Here you are. The whole thing. What he says about recent research into the importance of reciprocity is most interesting.
Why the left will never understand populism
January 17 2017, 5:00pm,
Daniel Finkelstein
Labour and the Democrats still believe in equality but voters’ notion of fairness rests on taking out what you put in
‘I Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States.”
So help us God.
How did this happen? An anti-establishment revolt is not, perhaps, an entirely surprising reaction to a banking collapse and stagnant wages, but why has that revolt turned to the right and not the left? And, even more perplexingly, why is this revolt coming from voters who should be keen on the left agenda, people who are not, by any means, prosperous?
On Friday, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States; Britain is leaving the EU; Geert Wilders leads in the polls in the Netherlands; the centre-left Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi has fallen; there are right-wing populist governments in Hungary and Poland; François Hollande has been forced out of the Élysée; and it is quite likely that the final round of the French presidential election will be a contest between a candidate of the centre right and one of the far right.
Last weekend Jeremy Corbyn tried hard to suggest that his agenda should be seen as an effective response to Donald Trump’s, but even without his usual stumbling performance, he did not convince.
This should be the left’s moment, shouldn’t it? Yet everywhere one looks they seem to be losing. There isn’t one simple reason of course, but I would like to suggest one that I think is particularly powerful. It is that the left misunderstands what most people mean by fairness.
In the past 20 years we have learnt a great deal more about how the brain works and about how our social behaviour has evolved. A new wave of thinkers — people like Robert Trivers, Ken Binmore, Martin Nowak, Robert Wright — have looked closely at how we co-operate with each other and why.
Their interest is not in identifying a superior idea of fairness, or making judgments about what we should think is or is not fair. They are seeking to discover what we actually, right or wrong, do think.
This work has led to the powerful, and increasingly widely discussed, idea of reciprocal altruism. We co-operate with people not out of some vague niceness, but because it is a good evolutionary strategy. If I do a favour for you, you will do me one back.
The left traditionally stresses equality and the fairness of equal shares. And, indeed, people are concerned about equity and the way things are shared out. But the new thinking points beyond equality, to the idea of reciprocity. Fairness demands a relationship between what you put in and what you get out. Equality is silent on the contributions that people put in, and no proper notion of fairness can be silent on that.
That people believe in reciprocity rather than equality explains quite a lot, it turns out. We are all on our guard that someone else is taking out more than they have put in. We are, in fact, fairly certain that this is happening all around us and it makes us pretty cross. The political issues that excite the strongest emotions are those where we think someone else is committing a sin against reciprocity. MPs’ expense claims, for instance.
This, obviously, provides a challenge to the right that the left can feel pretty comfortable with. What about men who earn more than women doing the same job? What about chief executives earning vast multiples of their staff’s wages? What about bankers’ bonuses? Here are anti-establishment, egalitarian left arguments that work politically.
But now let’s look more carefully at the banking example.
Bankers were earning vast bonuses for years and nobody was all that bothered. Yes they were being paid big money, but the banks were making big money and paying big taxes. Then came the crash. People suddenly became contributors to the banks rather than vice versa. We were putting in, they were taking out. Bankers’ bonuses became a huge political issue when they moved from being a sin against equality to one against reciprocity.
There’s more. And this is where the idea becomes challenging to the left. What is true of our attitude to bankers turns out also to be true of our attitude to welfare recipients.
Belief in equality dictates only that we are concerned (as we must always be, of course) about whether welfare recipients are given enough to live on and are able to be equal citizens. Yet much debate about welfare ends up being about something else entirely. Just like with the bankers it ends up being about what welfare recipients put in as much as what they take out.
Because we are hardwired to be suspicious that we are being deceived — deception is the subject of two recent books by the biologist Robert Trivers — we are almost impossible to persuade that enough is being done to prevent welfare fraud. Even when (as is often the case) it is. Stressing equality rather than reciprocity, the left is vulnerable on welfare, an issue on which it might imagine it would be strong.
Crime is another example. Here are people who are taking what others have worked hard to earn. Crime isn’t just a potent issue because of safety, it is a potent issue because it is also a question of fairness.
But the most important demonstration of the difference between reciprocity and equality is policy on immigration. And it is here that the gap between the left’s idea of fairness and their voters’ idea of fairness has given them most trouble.
Equality provides very little argument for immigration control. Yet voters in traditional Labour areas don’t regard an open door policy as fair. There are two mechanisms at work here. The first is a feeling, whether reasonable or not, that immigrants are using public services that others have paid to establish. They are taking out what they have not put in. No amount of data showing the contribution made by hard-working migrants shifts this debate all that much.
The second mechanism is more complicated. Because we are worried about being deceived by people who take our favours, but don’t reciprocate them, we guard against it by using shortcuts to help us decide who to trust. One shortcut, unfortunately, is to trust people who look like us and distrust strangers. Mass immigration triggers this reaction too.
The left should be on the rise at a time when people think there is a great deal of injustice and unfairness and are casting around for someone to put it right. But it can’t when its idea of fairness diverges from that of the voters it seeks to attract. They are not hearing the cry of the voters.
Liberté, fraternité, réciprocité.
