What direction does the academy's leftwardness come from?
I was just reading a post of cephalicfurrow's, recommended from his archives by Andrew, and I started wondering about the anti-wealth choices of the academic.
As far as I can tell, a lot of academics, and most public servants have chosen a life that values a lot of other things higher than money. A professor in Math has the intellectual horsepower to make substantial $ in the private sector as a quant or an engineer or programmer/architect. Why does he choose professor? Either he's made a mistake that he needs to justify to himself, or else he's made a costly choice trading autonomy, self-directedness and such for a high initial salary.
If he has made a mistake, there are two choices. Either he can fix it, or he can try to convince himself that he ahs made the right choice. As we know an awful lot of folks choose the 2nd, and proceed to try to convince themselves that their choice WAS the right one. A particularly effective way of doing that is to shift your nominal values.
Also, if your values say wealth and productivity are relatively unimportant (the traditional position of the clergy), then there should be a substantial preference for other-serving pleasant life over hard-work, high wealth lives. Could this be a source of part of the liberal gradient in the academy?
Of course, it's still semi-obvious that almost the whole liberal gradient should be attributed to in-group status. People adopt the positions of their (a) neighbors, (b) colleagues, and (c) those more powerful. Grad students should adopt professorial positions, and professors should adopt the positions of their co-professors. But the wealth issue may still matter.
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Yes. But that barely scratches the surface. There's so much more out there on this question (why intellectuals are so progressive) that it looks like maybe a huge, surprising gap in your recall!
The classic is F.A. Hayek's "Intellectuals and Socialism": http://mises.org/daily/2984 , and it's worth frequent reskims.
I'll paste in some block quotes here as I reskim it.
And, a ton of MM on the Cathedral strikes right at this question...why professors are so lefty, why journalists are.
quotes:
What to the contemporary observer appears as the battle of conflicting interests has indeed often been decided long before in a clash of ideas confined to narrow circles. Paradoxically enough, however, in general only the parties of the Left have done most to spread the belief that it was the numerical strength of the opposing material interests which decided political issues, whereas in practice these same parties have regularly and successfully acted as if they understood the key position of the intellectuals. Whether by design or driven by the force of circumstances, they have always directed their main effort toward gaining the support of this "elite," while the more conservative groups have acted, as regularly but unsuccessfully, on a more naive view of mass democracy and have usually vainly tried directly to reach and to persuade the individual voter.
The term "intellectuals," however, does not at once convey a true picture of the large class to which we refer. The typical intellectual need be neither: he need not possess special knowledge of anything in particular, nor need he even be particularly intelligent, to perform his role as intermediary in the spreading of ideas. What qualifies him for his job is the wide range of subjects on which he can readily talk and write, and a position or habits through which he becomes acquainted with new ideas sooner than those to whom he addresses himself.
Until one begins to list all the professions and activities which belong to the class, it is difficult to realize how numerous it is, how the scope for activities constantly increases in modern society, and how dependent on it we all have become. The class does not consist of only journalists, teachers, ministers, lecturers, publicists, radio commentators, writers of fiction, cartoonists, and artists all of whom may be masters of the technique of conveying ideas but are usually amateurs so far as the substance of what they convey is concerned. The class also includes many professional men and technicians, such as scientists and doctors, who through their habitual intercourse with the printed word become carriers of new ideas outside their own fields and who, because of their expert knowledge of their own subjects, are listened with respect on most others.
There is little that the ordinary man of today learns about events or ideas except through the medium of this class;
A break for my own comment!: The Internet has been shifting this power dynamic. The web brings the outside-some-field-of-knowledge views more in line with the inside-that-field views. Not completely, and the influence is bidirectional as always, but still a huge change from Hayek's days of intermediation.
back to F.A.:
and outside our special fields of work we are in this respect almost all ordinary men, dependent for our information and instruction on those who make it their job to keep abreast of opinion. It is the intellectuals in this sense who decide what views and opinions are to reach us, which facts are important enough to be told to us, and in what form and from what angle they are to be presented. Whether we shall ever learn of the results of the work of the expert and the original thinker depends mainly on their decision.
The layman, perhaps, is not fully aware to what extent even the popular reputations of scientists and scholars are made by that class and are inevitably affected by its views on subjects which have little to do with the merits of the real achievements. And it is specially significant for our problem that every scholar can probably name several instances from his field of men who have undeservedly achieved a popular reputation as great scientists solely because they hold what the intellectuals regard as "progressive" political views; but I have yet to come across a single instance where such a scientific pseudo-reputation has been bestowed for political reason on a scholar of more conservative leanings. This creation of reputations by the intellectuals is particularly important in the fields where the results of expert studies are not used by other specialists but depend on the political decision of the public at large.
There is indeed scarcely a better illustration of this than the attitude which professional economists have taken to the growth of such doctrines as socialism or protectionism. There was probably at no time a majority of economists, who were recognized as such by their peers, favorable to socialism (or, for that matter, to protection). In all probability it is even true to say that no other similar group of students contains so high a proportion of its members decidedly opposed to socialism (or protection). This is the more significant as, in recent times, it is as likely as not that it was an early interest in socialist schemes for reform which led a man to choose economics for his profession. Yet it is not the predominant views of the experts but the views of a minority, mostly of rather doubtful standing in their profession, which are taken up and spread by the intellectuals.
The all-pervasive influence of the intellectuals in contemporary society is still further strengthened by the growing importance of "organization." It is a common but probably mistaken belief that the increase of organization increases the influence of the expert or specialist. This may be true of the expert administrator and organizer, if there are such people, but hardly of the expert in any particular field of knowledge. It is rather the person whose general knowledge is supposed to qualify him to appreciate expert testimony, and to judge between the experts from different fields, whose power is enhanced.
moar:
the fact that the propertied classes are no longer the best educated, and the fact that the large number of people who owe their position solely to the their general education do not possess that experience of the working of the economic system which the administration of property gives, are important for understanding the role of the intellectual.
how far the growth of this class has been artificially stimulated by the law of copyright. [oh, F.A.!! awesome]
The first is that they generally judge all particular issues exclusively in the light of certain general ideas; the second, that the characteristic errors of any age are frequently derived from some genuine new truths it has discovered, and they are erroneous applications of new generalizations which have proved their value in other fields. The conclusion to which we shall be led by a full consideration of these facts will be that the effective refutation of such errors will frequently require further intellectual advance, and often advance on points which are very abstract and may seem very remote from the practical issues. [Interesting.]
It is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the intellectual that he judges new ideas not by their specific merits but by the readiness with which they fit into his general conceptions, into the picture of the world which he regards as modern or advanced. It is through their influence on him and on his choice of opinions on particular issues that the power of ideas for good and evil grows in proportion to their generality, abstractness, and even vagueness. As he knows little about the particular issues, his criterion must be consistency with his other views and suitability for combining into a coherent picture of the world. Yet this selection from the multitude of new ideas presenting themselves at every moment creates the characteristic climate of opinion, the dominant Weltanschauung of a period, which will be favorable to the reception of some opinions and unfavorable to others and which will make the intellectual readily accept one conclusion and reject another without a real understanding of the issues.
I'm only 1/3 of the way through! Everyone who's gotten this far...Read The Whole Thing.
Thanks for the shoutout. I think both of your hypotheses are plausible, and there's probably causality in both directions. Professors are preselected, as folks who care more about prestige, autonomy, job security, and intellectual satisfaction rather than making money, so it makes sense that they'd assign less importance to economic growth and material well-being in their politics as well. At the same time, they are engaged in status competition with other upper-class professionals, most of which make more money. The way that they can win the status contest is to decrease the importance of earnings and to increase the importance of prestige, which implies left-wing policy.
Or, as Tyler Cowen puts it: "Take the so-called "left wing." Some of these people favor a kind of meritocracy. They feel it is unfair that money so determines access in capitalist society and they do not want the monied class to rise in relative status, certainly not above the status of the smart people and the virtuous people. It is important to fight for the principle that the desires of this monied class have a relatively low priority in the social ranking. Egalitarianism is the rhetoric of the day, and readjusting the status of other Americans to the status of this monied class often receives more attention than elevating the very poorest in the world to a higher absolute level."
(http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/07/xxxxxxx.html)
I think you've answered this question with your previous posts on status seeking.
Also, my completely unscientific observations from having lived in a world surrounded by liberal professors and nonprofit types is that many of them have more wealth than their salaries might indicate.
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