I hadn’t heard that. If it’s true, I have two possible hypotheses to explain it:

1. Because they’re faced with it so constantly. i.e. Red-ink Republicans who have skyrocketed the national debt since Reagan sanctimoniously preaching reduced debt, and blaming that debt on Democrats.

2. Democrats do, in fact, value honesty/truth-telling more highly–at least in the public space. I’m sorry that Haidt seems to be testing integrity, not truthfulness, as a moral value.

@Tim Dean

This also seems to confute integrity and honesty, but it might make sense: One who lives by one’s own moral code would tend to place high value on personal, internal integrity. Hence behaviors that demonstrate lack of that internal integrity in others would be quite bothersome. In evolutionary terms, it would look like cheating, free-riding on the integrity of others.

P.S. Choosing and building one’s own moral values from a broad range of sources is no more “relativist” than cherry-picking some values out of one particular source, such as the Bible, while ignoring others from that same source. Arguably much less so.

However, I still suspect that honesty – particularly the breach thereof – is a more serious moral transgression for a conservative than for a liberal. Honour, trust, proving oneself a reliable in-group member etc.

@Curt – I think the reason liberals are obsessed with hypocrisy is because of the influence of post-modernism and relativism. If one accepts relativism, then all one has to use as a moral compass is one’s own perspective and convictions. Contravening an externally imposed moral code is one thing – arguably you’re still behaving in a way consistent with your own beliefs and values, but they happen to be in conflict with the external moral code – but contravening your own moral code is somehow worse. It’s ‘bad faith’. It means you have *no* moral compass, or at least no consistent one. Conservatives, on the other hand, can disobey the external moral code for their own reasons but demand that others obey the code.

Again (I was rather pleased with this) competition’s virtue is a secondary one–it makes cooperation more efficient overall (though at considerable countervailing cost). Human selfishness is a given–and competition addresses that–but it’s not a virtue.

I’m not sure that the results of extreme libertarianism are so hard to anticipate: concentration of wealth, oligopoly, widespread poverty…

“Does it explain the continued predictions of disaster for those countries that the more extreme Libertarians have been warning us of for so long — even though those sky-is-falling scenarios have not occurred? (Over the long run — as libertarians will happily point out when it serves their rhetorical turns — things keep getting better.)”

I think that this selective use of arguments is especially noticeable in economics – as you say, the frequent message that ‘all is getting better’ is tossed aside as needed. Likewise, I think economics of all studies should remind us that we gain great benefits from cooperation, yet I find Bryan Caplan writing just a few days back this gem:

“Ever heard of Darwin? People are selfish because of billions of years of evolution, not capitalism. End of story.”
(from: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/03/richter_contra.html)

Not to say that people are never selfish, or that capitalism causes selfishness – but I think evolution shows us a lot of cooperation as well as selfishness.

Anything to bash ’socialism’ I suppose… but it does strike me that we’ve done awfully well using such supposedly compromised solutions. The utopian dreams are always with us… and I suspect usually lead to highly unanticipated results when actually implemented.

I agree with you 1000%. I include infrastucture and public works projects in my rather broad and loose characterization of “redistribution.”

IOW it’s not just taking money from the rich and giving money to the poor (though that’s both economically and morally necessary, to some extent, IMO); it’s taking money from the rich and investing it in common public goods.

For whatever reasons, excessively “free” markets don’t do this very well. They inevitably concentrate wealth and beggar the commons, with manifold negative consequences for all. Government “redistribution” is the only solution we know of.

This is not the case. Machines do not replace human labor but change how work is done and thus changing the working area of human labor. Capital transforms what can be done with labor and this argument doesn’t consider that factor.

Robin’s argument could be updated to say that rate of the capital substitution in the production process compared to the rate of labor transformation is uneven thus creating the “drowning tide” i.e. creative destruction.

But what is really happening? I suggest that when we see that rate of capital substitution it not because economy is becoming more efficient but rather the rate of labor transformation is declining or what Galbraith calls economic diversity (in productive sectors) is actually in decline.

The decline creates the illusion that productivity is increasing when in reality it is decreasing because the standard metric of units per worker per time unit doesn’t in fact measure other factor in productivity e.g. number of changes per unit, per worker per time unit e.g. the rate of tool/product design.

The flaw in standard economics is that it assumes that value of productivity is measured purely in terms of the price of the unit being produced relative to its cost over time but this is not the value. The value is the transformation of the work relative to cost over time.

The question of how to avoid Robin’s drowning tide is simple a question of rational economic organization and not market forces versus Keynesian redistribution. The question is how do we produce enough creativity and new fundamental discoveries where the objectives of work can transformed into the new modes of labor?

In short it’s about producing more people that can essentially design and invent more modes of work that they produce machines to do that work.

Therefore what we need is not so much a welfare state but rather a super CCC job programs building state of the art infrastructure.

People need productive work not “make work” jobs or simple welfare. Let’s say that we produce a super machine that lets one worker produce 1000 cars per hour. Rather than firing all the others workers we simple have then build maglev trains instead of cars.

It doesn’t matter how good the machines get at copying human labor if we are constantly changing what we do with human labor thus technology can never replace human labor because no digital system or mechanical system can be creative in terms of non-linear dynamics because they are linear and binary.

If you want the science behind the non digital human creative cognition I will be more than happy to discuss why all the talk about general AI, Mind-uploading, and future sex with androids is nonsense and anti-science.

http://www.asymptosis.com/can-rich-people-provide-all-the-necessary-demand.html

I feel many of your questions are indeed worth more serious consideration. To me it appears that we’ve propped up effective demand (ability to pay) with a combination of redistribution and easy credit, and we’re finding that the easy credit solution only goes so far.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%3Adeserts&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B7GGLL_enUS365US365&ie=UTF-8