Why it May be Hard to Change My Mind

Cass Sunstein offers a list of books from the left or center-left for a conservative to read to possibly change one’s mind. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

You recall that I appreciated his idea of proposing books for liberals to read that presented a conservative or libertarian perspective.

If you go back and read his first list, written by conservatives and libertarians, the books are quite obscure. I have not done a Google search to check, but I would not be surprised if there are only one or two that have been reviewed in publications that liberals would read. My guess is that if you gave a typical liberal intellectual only the title and author of one of these books and said, “Tell me what you think it says,” you would get an answer that is blank or incorrect.

It turns out that I have not read any of the books on Sunstein’s new list, but long before I saw Sunstein’s post I had read op-eds by the authors and/or reviews of all of them other than Dworkin’s (which falls outside of my area of interest). Based on these, I presume that:

–Nordhaus makes the case that climate models are uncertain, that we need to be worried that they under-estimate the danger, and that a carbon tax is the most efficient way to buy “insurance” against climate risk.

–Frank makes a case that we live in luck village.

–Mullainathan and Shafir say that there is a household-level poverty trap in that the less income you have, the less mental/emotional slack you have, and the worse decisions you make.

–Gordon makes the case that current technological innovation is not boosting living standards as dramatically as innovation a hundred years ago.

My point is that when liberals publish books, conservatives become aware of them. So at the margin, actually reading the book does not introduce us to new ideas–although the book may make the argument more compelling. When conservatives publish books, liberals are not aware of them. So just encountering the ideas would be new. Other things equal, I would expect liberals to find more unfamiliar ideas in conservative books than vice-versa.

22 thoughts on “Why it May be Hard to Change My Mind

  1. Frank: “being born into the right family” this is in addition to luck the parents, or a series of ancestors, working hard and making food decisions. Not that they would be aware of my retorts, but I am bored by their non-sequiturs being repeated ad nauseum.

  2. I only recognized one from each list. Gordon and Haidt. You might be right but this is highly anecdotal and its confirming your prior so be careful.

    • You name 2 people that were on different lists.

      My experience is also anecdotal, but I as a mere hobbyist am at least vaguely familiar with all the liberal arguments as summarized by Sunstein. And my point above is that these arguments don’t seem to have changed in at least a decade. They don’t seem to have spent 10 seconds talking to someone like me. For example, nobody says equality before the law isn’t interpretable. That isn’t what the “living document” argument is about. If they ever address originalism, they strawman the heck out of it.

      • Yea, I recognized one from each of the two lists.

        Understandable but you can make efforts to get ideas out and talk to them as well, goes both ways.

        Below, – book and year published. As you can see, liberal list books are much more recently published.

        Book/year published
        Liberal List:
        Rise and Fall of Growth: 2016
        ClimateCasino: 2015
        Scarcity: Pubilshed 2014
        Freedom’s Law: 1997
        Success Luck: 2016

        Conservative List:
        Seeing Like a state: 1999
        Matter of interpretation: 1998
        Side effects: 2015
        Righteous Mind: 2013
        Order without : 1994

        • I agree that conservatives become aware of liberal ideas more than vice versa. give me an average conservative and and average liberal and I’m betting way more money on the conservative passing an intellectual turing test.

          But I’m not going to use recognition of random books as evidence.

        • Perhaps I should select a book from the liberal list and see if it convinces me of anything or at least presents an argument I haven’t heard before.

          I so rarely see liberals present the economic risks of global warming remedies, which is a problem in itself, but maybe I’ll look at that one.

  3. Mullainathan and Shafir say that there is a household-level poverty trap in that the less income you have, the less mental/emotional slack you have, and the worse decisions you make.

    That has Replication Crisis written all over it.

  4. Don’t really understand why ideas have to be sorted into categories like “conservative,” “liberal” or “libertarian.” Any one of the books listed on either list can be used by an ideologue of any persuasion to support their case. Sadly, the very idea of such lists confirms my prior that politics is mostly about bigotry: taking the least charitable view of those who disagree. It should not be that hard for people of good will to acknowledge that as a rule, everyone (Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Gary Johnson, Jill Stein included), all other things being equal, is in favor of more, rather than less, tolerance, law and order, pluralism, prosperity, mutual understanding, opportunity, safety, individual autonomy, clean environment, education, jobs, trade, etc. The Three Languages of Politics model and Haidt, at least as I read them, acknowledge this and look at how differences in methods, priorities and emphases produce conflict. And, most importantly, offer ways out of that trap. Trying to make the case that an idea, rather than a person, falls into these categories is counterproductive. Even the well meaning guys like Cass Sunstein seem to be utterly clueless when they offer up a non sequitur like that understanding the existence and importance of a household poverty trap is exclusive to liberals. Instead of tallying up the score in some artificial category, why not just focus on the idea itself and how it can inform methods and priorities?

  5. I have to say that I’m rather surprised that Arnold never ran across the wonderful Seeing Like a State or Scott’s newer The Art of Not Being Governed. Liberal intellectuals seem aware of Scott’s work, for example:

    http://crookedtimber.org/2008/02/05/seeing-like-seeing-like-a-state/

    And Haidt’s work seems even better known and less likely to have gone unnoticed by liberals. Again, from Crooked Timber:

    http://crookedtimber.org/2014/05/13/makessense-stop/

    But my experience does match Arnold’s in that I was already familiar with the authors and arguments in the new list, and I don’t think that reading the books themselves would likely to be novel or mind-changing.

  6. For an interesting critique of some of Dworkin’s more famous ideas I would recommend Robust Political Economy by Mark Pennington.

  7. Book #2 shows a gross misunderstanding of the conservative mindset. Conservatives believe in family merit and maybe even community merit, not strictly individual merit.

    Cass Sunstein cites the benefits of family as being random “luck” which would make any conservative howl. Children don’t earn the quality of their parents and the families or communities that they are born into. Sunstein has this mental model that factors that affect success need to be a consequence of strictly individual merit or they are just random outside events that just occur for no rhyme or reason.

    Liberals regularly mock conservatives for “family values” which shows that they hear conservatives at a superficial level. But they don’t get it. They cite quality families as just these mysterious things that randomly fall out of the sky for some people but not for others.

  8. Sunstein writes that Dworkin “contends that whatever judges say, all of them end up as “moral readers” of such phrases — and so their own convictions must play a significant role. The question, then, is what kind of moral reading we will give, not whether we will give one. Dworkin raises serious questions about the notion of judicial restraint — and the very idea that judges can simply follow the law.”

    First, Dworkin’s work has been around for decades. Any conservative interested in constitutional law who is unaware of Dworkin’s sort of ideas, and how serious conservatives have refuted them, would have to be exceedingly wet behind the ears, or else his or her interest is not really serious. In fact, I suspect that Sunstein’s recommendation is aimed, not at serous conservatives at all, but at millennial college and law students who have started to question, in a naïve way, the leftist indoctrination they’ve received.

    Secondly, even if Dworkin were correct that judges inevitably give their own “moral reading” to the constitution, that is not an argument for the particular “moral [sic] reading” he recommends. That Dworkin may have had a good case as a legal theorist does not mean that he wasn’t a quack as a moral philosopher.

    And, has already been mentioned here, no serious conservative contends that judges can “simply follow the law,” as if applying the constitution were similar to following the directions for completing a tax return or baking a cake.

    • “Secondly, even if Dworkin were correct that judges inevitably give their own “moral reading” to the constitution, that is not an argument for the particular “moral [sic] reading” he recommends.”

      This is a really important point that legal postivists/legal realists seem to completely miss. They more or less assume that the indeterminacy of law leaving judges room to impose their own agenda will inevitably lead to them promoting a progressive agenda. They may sort of be right in that conservatives thus far have purported to adhere to strict constructionism. However, I can easily imagine a de Maistre reading arch-conservative reading Dworkin and concluding that he has license to impose conservative morality on the citizenry at the expense of classical liberal ideals.

      In short, when progressives yearn for conservatives to abandon their (again, purported) commitment to a strict, limited interpretation of the constitution, they should be careful what they wish for.

  9. I just wanna note that Frank argues luck dominates within a population of people with uniform skill. That is, big winners will tend to be smart, but being smart isn’t enough to be a big winner. Slightly more subtle.

        • My point was, nobody denies that luck, including what family you’re born into, influences your chances for success in life. In other words, claiming that conservatives hold this position and then “refuting” it is a straw-man argument.

          • Both my parents were raised by single mothers (with high school educations) just past the depression. They worked their butts off and saved money. Now I have one level beyond my father’s educational attainment. How lucky/unlucky am I? Maybe they just don’t know how to control for what is and isn’t luck yet.

  10. I’m familiar with Freedom’s Law, and the idea that it makes an argument any conservative would find compelling, – especially anyone familiar with these constitutional arguments – persuasive, or even novel (even in 1996 when it was published) is frankly laughable. I have to conclude there is some kind of strange Straussian double meaning behind Sunstein’s inclusion of that book on his list.

    Spoiler alert, Dworkin’s ‘moral reading’ requires progressive results in every instance, at least, according to his analysis.

    Even in the case of abortion rights, a ‘moral’ claim which conservatives night find especially unpersuasive.

    Indeed, Dworkin says the key question is whether an individual is a moral person thus constitutional person. But then dismissively evades this central question in the case of the fetus as being ‘metaphysical’ thus peripheral, where i figure most conservatives would find the issue a moral and central one.

  11. It seems that Cass Sunstein, in practice, is more doing “virtue signalling” to his mostly Democrat supporters than genuinely supporting opening the minds of intelligent folk who are unaware of arguments against their side. Even if his “good intention” was to help open the minds of political opponents.

    Democrats lost, big, in the last election. This is a big, Big, BIG signal that Democrats, far more than Republicans, should read more books from the opposite viewpoint.

    What needs to be clearly stated: conservatives have many cogent arguments about various policies, including pros & cons in terms of likely consequences. Far too much Democrat arguments are concerned with intentions, and the good intentions of the Dem policy — with the key argument becoming anybody opposed to that good intention policy has bad intentions, and is thus evil, not to be listened to, and insults, boycotts, and even bullying them (for their own good) is fully justified.

    Democrats for the last 20 years know far less about conservative positions and ideas than the reverse.

    I’m not willing to claim that a populist Republican Trump is really conservative, but I don’t like calling intolerant, close-minded, ignorant Democrats “liberal”, tho maybe “progressive”. It’s the (D) Democrat on the ballot which I mostly oppose.

    I’m explaining to my kids means the stupid idea that “good intentions” of a policy are more important than actual results of the policy.

    Maybe I’m missing it, but did his first list for liberals get much talked about among liberals?

  12. Not to question the point of your post, but I’m guessing that Sunstein includes Gordon’s book because of Gordon’s views about links between inequality and growth, which are part of his thesis, not because of his views about innovation, which is the piece that reviewers tend to focus on.

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