Tyler Cowen: observation

Transcript context

…Jonathan is one of the world’s leading thinkers on the political views of individuals. Most recently, he has been involved in a crusade to make the campus environment more intellectually diverse. He is one of the world’s leading psychologists, has a strong background in cultural anthropology and economics, and basically, is known to us all. If you’re familiar with how the Conversations with Tyler series works, I’ll just point it out again: this is essentially the conversation I want to have with Jonathan, not the conversation you want to have. To start off with a question. Jonathan, you think of people’s political views as stemming from their social intuitions, which are fairly strongly hardwired into them. If I look at politics this year, what I see is we had almost all the pundits, thinking about Republican values, the Republican past, and seeing Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and thinking some mix of those people would be the leaders, because they matched Republican values. And they all have failed, basically. How do we think about this using your constructs? You have to see politics as occurring at multiple levels simultaneously. Just as at a university we’ve got psychologists studying individual experiences, we’ve got neurologists studying neurons, we’ve got political scientists and sociologists studying emergent phenomena, that’s what you have to do to study politics. If you look at the history, if you look at the higher‑level constructs, yeah, it’s bizarre what’s happening. It’s unprecedented, and people expected the past to predict the future. But what if the emerging social constructs of the Republican Party have been getting progressively out of tune with the moral intuitions and the psychology of the voters? I think that’s what we have seen happening.…

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