NZ Conservative

Neuropolitics certainly has to be one of the more original websites on the Internet – where else will you find article titles like, “Barack’s Brain – The politics of the Right Prefontal Context,” or “The Thermodynamics of Conservatives and Liberals.”

As a source of new, inventive theories about the political views of mainstream voters in the U.S, it’s possibly without compare. Once this kind of neuro-biological analysis makes it into the mainstream, it could have a significant influence on the future of politics and how it is studied.

However, the site seems to be a lot more limited when it comes to analysing the political views of voters who don’t fit into the mainstream.

As alternative right wing analysts points out, mainstream politics isn’t really a clash between liberals and conservatives, but between rival visions of liberalism, with right liberalism seen as a tough, practical and positive ideology for the rugged individual, and left liberalism seen as an enlightened, inclusive and progressive ideology for the easy-going urbanite.

Thus the masses follow whichever of the two camps best appears to fit their values, and their vision of where society should be heading.

But knowing Republican voters tend to be extroverts, and Democrat voters are more likely to suffer from depression, doesn’t lend much light on the biological and psychological makeup of alternative political supporters like nationalists, anarchists, populists and paleoconservatives.

Neuropolitics does have some interesting information about differences between libertarians and mainstream centre-right voters, but again, this is only a comparison between groups that fit within the mainstream liberal paradigm.

In the case of the alternative right, it’s likely that many voters may well tendencies usually identified with liberals, since to hold an alternative right wing view in a liberal society, you need to be independently minded or interested in arcane or unfashionable cultural perspectives – a trait Neuropolitics says is more usually associated with “creative” novelty-seeking left-liberals.

It also doesn’t offer much help in analysing the politics of special interest groups – does knowing Democrat-voting liberals are more likely to be late-night owls example, tell up anything about the average supporter of say, the Sierra Club? Since outdoor people are more likely to be larks, then that would suggest they were ore likely to be Republicans, but conventional wisdom says most environmentalists are liberals. Similarly, since immigration restrictionism tends to cross party lines, what can we biologically deduce about your average Numbers USA voter?

Another question mark is whether psychological and biological information about mainstream U.S voters is of much use in analysing politics outside the U.S.

Certainly there are a lot of similarities between mainstream parties in the U.S and those in other English-speaking countries. In New Zealand and Australia for example, most right wing voters tend to espouse the free market, low tax, pro-Israel views held by mainstream U.S conservatives, while most Labor/Labour voting urban liberals can be compared to U.S Democrat voters, albeit with slightly more left-wing views on taxation and welfare.

Continental European politics presents more of a challenge. Most conservative European voters would be considered economically left-wing Greenies by U.S standards, but they’re often further to the right of U.S voters in relation to immigration policy.

Continental immigration restrictionist parties also vary a lot in both social and economic orientation. Some like the Danish Peoples Party are economically and socially right-wing, others like France’s Front National, are economically left-wing and socially right-wing, while Holland’s Pim Fortuyn List party was economically right-wing and socially left-wing.

To find out if the voting differences between Continental and American voters, are due to structural differences in the political systems, or fundamental differences among the voters themselves, it would be necessary to conduct of values surveys which go beyond political allegiance to a particular party.

In a New York Times article on university education there’s a useful rule of thumb for students contemplating how much to spend on tertiary courses – don’t spend more on a degree than you are likely make in your first full year of post-graduate employment (hat tip: Randall Parker).

For example, if you’re likely to make $40, 000 in your first year as an English teacher, then try not to accumulate more than $40,000 of student debt in your four years of training.

While wages for some jobs do increase substantially with experience, for most graduates they don’t increase enough to make up for high debt levels and interest payments. You’ve also got to factor in that you may not even get work in your chosen field of work, and that even if you do, you may grow to hate it and want to do something else.

This should of course be something that governments take into account in formulating education policy, which at the moment seems to be about what’s best for university marketing departments.

Rather than continuing to promote a quantitative bums on seats attitude to education, it’s time western governments were honest and up front with students about the pros and cons of university education.