Why We Don’t Agree

I find symbolic behavior morally objectionable, because the speaker cares about the values he expresses more than about those persons he says he wants to help.

I agree with you. I think we should judge our actions by our best estimates of their consequences, even though it is often very difficult to gauge those consequences.

However, I think you are overlooking the fact that people sometimes fail to act with regard to the consequences, not because they are determined to act symbolically, but because their moral code is informed by deontological considerations. This isn’t just progressives. Libertarians also (of the non-bleeding heart variety?) are often driven by rights-based thinking that tells them there are certain things we just shouldn’t do, even if the consequences of those things would be better than the consequences of the alternatives.

Beyond symbolic behavior, the distribution of power is a real issue. Many political fights are about the distribution of power for the next fight. Some aspects of power are inherently zero-sum, so unsurprisingly agreement is very hard to come by.

Politics is very much a multi-round game, so it isn’t enough to suggest a policy that will help the poor in the next year, its a matter of finding one that’s sustainable.

As a result, I fear your classification of many of the divisions as a matter of symbolism may be too optimistic. Ultimately, I think successful progressive-bleeding heart libertarian alliances may be centered around low-deadweight loss means of both helping and politically empowering the poor.

This is looking to be a good discussion, but I’ll have to bow out for the time being with this thought: perhaps we should be looking for better symbols.

So should I assume that praising the New Deal, announcing that you voted for a Democrat, supporting public schools, criticizing Bush are all things you consider to be morally objectionable symbolic behavior?

I’m hardly a liberal in any modern sense of the word, but I think it’s pretty important to criticize leaders – regardless of their political affiliation – when they do things such as using inconclusive intel and a national tragedy as a pretext for a preemptive strike, or employing “enhanced interrogation techniques” or using disconcerting expansions of power to surveil American citizens. If for no other reason than it will (hopefully) give pause to the next one in line.

As for supporting public schools (in lieu of supporting school vouchers? again, I’m assuming, so correct me if I’m wrong) – I think there were some cogent arguments in the comments section of “Social Justice or Big Government?” that serve as an effective counter to any empirical weight the voucher system may have. (E.g., religious or sexual orientation-based discrimination on the part of what would essentially be publicly-funded parochial schools – hardly libertarian, or the possible ghettoization of some schools due to market equilibrium, etc.)

This is a very insightful analysis, but I think there’s more to the divide than this. For example, lefties are far more likely to be opposed to gun ownership, far more likely to approve of paternalist rationales for policies, far more likely to believe that inequality of wealth is _per se_ bad even if it makes everyone better off, and so on – these are values divisions, not merely empirical disputes.

ricketson, Aumann Agreement implies that if we approach things rationally, we should agree on a best guess about the consequences of policy. Social phenomena are fundamentally material, not aesthetic or moral, and so when we reach different conclusions from the same input someone really is wrong. This is different, of course, from saying that we can place a high degree of confidence in our answers, and in the case of the minimum wage the evidence really is ambiguous and scarce.

One might also add that the minimum wage is a relatively low-impact policy and thus for people to focus on it is symbolic in a more general sense (though, sadly, more substantive than much of what else dominates political discourse.)

A notable asymmetry that I don’t think can be ignored is that talk is cheap and so positive effects from signalling are parasitic on (at least perceived) negative ones: if I see someone condemn racism they might just be being pious, whereas if I see them complaining about “political correctness” I can rest assured that they’re an asshole. Someone for whom complaints about political correctness are affiliative finds them that way precisely because people like me react negatively to it, and so it has at least some risk. To actually summon my esteem you’d have to say something that would offend someone else, like that as a white settler nation America is an inherently horrible racist monster, or whatever. And you’d have to say it outside the context of a leftist echo chamber, where it would merely be pious and obvious, not worthy of communication at all.

pedrovedro: the evidence for the minimum wage 1) destroying the jobs of the least-productive workers, and 2) being motivated by racist concerns is beyond question. The only question about #1 is how many people’s livelihoods are you willing to destroy in exchange for increasing the wages of others. It’s perfectly possible that for a sufficiently small increment in the minimum wage over the market-clearing wage, no actual person loses their job. Raise that increment high enough, though, and the effect is unmistakable. Don’t believe me? Try a simulation: go to your boss and demand that he pay you a minimum wage twice your current wage, and see if you still have a job five minutes later.

For #2, besides the legislators explicitly saying that minimum wages will remove the unfairness of black workers working for less money, just look at the unemployment rates for teenagers. Black 40%, white 9%. There are many possible explanations, but they all circle around to racism. Abolishing minimum wages won’t get rid of racism, but it WILL punish racist employers by forcing them to pay a premium for white labor. Right now, the people being punished for racism are young blacks. Let’s blame the victim for the crime.

I think the question of whether progressives/liberals really support the minimum wage for merely symbolic reasons is itself an empirical question. Unfortunately, since we cannot read minds, it is not an empirical question that has an easy answer.

I will say this though. Your assertion, which has not one iota of actual evidence to support it, that progressives/liberals care more about symbolism than results is actually insulting. Then, for you to go on and say that you find the fact that progressives/liberals only care about symbolism rather than results to be morally problematic is just to heap another insult upon another insult.

And keep in mind, that you do not actually have one iota of evidence for the assertion that what matters more is symbolism.

I will tell you why I support the minimum wage. I am only one data point, but that is more than you have provided in your ridiculous suggestion that what really matters to people is mere symbolism. First of all, I am deeply skeptical of economic theories which suggest that the minimum wage causes much unemployment. And there is empirical evidence (Card and Krueger) that suggests that backs up that skepticism. However, even if the minimum wage did cause some level of unemployment, it wouldn’t really matter to me much. Why? Because, someone who is only making minimum wage is practically living in poverty as it is (unless they have some outside support), so I don’t particularly think that jobs that produce so little value that they cannot even pay minimum wage are particularly valuable. To me, rather than have an underclass who makes even less than the minimum wage, which is a really pitiful wage, it would be better to invest more in education and job training so that such people can get what are known as “real jobs.” Imagine that…

I should point out what I think the REAL reason that libertarians and liberals cannot agree. The basic problem is that libertarians gravitate towards simplistic models of the world which fail to capture the complexity and nuances that progressives/liberals are so aware of. Libertarians are black and white thinkers who tend to be much less capable of appreciating the complexity that exists in the real world. This is why you have simplistic dichotomies that libertarians tend to gravitate towards like “government bad, markets good.”

You want to know why liberals don’t gravitate towards libertarian thinking? I will tell you why. Because it is too simplistic and fails to take into account too much of reality. Liberals do not agree with libertarians because libertarians are wrong. In contrast, libertarians do not agree with liberals because libertarians are more black and white thinkers who prefer to gravitate towards simple rules and substitute “faith” in markets to somehow “magically” sort out problems for actual analysis. Basically, liberals and libertarians don’t agree because liberals tend to be right, and libertarians tend to be wrong. But libertarians, perhaps through no fault of their own, fail to perceive how exactly they are wrong.

Basically, I think the typical libertarian is someone who probably got an A in economics 101, but didn’t really get much farther than that in terms of sophisticated thinking. (And, I will go ahead and include many so-called “fresh water” Ph.D. economists in that group. Efficient market hypothesis? A lot of good that sort of blind faith in markets has done us…)

Oh, and I will say this. “Bleeding-heart libertarians” are not representative. Okay. Ayn Rand was not a “bleeding-heart” anything. So, a lot of the reason that many liberals and libertarians disagree really is about a very different set of values. Some libertarians really are much more self-centered. The bleeding-heart variety excluded, of course.

Anyway, I can assure of one thing. Liberals are not primarily concerned about symbolism. Liberals are primarily concerned about results. Results like increased inequality. Or disadvantages that arise merely because of who your parents are. That sort of thing. There is nothing SYMBOLIC about it!

Hey Fernando, very illuminating. In my psychology doctorate program, I just spent a good deal of time on the Festinger study of resistance to persuasive communication — why people override something they see, in a flash, is more rational with something they sense is less rational. I’ve enjoyed Julian Sanchez’s work on epistemic closure, and I think that gives an a priori framework to what’s going on cognitively. My personal — empirical — explanation hinges on the distinction between aptness and operativeness. The Festinger study notes that subjects subvocalize counter-arguments to themselves in the midst of a conclusive case presented to them showing what they believe is incorrect. I say that we need to look to the criteria of whether the subvocalizations are satisfactory to the subject. And the criteria turns out to be, as you suggest, whether the propositions play with the social group of which the subject is a part. What the Festinger study shows, though, is that if the subject misinterprets the theme of a set of propositions, they’re actually more open to the content of the propositions — more likely to have the logical form resonate. That’s precisely why BHL is such a beautiful category. It gives market-oriented progressives virtual permission to engage libertarian ideas because the theme of social justice accesses a kind of “go on…” mindset. Obviously y’all know this, but I just want to say that what you’re doing prompts epistemic openness and the field on which progressives and libertarians can agree. Great space.

I think the weakness of this post is that it’s not clear to a lot of folks that they agree that political institutions should be arranged to alleviate poverty. A useful corrective is Matt Zwolinski’s post here.
http://www.bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2011/03/on-bleeding-hearts-and-crocodile-tears.html

Symbolic acts are all about communication. And that communication has long been in the context of the right-wing fusionist alliance, which has led to excessive trust issues between liberals and libertarians. That’s what a lot of things are in the libertarian penumbra: symbolic communication to reinforce an old political alliance.
http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2011/02/23/the-libertarian-penumbra/

So, the Cato Institute may make a convincing argument that a carbon tax is the best of the realistic policies to address climate change. But when push comes to shove, will Cato support it? No. Because they don’t think climate change is actually a pressing concern.

I think a liberaltarian alliance, or whatever you want to call it, is certainly worth doing. Partly because, as a liberal, I think libertarians just have a lot of great ideas about how to do policy well. We have lots of room for empirical agreement. But the trust issues are going to take a long time to heal.

David,

I think simplistic thinking happens on all sides, and political parties generally espouse simplified models that don’t fully correspond to reality to reach voters, this isn’t unique at all to libertarians. Mainstream parties might have it better because they have had more time to take complex truths and compress them down to simple messages that resonate with voters.

Even someone educated in economics 101 is still a step above the average in terms of how complex of a model they understand, so it might be more that they have the mistaken belief that these models correspond well to reality rather than that the models are overly simplistic.

Just to help me understand where bleeding heart libertarians come from, would you be willing to ban McDonald’s if it could be shown (and perhaps it has already be so shown) that doing so would lead to an improvement in the overall health of society?

If yes then you’re certainly not my kind of libertarian (which is fine…I’m sure we will agree an plenty of other things), and if no then I suspect that you will have non-empirical disagreements with much of the progressive movement.

@Michael Wiebe,

The intuitive point is lowest paid worker makes more money with a MW than without one. Simplistic? Sure, but the mechanism by which supply and demand makes the poorest workers worse off under a MW is increased unemployment, no? Well, the premise of the example was a situation where the empirical evidence of actual increased unemployment with MW is ambiguous.

I’m not saying the hypothetical liberal is correct in this judgment, just that it doesn’t seem necessary to invoke “symbolic behavior” to explain her support of MW — what she knows is people are less poor when their wages are higher, a MW makes their wages higher, and the chief objection to MW -that it increases unemployment- is not clearly borne out by the data. The example asks her to adopt a default stance that a MW can nonetheless be assumed to harm the poor anyway until the balance of evidence clearly demonstrates otherwise. But if the jury is out, the jury is out.

Now perhaps she (as libertarians often assert about liberals) does not have sufficient knowledge of economics to see how, in the absence of evidence, the anti-MW position is a more reasonable default than the pro-MW position. But if so, that’s not “symbolic behavior” or an “unconscious emotional judgment” either…it’s just ignorance.

I agree with the post generally, though I don’t share the antipathy for “symbolic behavior.” Such behavior is fine so long as it is not obstinate or inflexible. As mentioned in other comments, human beings cannot process all the empirical data necessary to have suitably cogent views on all the political decisions they are called upon to make.

Instead, we work from theoretical constructs–e.g., political ideologies–and try to make sense of the data in terms of those constructs. This is where the “symbolic behavior” comes from, and if you’re going to call that behavior objectionable you’d have to say the use of theoretical constructs generally is objectionable, too. In this regard, I strongly disagree with Teson’s general denunciation of “symbolic behavior.” And I certainly don’t see the grounds for turning any of this into a “moral” question.

Having read these comments, I think that Prof. Teson missed the mark. The problem is not “symbolicism”, it’s partisanship.

Of course, if Teson is a libertarian (as many commentors suggested), then an attack on “partisanship” can seem like the cynical strategy of a person belonging to the weaker party.

The remarkable truth of this conversation between bleeding heart libertarians and progressives is that our disagreement is exclusively empirical. If we all agree that political institutions should be arranged to alleviate poverty, then the only remaining question is which policies actually do this. Why is it then that we cannot agree, or at least converge, by just looking at reliable data, studies, and empirical theories?

I suggest an answer: in the political arena, a person often supports a policy, not because of the effects he thinks that policy will have, but because his supporting it has symbolic value for himself or others.

Fernando, I don’t deny your premise.but it doesn’t describe me, so I’ll suggest an alternative. We can all agree on truth, justice and the American Way. But we start splitting up as move into tactics and operations.

Likewise, at the visionary level, liberals and libertarians (and even a few Conservatives, I bet) can agree that the most disadvantaged should have opportuntities to improve. We lose some when we shift to “society” should provide for the disadvantaged. We lose more when my wealth is transferred to the needy. We lose more when one middle class person hands over 20% of their income so that their neighbor (who has a bigger house, drives a nicer car, takes better vacations, etc.) can send their child to college.

So as long as you stay visionary, we can all buy into the sky pie, but as you get to details you start hitting some people in the wallet and others in their ethos.

At the risk of speaking out of turn now, liberals are willing to allow force to collect the funds for distribution and to allow a third-party to control the distribution (even if some violates their principles; it’s considered the cost of living in the greatest nation in the world). Libertartians do not believe in the use of force for collecting funds.

I’m a libertarian. I do want the worst off improved. I read this blog because I really want to find how to make this work for me.

I see three paths. One is that both the collection of funds and the choices for distribution must be voluntary. Second is to put in checks and balances that protect the interests of all parties, but those are not clear. Third is some kind or privatization (but isn’t that just existing charities?), which really doesn’t lead to an obvious solution.

So, you academics, help come up with something better for me. That’s my challenge to you.