A political science blog by academics covering elections, democracy, public opinion and data analysis of political events.
Commenters enjoy it for the authors' evident love of their field and cite its data-driven posts, such as those on dating-site age distributions.
"However, I'm not sure I see any actual evidence to support the power theory."
I am a little unclear on what you specifically mean by "the power theory".
Do you mean to question the proposed relationship between greater monetary resources and greater (political and social) power? This is something that seems pretty obvious but there are some interesting graphs presented in:
"Economic Inequality and Political Power (Part 1 of 3)", Martin Gilens, 2012. http://themonkeycage.org/2012/08/economic-inequality-and-political-power-part-1/
"When preferences across income groups do diverge, however, I found that the association with policy outcomes persisted for the affluent but disappeared for the middle class and the poor, as the second chart shows...If federal policy more equally reflected the preferences of all Americans, we would see a more progressive tax structure, higher unemployment benefits, stronger regulation of business and industry, a more protectionist trade regime, more prayer in public life, and less access to abortion."[1]
Another source is:
"Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans", Benjamin I. Page, Larry M. Bartels, and Jason Seawright, ?. http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~jnd260/cab/CAB2012%20-%20Page1.pdf
"There is good reason to believe that the wealthiest Americans exert more political influence than their less fortunate fellow citizens do. Historically oriented scholars like
Thomas Ferguson, William Domhoff, Fred Block, and
others…
Sure. Looking over the list, I'm reminded why I enjoy reading these people. Even when I disagree with them, it is obvious that they love their field. They have a lot of fun with it. There's a kind of joy found in doing something that you love and have devoted your life to that comes out in their writing. As a result, these writers make actual value judgments. They don't write sterile corporate prose guaranteed to offend no one.
* Lawyers Guns and Money, global conflict, international relations, political science, some legal history: http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/
* The Monkey Cage, real political science by political scientists: http://www.themonkeycage.org/
* The Edge of the American West, mostly history professors but some philosophers too, but less academic than Crooked Timber: http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/
* Brad Delong, econ prof at UC Berkley; strong focus on economic history; leans left: http://delong.typepad.com/
* Tyler Cowen, econ prof at GMU, leans right: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/
* Marc Lynch, foreign affairs prof who talks about the middle east; unlike pretty much every middle east expert, he actually speaks Arabic and has some idea about what actual Arabs are talking about: http://lynch.foreignpolicy.com/
* Matthew Yglesias, foreign policy, some economics and politics: http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/
* Ezra Klein, health care and economic policy: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/
* Felix Salmon, a former bond trader…
If I were asked (as the author here was) to put together a piece on "10 ideas for the next 10 years" as part of a series subtitled "a thinker's guide to the most important trends of the new decade" - and for a national magazine to boot - I would at least try to make it tight and coherent, backed up by logical thought and good examples.
In this article, the author nowhere even states the theme he is trying to develop - instead, he presents a grab-bag of under-developed ideas, many of them cliched.
If you read the piece itself, I challenge you - quick now - to state its principal theme.
Here is my best guess: "Young people of all political persuasions are today increasingly rejecting middle-class ideals of school and work in favor of new forms of communitarian living by which they are returning to the soil and are otherwise seeking to escape the reach of nanny-state government."
This is just a guess cobbled together from fragments scattered throughout this piece.
What are those fragments?
Within a few paragraphs (about 1,000 words), we have a jumble of ideas that includes: 30% school drop-out rates; educational stagnation; projections of "fiscal doom;" jobless recovery; New Deal programs about to "starve;" sputtering industrial agriculture; millions of families living "off the grid;" food-distribution systems based on ancient Mayan know-how; communes and co-ops avoiding the nanny state; bourgeois rebels; exploding home schools; self-sufficient vertical farms built from…
Based on recommendations from fellow leftists, I've read three of Haidt's books.
Although his Just So theories don't sound right to me, I'm neither smart or educated enough to argue against them. Fortunately, there are plenty of people smarter and wiser than me who do this yeoman's labor.
My favorite review comes from another professor:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2520208235
Just the first paragraph:
"This is a very narrow and small-minded book parading as a big thoughtful one. It says it is about the American Mind, but the data and the theory only support "the coddling" of a very narrow subset of the American mind: upper middle class college kids born after 1995 that got to college in 2013. As far as that group is concerned, this is really good advice. I totally agree with his three untruths--your feelings are not necessarily true, the world is not good and evil, and adversity does not make you weak. I also agree that children need lots of free play and that social media is bad for kids and they are over-protected. There is nothing to disagree with here (even though I sometimes chafe at "when we were kids..." arguments)"
Ouch.
Please read the whole review.
--
More generally, John Jost, a social psychologist like Haidt, critiques moral foundations.
My noob TLDR: Haidt's ignores "Justice". "Justice" beats "Authority", meaning "just following orders" is not a defense for failing to "do the right thing". Haidt also glosses over contemporary research which…
Getting a representative sample in social science is really hard.
"The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data. That’s lower than the $91,000 median for Kasich voters. But it’s well above the national median household income of about $56,000. It’s also higher than the median income for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, which is around $61,000 for both"[0]
How many richer people are spending their days on Mechanical Turk? The authors don't seem to have collected any income, educational or other data that might help us ascertain how representative their sample is. Even when completely random 196 people is a fairly small sample in social science although it's much larger than many psychology studies, which seems to be the background of the authors. Other discussion[1] seems to suggest the people using the service are not very representative of the population at large.
[0]http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support/
[1] http://themonkeycage.org/2012/12/how-representative-are-amazon-mechanical-turk-workers/
Apart from the small sample size, if they collected data by mechnical turk then I wonder what sort of biases that introduces? In the paper you linked, Frances and Mialon state:
"Samples of mTurk workers have been found to be more representative of
the US population than in-person convenience samples, standard internet samples, and typical
college samples"
I am somewhat sceptical of this, and there seems to be some evidence to back-up my scepticism [1][2][3]. In particular, [2] states:
"In sum, the MTurk sample is younger, more male, poorer, and more highly educated than Americans generally. This matches the image of who you might think would be online doing computer tasks for a small amount of money."
Which are some of the factors that the marriage study itself seeks to examine. This looks like lazy data collection methodology to me.
[1] http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2013/7/10/fooled-twice-shame-on-who-problems-with-mechanical-turk-stud.html
[2] http://themonkeycage.org/2012/12/19/how-representative-are-amazon-mechanical-turk-workers/
[3] http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2010/03/new-demographics-of-mechanical-turk.html