"Choice Blindness" Can Transform Conservatives Into Liberals - and Vice Versa 542
ananyo writes "When U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney said last year that he was not even going to try to reach 47% of the US electorate, and that he would focus on the 5–10% thought to be floating voters, he was articulating a commonly held opinion: that most voters are locked in to their ideological party loyalty. But Lars Hall, a cognitive scientist at Lund University in Sweden, knew better. When Hall and his colleagues tested the rigidity of people's political attitudes and voting intentions during Sweden's 2010 general election, they discovered that loyalty was malleable: nearly half of all voters were open to changing their minds. Hall's group polled 162 voters during the final weeks of the election campaign, asking them which of two opposing political coalitions — conservative or social democrat/green — they intended to vote for. The researchers also asked voters to rate where they stood on 12 key political issues, including tax rates and nuclear power. The person conducting the experiment secretly filled in an identical survey with the reverse of the voter's answers, and used sleight-of-hand to exchange the answer sheets, placing the voter in the opposite political camp. The researcher invited the voter to give reasons for their manipulated opinions, then summarized their score to give a probable political affiliation and asked again who they intended to vote for. On the basis of the manipulated score, 10% of the subjects switched their voting intentions, from right to left wing or vice versa. Another 19% changed from firm support of their preferred coalition to undecided. A further 18% had been undecided before the survey, indicating that as many as 47% of the electorate were open to changing their minds, in sharp contrast to the 10% of voters identified as undecided in Swedish polls at the time (research paper). Hall has used a similar sleight of hand before to show that our moral compass can often be easily reversed."
Re:Sample of 162 in 9.5 Million (Score:5, Informative)
The statistical power of a sample has pretty much zilch dependence on the population size being sampled (until you reach a near-unity portion of the population being sampled); 162 of 9.5 Million provides no less hypothesis-testing power than 162 of 1000 (assuming sampling is properly uniform; a caveat here is that the researcher has a sample of 162 voluntary-survey-responders). While it might have been nice to include statistical error bars on the percentages in the summary, the "in 9.5 Million" is irrelevant to the robustness of conclusions drawn from a sample of 162.
Not what he said (Score:2, Informative)
"When U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney said last year that he was not even going to try to reach 47% of the US electorate"
Got to wonder about an article that starts out this way. Grant you, I haven't gone back and reviewed the video in a while. Still, I'm pretty sure what he said was that about 47% of the population wouldn't be interested in him and a platform for a smaller government. I certainly don't recall anything even approaching the notion that he was going to ignore half the population. That is a LOT different than focusing your message on those you think would be most interested in your message.
Every campaign focuses their attention on those votes they're most likely to get. You didn't see Obama spending a lot of his campaign in states that weren't likely to go his way no matter what. Certainly he had his strategy sessions that had they been publicly released wouldn't be especially flattering either.
Re:Yeah Right (Score:5, Informative)
We're just against unreasonable regulation.
In my experience, opinions vary *wildly* amongst self-defined libertarians as to the definition of "unreasonable".
For example, PBS is insanely profitable (its executives make over 300,000 per year) yet how dare anybody suggest we stop handing them free money, because clearly that means they hate children.
The Federally chartered Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created by Congress specifically to keep PBS alive in the late 60s.
I don't think you hate kids, I just think your ideology is based on a poor grasp of public policy.
Re:Yeah Right (Score:5, Informative)
Re:My observation (Score:3, Informative)
Well, balancing the budget is just, to put it bluntly, a really bad idea. There's a reason companies will frequently borrow to expand themselves. It is often the case that to do so produces better returns than the interest/dividends rates one has to pay on those loans/dividends/whatever. By the same token, government action into funding research (which leads to people/companies expanding the economy) and social programs (which provide a base framework of funding to keep the economic engine running even in bad times) can well pay for themselves. How do I know this to be true? Because rather consistently while the US debt has grown, the GDP has grown at a faster rate. The fact that it's currently not true has to do with (a) tax cuts, (b) off-the-books, now-on-the-books wars, and (c) the current economic crisis--the sort that seems to happen at least once a decade. It's precisely those chain of events that is why the debt looks so bad now. But just like the Great Depression then WW2, there's ample time for economic prosperity in the future to allow for short-term tax increases to reduce the debt for a while and then go back to the slight deficit (relative to GDP) of old.
Yea, well, economic collapse is always a possible. Even in the best of circumstances, it's been know to happen--all it would take is if another country (say China) over a few years underselling enough critical value goods, for example. But the sort of budgetary situation we're in is unlikely to lead to economic collapse. Look no further than Greece, which I'll get to below.
Yea, uh, no. Greece pushed though austerity measures which drastically cut back social entitlements--in the form of government jobs--even though they were extremely unpopular. Then they pushed even more austerity measures through. Why? Because once your credit rating goes to junk bond status, you have really only the choices to either (a) bankrupt yourself--in a country, that takes the form of either just writing off the debt and refusing to pay or through hyperinflation by printing money (obviously Greece couldn't really choose the second option as they didn't "own" the Euro)--or (b) take whatever extreme measures your creditors demand--often austerity measures--to guarantee payment. Either way, economic collapse seems rather unlikely because (a) most businesses can still keep operating no matter how defunct the US government becomes and they're the driving force of the economy and (b) as much as that sort of failure of the US government would still have a lot of ripple effects through the economy, it's hard to believe that it would be any worse than the Great Depression which, as horrible as it was, is a survivable circumstance. Of course, another Great Depression is unlikely precisely because of all those social programs.
As for the former, your best bet is a very diverse portfolio. For the latter, well, the vast majority of people don't have to worry because the "grab your ankles" part generally applies to taxes on income--ie, it's the top 10% who are most likely to feel the pain if it comes to it*.
*And as bad as one might want to feel for them, I'd much rather be making $1 million/year where the top $750,000 are taxed at 90% and the bottom at $250,000 at 25% (leaving you with net $262,500/year) than to be making $50,000/year (leaving you with net $37,500/year); with the former, after only 10 years of work you could reti
One Falsity Replaced with Another (Score:5, Informative)
"When U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney said last year that he was not even going to try to reach 47% of the US electorate"
Got to wonder about an article that starts out this way. Grant you, I haven't gone back and reviewed the video in a while. Still, I'm pretty sure what he said was that about 47% of the population wouldn't be interested in him and a platform for a smaller government.
Well, after five seconds of googling I found [motherjones.com]:
Romney: There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, 48—he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect. And he'll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean that's what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people—I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not, what it looks like. I mean, when you ask those peoplewe do all these polls—I find it amazing—we poll all these people, see where you stand on the polls, but 45 percent of the people will go with a Republican, and 48 or 4
I did enjoy, however, how you removed the inflammatory notion that "there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it" and replaced it with "a platform for a smaller government."
It's amusing to call out one summary as being inaccurate and replace it with your own inaccuracies. I found the line you quoted from the summary more accurate about Romney's "giving up on them" attitude than your "they refuse a small government."
Every campaign focuses their attention on those votes they're most likely to get. You didn't see Obama spending a lot of his campaign in states that weren't likely to go his way no matter what. Certainly he had his strategy sessions that had they been publicly released wouldn't be especially flattering either.
So quote them. Go ahead, you don't think he's mindful of what he says to a large group of people? Your accusations that Obama was just as bad as Romney are backed up with absolutely zero citations.
Re:Sample of 162 in 9.5 Million (Score:5, Informative)
"Sample of 162 in 9.5 Million"
This is the dumbest goddamn thing you can say about statistics [angrymath.com].
Re:Yeah Right (Score:5, Informative)
For example, PBS is insanely profitable (its executives make over 300,000 per year) yet how dare anybody suggest we stop handing them free money, because clearly that means they hate children.
That's not true. Maybe you didn't know it was a lie, and are just stating what you honestly believe to be fact, but it's a lie all the same. I blame Romney for creating this ridiculous talking point in the debates last year.
You can review PBS's financial statements [pbs.org] for yourself. They lost ~$30 million in the past year, and a similar amount the year before -- page 5, "Change in net assets" row, "Total" columns for both 2012 and 2011.
They've got enough money that they could last for a while without public funding, but not forever. Cutting executive pay wouldn't make a difference. Also, I find it funny that banks need to pay millions of dollars of tax payer bailout dollars as bonuses to retain "top talent", but it's outrageous when PBS or schools want to spend a fraction of that to keep their top employees.
And really, it's a trivial cost for tax payers to bear (something like $1 per person per year), and provides our kids with educational programming that doesn't smother them with ads or ADHD-inducing hyperactive crap.
Re:Yeah Right (Score:1, Informative)
The "free" market before the civil war, where all the work was done by slaves?
- do you care at all about the words that come out of you? Like do you ever stop for a moment and think: maybe I do not actually know, maybe everything that I heard is garbage?
The industrial revolution in USA in 19th century was not done in the South, it was in the North. This fact alone dismisses your entire argument.
Secondly: slavery is a terrible idea economically, slaves are much more expensive than hired labour. Slaves can only serve as unskilled labour, they require a large upfront capital investment (you have to buy them), they are maintenance heavy, after all, you have to look after your investment. So you have to feed, cloth, shelter them, you have to take care of ALL of their needs, you have to provide medical care, everything (or you lose your money, it's not like sick and dying slaves will do hell of a job).
You can only force a slave to do bare minimum not to be punished, slaves are not good for factory work clearly.
Civil war was unnecessary to free the slaves, it was going to happen regardless like in all other countries, it was uneconomical to use slave labour rather than innovate. Of-course Civil war was about control, central authority, keeping the power in the hands of the federal government, but it's OK, it helped to remove slavery faster.... at the cost of 600,000 lives. Much more than Americans have lost in ANY other conflict. I would say it was a bad idea to have civil war in any case, and it hurt economically speaking, never mind all the human lives lost.
Even with that setback US economy grew more than any other economy in the history of the world until China, but of-course China enjoyed a start with a much greater access to capital, tools, machinery, industrial knowledge that was brought there by capitalists.
comprises almost 99% of total organized labour.
- impressive. Until you realise that in Singapore only about 600,000 people are labour union members.
There are over 5,000,000 people living there, so that's a considerable chunk of people, so that's pretty large, about 12% of population. Do you know that their laws are very strict in terms of how they can use the labour union power? The last strike was in .... 1986. There are no significant labour laws, minimum wage is non-existent, yet per capita earnings are highest in the world. Health care spending is mostly private and it's very cheap because it's mostly private and it's free market.
You seem to be a big fan of slavery.
- more nonsense. Slavery in Ancient Rome had nothing to do with their wealth, it was free trade, the open routes to many other parts of the world that allowed build up of wealth. Slavery existed throughout the world pretty much everywhere, yet slavery does NOT lead to wealth generation, freedom does. Ancient Rome a degree of trade freedom that was previously unknown in the world.
Stop lying. I asked for an example. I didn't claim there are none. I do not understand what it is.
- so you are just ignorant then. Freedom is relative. The freer ONE country is compared to another, the more wealth will flow to THAT country. This is what you clearly don't understand. There is a reason Gresham's law works.
If somebody forces labour unions upon employers and somewhere else this is not a law, then the other place is freer and that's where business will be done. Contract laws are necessary, crime laws are necessary, sure. Private property must be protected.
But that's all that a market needs: protection of individual rights and enforcement of contract law.