I’ve noticed that most things that I would post here have ended up as crappy Reddit comments. I am going to try to fix that.<\/p>\n
I saw a comment on Reddit the other day that made me think of political strategy.\u00c2\u00a0 The post referred to the fact that the proposed “Buffet Rule” would not actually generate that much money. My response was, of course not. The goal at this point is not to raise money. The goal at this point is to start moving the needle with response to public opinion on taxing the rich.<\/p>\n
It is interesting how much public opinion has changed with respect to the tax rate for the highest income in America. Setting aside questions about how effective such taxes are, it is remarkable how there seems to have been a consensus that taxing them is bad. In this post I want to present a theory that large issues like behave as though… well, i can’t think of a good physical analogy but allow me to explain.<\/p>\n
I still believe quite strongly that much of politics is governed by group dynamics, in particular people’s need to identify with a group. I recently heard of some interesting research that talked about how what I call group dynamics effects cheating. They set up a math test where one is paid $0.50 for each question they answer correctly. The catch is that 2 minutes into the test someone who isplanted by the experimenters stands up and says “I’m finished”. The person running the experiment asks him how many problems he finished, the plant lies and says all 20, collects his money, and leaves. The real participants now know that cheating is possible and lucrative. Turns out that after seeing this a large number of people also cheat.<\/p>\n
Thats not the interesting part though. Things get awesome when they dress the planted person in a competing college’s sweat shirt. In this case, when the person cheating is in a different group, cheating goes down<\/em>.<\/p>\n What?<\/p>\n Yes.<\/p>\n So to recap, if someone in your group cheats, cheating becomes less bad. If someone not in your group cheats, cheating becomes worse. Turns out morality is a somewhat fluid thing, not that we should be surprised. So the question is, how does this apply to politics?<\/p>\n The usefulness of the Occupy movement has not been, really, any particular achievement with regards to policy. The lasting achievement of the Occupy movement has been to create two new groups in the eye of the public: the 1% and the 99%. Such a division is not new, a viewing of old political cartoons shows that it was quite common to depict rich people as having bodies that looked like bags of money. The effect is the same, to create a group of people defined by their money, an amount of money one could not hope to achieve in their lifetime.<\/p>\n Prior to the 1% it was simply the rich vs. the poor. The problem with rich vs. poor is that, well, no one wants to be poor. Even if they are, they will self-identify with the rich. This led to the norming of many of the evils historically associated with the rich: greed, political manipulation, and exploitation. They were not necessarily good… just, acceptable just like cheating in the test became more acceptable after one person did it.<\/p>\n But with the introduction of the 1% now suddenly it is possible to frame alot of these discussions in such a way that the person cheating is not part of your group anymore. Now the greed, political manipulation, and exploitation become unacceptable activities, well worth punishing the fuck out of people for.<\/p>\n It is striking out much of politics is actually just this sort of framing. You should try to paint the picture such that as much of your constituency is included as possible. As long as they can identify with what you are talking about they will generally find good stuff great, mediocre stuff good, bad stuff mediocre, and horrible stuff bad. Of course the opposite is true too \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve noticed that most things that I would post here have ended up as crappy Reddit comments. I am going to try to fix that. I saw a comment on Reddit the other day that made me think of political strategy.\u00c2\u00a0 The post referred to the fact that the proposed “Buffet Rule” would not actually […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.blog.craig.snoeyink.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.blog.craig.snoeyink.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.blog.craig.snoeyink.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.blog.craig.snoeyink.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.blog.craig.snoeyink.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.blog.craig.snoeyink.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.blog.craig.snoeyink.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.blog.craig.snoeyink.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.blog.craig.snoeyink.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}