During my recent interview with Andrew Sullivan, he repeatedly accused me of being totally oblivious to the realities of human nature. In his view, I hew to an absurdly economistic view of what people are really like. In reality, people care about culture, identity, and community at least as much as they care about material consumption. Indeed, this is how practically everyone describes themselves, right?
False humility aside, I maintain that my understanding of human nature is far deeper than Sullivan’s. Indeed, my understanding of human nature is nothing short of profound.
Like Sullivan, I am well-aware that human beings routinely claim to place supreme value on culture, identity, community, and so on. Unlike Sullivan, however, I refuse to take such hyperbolic claims at face value. Actions really do speak louder than words. And the vast majority of people who claim to place supreme value on culture, identity, or community show otherwise with their deeds.
In the interview, I presented Sullivan with a simple hypothetical. What do you say about a Christian who insists, “My religion is the most important thing in my life,” yet never goes to church? I say this is mighty evidence that this self-styled Christian dramatically overstates her religious commitment. “Most important thing”? More like, “Thing of marginal importance at most.” Sure, she could change my mind if she read the Bible for ten hours a week, or habitually discussed religion on social media, or spent Sundays knocking on neighbors’ doors to ask them to adopt Jesus as their personal savior. But when someone puts little effort into something they claim is extraordinarily important to them, we should conclude that their self-description is false.
Why would a human being say such falsehoods? Sometimes they’re consciously lying; more often, they’re just too intellectually lazy to check their words for accuracy. Either way, their underlying motive is to say things that sound good – to yourself and other people. Why bother? To feel good about yourself – and persuade other people to feel good about you. Saying what sounds noble, and doing what feels pleasant: Now that’s human nature.
What does this have to do with culture, identity, or community? Simple. If you passionately care about such things, you will pay a lot of time and money to get a heavy dose. If you are passionate about being Irish, for example, you will pay a sizable premium to live in an Irish community. If you are passionate about patriotism, you will be an active member of groups like the American Legion. If you are passionate about your community, you’ll regularly volunteer to beautify it. Yet as we know, only a tiny minority of people do anything in this ballpark.
Yes, I know that humans are heterogeneous. People who voluntarily live in communes show by their actions that their community is deeply important to them. Yet the vast majority of people who don’t voluntarily live in communes ipso facto show a lower level of commitment, with the median just a little above zero.
Can’t we just express our deep commitments via voting? Absolutely not. In any real-world election, the probability that you change an electoral outcome is near-zero. For practical purposes, then, voting is talk, not action. Voting is on par with threatening to leave the country because your side loses an election. To count as action, you would actually have to follow through with your threat. Hardly anyone does.
You could reply, “Bryan, if you really had a profound understanding of human nature, you would keep your mouth shut about all this, because you’d realize that people hate hearing these ugly truths and aren’t going to reform.” Rebuttal: Normally I do keep my mouth shut about all this. I share my profound understanding of human nature with the rare minority of people who are genuinely curious about the social world. Self-selected folks like you, dear EconLog readers.
READER COMMENTS
Philo
Jun 24 2021 at 12:07pm
“Saying what sounds noble, and doing what feels pleasant: Now that’s human nature.” In short, we are hypocrites. I don’t know whether this counts as *profound* understanding, but at least it is *accurate*.
Mark Z
Jun 24 2021 at 12:19pm
“In reality, people care about culture, identity, and community at least as much as they care about material consumption.”
To the extent that Sullivan is right – and I think you underestimate how much people do care about these things – it’s a self-defeating argument with respect to open borders. If he’s right, then most people won’t want to move even once borders are open, because they won’t want to leave their communities, their cultures, and their identities behind. And again, I think this is probably true. Changing languages, leaving behind already-made friends, family, and familiar settings are big non-monetary costs that will limit the number of people willing to migrate. But for open borders to be a severe threat to host countries’ culture/identity, ironically, people in poor countries would have to be economistic caricatures who flood to wherever median wages are highest until wages in different countries are brought to parity in short order.
Tom Howe
Jun 25 2021 at 10:09am
Mark correctly lists losing language, friends, family, and familiar settings as costs; yet he dismisses them as “non-monetary”. This makes it hard to make economic calculations, but doesn’t affect the necessity to do so. As to the effect on open borders, each potential migrant evaluates all his loses (costs) against the expected gain. (And the gains also have a non-monetary component, especially when the home environment is heavily violent.) Once you allow accounting for ALL the costs and benefits, it is exactly the sort of economic calculation that Bryan suggests.
Aaron
Jun 24 2021 at 12:36pm
I was really disappointed by that podcast. I like both Caplan and Sullivan. It was like watching two of your friends fight. FWIW I don’t think Sullivan was being terribly fair.
But the verb “care” is really failing us here.
Arguing about what people care about is like arguing about what makes a person a true Scotsman.
The fact that the meaning of the word “care” is nebulous is in a sense a feature rather than a bug. If it wasn’t vague, it wouldn’t be as useful for signaling.
Joe Denver
Jun 24 2021 at 12:53pm
I think Bryan is right in broad strokes.
However, there does seem to be many people in the US, who are willing to pay for overly expensive homes, and endure long work commutes, largely because those homes exist in a low crime, high trust, suburbanite culture.
I’m willing to bet that Bryan himself does this as well.
Perhaps there is nothing sinister about this tendency. But when you look at the deep south, or highly urban areas in the north, this tendency does lead to a lot of ethnic, and sometimes religious, segregation.
mark
Jun 25 2021 at 11:18am
They might live in that “overly-expensive houses” far from work in nice communities mostly because a) they really like to live with their family in those houses and b) those houses are affordable only far from work. Here in Germany people move to build houses in villages (meaning 10-20 miles from work in town; small country here), because those houses would cost at least double near their work. The nice community there – well, some like it, some don’t. They all like the house-prices. And after moving all will claim the community is “really nice, low crime and all”.
Joe Denver
Jun 26 2021 at 8:42am
Certainly.
But you could give similar excuses to any such scenario.
Perhaps a person who claims to various their religion, but doesn’t go to church, simply doesn’t like the priest at their local church (this is probably one of the more common response I’ve heard to this scenario).
Perhaps an Irishman who claims to value their culture, but refuses to live alongside other Irishmen, simply can’t afford to do so.
Emily
Jun 24 2021 at 12:57pm
When I look around at regular worship attendance (and dues-paying), participation in other voluntary associations, military service, people who choose to stay where they grew up instead of leave for education or career, and different home values in different communities, I see a whole lot of humans whose decisions at least plausibly are being significantly affected by their values around culture, identity, and community. Not everyone, but certainly more than a “tiny minority.”
Brian
Jun 24 2021 at 2:15pm
While I agree that actions speak louder than words, what a person feels is important can also be expressed in what they do privately and in what they think. So someone who never goes to church but reads the Bible daily could still plausibly that religion is highly important to them. And someone who eschews Irish step-dancing lessons but constantly thinks about taking a trip to Ireland or humming Irish tunes could honestly claim to be proud of their Irish heritage, even if there’s no public evidence of it.
I agree with some of the other posters–when the sum total of people’s thoughts and private actions and public actions are taken into account, there seems to be a lot of individual focus on culture, identity, and community.
Ghatanathoah
Jun 24 2021 at 3:45pm
I can see two possible counterarguments to this. One is that people experience akrasia. They do care about community, identity, etc, but are thwarted from acting on their caring by their impulsiveness and shortsightedness. Instead they impulsively chose the short term reward of material consumption.
The second possible counterargument is that community and identity are needs in the same way water is a need. Most people spend very little time drinking water. But if someone tried to stop them from drinking any water at all, they would resist very hard indeed!
On the other hand, I am not sure how well these two arguments hold up. The people I think of as exceptionally disciplined, the kinds of hard-working people who achieve lots in their lives, don’t seem especially more community oriented than average. I think less impulsive humans with lower akrasia might participate a bit more in their community, but not massively more.
I am less sure about the second one, but from introspection it feels like community is more of a consumption good than a need like water.
Rebes
Jun 24 2021 at 3:51pm
Regarding the hypothetical conversation with the purported Christian, I have a more current example.
What do you say about somebody who claims to be concerned about climate change, yet moves to a beachfront home in Florida?
People do indeed express their true beliefs with their actions, not their voices.
David Seltzer
Jun 24 2021 at 4:57pm
Rebes, nice example of revealed preference.
Lant Pritchett
Jun 24 2021 at 4:45pm
This blog makes me really glad I paid my tithe last month.
I am sorry Andrew Sullivan wasn’t nice to you.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Jun 24 2021 at 4:59pm
But if people’s valuing of community, religion, etc. affects which and how much the demand and supply of stuff, doe it make sense to contrast the two?
Philo
Jun 25 2021 at 5:44pm
Yes, we can contrast the demand for community and religion with the demand for stuff, because we can contrast community and religion with stuff.
Fazal Majid
Jun 24 2021 at 5:26pm
And people claim they love their children but pursue NIMBY policies that price them out of a home, or support deficit spending that will saddle their grandchildren with unsustainable debt. That said there are plenty of examples of people voting against their rational self-interest.
Sriram Balasubramanian
Jun 25 2021 at 2:31am
That’s the thing, as Bryan mentioned, voting is practically just talk. The probability that any single vote is going to change any outcome is minimal.
Jose Pablo
Jun 24 2021 at 8:42pm
Climate change is probably one of the best nowadays example of this ¨feeling good¨ talking but not doing …
… interesting enough politicians could end up taking ¨people false preference¨ at face value and forcing them to pay the economic (or behavioral) price the vast majority of them don’t really want to pay …
… or maybe the politicians will discover the political risk of taking people claimed preferences at face value when the actual price to be paid by the vast majority of them is revealed
Student of Liberty
Jun 28 2021 at 10:02am
“maybe the politicians will discover the political risk of taking people claimed preferences”
That’s what happened with the Yellow Vests in France, at the start. The trigger for the movement was a suggested increase of tax on gasoline.
The other funny thing on this movement is that everybody had a yellow vest in their car further to a regulatory change from a few years earlier, mandating it for “safety reasons”. As an unintended consequence of regulation, I love that one.
Kevin Jackson
Jun 24 2021 at 9:02pm
I think Bryan’s example of people that care about their community (ie, volunteering to improve it) is not the best. I would say that such volunteering shows sometime who wants a different community, not one who values the community they have!
Perhaps a better example would be willingness to move for better employment. And my understanding is that people don’t take advantage of such opportunities as much as they could. And if part of the reason that people don’t move as much as they could is because they have purchased a home, that’s another sign they value a community over material factors.
Emile Hatem
Jun 24 2021 at 9:43pm
A better way to show that your passion for you community is to pay a premium to live in it, as you Bryan said in the interview.
But your 5% premium for a more desirable community seems quite low. The premium to live in Manhattan over Hays, Kansas is far more than 5%. Those two communities are at extreme ends of the spectrum, but I suspect many people could reduce their housing costs by much more than 5% by moving to less desirable locations. People care about their community and are paying for it.
Brent Buckner
Jun 25 2021 at 9:10am
I’ll count the number of hours that I watch television and read genre fiction in favour of demonstrating how much I value culture. I could do similarly in favour of identity – how much I identify as a science fiction fan….
JFA
Jun 25 2021 at 10:23am
I am less reluctant to dismiss people’s statements of preference as having little effect or meaning. Public pronouncements act to coordinate many individuals, and many public pronouncements amplify that. As a student of communism (and the evils lying therein), I’m surprised Bryan doesn’t see the importance of public pronouncements that do not perfectly correlate with behavior. One thing that keeps totalitarian regimes (past and present) afloat are the things people say in public that signal fealty to the regime (even if they would really want the regime toppled). Even if some proclaims they are a devout Christian while not going to church, those pronouncements can aid in delaying the death of the church (or at least the church’s influence) for at least a little while. Likewise for other pronouncements of support for various institutions.
JFA
Jun 25 2021 at 12:10pm
“less reluctant” should be “more reluctant”
A Country Farmer
Jun 25 2021 at 2:02pm
> Voting is on par with threatening to leave the country because your side loses an election. To count as action, you would actually have to follow through with your threat. Hardly anyone does.
So profoundly true.
Julian
Jun 26 2021 at 10:56am
I listened to the full discussion. And Bryan, I’m not sure why you wouldn’t just concede that people may have a genuine “communitarian” desire for a more nativist public policy, or something deeper than just political poetry. Even you used to acknowledge that opposition to immigration was mainly due to xenophobia and nationalism, which are common among the masses.
I think a more reasonable way to defend such claims would’ve been the same approach you had in your book; that is, rather than fight the assertions that people genuinely want to preserve their native cultures, national character, institutions, and all of that, a more productive route would be to point out that immigrants don’t really threaten any of that in any deep way (some of which I know you did in the beginning of the interview).
Another response would be to point out that culture does change even in times of low immigration. For example, the United States between 1940 and 1970.
SK
Jun 28 2021 at 6:12pm
Great post! Yep, action is where the rubber meets the road. Some years back was at a family dinner and a very wealthy woman was ranting about the imminent planetary doom from carbon emissions and the not soon enough need to address it. So I asked this very wealthy woman this: How much of your net worth are you willing to hand over to address your uber concern? Answer: That’s an interesting question which i still await an answer to. Thought to myself at the time: Not being able to specify any dollar amount told me tons of what she really feels re imminent doom
Mike
Jun 29 2021 at 9:32am
Like many, Sullivan conflates economics (the study of how humans deal with the problem of unlimited wants in a world of scarce resources) with finance (how an individual, company or government acquires money and how they spend or invest that money). The problem is that they fail to recognize that many things other than money (or other tangible object) have value. As such, Sullivan cannot recognize that a rational actor might value the act of charity higher than the possession of a certain amount of cash and act accordingly.
Pierre Lemieux
Jun 29 2021 at 10:19am
People value community so much that, in a shortage (quantity demanded larger than quantity supplied at a capped price), they rush to hoard toilet paper even if their purchases reduce what’s available to the rest of the community and irrespective of the fact that some fellow community members would be willing to pay more for it.
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