Skip to main content

So I was reading a piece on The Outline about identity politics when the author, Sean McElwee, brought up a survey he had penned and collated to establish how positions on economic and racial issues align;
Could Democrats win over racially conservative whites with economic populism? It’s unlikely, because people who oppose racial justice also tend to oppose liberal economic policies. 
To test this, I created scales of economic and racial liberalism, using two questions that have been on the American National Election Studies surveys since 1972.
One question asks respondents to place themselves on a one-to-seven point scale on government aid to black Americans, the other on a one-to-seven scale on guaranteeing jobs and income for all Americans.
In 1972, only 54 percent of white Americans who took the racially liberal position (supporting aid to black Americans) also took the economically liberal position (guaranteeing jobs and income). 
By 2016, 74 percent did. And in 1972, 77 percent of individuals who took the racially conservative position were economic economic conservatives. In 2016, 86 percent were.

So if I am opposed to government aid to black people, and government aid to people in general (the inevitable consequences of being opposed to the existence of the government) I am apparently a "racial conservative" which I guess would make Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams racial conservatives as well...

So Sowell, Williams and I are apparently opposed to black prosperity in America. Gotta say this is news to me. That Walter Williams link is very informative.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Private Ownership and the Emergence of Field-based Agriculture

Quick update: There is a nicer, fancier article on this very subject on another blog. If for some reason you read my article below, treat yourself and partake of properal's piece too . ~~~ There is a paper by Samuel Bowles and Jung-Kyoo Choi called 'Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene' and it is wonderful. It leaves a few stones unturned and its thesis needs to be empirically verified or falsified but it really begins to clarify the intimate relationship between the form of agriculture that we refer to as farming on the one hand and private ownership on the other. Their thesis is that technology was not the driver that led to long-term (inter-generational) farming, but also that farming did not follow some moment where the folks in a society all said "hey, let's all have private property now!" Rather, what they posit is that farming and private property actually coalesced, ad-hoc and over a multi-generational time-fram...
Post a Comment
Read more

I AM AN AUSTRIAN

Is it so wrong? Really? Just humour me, dudes and dudettes. I am an Austrian. I am a Libertarian. I am an Austro-Libertarian. I'm evidently also a hypocrite, as I've used most of these words without capitals in past posts. Oops. I've made Austrian economics my home because it accords better with certain concerns of mine; why have a subjective theory of value and then lump desires and capacities into aggregates? Why declare that economic facts can be gleaned from the movements of particular markets at particular times in the past? Rothbard sums up the problem with both phenomena in a way that no mainstream economist ever would, since to do so would be to admit that there are entire fields of modern economics that are, at best, pointless, and at worst, harmful. NOT MAINSTREAM? Why is Austrian economics not mainstream? It rejects the efficacy of aggregates and mathematical formulae to arrive at economic truths. According to the Austrian worldview,...
Post a Comment
Read more

1318 - The Evil Capitalists Own Your Mom!

The New Scientist ran a piece  on the economic relationships between the 43,060 transnational corporations in the world as of 2007. It turns out that 147 of 'em are thick as thieves, which each of those 147 entirely owned by one or more of the others within that clique. Naturally some anti-capitalists have decided that this proliferation of tight interconnections constitutes the proof that not buying what someone's selling will fail to put that seller out of business. Takes all sorts to make a world, brah. Is concentration scary in itself? No; John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability. Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core’s tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable . “If one [compan...
Post a Comment
Read more