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Voters of America! All 41 Republican Senators Knuckle Under to the Banks!!

in Which Greg Mankiw and Clive Crook Puzzle Over the Puzzle of Why So Few Academics Believe in the 4000 Year Old Earth, That Human-Emitted Carbon-Dioxide Molecules Don't Absorb in the Infrared Spectrum, or that Unregulated Financial Markets Are Socially O

Wow. Just wow:

Clive Crook: Greg Mankiw points to an interesting, if slightly dyspeptic, essay on the puzzle of academic bias to the left. Thomas Reeves says it is mostly due to envy, aggravated by (relative) financial distress. Times are hard for scholars....

Even US$300,000, well beyond the reach of most young and many senior professors, won't buy much in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Atlanta or Chicago.... And so many of us move into older, deteriorating, often dangerous areas, telling all who listen that we made the choice deliberately and that we, being humanists, have a natural desire to live among the poor and oppressed... some English and anthropology professors actually believe this nonsense, and enjoy dressing as factory workers and displaying furniture obviously purchased at a rummage sale.

In this talk from 1998, Robert Nozick put it down to a subtly different cause: a sense of frustrated entitlement... Note the difference: envy is wrong; insisting on reward by merit (however Utopian) is right:

The intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large.... Those at the top of the school's hierarchy will feel entitled to a top position, not only in that micro-society but in the wider one, a society whose system they will resent when it fails to treat them according to their self-prescribed wants and entitlements. The school system thereby produces anti-capitalist feeling among intellectuals.

Of course, the two causes are not mutually exclusive.

May I point out that one has to live in a strange alternate universe to think that belief in evolution, in human-caused global warming, and in the need for regulation of the banking system is a "bias" rather than the natural order of things?

The interesting question from my perspective is why Clive Crook and Greg Mankiw support a political party opposed to evolution, opposed to recognizing human impacts on climate, opposed to financial regulation, opposed to RomneyCare, and opposed to the government budget constraint. That seems to me to be a "bias" that it is important that we try to understand.

Perhaps ressentiment of some sort has a role?

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