Current Events > racists are more likely to support redistribution, oppose capitalism

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2226246

In debates over the roles of law and government in promoting the equality of income or in redistributing the fruits of capitalism, widely different motives are attributed to those who favor or oppose capitalism or income redistribution. According to one view, largely accepted in the academic social psychology literature (Jost et al., 2003), opposition to income redistribution and support for capitalism reflect an orientation toward social dominance, a desire to dominate other groups. According to another view that goes back at least to the nineteenth century origins of Marxism, anti-capitalism and a support for greater legal efforts to redistribute income reflect envy for the property of others and a frustration with ones lot in a capitalist system.

In this paper I expand and test the first (social dominance) thesis using twenty nationally representative General Social Surveys conducted by the National Opinion Research Center between 1977 and 2010, involving over 21,000 respondents. I first show that respondents who express traditionally racist views (on segregation, interracial marriage, and inborn racial abilities) tend to support greater income redistribution. Traditional racists also express less positive views toward free-market capitalism and its consequences, tending to want the government to guarantee jobs for everyone and to fix prices, wages, and profits. Next, I report a similar pattern for those who express intolerance for unpopular groups on the fifteen Stouffer tolerance questions (regarding racists, homosexuals, communists, extreme militarists, and atheists). Those who express less tolerance for unpopular groups tend to favor income redistribution and to be less supportive of capitalism and its discontents. Using full latent variable structural equation modeling shows similar results. The data are broadly inconsistent with the standard belief in the social psychology literature that pro-capitalist and anti-redistributionist views are positively associated with racism and intolerance.

I then explore an alternative hypothesis, showing that, compared to anti-redistributionists, strong redistributionists have much higher odds of reporting anger, sadness, loneliness, outrage, and other negative emotions. Similarly, anti-redistributionists had much higher odds of reporting being happy or at ease. Last, both redistributionists and anti-capitalists expressed lower overall happiness, less happy marriages, and lower satisfaction with their financial situations and with their jobs or housework. Further, in several General Social Surveys anti-redistributionists were generally more likely to report altruistic behavior than those who favored a stronger policy of government redistribution of income.

still looking through it but those are some interesting results if true
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I am unconvinced.
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this looks like a really disingenuous argument
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P4wn4g3 posted...

I am unconvinced.

me too

Paper_Okami posted...

this looks like a really disingenuous argument

why do you say that?
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What's more racist? Anyone can make it they work hard enough? Or certain people have disadvantages and we have to help them?
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Racists are typically people who feel they got a shitty lot in life. Makes sense.

RealBroShiiii posted...

What's more racist? Anyone can make it they work hard enough? Or certain people have disadvantages and we have to help them?

in this case, racism is people who oppose interracial marriage, support segregation, and view races as having inherently different innate abilities
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Balrog0 posted...

RealBroShiiii posted...

What's more racist? Anyone can make it they work hard enough? Or certain people have disadvantages and we have to help them?

in this case, racism is people who oppose interracial marriage, support segregation, and view races as having inherently different innate abilities

Can you explain the point he is trying to make? I don't see a clear path from that to "therefore being a liberal is racist" or anything similar.
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It's almost as if some of us have been saying for years that leftists are the biggest racists of all.
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Balrog0 posted...

traditionally racist views (on segregation, interracial marriage, and inborn racial abilities)

I can see the results being valid if framed around these types of issues. For example, blacks consistently poll as the lowest in terms of support for same sex marriage:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_of_same-sex_marriage_in_the_United_States#By_ethnicity_or_race

And hispancs are, by far, the largest remaining practicing Catholic group in the country:
http://allthingsreligion.blogspot.com/2010/09/race-and-ethnicity-of-us-adult-catholic.html

And if we go directly to the issue of interracial marriage, you see a similar trend:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage_in_the_United_States#Public_opinion

A 2018 YouGov/Economist poll found that 17% of Americans oppose interracial marriage; with 19% of "other" ethnic groups, 18% of blacks, 17% of whites, and 15% of Hispanics opposing.

Minorities, like anyone else, are capable of holding conservative views and often do when it comes to certain hotbutton issues. If you orient your definition of racism around social issues that are less popular among minorities, when tied with the fact that minorities tend to prefer redistribution over whites, then it's not unreasonable to come to the stated conclusion that racists tends to prefer redistribution.

The issue, then, is whether you consider support for or against these issues as sufficiently "race related" to consider the individual racist.
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well boys looks like there's another study on fascists
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s0nicfan posted...

If you orient your definition of racism around social issues that are less popular among minorities, when tied with the fact that minorities tend to prefer redistribution over whites, then it's not unreasonable to come to the stated conclusion that racists tends to prefer redistribution.

well, that probably isn't the case here but I can see why you say this given the summarized view I presented

the actual GSS questions it uses are:

Do you think there should be laws against marriages between (Negroes/Blacks/African-Americans) and whites?

Which statement on the card comes closest to how you, yourself, feel?...
White people have a right to keep (Negroes/Blacks/African-Americans) out of their neighborhoods if they want to, and (Negroes/Blacks/African-Americans) should respect that right. (ranked strongly disagree to strongly agree)

On the average (Negroes/Blacks/African-Americans) have worse jobs, income, and housing than white people.
Do you think these differences are . . .
Because most (Negroes/Blacks/African-Americans) have less in-born ability to learn? (yes/no/don't know)
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Wow, those are incredibly loaded questions. Honestly, those completely invalidate the study in my mind.
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What was their polling pool like
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s0nicfan posted...

Wow, those are incredibly loaded questions. Honestly, those completely invalidate the study in my mind.

...What? Why?
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P4wn4g3 posted...

What was their polling pool like

they used responses to the GSS

http://gss.norc.org/About-The-GSS
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Balrog0 posted...

s0nicfan posted...

Wow, those are incredibly loaded questions. Honestly, those completely invalidate the study in my mind.

...What? Why?

For one it makes it entirely about white vs minority. If you're actually trying to measure racism, you'd also want to know what black people think about hispanics, or hispanics about blacks, or asians about both, etc.
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I can see this being true for facist and other anti-capitalist ideologies on the far right. Maybe even true for some misguided leftists that are more nationalistic in leaning as well. Racism is against the ideal of a classless society in socialism/communism, though.
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s0nicfan posted...

For one it makes it entirely about white vs minority. If you're actually trying to measure racism, you'd also want to know what black people think about hispanics, or hispanics about blacks, or asians about both, etc.

Yeah, it's just about one racial group because that is the only stable measurement we have over the whole data set

just a limitation of the data

seems like a perfectly fine proxy for racism to me, though
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Balrog0 posted...

P4wn4g3 posted...

What was their polling pool like

they used responses to the GSS

http://gss.norc.org/About-The-GSS

Er wait, so were they looking at current day opinions? Seems like that would be important.
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P4wn4g3 posted...

I am unconvinced.

The initial bits of the New Deal were white-only, or at least heavily skewed towards white people, because reasons.
http://theconversation.com/how-racism-has-shaped-welfare-policy-in-america-since-1935-63574

Then, there's the general trend of homogeneous populations favoring safety-nets significantly more than diverse populaitons.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/06/race-safety-net-welfare/529203/

Anyone know The Conversation's bias?

Balrog0 posted...

s0nicfan posted...

For one it makes it entirely about white vs minority. If you're actually trying to measure racism, you'd also want to know what black people think about hispanics, or hispanics about blacks, or asians about both, etc.

Yeah, it's just about one racial group because that is the only stable measurement we have over the whole data set

just a limitation of the data

seems like a perfectly fine proxy for racism to me, though

If your data is sufficiently limited, it can be entirely insufficient.
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P4wn4g3 posted...

Er wait, so were they looking at current day opinions? Seems like that would be important.

Balrog0 posted...

In this paper I expand and test the first (social dominance) thesis using twenty nationally representative General Social Surveys conducted by the National Opinion Research Center between 1977 and 2010

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s0nicfan posted...

If your data is sufficiently limited, it can be entirely insufficient.

yeah thats what I included my last sentence for

seems like a perfectly fine proxy for racism to me
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Balrog0 posted...

P4wn4g3 posted...

Er wait, so were they looking at current day opinions? Seems like that would be important.

Balrog0 posted...

In this paper I expand and test the first (social dominance) thesis using twenty nationally representative General Social Surveys conducted by the National Opinion Research Center between 1977 and 2010

Yeah ok. I wasn't sure if he literally meant he was looking at data from the 70s. You were still supposed to pretend to be racist then. I'm not sure his results are going to be particularly conclusive. He should have done his own polling.
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Balrog0 posted...

s0nicfan posted...

If your data is sufficiently limited, it can be entirely insufficient.

yeah thats what I included my last sentence for

seems like a perfectly fine proxy for racism to me

*shrugs* I think it's missing too many variables to count, but I'll also add that I would expect the results to only get worse if you added those other axes, so I'll at least concede it probably provides a good lower bound.
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that's fine, that is how the other side will treat whatever evidence your side presents in any conversation as well
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Well duh, leftists are the real racist after all.
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Godnorgosh posted...

Balrog0 posted...

that's fine, that is how the other side will treat whatever evidence your side presents in any conversation as well

Considering I'm not going to pay to read this guy's paper, just like most people itt, the evidence is not actually accessible to me.

it's ssrn, it isn't behind a pay wall
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I don't consider the methods very good, it is a too-simple metric sort of like sonicfan indicated, but it is an interesting correlation
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Using hindsight bias, I would wonder whether racists, believing their own group to be superior or inherently more worthy, would want to see their fellow race members taken care of and excessive capitalism and inadequate wealth distribution might tend to leave group members less well off taken together.

Godnorgosh posted...

Anyway, the traditional socialist view has been that racism is and has historically been utilized within capitalism as a divide-and-conquer tactic: promote in-fighting within the working class as a means to break down unions and social resistance. And it's also been used to justify the provision of cheap or even free labor.

If that's the case, then it's difficult to see how one could reconcile that with the conclusion of this paper.

I don't think that this paper refutes that idea, but it is arguing against it, and I do not consider that a settled argument.

That socialist story makes sense, but I feel like the way most socialists employ it is overdetermined. Capitalist-owners aren't the source of racial strife, even if they do exacerbate and leverage it for their gain
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Balrog0 posted...

Godnorgosh posted...

Anyway, the traditional socialist view has been that racism is and has historically been utilized within capitalism as a divide-and-conquer tactic: promote in-fighting within the working class as a means to break down unions and social resistance. And it's also been used to justify the provision of cheap or even free labor.

If that's the case, then it's difficult to see how one could reconcile that with the conclusion of this paper.

I don't think that this paper refutes that idea, but it is arguing against it, and I do not consider that a settled argument.

That socialist story makes sense, but I feel like the way most socialists employ it is overdetermined. Capitalist-owners aren't the source of racial strife, even if they do exacerbate and leverage it for their gain

slaves were considered property

slave owners became wealthy due to owning them, meaning they were Private Property

does that not make slave owners capitalists?
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yeah, sure

slave owners, a subset of capitalist-owners, aren't the source of racial strife
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The human condition is the source of racial strife.
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i mean idk maybe i think human nature is malleable and all so i dont want to put it in those terms but yeah something like that, it definitely predates and supersedes any particular economic system
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Balrog0 posted...

i mean idk maybe i think human nature is malleable and all so i dont want to put it in those terms but yeah something like that, it definitely predates and supersedes any particular economic system

Race as we think of it is a fairly new invention, by the standards of human existence.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/06/taking-the-enlightenment-seriously-requires-talking-about-race.html

Race as we understand ita biological taxonomy that turns physical difference into relations of dominationis a product of the Enlightenment. Racism as we understand it now, as a socio-political order based on the permanent hierarchy of particular groups, developed as an attempt to resolve the fundamental contradiction between professing liberty and upholding slavery.
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To say that race and racism are products of the Enlightenment is not to say that humans never held slaves or otherwise classified each other prior to the 18th century. Recent scholarship shows how proto- and early forms of modern race thinking (you could call them racialism) existed in medieval Europe, with near-modern forms taking shape in the 15th and 16th centuries. In Spain, for example, we see the turn from anti-Judaism to anti-Semitism, where Jewish ancestry itself was grounds for suspicion, versus Jewish practice. And as historian George Fredrickson notes in Racism: A Short History, the prejudice and discrimination directed at the Irish on one side of Europe and certain Slavic peoples on the other foreshadowed the dichotomy between civilization and savagery that would characterize imperial expansion beyond the European continent. One can find nascent forms of all of these ideas in antiquityindeed, early modern thinkers drew from all of these sources to build our notion of race.

But it took the scientific thought of the Enlightenment to create an enduring racial taxonomy and the color-coded, white-over-black ideology with which we are familiar. This project, undertaken by the leading thinkers of the time, involved the setting aside of the metaphysical and theological scheme of things for a more logical description and classification that ordered humankind in terms of physiological and mental criteria based on observable facts and tested evidence, as historian Ivan Hannaford wrote in Race: The History of an Idea in the West.

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Balrog0 posted...

i mean idk maybe i think human nature is malleable and all so i dont want to put it in those terms but yeah something like that, it definitely predates and supersedes any particular economic system

the concept of race as we know it barely predates capitalism

edit: of course antifar beat me to it
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Honestly, my biggest issue with this study, regardless of whether the correlation consistently exists or not, is that it's yet another thing that distracts from the arguments themselves and puts the focus on the people making them.

Antifar posted...

Balrog0 posted...

i mean idk maybe i think human nature is malleable and all so i dont want to put it in those terms but yeah something like that, it definitely predates and supersedes any particular economic system

Race as we think of it is a fairly new invention, by the standards of human existence.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/06/taking-the-enlightenment-seriously-requires-talking-about-race.html

Race as we understand ita biological taxonomy that turns physical difference into relations of dominationis a product of the Enlightenment. Racism as we understand it now, as a socio-political order based on the permanent hierarchy of particular groups, developed as an attempt to resolve the fundamental contradiction between professing liberty and upholding slavery.
...
To say that race and racism are products of the Enlightenment is not to say that humans never held slaves or otherwise classified each other prior to the 18th century. Recent scholarship shows how proto- and early forms of modern race thinking (you could call them racialism) existed in medieval Europe, with near-modern forms taking shape in the 15th and 16th centuries. In Spain, for example, we see the turn from anti-Judaism to anti-Semitism, where Jewish ancestry itself was grounds for suspicion, versus Jewish practice. And as historian George Fredrickson notes in Racism: A Short History, the prejudice and discrimination directed at the Irish on one side of Europe and certain Slavic peoples on the other foreshadowed the dichotomy between civilization and savagery that would characterize imperial expansion beyond the European continent. One can find nascent forms of all of these ideas in antiquityindeed, early modern thinkers drew from all of these sources to build our notion of race.

But it took the scientific thought of the Enlightenment to create an enduring racial taxonomy and the color-coded, white-over-black ideology with which we are familiar. This project, undertaken by the leading thinkers of the time, involved the setting aside of the metaphysical and theological scheme of things for a more logical description and classification that ordered humankind in terms of physiological and mental criteria based on observable facts and tested evidence, as historian Ivan Hannaford wrote in Race: The History of an Idea in the West.

Race is a relatively recent invention, but group supremacy thinking is old as sin.

Antifar posted...

Balrog0 posted...

i mean idk maybe i think human nature is malleable and all so i dont want to put it in those terms but yeah something like that, it definitely predates and supersedes any particular economic system

Race as we think of it is a fairly new invention, by the standards of human existence.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/06/taking-the-enlightenment-seriously-requires-talking-about-race.html

Race as we understand ita biological taxonomy that turns physical difference into relations of dominationis a product of the Enlightenment. Racism as we understand it now, as a socio-political order based on the permanent hierarchy of particular groups, developed as an attempt to resolve the fundamental contradiction between professing liberty and upholding slavery.
...
To say that race and racism are products of the Enlightenment is not to say that humans never held slaves or otherwise classified each other prior to the 18th century. Recent scholarship shows how proto- and early forms of modern race thinking (you could call them racialism) existed in medieval Europe, with near-modern forms taking shape in the 15th and 16th centuries. In Spain, for example, we see the turn from anti-Judaism to anti-Semitism, where Jewish ancestry itself was grounds for suspicion, versus Jewish practice. And as historian George Fredrickson notes in Racism: A Short History, the prejudice and discrimination directed at the Irish on one side of Europe and certain Slavic peoples on the other foreshadowed the dichotomy between civilization and savagery that would characterize imperial expansion beyond the European continent. One can find nascent forms of all of these ideas in antiquityindeed, early modern thinkers drew from all of these sources to build our notion of race.

But it took the scientific thought of the Enlightenment to create an enduring racial taxonomy and the color-coded, white-over-black ideology with which we are familiar. This project, undertaken by the leading thinkers of the time, involved the setting aside of the metaphysical and theological scheme of things for a more logical description and classification that ordered humankind in terms of physiological and mental criteria based on observable facts and tested evidence, as historian Ivan Hannaford wrote in Race: The History of an Idea in the West.

How can capitalism be the source of "race" when capitalism is at least as old as the Roman Republic?
https://www.jstor.org/stable/590734
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Racism, like almost all forms of prejudice, stems from in-group vs. out-group psychology that is as old as humanity. Also what we commonly call race now in the US is more often culture than it is any set of genetic attributes (as emphasized by people "acting white", or wannabe [insert race here], you can't act a set of genetic traits).
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Antifar posted...

Balrog0 posted...

i mean idk maybe i think human nature is malleable and all so i dont want to put it in those terms but yeah something like that, it definitely predates and supersedes any particular economic system

Race as we think of it is a fairly new invention, by the standards of human existence.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/06/taking-the-enlightenment-seriously-requires-talking-about-race.html

Race as we understand ita biological taxonomy that turns physical difference into relations of dominationis a product of the Enlightenment. Racism as we understand it now, as a socio-political order based on the permanent hierarchy of particular groups, developed as an attempt to resolve the fundamental contradiction between professing liberty and upholding slavery.
...
To say that race and racism are products of the Enlightenment is not to say that humans never held slaves or otherwise classified each other prior to the 18th century. Recent scholarship shows how proto- and early forms of modern race thinking (you could call them racialism) existed in medieval Europe, with near-modern forms taking shape in the 15th and 16th centuries. In Spain, for example, we see the turn from anti-Judaism to anti-Semitism, where Jewish ancestry itself was grounds for suspicion, versus Jewish practice. And as historian George Fredrickson notes in Racism: A Short History, the prejudice and discrimination directed at the Irish on one side of Europe and certain Slavic peoples on the other foreshadowed the dichotomy between civilization and savagery that would characterize imperial expansion beyond the European continent. One can find nascent forms of all of these ideas in antiquityindeed, early modern thinkers drew from all of these sources to build our notion of race.

But it took the scientific thought of the Enlightenment to create an enduring racial taxonomy and the color-coded, white-over-black ideology with which we are familiar. This project, undertaken by the leading thinkers of the time, involved the setting aside of the metaphysical and theological scheme of things for a more logical description and classification that ordered humankind in terms of physiological and mental criteria based on observable facts and tested evidence, as historian Ivan Hannaford wrote in Race: The History of an Idea in the West.

Wtf. If anything the great thinkers of the Enlightenment furthered the concepts and relation between equality and personhood. Thats why theres been extraordinarily less racism as time went on instead of the opposite. If this article is to be believed, then the propagation of racial taxonomy during the Enlightenment would have made racism worse over time, and yet the Enlightenment was around the time when various centuries old slave institutions fell. Totally bogus
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ssjevot posted...

Racism, like almost all forms of prejudice, stems from in-group vs. out-group psychology that is as old as humanity. Also what we commonly call race now in the US is more often culture than it is any set of genetic attributes (as emphasized by people "acting white", or wannabe [insert race here], you can't act a set of genetic traits).

Yeah, I agree

That we conceptualize race differently than the athenians is not, to me, any kind of refutation of my stance though it does underscore how malleable these ideas are

I'm actually very well aware of how new these ideas are, but fwiw that article is kinda misleading because the idea of biological determination of any physical characteristics is new, not just for race

Ppl in bible times literally thought we'd get softer closer to judgment day cuz wed be turning into souls
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