Out of touch?

Yesterday, Ryan Bourne tweeted:

Just 13 per cent of people think 'Inequality' is the biggest issue facing country. Yet left wing commentators call others out of touch!

There is, I think, an answer to this. We must distinguish two ways of being out of touch with people. One is by not sharing their views, the other by not heeding their interests. I'll own up to being out of touch with voters' views, but I'm not sure I am so out of touch with their interests.

This distinction is, of course, only possible if people's preferences don't serve their interests. And in the case of inequality, I think one can argue this.

It is at least possible that inequality has adverse effects not just for the quality of democracy, trust (pdf) and social cohesion (pdf) but economic efficiency (pdf)  too. This isn't merely because a shift in incomes to the rich, who happen to save more, depresses aggregate demand. It's also because inequality increases the narcissistic self-confidence of the rich and encourages short-termism, both of which contribute to financial crises.

However, there are psychological mechanisms (pdf) which cause people to accept inequality: these include the just world effect, status quo bias, anchoring heuristic and resignation.

The natural inference of these two thoughts is that inequality matters more than voters believe. We lefties might be out of touch with voters' beliefs - but we care about inequality precisely because we believe it damages voters' interests. And one can argue, as Daniel Hausman does, that it is interests that matter more than preferences.  

In saying this, I'm not taking a uniquely leftist position. I'm echoing Edmund Burke, who argued that MPs should ignore the "hasty opinion" of voters if this clashed with the national interest. And I suspect even Ryan would agree. Most people want energy companies to be nationalized. Ryan probably thinks otherwise. This isn't because he's out of touch but because he thinks such a preference would not in fact have the benefits voters believe it would.

My point here is not about inequality: exactly the same thinking applies to immigration too. Instead, it's about the nature of politics. When we lefties (or, more precisely, I) complain that politicians are out of touch, what we mean is that professional career politicians serve the interests of the rich rather than the public. Our fear is that, when Ed Miliband promises to "listen" to voters, he will put Labour in touch not with voters' true interests but rather with their basest and most irrational impulses.      

Comments

[theOnlySanePersonOnPlanetEarth]

Your point is correct but I have another point:

You cannot help people who can't help themselves. No wonder UKIP are doing so well.

"However, there are psychological mechanisms (pdf) which cause people to accept inequality: these include the just world effect, status quo bias, anchoring heuristic and resignation."

I am tempted to collectively call this, "Thick bastard syndrome"

[Noah Carl]

May be of interest: http://posnetres.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/concern-about-inequality-and-actual.html

[Neil Harding]

Beautifully argued as usual. A concise summing up of everything I believe about politics in paragraph 3.

[Frank Rizzo]

Great piece. In the Twitter thread that followed, Ryan reveals he's pulling a strawman - saying we can talk about inequality, but it's not "the big thing". In other articles and interviews he's been purposefully vague about what degrees of inequality we should worry about.

So standard blogger fayre.. Ho hum.

[Luis Enrique]

it's pretty hard to distinguish, for example, between for concern about low wages and concern about inequality. I mean of course we can talk of thought experiments in which the two change independently, but I doubt these feature prominently in the minds of survey respondents. If you find someone who says they do not care about inequality but care about low wage growth, in a context where incomes of the better off have been growing much more rapidly, maybe they do care about inequality after all

[El]

This line thinking could be used to justify all sorts of government policies people don't want but are "in their best interests".

How do you know you know what is the best interest of the public? Are you suggesting it's only right-wing capitalist sorts who are capable of being over-confident in their abilities? Perhaps you are guilty of a confirmation bias or two yourself.

Pretty scary stuff if you ask me. So much for "Left Libertarianism".

[Neil]

Yeah, 100% with El on this. If you're going to redefine "out of touch" as meaning ignoring interests rather than the more obvious accepted definition (ignoring preferences), you have to be DAMN sure that you're correct in your assessment of interests before you call anyone "out of touch".

Anyway, this feels like a sneaky debater's trick. "Out of touch" is commonly understood to mean "doesn't know what the people want"; ask the average man in the street, and that's how they'll define it, and that's how 99% of your readers will have understood it when you've called politicians out of touch in the past. To try to say "oh, when *I* say it, I mean something different" feels like just trying to weasel out of a tight corner.

[Icarus Green]

Good to see Ryan Bourne from the Centre for Sophist Studies weighing in with the presumably rigorous polling data the conservative priesthood/think tank came up with. I guess other polling has also suggested that tobacco regulation is also something people don't like:

http://www.cps.org.uk/about/news/q/date/2013/10/14/letter-smoking-and-tobacco-controls-in-ireland-the-iris/

Can't be anything to do with their funding of course...

[They deleted the 'funding' section of their wikipedia page - basically it showed these guys take a lot of tobacco money]

And then there's reality where people do think its a problem:

http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/about-inequality/attitudes/what-do-people-think

Strange Chris, that you would even pay heed to a utter hack like this. The fact the CPS has a section devoted to Austrian "economics" in its "policy" section had me laughing a bit.

[Deviation From The Mean]

I would say a millionaire MP is out of touch with most people because they are millionaires. Disagreeing on policy is not being out of touch. 20 years ago gay rights were taboo, now they are taken for granted. This shows that applying being out of touch to what people want is a little flawed.

Having said that I would argue the market is out of touch, based on its application by neil and el.