> On balance, it appears that, when it comes to immigration, narratives are more powerful than hard facts in shaping people’s views.
Narratives trump facts every time so expecting people to change their minds based on facts alone is a non-starter. All the conspiracy theories around the pandemic should be convincing evidence for anyone that thinks otherwise. Thousands of people are still dying every day and people continue to refuse vaccination even though the vaccine greatly improves one's chances of survival after contracting the virus.
Only if you have bought into some ideology that elevates self-sovereign individuality above all other concerns. I don't know why you're getting downvoted, your question is valid. If people think "redistribution" is "theft" then they will definitely disagree with such policies. But the sensible interpretation of redistribution isn't theft, sane societies are composed of people that are willing to make sacrifices for the greater good and don't see such policies as theft.
Respectfully disagree. As stated, their voter model "should" vote for more redistribution the further the individual is from the median/mean. Then they seem surprised that actual people don't behave that way. Duh.
The researchers seem to have at least partially answered their own question though:
"Trust in government (or lack thereof) also seems to be a critical element in driving support for redistribution."
the hubris of the authors seems to preclude any examination of their own assumptions about what is "right" or "wrong", so they conclude that the rest of us just need more education/indoctrination
Are they opposed to ever expansive corporations like Amazon as well or is it that their principle only applies to what they think is the government? If the government rebranded itself as Gov. Inc. would these people stop opposing its perceived expansion?
@moreoutput: Your reply is marked as dead so most people are not going to see it. If you have an argument then present it instead of projecting what I think about Amazon. I have no problems with Amazon.
I think you could get these people to join you in your distaste for expansive corporations by allowing Amazon to both take money from people without an exchange of goods and letting Amazon jail people who break its polices.
They presumably focus on the fact that the government can use the threat of violence to take money from you against your will (imprisoning you if you don't pay your taxes, for example), whereas the methods of coercion available to a monopolistic company (or a cartel of companies) are much more indirect and seemingly avoidable.
Some people would probably prefer private military and private police/security forces, but those services work differently from private schools and private healthcare due to the inherent adversarial nature of the service they are providing.
For example, the amount of police needed scales with the amount of criminals, and criminals wouldn't be the one funding the police, so there needs to be a way of forcing criminals to pay for the police, which requires something like a government.
Similarly, everyone in a society benefits from that society's military, as you can't ask a foreign power to only invade the parts of the country that haven't paid their annual mercenary fees. Either the people who want to pay keep moving to more easily defensible locations, taking their military hardware with them and leaving the borderlands undefended, or you need a government to tax everyone to pay for a society-wide / territory-wide defence.
In contrast, if other people don't want to (or can't afford to) pay for their own (or their family's) education and healthcare, that doesn't make you any less educated or healthy. (There are probably some economies of scale, and unhealthy people can affect you by carrying contagious diseases, but these are edge cases).
So I don't think it is hypocritical for someone to (grudgingly) accept that the government provides a military and police, even though those are precisely the services that they should most fear trusting the government with.
> So I don't think it is hypocritical for someone to (grudgingly) accept that the government provides a military and police, even though those are precisely the services that they should most fear trusting the government with.
It is definitely hypocritical. If you are not opposed to a collective military then being opposed to a collective healthcare system is nonsensical. And if you are opposed to collective efforts of any kind then that also runs into all sorts of contradictions because corporations are collective efforts. Whether force and coercion are involved are orthogonal issues which people constantly conflate and confuse with issues unrelated to them.
I think there are nuances to the question of which services someone can support, which require deeper consideration than just "are they (involuntary) collective systems".
If someone gets heart disease because of a bad diet, you may not want there to be an involuntary collective system that covers the cost of their medical treatment, since you don't get any direct benefit from this. (For comparison, a voluntary health insurance based system, with multiple competing private insurers, wouldn't have the same concerns attached).
In contrast, if someone decides they are a pacifist and doesn't want to pay for the armed forces, but they live within the same borders as you, then they will gain the benefit of military protection that you are willing to pay for.
That's not to say I personally agree with that distinction, though. Ultimately a life is worth the same whether it is ended by heart disease or a foreign soldier, and I believe that people in a society owe each other a duty of care to spend "reasonable" resources on protecting each others lives.
However, I think that is a moral position, and someone with different morals could consistently draw a line between the necessity of involuntary military funding and the non-necessity of involuntary healthcare funding.
> If someone gets heart disease because of a bad diet, you may not want there to be an involuntary collective system that covers the cost of their medical treatment, since you don't get any direct benefit from this. (For comparison, a voluntary health insurance based system, with multiple competing private insurers, wouldn't have the same concerns attached).
I have no problem with anyone benefiting from the healthcare system regardless of their lifestyle choices. In the long run it benefits everyone to understand that their health and well being is not tied to a profit seeking system that views some people as less worthy of healthcare than others because it would be less profitable to provide care for them.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 47.6 ms ] threadNarratives trump facts every time so expecting people to change their minds based on facts alone is a non-starter. All the conspiracy theories around the pandemic should be convincing evidence for anyone that thinks otherwise. Thousands of people are still dying every day and people continue to refuse vaccination even though the vaccine greatly improves one's chances of survival after contracting the virus.
The researchers seem to have at least partially answered their own question though:
"Trust in government (or lack thereof) also seems to be a critical element in driving support for redistribution."
the hubris of the authors seems to preclude any examination of their own assumptions about what is "right" or "wrong", so they conclude that the rest of us just need more education/indoctrination
@moreoutput: Your reply is marked as dead so most people are not going to see it. If you have an argument then present it instead of projecting what I think about Amazon. I have no problems with Amazon.
For example, the amount of police needed scales with the amount of criminals, and criminals wouldn't be the one funding the police, so there needs to be a way of forcing criminals to pay for the police, which requires something like a government.
Similarly, everyone in a society benefits from that society's military, as you can't ask a foreign power to only invade the parts of the country that haven't paid their annual mercenary fees. Either the people who want to pay keep moving to more easily defensible locations, taking their military hardware with them and leaving the borderlands undefended, or you need a government to tax everyone to pay for a society-wide / territory-wide defence.
In contrast, if other people don't want to (or can't afford to) pay for their own (or their family's) education and healthcare, that doesn't make you any less educated or healthy. (There are probably some economies of scale, and unhealthy people can affect you by carrying contagious diseases, but these are edge cases).
So I don't think it is hypocritical for someone to (grudgingly) accept that the government provides a military and police, even though those are precisely the services that they should most fear trusting the government with.
It is definitely hypocritical. If you are not opposed to a collective military then being opposed to a collective healthcare system is nonsensical. And if you are opposed to collective efforts of any kind then that also runs into all sorts of contradictions because corporations are collective efforts. Whether force and coercion are involved are orthogonal issues which people constantly conflate and confuse with issues unrelated to them.
If someone gets heart disease because of a bad diet, you may not want there to be an involuntary collective system that covers the cost of their medical treatment, since you don't get any direct benefit from this. (For comparison, a voluntary health insurance based system, with multiple competing private insurers, wouldn't have the same concerns attached).
In contrast, if someone decides they are a pacifist and doesn't want to pay for the armed forces, but they live within the same borders as you, then they will gain the benefit of military protection that you are willing to pay for.
That's not to say I personally agree with that distinction, though. Ultimately a life is worth the same whether it is ended by heart disease or a foreign soldier, and I believe that people in a society owe each other a duty of care to spend "reasonable" resources on protecting each others lives.
However, I think that is a moral position, and someone with different morals could consistently draw a line between the necessity of involuntary military funding and the non-necessity of involuntary healthcare funding.
I have no problem with anyone benefiting from the healthcare system regardless of their lifestyle choices. In the long run it benefits everyone to understand that their health and well being is not tied to a profit seeking system that views some people as less worthy of healthcare than others because it would be less profitable to provide care for them.