Tuesday, June 18, 2019

Occupations and Ideology


I agree with the author of the study on political sorting by occupation that the surprise is not the tendency, but the strength of it.
It fits nicely with the many Arts & Humanities articles I wrote years ago.  The comments are worth reading for a change.  I had the same thought about the “spoils system” that one of the commenters did.  There is more on the same topic here, with updated information. Hmm, in my slowly assembled most-popular posts list I don’t recall A& H posts figuring prominently. I wonder if I should look those over and pick a few, or perhaps attempt a summary post.  It seems old hat to me now, but it was one of my soapboxes for quite a while.

6 comments:

Christopher B said...

Interesting to note how far left venture capitalists, investment bankers, hedge funds, and mortgage brokers are.

james said...

Buying influence. It may not have anything to do with their preferences.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

I had the same thought. They may rely on government favors and legislation, or are rent-seeking.

RichardJohnson said...

While I was raised in true-"blue" lib-land in New England, I changed into an evil right-winger. Some attribute this to my moving to Texas, or to working some of the time in a right-leaning industry, but life experiences in New England helped push me away from the libs. For example, while many libs believe they are inclusive and without prejudice,in contrast to those horrid bigoted deplorables on the other side of the aisle, from childhood and adolescence experiences I concluded that all of us have in-groups and out-groups. Similarly, in high school I realized that political beliefs are often not deeply thought out, but are the result of wanting to belong to a certain group that has certain beliefs. I was far too cynical to remain a lib.

David Foster said...

Word & Image people vs Thing people. I suspect that a finer-grained analysis would further confirm this view; for example, STEM professors vs non-STEM professors, or software engineers vs electrical engineers vs mechanical & civil engineers.

Also, I don't see salesmen on the chart...there are an awful lot of sales people in the US.

Texan99 said...

Being a lawyer, and a corporate one at that--and a feiminst to boot!--I can't imagine what went wrong with me. Maybe, as with Richard Johnson, it was the Texas effect.