Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

I&#x27;m an upper-middle class, over-educated professional expert, and I&#x27;m strongly liberal for selfish reasons: mostly, I want to live in a climate of social peace, and would prefer to be surrounded by people who foster a mood of solidarity and benevolence, rather than a cut-throat and ever-worsening competitive mindset.<p>So sure, one way is to protect myself and those I love behind a gated community. But that&#x27;s pretty much voluntarily throwing myself to jail, I&#x27;d rather make it less necessary for others to be aggressive against my kin. I believe it requires more (and smarter) redistribution.<p>Another reason why it&#x27;s my selfish interest, as a professional expert, to continuously reshuffle wealth, is that my social value resides in what I know and in my ability to learn, not in my family&#x27;s accumulated wealth. Stabilising accumulated wealth, especially across generations, would make it harder to use my skills in order to climb higher on the social ladder.<p>Is my education a factor in this view? Probably.<p>* It helps me grasping some sociological insights which ought to be obvious. For instance, while hearing political speeches about wealth (re)distribution, I stay aware that the property laws are a social construct that must be agreed upon and can be altered at will by society, not a natural (let alone a God-given) law.<p>* It exposed me to a lot of competition, in school then at work, and although I&#x27;ve been a winner on average, I aspire to more fulfilling activities than turning others into losers. I have no revenge to take on others people, I don&#x27;t enjoy crushing them.<p>* Having gone from penniless undergrad to minimum-wage PhD student to well-paid junior then senior specialist, I&#x27;ve experienced a variety of wealth levels. As a result I&#x27;m convinced that once basic needs are addressed, monetary incentives don&#x27;t work the way Adam Smith&#x27; sycophants pretend they do. Money&#x27;s meaningful as a way to keep score, and to compare myself among my social peers; but taxes don&#x27;t affect that much, as long as they don&#x27;t reverse relative wealth between potential peers.

51% of college graduates voted for Romney in 2012 while only 48% for Obama<p>Romney actually lost with highschool educated only and he lost significantly with postgraduate studies only getting 42% of the vote with Obama getting 55%.<p>So really the trend is that academics are liberal, not the highly educated.<p>(That 3% gap in college grads likely accounts for a larger percentage of the population than the massive 13% gap among grad degree holders)<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ropercenter.cornell.edu&#x2F;polls&#x2F;us-elections&#x2F;how-groups-voted&#x2F;how-groups-voted-2012&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ropercenter.cornell.edu&#x2F;polls&#x2F;us-elections&#x2F;how-groups...</a><p>edit: another source that adds evidence to my argument<p>Professors in humanities that identify as Republican range from 6 to 11 percent.<p>Social Sciences 7 and 9 percent<p>2% of English professors are Republican.<p>Meanwhile 18% of social scientists are Marxists.<p>This evidence leads me to believe that Academics self select to be liberal and that people with a conservative mindset do not find academia appealing for whatever reason. The reason I rule it has little to do with intelligence of the groups is the prevalence of Marxism amongst academics. Intelligent people that use evidence to reason about their beliefs wouldn&#x27;t be Marxist.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;08&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;sunday&#x2F;a-confession-of-liberal-intolerance.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;08&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;sunday&#x2F;a-confessio...</a>

I worked at a private University (as a conservative leaning independent) for 7 years. I found the University to be a hostile work environment for conservatives. In my case as well as others, that I met while there, it was enough to dissuade us from pursuing an advanced degree.<p>I worked with many wonderful academics, they are people that I still count among the smartest and kindest people that I have ever met. At the same time, they could be absolutely vicious towards conservative or religious ideals or individuals. There was regular conflict over the Catholic University&#x27;s traditional masses and other gatherings. They would wrap themselves in a cloak of &quot;Academic Freedom&quot; as they denounced anything that they viewed as religious infringing on their positions.<p>It wasn&#x27;t just religious issues that brought out the worst of them. I still remember how on the first anniversary of 9&#x2F;11 a number of professors refused to participate in the memorial ceremony because the University&#x27;s ROTC would be the color guard. They deemed their presence to be sending the wrong message and a validation of the war in Afghanistan.<p>All in all, it left a bad taste in my mouth and as time grew on it was no longer a place that I wished to be. If it wasn&#x27;t for an online option at a different school, then I never would have pursued my masters degree.

This has always confused me. There are some rich texts based on beautiful rigor on the side of the conservatives like freidman and Hayek. Goldwater also approaches things in a very principled manner. Arthur brooks&#x27; latest book is similar.<p>On the other than, I have not come across any liberal text, yet, that makes a good convincing case for liberalism. I would love to get some recommendations. I&#x27;m interested in principled arguments for liberalism. If there are so many highly educated people who are liberal, I would assume there are certain foundational texts that argue their position. Basically, I&#x27;m looking for &quot;freedom to choose&quot; of the left.

These kinds of threads tend to be self-congratulatory, and obviously the answer is &quot;self-selection&quot;. But I&#x27;ll bite. Most of the conservative professors I have known in the Humanities have been in (military) history and classics, where they are likely drawn to classical or martial virtues. Economics professors are generally some variety of libertarian. Many Humanities professors are devout Christians.<p>But I&#x27;ve never known a professor to be an intolerant, hard-core social conservative. And perhaps that&#x27;s because the only personality trait that has a correlation with intelligence is &quot;openness to experience&quot;. A certain kind of liberality is necessary in academia.

And I guess the converse question which has vexed socialists for decades - why do so many of the poor vote for centre-right, business-friendly parties? For example, why did so many working class people vote for Thatcher in UK in the 1980s? Why are they not massively in favour of Jeremy Corbyn right now?<p>I&#x27;m not saying it&#x27;s irrational. But sometimes it&#x27;s odd to hear people who need the government to subsidise their minimum wage zero-hours income just for basic survival defending the Conservative Party&#x27;s economic manifesto. I read &quot;The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists&quot; some years ago, and this question really stuck with me.

It never seems to occur to anyone that maybe, just maybe ... there is an anti-conservative selection pressure or bias?<p>Look at the &quot;nomenklatura&quot; in USSR times - they were all good Party members, and they too, had the higher university degrees.<p>If you weren&#x27;t a Party member or in other ways, indicated disloyalty to the prevailing political worldview ... you didn&#x27;t get admitted to the choice spots.<p>How many &quot;Western-style free market&quot; (however defined) professors with tenure, were there in Moscow, in 1987? Must mean that as an economic perspective it was wholly discredited, right?

Unpopular opinion on HN, but people are mostly liberals when the current system works for them and it&#x27;s even more visible as observe the political spectrum outside the US. It&#x27;s easier to say &quot;the market solves everything&quot; when it works for you. When it does not work for them, they turn either to the right or the left side. As the current system is mostly falling apart for the middle class, you then have a raising far-left and far-right as a consequence. That&#x27;s also why the vast majority of rich people are liberals.

Higher education both attracts and produces mindsets which solve problems through planning, engineering and designing.<p>There is a natural tendency to use your methodology of problem solving on all problems. So we tend to produce a greater collection of social engineering and central economic planning advocates. We want to design a greater society. We want to design a greater economy.<p>Even when you look at highly educated vs slightly more highly educated in the same field you see the same shift in mindset. The divergence between Fellow, Architect, Engineer is that at each higher level there is a greater degree if centralization mindset of design.<p>There is a potential fallacy that should be evident that you can not necessarily and simply equate more education with always producing the correct perspectives and therefore liberal view points are the correct positions. As in the above, we in engineering fields know the value higher levels of discipline, yet we also are fully aware of the problems resulting from high level engineers and architects who design their perfect systems which don&#x27;t work in the real world.<p>Higher education produces problem solving disciplines that are very useful and powerful, yet these same disciplines also are subject to error as well as they typically can&#x27;t quantify the numerous variables in large systems thinking<p>For more around this topic, this was a great talk working with systems greater than our human capacity to understand them. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=KGaFcI2UNrI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=KGaFcI2UNrI</a>

I think I&#x27;ll be heavily down-voted for posting that on HN but in my opinion the reason most college graduates are liberal is that - whether we want to admit or not - colleges teach liberalism. I&#x27;m not saying that Big Brother is behind this, I think it &quot;just happened&quot; for many reasons.<p>As a consequence while most liberals think that they have the answer for life, the universe and everything and that they are objective, independent and &quot;scientific&quot; thinkers, they are more often than not just regurgitating packaged values that have been impressed on them.<p>You&#x27;ll always see that 80% of the people are followers. The system teaches liberalism, so 80% of the people going through the system will be liberal just by following - often unconsciously. 10% of the remaining will choose to be liberal out of true critical thinking while the 10 remaining percents won&#x27;t be. Those who haven&#x27;t been through the system (drop outs, high school graduates, etc.) are more likely to have more diverse opinions. Which are then dismissed by flagging them as &quot;opinions mostly held by uneducated people&quot;.<p>But what I&#x27;ve found is that education systems barely teach anything. For all the knowledge we&#x27;ve been presented, we just &quot;really know&quot; a ridiculous tiny fraction of it. This is why nowadays, you don&#x27;t even need to be &quot;smart&quot; in the academical sense of the term to be in the top 5%, you just need to be a critical thinker in your field and think out of the box. Because it is indeed an extremely hard thing to do once you&#x27;ve been through college, as you&#x27;ve been nurturing the illusion that you learned most of the things you actually memorized. Many packaged values and referentials have thereby been patterned on your mind.<p>For all these reasons, it is in my opinion unlikely that most people won&#x27;t feel liberal after going through college.

For perspective, what in the US is called &quot;liberal&quot; in the rest of the world is rather to the right of centre. The two parties are pulling apart from each other but to outsiders they remain very similar both in policy and ideology, at least at the national level. Neither is talking of actual reform, only incremental change.

The two parties have been getting more polarized, that much is clear. The problem with the GOP from an educated person&#x27;s perspective is that many, if not most of its politicians get elected through anti-intellectual rhetoric. Trump is the most extreme example of this. He makes no actual arguments and just attacks his detractors.<p>An educated group taught to embrace science will certainly take issue with leaders who ignore it.<p>Additionally, the GOP is the party of creationists and climate deniers. That is just too extreme of an anti-intellectual slant to tolerate.

Probably because the education system, in most western countries is largely subsidised by government. So the professors, and the teachers who are largely on public payroll, are bound to be less critical of government, than, say someone in the private sector. Which in turn will permeate those who they teach. It&#x27;s in their best interest to then spread ideals which uphold their government funding.

The article isn&#x27;t very well written, but it does raise an interesting question. However, this question requires a clear definition of what is meant by liberal, which is a non trivial matter: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2014&#x2F;02&#x2F;the-origin-of-liberalism&#x2F;283780&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2014&#x2F;02&#x2F;the-orig...</a><p>My to cents: Let&#x27;s start by defining &quot;liberal&quot; as those who hold the belief that the current Trend in social, economic or political developments will result in them having a better life. The opposite of that is the quintessential &quot;conservative&quot; adagio that &quot;things are getting worse and worse&quot;. What exactly constitutes that trend is up for debate, but I think a precise definition isn&#x27;t essential for this argument.<p>Since the percentage of the population that is highly educated is increasing (for whatever definition of &quot;highly&quot;), we can infer that access to education isn&#x27;t only hereditary. That is, there are some of us who are now highly educated but who&#x27;s parents were not (yes, it still is mostly hereditary, and almost for sure we will inherit that to our children). This, in turn, results in better standards of living for us than for our parents. So, locally, the trend, seems for us to be moving in the right direction. We vote for continuing this trend of more education for more people, of more access to healthcare for more people, and so on, because if it weren&#x27;t for that trend we&#x27;d be struggling like our parents did.<p>Compound to that the rich-get-richer phenomena, and then our children will probably keep benefiting from this, so they will most likely also be &quot;liberal&quot;. Only when a social revolution removes our now-hereditary privileges will we turn into &quot;conservatives&quot;.

I believe myself to be a liberal. However, I still believe that the question asked &quot;Why are the highly educated so liberal?&quot; in itself is a loaded question.

Here&#x27;s an alternative perspective from the nytimes:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;08&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;sunday&#x2F;a-confession-of-liberal-intolerance.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;08&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;sunday&#x2F;a-confessio...</a>

There is a curious (albeit incomplete) parallel here to Moldbug&#x27;s theory of the five castes of the United States.

The highly educated can afford to be liberal.<p>This demographic tends to be wealthier. Greater wealth means less required assistance and, therefore, greater opportunity to advocate on the behalf of others.<p>Such is my experience.

Superiority complex leading to a savior complex.

Pithy answer 2: because they are economically privileged.<p>The headline is a broad generalisation, and as another broad generalisation poorer people are more religious and more conservative because they have harder lives, bleaker temporal outlooks and hope for a better life &#x27;beyond&#x27;.

The short answer is &#x27;watch Game of Thrones&#x27;.<p>Liberal means different things in different countries.<p>Generally speaking people&#x27;s beliefs follow their group association rather than the other way. In many US groups this means adopting &#x27;liberal&#x27; ideas.<p>There is also the history of conflict between religious traditions that are Judeo-Christian-Islamic and more pagan or Satanic belief systems.

I would say that I&#x27;m liberal, but not what most people consider liberal by some standards since my politics are closer to mutualism crossed with geolibertarianism. So, I get the occasional &quot;huh&quot; from people when explaining what govt policies I support like LVT, promotion of unions and&#x2F;or worker owned businesses, and the like.

I&#x27;d question the other side: why are conservatives so stupid? They aren&#x27;t all, of course, but there&#x27;s a strong correlation between low IQ and holding a conservative world view.

Because empathy requires effort and a certain level of intellect. My personal experience is that less educated people tend to view the world through a filter of their own experiences and don&#x27;t realise (or choose to ignore) the possibility of a situation vastly different to their own. Highly educated people are exposed to philosophies and opinions that provoke thought and analysis. They are used to engaging in thought experiments and utilising imagination to consider many facets of an issue. I suppose you could say that they are trained to think rather than view something at face value.

1. They&#x27;re less susceptible to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_cognitive_biases" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_cognitive_biases</a><p>2. They like to explore <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Complex_interdependence" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Complex_interdependence</a>

This question doesn&#x27;t get enough attention. I thought this article was pretty shoddy, though.<p>&gt; The growing number of women with advanced degrees is part of it, as well-educated women tend to be especially left-leaning.<p>&quot;Why are the highly educated so liberal?&quot;... &quot;Because highly educated women are liberal, and there are more highly-educated women.&quot;<p>Well that explains everything. &#x2F;s

The most question begging headline you will see this week.

Because they&#x27;re highly educated.

Pithy answer: because you aren&#x27;t going to be afraid of something when you understand that it&#x27;s not something you need to fear.<p>When you have a simple world view, nuance is always going to escape you. An educated person can understand that the world isn&#x27;t simple, which will lead to a more liberal view, as liberal views tend to be based on the assumption that angry, narrow world view responses aren&#x27;t a good thing. Someone who sees things in black and white, ignoring the complexities of life, will respond with simple, ignorant answers.<p>Examples: climate change denial, anti-vax, religion... They&#x27;re the intellectual equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting, rather than seeking to actually understand anything.<p>It&#x27;s worth noting that all these things are driven by fear of things people don&#x27;t understand. Someone who understands how vaccinations work, why we do them, why they&#x27;re made the way they are can&#x27;t be afraid of them, and thus won&#x27;t be against them. But most people aren&#x27;t in that camp, which opens the door for people to make bad choices.<p>It&#x27;s hard getting people to be want to be informed and right, when it means they might have to disagree with their social group.

Just like to point out the members of the T9 lean libertarian.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20150226234712&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.triplenine.org&#x2F;poll&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20150226234712&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.triple...</a><p>T9 (Triple 9) is a high IQ society similar to Mensa, but which only accepts members whose IQ is in the .999 percentile.<p>It&#x27;s a non-scientific poll, but in my experience while lots of my college friends were liberal, lots of my professors and the smartest people I know lean libertarian.

&gt;nytimes.com<p>You might as well post from Pravda.