Winston Churchill once said: "If you're not a liberal at 20, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative at 40, you have no brain." Like a lot that Churchill said, there's a lot of wisdom there, but now that I'm well past 40, I'm convinced he's wrong.
We go through phases of life, driven by our environment and the things we've learned and adapted to. When we're babys, we know almost nothing, and we regard out parents as everything--the equivalent of God. As we get older, we learn to communicate, to recognize similarities and difference between ourselves and other individuals (we call this "self-awareness") and to manipulate our direct environment a little bit. In this second phase, we may be aware of people that are not in our direct environment, but we don't really have any perspective. Our "situational awareness" consists of a fairly small bubble, and anything outside it may seem far away, but in our mental picture, it isn't really.
Some time in our teen years, we start realizing that the world is a very much bigger place than the bubble we grew up in. Among other things, this includes recognizing that your parents are just people, not the godlike entities of a baby's perspective, and that there are other ways to see the world than the one they presented. One of the most common is popular music. For most people, their taste in music is defined by the period that they were between 12 and 18. During that time, you're very open to new things, and everything new seems to be the most wonderful thing in the world. The fact that 95% of everything is rubbish doesn't start to sink in until the end of the period. Puberty and our first sexual experiences are happening at the same time, of course, so that's the most wonderful thing in the world too. Except when the travails of young relationships make it the most horrible thing in the world. Except for the sexual part, I call this phase "consciousness". Animals never develop consciousness. Their view of the world consists entirely of the bubble.
Around age 20, some people start to develop an ability to do what's called "critical thinking". This is the ability to study, compare, analyze and recognize good from bad. It comes about from many things. Life experiences are important, but even more important is the ability to learn from the successes and failures of others. College is the best way: it pours zillions of ideas and experiences into developing young minds and forces them to compare and judge. Job training and trying to make your way in the real world with a job or raising a family is good too, but the experiences are necessarily much narrower and more like the childhood bubble. I've found that the ability to write well correlates well with critical thinking ability although not always. Translating word problems into mathematical equations is one particular form of "writing" that requires some critical analysis. A lot of people, the majority I think, never really develop critical thinking ability.
Another thing that happens at around age 20 is the competition. The world we live in consists of a set of competitions--for food, for lovers, for jobs, for status, for power, etc. Prior to "graduation", we're exempted from competing to some extent, but normally, completing school dumps us into the real world and suddenly we're competing for real. (School itself is part of the competition, of course, but the rules are different) This is true in the most capitalistic society and the most communistic. The only difference are the tools we use to compete with and the rules we play by, and to some extent what happens to us if we lose. Good critical thinking ability is helpful in the competition, but so are your relationships at the start of the game. A bonehead who was Bill Gates' neighbor growing up has advantages a much smarter person growing up in the inner city or Bangladesh doesn't have.
A liberal is a person who believes that everybody should have an equal shot in the competition. A conservative is a person who wants to preserve the status quo, meaning that those who have found or created advantages tend to pass them on to their progeny. This is natural. No one is without some conservative sentiment, and to be sure, if the rules made sure that everybody started on an equal footing every day, it would be a pretty traumatic world to live in. But some conservatives would like to change the rules to benefit themselves or their group to the heavy cost of everyone else. Churchill's 40 year old is such a person. The competition beats a lot of people down to the point that they're prepared to surrender or cheat by age 40.
A major goal of society should be to make sure that people don't get so beaten down that they want to surrender or cheat. The "social safety net" is one way, but conceived as such, it's not capable of much. A better way would be to make sure that the rapaciousness of a few cannot possibly make it impossible for great numbers to keep afloat. Things like anti-monopoly laws, bank regulation, media fairness doctrines and so forth can have a profound effect. The 40 hour work week is a good metric. If 90% of families can live a decent life on a 40 hour work week, then we're doing all right. Decent includes comfortable housing, food, transportation, putting a little away for the kids education and retirement, and health care such that sickness has no secondary financial consequences. When too many people can't do this, we need to adjust the inequality needle.
Some people will cheat, no matter the circumstances. But most will not. We need to arrange society so that the cheaters are easily caught and prevented from causing harm, and nobody else feels the need.
addenda: 17Feb2012 Catherine Rampell has a column on this same subject, with real data.
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