education (presumably a culture proxy) capital reduces % of independents as per the introductory graphs. Shouldn't the "LEFT" and "INDEPENDENT" area labels be swapped?
Hmmm, I don't think they should be swapped, but it gets quite confusing to reason in terms of these two axes. I think it would probably be clearer to just first draw the curve in "economic capital vs. cultural capital" space and then translate it.
This is an inspiring post. However, I disagree with the suggested revision.
I would like to start with Bourdieu's diagram. It is important to notice that both the lower left and the lower right corner must be empty. If you add the original axes cultural capital and economic capital it would be a v-shape with the origin at the bottom of the total capital-axis (the economic capital axis pointing up right and the cultural axis up left). That makes sense: A person with no total capital has equally neither cultural nor economic capital.
We can spin this a bit further. A diagonal from lower left to upper right has people with about the same amount of cultural capital but increasing economic capital, a diagonal from lower right to upper left has people with about the same amount of economic capital but increasing cultural capital.
Therefore, reading the diagram very roughly, one can say that Bourdieu postulates the rich are tending towards the right and the poor towards the left. On a closer look, one can separate the dashed line into two parts. The upper half is a diagonal of constant economic capital, i.e. no matter how much cultural capital a person has accumulated, above a certain amount of economic capital they will vote conservative. This limit is not shown in the second graph of the survey, if one can assume Democrats are left and Republicans are right. It rather shows the opposite: Democrats attract voters independently of their income.
The lower part of the dashed line means that up to a certain economic capital right voters have less or only a little bit more economical than cultural capital. This seems to be somewhat true.
I would therefore suggest a completely different separation in the Bourdieu diagram. Everything under the horizontal bar (remember, it is a triangle) is independent, the second quadrant is Democrats and the first quadrant is Republicans.
I think this reflects the current situation better. For Democrats cultural values are more important, Republicans mainly want to get richer. Improving the economic situation of poor people is on nobody's agenda.
However, I am neither from nor in the US and so my political insights are limited. Please correct me where I am wrong.
I wonder where Video Games would fit on that chart - my first instinct was that it would fill in that lower left segment but I'm not so sure.
I've thought about this true, and I'm highly unsure. I don't even have any intuition!