There is a tendency or those on the political right to invoke economic theory when developing or critiquing environmental policy. This can make sense or not, depending on the context. For example, a cap-and-trade system for dealing with the emissions causing acid rain (sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides) has contributed to significant reductions (though of course not elimination) of these pollutants, and as a result acid rain is currently less of a threat to northeastern U.S. ecosystems than it once was. So, many advocate a similar system to control carbon dioxide, which has recently become recognized as a pollutant for its role in exacerbating global climate change.

The basic premise of cap-and-trade is that government - such as the E.P.A. in the U.S., or state government - sets a total cap on allowed emissions for the whole country or region within it. They then issue a set number of licenses totaling that cap. These licenses can then be traded on the open market, so that companies emitting CO2 can either spend money reducing their emissions, or buying more licenses - whichever makes more financial sense. If the cost of reducing emissions (through special technology or alternative energy production, for example) is low for most companies, the price of the licenses will drop. If, however, the cost is high, licenses will go up too. because of the increased demand. Advocates of the approach support its reliance on the free market rather than excessive top-down regulation.

There are problems as well. For the system to accomplish its intended purpose, the cap must be set using the most objective scientific means possible, which seems an unlikely prospect, especially given the current political climate. But even if science is given a chance, CO2 is a global pollutant. That is, everyone's CO2 emissions affect everyone else. By contrast, acid rain in the northeastern U.S. was easily traceable mainly to coal-burning power plants in the east and Midwest, and thus the emissions were a local problem solvable by local policy. The harm done by carbon dioxide is genuine, but much less tangible and not at all direct. This is used by those opposed to emissions caps to insist that capping our own country's CO2 would be meaningless if other countries do not do the same, and it would somehow destroy our economy to do so. (This is despite the obvious counter argument that a genuine government mandate to develop alternative energy sources would spur a whole new economy for the U.S. However, the tangible economic benefits would not be immediate, but long term, which does not play well in capitalist societies.)

Of course, this is the point of the Kyoto treaty - to get as many countries on board as possible. Kyoto is a necessary first step because in practicality countries do have different levels of wealth and technological ability to control emissions, so to expect them to do so equally off the bat is absurd. The idea is that asking more of the fully technological countries will motivate the development of alternatives to greenhouse-gas-producing energy, that could then be implemented in other countries as well. But without the world's biggest emitter on board, it all breaks down completely.

We all know that getting the world to agree on scientifically reasonable global carbon dioxide limits is somewhat less likely than the proverbial snowball in hell. More recent coverage will give cap opponents more ammunition to argue there is no point in even trying. Should we really use the problems to excuse a mentality of "winner take all, and who gives a damn what the world is like in a few decades, after I am gone?" What if instead, the U.S. (as suggested often by Thomas Friedman) made a conscious decision to be a world leader in alternative technologies? (Mandating ethanol production from corn to justify huge taxpayer giveaways to corporate agriculture does not count.) What if the U.S.'s mantra turned into, "this is a great opportunity to show the world's people, most of whom hate our guts right now for our arrogance, greed, and imperialism, that we are the leader for remaking our planet's future." Even the cynics who only care about money surely see the benefits of replacing foreign oil, the defense of which has cost enormous amounts of resources and lives over the years, with foreign good will, which is a benefit?

There are times in history when what we really need is a little more government in select areas, not less. Since the "anti-government" crowd happily uses fear to justify the invasion of personal privacy, why isn't there, in vocal opposition, an actively pro-government voice that uses hope to stop the sub-prime mortgaging of our future? Probably because bringing up difficult truths doesn't win elections.

Labels: economics, environment, politics

As suggested in my previous post, it seems unlikely that the clear results of the Science studies will actually affect policy given the hard-to-crack corporate influence on government. Fargione et al. point out that "the recently enacted US Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 specifies reductions in life-cycle GHG emissions, including land use change, relative to a fossil fuel baseline."

Here are some relevant bits. The first is included under section on grants for biofuels research, amending Energy Policy Act of 2005:

(4) develop cellulosic and other feedstocks that are less resource and land intensive and that promote sustainable use of resources, including soil, water, energy, forests, and land, and ensure protection of air, water, and soil quality.

The second amends the Biomass Research and Development Act of 2000:

(5) the improvement and development of analytical tools to facilitate the analysis of life-cycle energy and greenhouse gas emissions, including emissions related to direct and indirect land use changes, attributable to all potential biofuel feedstocks and production processes; and

(6) the systematic evaluation of the impact of expanded biofuel production on the environment, including forest lands, and on the food supply for humans and animals.

Does the law take into account land use changes beyond those of the United States, in developing countries where the local impacts are much more distructive? There is another growing fear that conversion of food-crop land into biofuels production, which is more profitable due to international demand, could cause even more devastating famines in Africa (for example) than are already occurring on a regular basis. According to the African Biodiversity Network, a car tank of ethanol requires the amount of grain that could feed a child for a year (Bonn, 2008).

But there does not seem to be any specific provision in the law that will call a halt to the madness if the results in biofuels research that companies like ADM wants are not found.

And of course industry is not going to sit there and give any policy ground to actual scientists. From the Times article:

Industry groups, like the Renewable Fuels Association, immediately attacked the new studies as "simplistic," failing "to put the issue into context."

"While it is important to analyze the climate change consequences of differing energy strategies, we must all remember where we are today, how world demand for liquid fuels is growing, and what the realistic alternatives are to meet those growing demands," said Bob Dineen, the group's director, in a statement following the Science reports' release.

The laughable irony here is that it is industry and their governmental cronies who have not put it into context. They are the ones who promote this policy as a "green" solution, when it clearly is not, and has been known not to be for sometime.

But of course they are correct that there is a demand for alternatives to fossil fuels. Are those of us criticizing the ethanol policy just short-sighted and naive? Do we reject the need to find alternatives to Middle-Eastern oil? Not at all. It is the biofuels industry that is being disingenuous by suggesting that they are somehow energy saviors. Unfortunately, it is the silver-bullet approach, rarely effective for any complex problem, that sells in today's America.

The energy pundits and power brokers dismiss wind and solar because they cannot supply all our power needs. The environmentalists dismiss ANWR drilling because it would clearly supply our current needs for only a short time, while doing permanent damage. The pro-nukes camp suggests more nuclear plants in order to reduce CO2 emissions, and yet they have failed to solve the waste problem, which is a (albeit smaller) serious environmental problem in its own right. The laudable attempts to remove environmentally damaging dams do not focus on how hydroelectric power will be replaced in a way that does not damage the environment. What the media and all the energy extremists fail to acknowledge is that a combination of all of the currently known types of energy not only would diversify our energy in a way that would help mitigate problems caused by shortages of any one resource, not to mention eliminate massive region-wide blackouts, and make a wide-ranging terrorist attack on energy sources next to impossible (unlike the current situation we have seen in which one blown power plant blacks out the entire northeast).

The reason this approach has not been advanced by any policy maker is that it doesn't create nice simple soundbites that result in huge amounts of public money flowing into a few giant corporations. Ethanol is a good partial solution to our energy problems. Carried to the extreme it's being carried to is a humanitarian and ecological disaster in the making. Biodiesel in the form of used cooking oil is a great way to recycle and create energy at the same time. But if every car did it, it would be an emissions disaster. We need to have ethanol cars and electric cars and keep working on hydrogen cars. We need it all, and the U.S. could be a technological leader in giving the world it all, which would have the added effect of generating a lot of economy that cannot yet be outsourced, as Tom Friedman has tried to advocate. Oil and natural gas need to have the role of back-up to the other energy solutions. Then we will have them when we really need them.

The problem is, policy makers in the U.S. government don't actually give a damn about energy solutions or preventing terrorist attacks on obvious targets. They care about big, deficit-inflating handouts that enrich certain corporations at the expense of the rest of the world. The outrage is that they use feigned concern about the approaching energy/climate change crisis, and terrorism, to gain unquestioned public support for their objectives. Eventually, it will dawn on the public that years of so-called "energy" and "anti-terrorism" policy has only made their lives worse. But of course it will be too late. Maybe it already is.


References

Bonn, D. 2008. Call for moratorium on agrofuels in Africa. Dispatches, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 6:6.

Labels: environment, politics

The announcement of two Science papers (Fargione et al., 2008; Searchinger et al., 2008) calculating higher carbon dioxide emissions through changes in land use is making a lot of noise. But will the public get this travesty enough to force a change in federal policy on ethanol?

It didn't take these studies to wake up scientists and more progressive policy makers to the dangers of overemphasis on ethanol.

Yet a quick check on Technorati of responses to this news shows a lot of people still don't get it. Some bloggers gleefully have blamed environmentalists for going to town on ethanol use, but scientists (the great majority of whom are environmentalists, but not vice versa) have known better for a long time - some smart ones just got a couple of easy Science papers out of the hot political potato that biofuels production is becoming. The papers are highly complementary, and both expose the faulty math that has been done to promote ethanol production as "renewable" energy - which is not so renewable after all when rain forests and grasslands are destroyed to produce it.

Fargione et al. calculated actual carbon release due to land clearing in order to create more land for biofuel production, and Searchinger et al. produced a model which uses estimates of these numbers. Both methods produce the same conclusion: the worldwide ethanol frenzy, ostensibly about reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, will actually accelerate the production of atmospheric carbon dioxide through the destruction of ecosystems which have much higher carbon storage than the biofuels plants themselves do. This is not a problem of the future, but is currently happening, both directly and indirectly: either new land is cleared for biofuel production, or the conversion of current crop land (or animal-feed land) for biofuel forces creation of new crop land. The fallacy of this is most extreme in Indonesian peatlands, which Fargione et al. point out are huge carbon sinks, and thus liberating this carbon to grow palms for oil leaves us with a carbon debt that may not be repaid for over 800 years.

Searchinger et al.'s model, as all models do, must make numerous assumptions about the numbers that cannot necessarily be confirmed at this time. However, they take great pains to be conservative in their estimates of carbon released due to changing land use, and the logic in their introduction cannot be denied. They point out what is known from previous studies: the carbon cost of growing biofuel feedstocks, refining them into fuel, and then burning them, is no different from the carbon cost of oil. What supposedly swings the balance in favor of biofuels is that while they are growing they take up carbon from the atmosphere, while the burning of fossil fuels liberates previously sequestered carbon. Given that we know that land conversion means a lot less carbon sequestered in plants grown on the same acreage, the model is practically gratuitous.

So why the big push for "renewable" ethanol? It didn't come from environmentalists. It came from agribusiness, the huge corporations such as Archer Daniels Midland, who have the most to gain from this legislation. By declaring the production of ethanol "renewable," (not to mention running their ads on PBS), they have framed themselves as a company who cares about people and the environment. But the consequences of the ethanol rush would have been obvious to anyone formulating the policy. Simply, like most legislation we've seen over the last decade plus, this is all about money - specifically, taxpayer giveaways to huge corporations whose buddies happen to be running the government.

Given that once again we seem to have failed to find our magic energy bullet, then what is the solution? Are scientists who criticize various alternative energy sources on environmental grounds hopelessly naive? Not at all. They simply acknowledge that our range of solutions is quite a bit wider than that proposed by corporate giants who want all the taxpayers eggs in their industry's personal basket.


References

Fargione, J.,Hill, J., Tilman, D., Polasky, S., Hawthorne, P., 2008. Land clearing and the biofuel carbon debt. Science (in press).

Searchinger, T, Heimlich, R., Houghton, R. A. , Dong, F., Elobeid, A., Fabiosa, J., Tokgoz, S., Hayes, D., Yu, T. 2008. Use of U.S. croplands for biofuels increases greenhouse gases through emissions from land use change. Science (in press).

Labels: biodiversity, ecology, environment, forests, politics

Rising periodically in the op-ed media and blogosphere are calls for more conservative university professors. There is seems to be an idea out there that everyone's children are being brainwashed by leftist ideologues giving them 'F's if they don't write papers agreeing with the professor's politics, because there is no room in these classrooms for different points of view.

Perhaps those on the right wing are concerned because they are imagining that this is how they would run their classrooms (if they had them), but their insistence that there is a problem is clearly belied by the fact that while Ph.D.s indisputably tend to have more liberal political opinions, I know of no identified trend in political opinion among those with bachelor's degrees. Nonetheless, this call for more 'conservative' professors is misguided for many other reasons.

People tend to hire those who they relate to and desire to interact with. In this sense, academia is no different from law, business, or any other profession. It seems likely that political conservatives are overrepresented in business, for example. There are those who find examples of conservative academics who do not get a job offer or even and interview and use that to support their charge of political bias. This is a straw man, as anyone who has recently been involved in an academic job search knows. There is a glut of Ph.D.s in most fields searching for jobs; for example, something like a third of the English Ph.D.s graduating now can expect to get a tenure-track position. When one of us looking for a job has a stellar publication record and recommendations, yet does not get an interview, it is easy to pick any reason we want as to why, and claim a bias. Certainly bias exists, but these days it is damned hard to prove because there are just too many qualified candidates out there for the number of positions available, and the reality for those of us who are not white liberal males is that there probably is one applying to the same job that is equally or more qualified than us.

But why do those with academic careers tend to be liberal in the first place? (The term 'liberal' is used here in its traditional sense, rather than the Right's derogatory term for 'leftist', though liberal opinions do of course coincide more with politics that are left of center.) Perhaps there is actually a reason that those who follow the long path of their studies to the point of becoming professors tend to be liberal. First of all, part of the true definition of 'liberal' is open-mindedness, and those who seek scholarship as a lifelong endeavor are more naturally curious about the world than those who don't. So the profession is self-selecting. Clearly if your goal in life is to make a ton of money, academia is not a career you will choose. As people who work hard for low pay, academics are not naturally sympathetic to policies that favor the affluent.

But a tendency toward liberal thinking is certainly reinforced in the field of education. No, not because we were all brainwashed by our predecessors, but because unlike those in many other professional careers, educators are exposed to people from a large cross-section of society, especially if they work at a large state university (as the majority of them do). One finds it harder to objectify and stereotype people of a certain race, social class, religion, etc. if one knows personally people in that group. The policies supported by those who consider themselves to be conservative tend to make the assumption that all Americans are born equal and treated equally. This is understandable when one largely associates with people within one's own social class, but much harder when the realities of inequality are staring you in the face all day. Faculty and graduate students at a large state university get to know students as people from across the societal spectrum, and as a result tend to support policies (associated with liberals) that treat different groups differently, in an attempt to make up for some of these inequalities.

So, acknowledging that most professors are liberal, should there be 'Affirmative Action' for conservatives? No, because Affirmative Action targets groups that are disadvantaged across society, and is meant to address unchangeable qualities such as race and gender. Though one can be discriminated against for one's opinions, they are a lot easier to keep to oneself. The truth that is never brought up in these discussions is that the political opinions of the professor are almost never relevant to any class discussion; professors who impose their views to the point of making students uncomfortable are wrong not because they may be liberal instead of conservative, but because it is inappropriate of them to do so no matter what their political persuasion. Sometimes however, a subject that happens to be a hot political issue is relevant to a class. If a professor is teaching an ecology course, he will naturally be passionate about his beliefs that ecosystems should be preserved. Should then his campus find an ecologist who supports clearcutting to 'balance out' his opinion? Such a person is not likely to exist -- after all, who would choose a field of study that he was not passionate about?

But aren't liberal universities then indoctrinating your children into beliefs that to you are wrong? There are several reasons you have nothing to fear. First, hiring and promotion have pretty much nothing to do with what goes on in the classroom. At most universities, they are all about how much money a faculty member brings into campus. But the uncomfortable truth is that questionable personality traits in a job candidate who hasn't ever received a grant suddenly recede into insignificance when that candidate shows he can bring in big bucks.

The main irony about those who fear indoctrination, however, is that they obviously do not believe in education. By definition, education involves learning the ability to critically think for oneself. Those who think that students will come out of universities as leftist automatons are the same type who fear that those who are exposed to the ideas and science of evolution will suddenly lose all religion. Simply, those who fear indoctrination are those who believe in the power of indoctrination. Those who make a career in education receive no benefit from indoctrination of their students; if they like to make outrageously one-sided arguments in the classroom, it should only have the effect of forcing students to learn to develop the proper counter-arguments to what the professors are saying - that is, to think critically. Universities are not madrassas of leftist thought that need "balance". A student who complains about a "D"on a paper in which he asserts the evidence for global warming is inconclusive is not being punished for his ideology, any more than a student who touts creationism in a paper about evolution. He is getting the grade he deserves for ignoring the known body of scientific evidence in his paper.

Imposing some sort of quota for conservative professors, as some suggest, would make a mockery of education, which is not about the promotion of specific ideologies, but rather the free exchange of ideas. Again, if a professor is not living up to this ideal, her actual political opinions are irrelevant; the issue is not a 'liberal' vs. 'conservative' one. When it comes to job applications, political opinions are as taboo as marital status, sexual orientation, etc. at a job interview; the interviewer has no business bringing them up, and the interviewee should not either, because they have no bearing on the interviewee's qualifications for a job.

There are lots of ways that people at work behave inappropriately, in ways that make clients or coworkers uncomfortable. Are professors to be held more accountable because they have the serious task of educating the next generation? Perhaps so. But the inappropriate remarks and behaviors by professors cited by those on the right as examples of why we need conservative 'balance' on campuses are not inappropriate because of the particular opinions of a professor or group of faculty; the nature of the problem is that of a hostile environment. If universities truly are making conservative students (or faculty) feel threatened, they need to address appropriate workplace behavior with staff. In my experience, the conservative students hold their own quite well, and I've never met a professor who was a shrinking violet.

Labels: education, politics

My last post covered a paper that found brain physiological correlates of political attitudes. That paper did not address the origin of the physiological differences, i.e. whether they might be genetic or environmental. An earlier paper (Alford, J.R., C.L. Funk, and J.R. Hibbing, 2005. Are political orientations genetically transmitted? American Political Science Review, 99:153-167), though, does claim a genetic origin for particular suites of political attitudes. While authors acknowledge that on the surface this seems nonintuitive, they back up their case by citing numerous studies that other social attitudes have a genetic origin.

This is another example of a twin study being used to support genetic causes of differences among people previously assumed to be purely environmental. The survey data used were collected not as part of this study, but recycled from a previous study, and include the usual thousands of twin pairs, because these authors, like so many others, assume that more is better, when that is not in fact true. A weakness of the data set is exposed when they calculate a surprisingly high 40% heritability of educational attainment, without any mention of the demographics of the survey-takers. Could there be any correlation of socioeconomic and education level and the willingness to return an esoteric research survey? It seems likely, but there is no consideration here of the possible effect.

The authors are all political scientists whose paper, published in a political science journal, purports to teach other political scientists how genetics works. (One can't help but wonder how they would react to a bunch of biologists pontificating on a political topic in a biological journal.) It probably does not matter whether or not any biologists actually reviewed this paper; twin studies appear in plenty of biological journals as well.

All the arguments the authors make supporting their assumptions, come from other twin studies, which have the same methodological issues, stemming from the ethical impossibility of manipulating human phenotype and social environment. The most important assumption upon which the results are based is of course the one apparently made in all twin studies: correlation in survey scores between identical twins minus correlation in scores between fraternal twins equals "heritability" of the survey scores. The authors attempt to address the obvious criticism that identical twins are likely to have a more shared environment than fraternal twins by citing studies that assert this is not so. Of course, if a weak study is published, all those that rely on it are weak as well. The problem with all of these studies is that they fail to separate the effects of genotype vs. phenotype. This is the major criticism of "twins reared apart" studies - similarities between identical twins reared apart aren't automatically genetic, because they look the same (and often have similar mannerisms). Researchers seriously underestimate the importance of visual cues in affecting human interpersonal interactions. Hence, their social interactions will have a greater tendency to be similar even when they live in different environments.

In a similar vein, when the authors claim that a majority of political attitudes are genetic, do they honestly think this explains why black women are likely to be more liberal than white men? Clearly phenotype, which drives much life experience, is the important difference here, not genotype. The authors also do not address at all the fact that many peoples' political attitudes change over time, sometimes in an extreme fashion. Yet they assert with a straight face that when children have opposing political beliefs from their parents, it must be due to a genetic mutation. They actually even calculate a heritability for party affiliation at 0.14. Yes, 14% of your choice of party apparently is from those alleles for "republican" and "democrat" you have tucked away.

Oddly, considering the tone of most of the paper, the authors do manage to point out correctly (even going into some depth on the topic) that all people are a product of the interaction of their genotype with their environment. They seem to do this to bolster their point that political attitudes must be partly genetic, but the discussion shows that clearly they think genes are as important as the social scientists they are criticizing think environment is. They go so far as to express regret that the current polarizing political environment will not change because of assortative mating - those with overlapping political views are more likely to reproduce together (true), and thus the "political genes" of their offspring will make them more likely to be polarized. Then they go on to speculate about the evolution of these genes and their effect on society, as if they actually know something about how evolution works, after reading a few papers.

Looks like all of the people with Ph.D.'s in genetics and evolution just wasted their time. They could have had a different career and still published papers on the topic.

Labels: humans, politics, sociality, statistics

A recent paper in Nature Neuroscience (Amodio, D.M., J.T. Jost, S.L. Master & C.M. Yee, 2007. Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism. Nature Neuroscience 10:1246-1247) has been presented as far more controversial than it is - although surely the authors knew they would ruffle a few feathers with their study.

Here is the abstract:

Political scientists and psychologists have noted that, on average, conservatives show more structured and persistent cognitive styles, whereas liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty. We tested the hypothesis that these profiles relate to differences in general neurocognitive functioning using event-related potentials, and found that greater liberalism was associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate activity, suggesting greater neurocognitive sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual response pattern.

The authors give citations to support the claim that "Across dozens of behavioral studies, conservatives have been found to be more structured and persistent in their judgments". I have not read those papers but for the purpose of this commentary will assume that there is indeed scientific support for this conclusion. Though their experimental procedure is clearly one accepted by neuroscientists, the rest of us are expected to take at their word that "responsiveness to complex and potentially conflicting information relates to the sensitivity of this general mechanism for monitoring response conflict." Here is the test:

Go/No-Go task. On each trial of the Go/No-Go task, either the letter "M" or "W" was presented in the center of a computer monitor screen... Half of the participants were instructed to make a "Go" response when they saw "M" but to make no response when they saw "W"; the remaining participants completed a version in which "W" was the Go stimulus and "M" was the No-Go stimulus; assignment to either version of the task was random. Responses were registered on a computer keyboard placed in the participants' laps. Each trial began with a fixation point, presented for 500 ms. The target then appeared for 100 ms, followed by a blank screen. Participants were instructed to respond within 500 ms of target onset. A "Too slow!" warning message appeared after responses that exceeded this deadline, and "Incorrect" feedback was given after erroneous responses.

There is no way here to confirm the authors' interpretation that results obtained on this test are explained by liberals' higher sensitivity to "cognitive conflict" at the level of political decisions, but it is an interesting idea, because it appears both from cited research and probably anyone's observations that conservatives tend to have more of a black-and-white view of the world, while liberals tend see more shades of gray. ("Liberal" here is used in its traditional sense, not the currently distorted media code word for "left wing." Indeed, hard left-wingers are arguably no more liberal than hard right-wingers.)

The paper wisely does not attempt to determine whether this brain-function correlate or political leaning comes first (and they certainly do not at all imply that the response of liberals to this test is "smarter," despite William Saletan's defensive interpretation). It should not be assumed that just because the brain shows a certain physiological response to a stimulus, this response is genetic. Just as the accumulation of memories alters pathways in our neurons, a response such as this may be "learned" by the brain as well, based on experience.

Of course, some people become more conservative with life experience. Here are three competently untested hypotheses for why this can happen (given the conclusion that liberals see more complexity in the world than do conservatives).

1) Often, people become more fiscally conservative as they grow older. Fiscal conservatism is, however, a separate issue from that of "cognitive conflict." Those emphasizing the long term will be more fiscally conservative than those who prefer to live in the moment, which is more correlated with age group than with social or political views. Certainly over the last three decades political conservatives have shown no sign of being fiscal conservatives.

2) Someone who has suffered a traumatic, life-affecting event, such as a death or lost job, or whose loved ones have, might find it simpler to have an easily defined target to blame. Bad economic times had a lot to do with the growth of the Ku Klux Klan.

3) There is really no way to form economic or social policy that takes into account all the complexities that a diverse group of people will experience. Because it is simpler to craft legislation that does not take so many complexities into account, policy makers - and the pundits living in the same beltway world, away from the real one, and those listening to the pundits - come to believe we live in a simple world with easily definable boundaries. Such was one of the major reasons the SCHIP legislation failed. The idea that there is a particular income cutoff, above which every American family can afford health insurance without regard to any other parameters, was heavily promoted by the conservative opposition to the bill.

A corollary of the last point is that people who are well-off financially are usually conservative not because they are fiscally conservative (many of them are not), but because it is emotionally least complicated to believe there is a simple reason why they are wealthy while so many others are poor, e.g. they work hard and poor people don't.

There also could be positive physiological feedback loops in the brain which strengthen a tendency to fall one way or the other in one's view of the world. While some people do change their political views, most people actually seem to become more strongly liberal or conservative over time. It is an unfortunate by-product of our social tendency to form opposing groups that once we have formed an opinion about a person or topic, our views become more confirmed because we accept observations that support them, and ignore or rationalize observations that do not support them.

To be truly objective in his or her views, a person would need to be constantly reassessing prior beliefs based on every bit of new information received. Why are humans, many of whom pride themselves on their over-awing logical arguments, not that way at all? Perhaps it is because as social animals, we are always creating rules to live by, and the simpler those rules are, the easier our lives are, in many ways. Even with our large brains, it would get too difficult to navigate socially, as we need to, if the rules were too complex.

Labels: brain, empathy, humans, politics, sociality