What is to be gained by listening to opposing viewpoints?

It is comforting to listen to people espouse views like our own. Perhaps it makes us feel that our views are being validated.

Listening to an opposing viewpoint can feel challenging. There are several reasons for that. There may be times when we are not in the mood for the intellectual stimulation involved in considering the merits and demerits of an opposing viewpoint.

A more deep-seated reason for feeling challenged arises when we identify strongly with views that are being attacked. We may even feel offended. That has traditionally been seen to be likely when views on politics, religion and sex are being criticized. Ethnicity and culture should be added to that list. People also tend to be highly offended if anyone casts aspersions on the sporting teams they support.

However, taking offence is optional. Many Collingwood supporters, and many people of Irish and Scottish descent even seem to be able to see the humour in some of the jokes made at their expense.

From my childhood memories, in the farming community in which our family lived in the 1950s, there seemed to be greater willingness to listen to opposing political viewpoints than exists anywhere today. There seemed to be widespread acceptance that you need to listen to opposing political viewpoints if you want to argue against them effectively. People steered clear of discussion of religious differences and if anyone had views about sex and marriage that were at variance with conventional morality they didn’t discuss them openly.

The civility of the participants is obviously an important determinant of the amount of heat generated when contentious political issues are discussed. From my own experience, and limited discussions with others, I have the impression that in the 1950s people were generally more intent than they are now on maintaining civility when participating in political discussions. It seemed common for discussions to end in a meeting of minds on some points and respectful disagreement on others. Occasionally, when one of the main participants was intent on giving offence, discussions would end in an exchange of insults, or worse.

Have people become more open to listening to opposing views on other contentious issues since the 1950s?  A few years ago, I would have argued that the shibboleths had diminished as the major religions had become more tolerant of each other and a revolution in attitudes had caused many people to moderate their views of sexual morality.

It now seems that the old shibboleths have been replaced as new issues have become politicised. When issues become politicised it now seems to be much more common for people to parrot the views of the leaders of their political tribe and to refuse to consider opposing viewpoints. The art of listening seems to be disappearing from the public realm.

Steven Pinker has an interesting discussion of the politicization of issues in his recent book, Enlightenment Now: The case for reason, science, humanism and progress. He refers to research by the Dan Kahan, a legal scholar, who argues that bitter public disputes over science are now “the exception rather than the rule”. The exception arises when certain beliefs become symbols of cultural allegiance. To help make this point Kahan refers to recent U.S. history regarding vaccines for Hepatitis B and the HPV virus (a major cause of cervical cancer). Both vaccines prevent sexually transmitted diseases. Hep B vaccination has apparently been accepted without much opposition, but HPV vaccination has become a political firestorm because of fears that it would encourage teenage promiscuity. Kahan suggests that the difference stems from the way the two vaccines were introduced.  Hep B vaccination was treated as a routine public health matter, but the manufacturers of the HPV vaccine lobbied state legislatures to make vaccination of adolescent girls mandatory. Kahan’s view is supported by Australian experience of a voluntary HPV vaccination program being introduced successfully without the issue becoming politicised.

Issues often become politicized when they are taken up by political leaders. For example, it seems likely that by politicising the global warming debate, Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth made it more difficult for conservatives to acknowledge the merits of any proposed policy action on climate change.

The media also plays a role in politicising issues by converting disagreement on public policy into a spectator sport.  In my view Australia’s public broadcaster, the ABC, is a major offender. The ABC’s charter requires it to inform and entertain, but unfortunately does not require it to encourage the reasoned debate and respectful disagreement necessary for liberal democracy to function effectively. In particular, the Q&A program seems to me to be designed to politicize policy debate. It entertains viewers by providing a forum for activist and conservative tribes to clash on totemic issues. Although some panellists and audience participants do their best to engage in reasoned debate, it would be difficult for any viewers to obtain a better understanding of alternative viewpoints from this program.

How can we have a useful exchange of views on issues that have become politicised? In a recent article on this blog I suggested that people who approach issues from different ideological perspectives would be able to have more useful policy discussions if they could turn their attention to what they can learn from the actual experiences of people in different institutional and policy settings. That is rarely straight forward, of course, because interpretation of experience is not immune to ideological bias. But it is still good advice!

It can also be useful to ask people to explain views you disagree with, rather than asserting that they are talking nonsense. Steven Pinker notes that when people are asked to explain an opinion they often realize that they don’t know what they are talking about and become more open to counter-arguments. That is more likely to occur when they are aware that someone is listening intently to the answer they are giving.

This view is consistent with Leah Goldrick’s conclusion in a recent article about the know-it-all syndrome. On her blog, Common Sense Ethics, Leah writes:

“Thinking is fundamentally driven by questions, not answers. This is why doubt, not certainty, is so important. Doubt is the starting place that leads us to question the assumptions that have lead us to a particular conclusion, and doubt is what drives us to learn more if we will humble ourselves enough to consider that we may be wrong. Constant learning, from a place of humble confidence, rather than a place of arrogance, is the antidote to know-it-all syndrome”.

You are more likely to have useful exchanges of view if you “assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t”. That is one of the rules that Jordan Peterson lists in his recent book, 12 Rules for Life (recently reviewed on this blog). Peterson suggests that we remain threatened by disease, self-deception, unhappiness and many other causes of suffering because we are too ignorant to protect ourselves. There is always potential for us to improve our own lives if we respect the personal experience of our conversational partners.

Some of my readers may be wondering whether there is any organisation they could joint to help cultivate a listening culture and improved communication in the community in which they live. A few weeks ago, the realisation dawned on me that for the past 16 years I have been a member of an organisation whose founder believed that “in bringing improvement in the way of better thinking, better listening, better speaking to individuals we are contributing to the improvement of the society which is made up of these individuals”. The quote is from an article by Ralph Smedley, founder of Toastmasters International, which appeared in the February 1958 issue of The Toastmaster. (The article, entitled, ‘The Toastmasters Club … Its Meaning and Values’, has been reproduced in Personally Speaking: Selections from the Writings of Dr Ralph C Smedley.)

The mission of Toastmasters is to develop communication and leadership skills of individual members so that they can achieve greater self-confidence and personal growth. The benefits that can bring to the lives of individual members are obvious but, as Ralph Smedley maintained, members of Toastmasters - now numbering more than 352,00 – also have an opportunity to contribute to “the building of a better society made up of individuals who must act in groups”.

Is John Locke responsible for the failings of liberal democracy?

The liberalism that Patrick Deneen writes about in his recent book, Why Liberalism Failed, is the set of principles upon which liberal democracies are built. This set of principles encompasses the classical liberalism favoured by many who would like to reduce the dependence of citizens on government, as well as the progressive liberalism of those who see a role for government in supporting emancipative values.

In my view Deneen makes many good points. Having just finished reading and writing about The Meaning of Democracy by Vincent Ostrom I welcome Deneen’s further reminder that citizens of the United States (and other liberal democracies) no longer display the intense commitment toward democratic citizenship at a local level observed by Alexis de Tocqueville when he visited America in the 1830s. I welcome Deneen’s view that “politics and human community must percolate from the bottom up, from experience and practice”. I welcome his support for practices “that sustain culture within communities, the fostering of household economics, and ‘polis life’, or forms of self-governance that arise from shared civic participation”. I welcome his acceptance that the achievements of liberalism “must be acknowledged” and that we “must build on those achievements”. I also welcome that Deneen’s book is much easier to read than Ostom’s book.

Unfortunately, Deneen’s book is based on a monstrous error. The error I refer to is not directly linked to his criticism of globalization and technological progress, his forecast of growing inequality, or his fears about “rapacious exploitation of resources”. Some of what he writes on those topics is in error, but in my view those errors are balanced to a large extent by insightful comments about education and politics, and his acknowledgement that “there can be no going back”. (Deneen’s negativity about the modern world leaves me with a strong desire for an antidote. My desire to read Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker’s latest book, has suddenly become more urgent.)

Deneen’s monstrous error stems from his mis-reading of John Locke:

“Both Hobbes and Locke—but especially Locke—understand that liberty in our prepolitical condition is limited not only by the lawless competition of other individuals but by our recalcitrant and hostile natures. A main goal of Locke’s philosophy is to expand the prospects for our liberty—defined as the capacity to satisfy our appetites—through the auspices of the state. Law is not a discipline for self-government but the means for expanding personal freedom: ‘The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom’.” (p 47-48).

Deneen has taken the quoted sentence about the “end of law” from John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. However, in the paragraph from which the quoted sentence is taken, Locke was actually writing about the discipline of self-government rather than law provided “through the auspices of the state”. The paragraph begins:

“The law, that was to govern Adam, was the same that was to govern all his posterity, the law of reason”.

Locke goes on to imply that everyone has to learn “the use of reason” before they can know where their “proper interest” lies. It is in the context of writing about “the law of reason” that Locke notes:

“the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom: for in all the states of created beings capable of laws, ‘where there is no law, there is no freedom’ for liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others”.

Locke implies that “the law of reason” is linked to norms of reciprocity: “for who could be free, when every other man’s humour might domineer over him”. See: Second Treatise of Government, para 57.

In The Nature and Purposes of Government: a Lockean View, Linda Raeder has carefully noted the vast difference between Hobbesian and Lockean views of the state of nature. While Hobbes saw the state of nature as a “war of all against all”, Locke saw it as being governed by natural law. Linda Raeder notes that Locke’s particular formulation of the law of nature “carried forward a longstanding tradition that ascribes an intrinsic moral dimension to human nature”.  According to that view all humans “possess an inherent ability to distinguish between right and wrong” and “every human being knows, as Locke says, that he is obliged, ‘as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind’.” (Raeder, loc 465)

Why do I view Deneen’s mis-reading of John Locke a monstrous error? If Deneen had read Locke more carefully he could not claim:

“Liberalism rejects the ancient conception of liberty as the learned capacity of human beings to conquer the slavish pursuit of base and hedonistic desires” (p 37).

Nor could he claim:

“Liberalism’s ascent and triumph required sustained efforts to undermine the classical and Christian understanding of liberty, the disassembling of widespread norms, traditions, and practices, and perhaps above all the reconceptualization of primacy of the individual defined in isolation from arbitrary accidents of birth, with the state as the main protector of individual rights and liberty” (p 27).

If Deneen had not misread Locke his central thesis about the contradictions inherent within classical liberalism would fall apart. He could not claim:

“Liberalism has failed—not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself. It has failed because it has succeeded. As liberalism has “become more fully itself,” as its inner logic has become more evident and its self-contradictions manifest, it has generated pathologies that are at once deformations of its claims yet realizations of liberal ideology” (p 3).

If we want to understand why liberal democracy is becoming “a war of all against all” we need to understand why the norms underlying it are breaking down, despite the efforts of classical liberals to uphold them. Why is it that people now exercise less restraint in the demands that they make on others through the political process? Why is it that those whose tax payments fund transfers through the political process increasingly consider themselves to be exploited? We can’t blame John Locke, or his classical liberal followers for the failings of liberal democracy.

Despite my misgivings about Why Liberalism Failed I am grateful to Patrick Deneen for drawing attention to the importance of the exit rights advocated by classical liberals. In discussing how self-governing communities might emerge, he writes:

“For a time, such practices will be developed within intentional communities that will benefit from the openness of liberal society. They will be regarded as ‘options’ within the liberal frame, and while suspect in the broader culture, largely permitted to exist so long as they are nonthreatening to the liberal order’s main business” (p 179).

That is hardly a ringing endorsement for the exit rights that Locke and Jefferson helped to have recognized as core values of western civilization. Nevertheless, I am grateful for the opportunity to note that the author is pointing to a means whereby liberalism could transform itself rather than fail.

What kind of governance would emerge if we insisted that we are individually responsible for fashioning mutually beneficial relationships with others?

This post begins where the preceding post ended. I suggested there that conditions most favourable to human flourishing would emerge in “self-organizing and self-governing societies” in which each person “is first his or her own governor and is then responsible for fashioning mutually productive relationships with others”.  That is the description of self-organizing and self-governing societies provided by Vincent Ostrom in The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerability of Democracies (1997, p 84).

Ostrom argued that it is “within families and other institutional arrangements characteristic of neighbourhood, village, and community life that citizenship is learned and practiced for most people most of the time”. This is where people learn to be self-governing, by learning how to live and work with others. (p x)

He explained that in face-to-face relationships associated with activities entered voluntarily for mutual benefit people also learn to exercise power with others rather than power over others. The exercise of power with others implies a willingness to take account of the interest of others in "patterns of social accountability." The democratic form of governance that evolves under those circumstances is likely to be characterised by “mutual understandings grounded in common knowledge, agreeable patterns of accountability, and mutual trust” (p 287).

Vincent Ostrom’s views on the benefits of decentralized governance for human flourishing were based partly on the empirical research on governance arrangements conducted with Elinor Ostrom at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. Aspects covered in this research included urban policing, irrigation systems, and forest resource management. Lin Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize for her work showing that common pool resources could often be successfully managed by user associations.

The history of decentralized governance, particularly in the United States, also provided Vincent Ostrom with evidence that self-governing societies were practicable. He observed:

“The American federalists and Tocqueville were able to conceive how democracy as a form of government could be used to craft the architecture of authority relationships in ways that were constitutive of what could appropriately be conceptualized as self-governing societies. Such concepts drew on prior experiences in consti­tuting free cities, monastic orders, religious congregations, merchant soci­eties, craft guilds, associations among peasants, markets, and other pat­terns of human association” (p 280).

Why have many functions previously performed by voluntary associations and local government been centralized, leaving citizens to be passive consumers of services with no direct role in management? It is easy enough to identify who might benefit from centralization. Access to central pools of funding have offered service providers the prospect of higher pay. Bureaucrats have been offered vast opportunities for career advancement. Centralization of funding has offered many consumers the prospect of getting someone else to help pay for services they consume.

Centralisation of service delivery has also promised lower cost service provision resulting from scale economies. However, such benefits have been offset to some extent by inefficient work practices associated with centralized bureaucracies. Lower costs could have been achieved with greater certainty if decentralized governance had been retained, with service delivery contracted out to the private sector.

Some readers might suspect that Vincent Ostrom was a reactionary, vainly seeking a return to the village life of a bygone era. He is more appropriately viewed as a scholar seeking progress toward a science of citizenship. In the final chapter of this book he writes optimistically:

“A quest for conflict resolution consistent with the reestablishment of communities of associated relationships based again on precepts of covenantal relationships is the way for maintaining the covenantal character of self-governing societies through time and across generations. Such an approach is facilitative of innovations consis­tent with standards of enlightenment, freedom, justice, reciprocity, and mutual trust in patterns of order in human societies” (p 280).

It is hard to know how sufficient numbers of citizens might eventually decide to insist that assign­ments of authority under current legislation be made subject to challenge and contestation by groups who want to be self-organizing and self-governing. Perhaps this will emerge from the slow train wreck now occurring in bureaucracies of even the older-established democracies as they experience increasing difficulty in meeting the expectations of voters. To reduce costs, greater efforts may be made to provide social safety nets in a manner consistent with contestable service delivery. Increasing efforts may be made to involve community groups in service delivery. Volunteers, who are still active in many areas of service delivery, may seek greater involvement in decision-making. We may also see more community groups seeking to opt out of centralised provision of social services to obtain services more closely attuned to their requirements.  

What kind of government is most likely to promote human flourishing?

One way to approach this question is to rule out those kinds of government that are least likely to enable people to live lives that they value.

We can begin by ruling out those kinds of government that exercise absolute power in a cruel and oppressive way. There is no need to explain why that kind of despotism is inimical to human flourishing.

If you ask yourself how we can avoid being ruled by a cruel and oppressive despot you will probably begin to sketch out some constitutional rules requiring fair elections and preventing concentrations of power in a few hands. There is a fair chance that the constitutional rules you specify would describe liberal democracy. So far so good.

However, some written constitutions that appear to embody ideals of liberal democracy end up as a façade for oppressive government. So, I have to ask myself why some experiments in liberal democracy been more successful than others.

Before I can attempt to answer that I need to explain what I have previously described as democracy’s basic problem – which could also be described as the tragedy of democracy because of its similarity to the tragedy of the commons (see my preceding post). Democracy’s basic problem arises because of inherent tendencies for the responsibilities of elected governments to expand beyond their capacity to cope. That results from a combination of two factors. First, the perceived benefits to individual voters of proposals for an expansion of government responsibilities in areas of particular interest to them exceed the additional costs they incur as a result of those proposals. Second, when an individual elector sees others declaring their support for political parties which promise additional spending or regulation in their particular fields of interest, it is natural for her to feel that her interests will likewise be better served by behaving similarly. (Democracy’s basic problem is further explained in Chapter 8 of Free to Flourish.)

Democracy’s basic problem could be expected to result in an ongoing expansion of government spending, an increasing regulatory burden constraining growth in productivity, higher tax rates on those least able to protect themselves politically (e.g. foreign investors) with adverse effects on investment incentives, and expanding fiscal deficits with public debt growing beyond the capacity of the government to service it.

Those trends obviously can’t continue indefinitely. At some stage, the government’s bankers will refuse to advance additional credit. That means that funds will no longer be available to fund social services or to pay government employees. Civil disorder is likely to ensue. It is open to speculation who the main characters will be in the next act, as the political theatre turns into a democratic tragedy. Voters may resort to electing demagogues whose policies will cause further deterioration in the economy. In the final act it is quite common for the generals to take over the reins of government to restore order.

Thus, on the basis of that reasoning it might appear that democracy is unlikely to be a sustainable form of government over the longer term.

So, how come some democracies have survived for well over a century?

One possible explanation, which could be described as the Schumpeterian explanation, after the economist Joseph Schumpeter, is that this has been achieved by constraining democracy to ensure that “the effective range of political decision should not be extended too far”. (Again, there is more discussion of this in Chapter 8 of Free to Flourish.)

Another possible explanation (not adequately discussed in Free to Flourish) is that the culture of some countries has fostered normative conditions that have prevented democracy’s basic problem from emerging with irresistible force. In his book, Why I, too, am not a conservative, James Buchanan identified two norms that underpin liberal democracy:

·         that a sufficient proportion of the population can make their own choices and prefer to be autonomous rather than dependent on others; and

·         that a sufficient proportion of the population enter relationships with others on the basis of reciprocity, fair dealing and mutual respect.

The first norm needs to be met for people to be able to cast their votes to achieve outcomes that they prefer, whilst exercising restraint in the demands that they make on others through the political process. The second norm needs to be met to ensure that those who depend on transfers from the public purse do not consider those transfers to reflect successful exploitation of others through the political process, and that those whose tax payments fund those transfers do not consider themselves to be exploited.

Buchanan concluded:

“Generalized or widespread failure of persons to adhere to these norms, along with widespread recognition that others also disregard the standards, will insure that the liberal order itself must fail, quite independently from any institutional safeguards.” (p 28)

As early as the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville expressed similar concerns in Democracy in America about the implications for democracy of the emergence of a culture of dependence on government.  In his discussion of the “sort of despotism that democratic nations have to fear” he suggested that democratic governments might take upon themselves full responsibility for the happiness of citizens, reducing each nation “to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd”.  Tocqueville remarked:

“It is indeed, difficult to conceive how men who have entirely given up the habit of self-government should succeed in making a proper choice of those by whom they are to be governed; and no one will ever believe that a liberal, wise, and energetic government can spring from the suffrages of a subservient people. … The vices of rulers and the ineptitude of the people would speedily bring about its ruin … ” See: Democracy in America, Book 4, Chapter 6.

Tocqueville doesn’t seem to have mentioned norms of reciprocity (or even adherence to the golden rule) explicitly as one of the factors that had led to maintenance of democracy in America, but he emphasised the importance of “the manners and customs of the people” and “the whole moral and intellectual condition of a people”.

Vincent Ostrom commented as follows:

“In light of the meaning to be assigned to the manner and customs of the people, we can understand why Tocqueville identified religion as the first of their political institutions even though religion took no direct part in the government of society. The place of religion was important to the whole moral and intellectual tradition of a people when complemented by the place of families, friends, neighbors, and schooling in the shaping of what might be called "habits of the heart and mind." The place of habits of the heart and mind is critical to the possibility that societies of men might establish systems of governance appropriate to the exercise of reflection and choice as ways of coping with problems of conflict and conflict reso­lution.” Vincent Ostrom, The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerability of Democracies, p 14.

Most readers will probably have gathered by now that I think that adherence to the norms that underpin liberal democracy has now diminished to such an extent that this form of government is in deep trouble, even in the western countries where it has been sustained most successfully in the past. So, we are faced with an ongoing struggle to avoid a democratic tragedy, with adverse implications for human flourishing.

However, such prognostications don’t help us much in answering the question I began with. The best way to move toward an answer, it now seems to me, is to follow the lead of Vincent Ostrom and to ask what forms of governance are likely to emerge when it recognized that each person “is first his or her own governor and is then responsible for fashioning mutually productive relationships with others” (p 84).

How did you react to the appointment of a Minister for Happiness in the UAE?

I chuckled. My initial reaction was that the appointment didn’t seem to be the kind of thing that should be taken seriously. But I wondered what the motives of the UAE government might be.

Some commentators have suggested that the appointment of a Minister for Happiness in the UAE was Orwellian. That sent me looking to see whether Orwell had a Ministry of Happiness in Nineteen Eighty-Four. He didn’t. He had ministries of love, peace, plenty and truth. The distinguishing characteristic of each those ministries was the pursuit of policies that were the opposite of what was implied by the label. For example, the Ministry of Love pursued enforced loyalty to Big Brother through policies of fear and repression.

If North Korea establishes a Minister for Happiness it would be reasonable to presume an Orwellian motive, but I doubt that applies to the UAE.

I am not sure that the Orwellian motive even applies to the establishment of a Ministry of Supreme Social Happiness by president Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela in 2013. His motive was probably to distract people from the decline in their economic well-being, occurring even then as a consequence of the government’s economic mismanagement. It is unlikely that the Ministry is helping people to feel any less miserable as the Venezuelan economy now collapses around them, with falling crude oil prices adding to their woes.

Given the fall in oil prices over the last year, the distraction motive might also help to explain the appointment of a happiness minister in the UAE. The IMF has reduced its growth forecasts for the UAE, even though it is more diversified than many other oil-producing countries in the Middle East. The fall in oil prices is causing fiscal deficits to rise and the government is responding by reigning in government spending. The flow-on effects of this might make life more difficult for the large expatriate community (83.5% of the population) most of whom are from South Asia.

In announcing the appointment of a minister for happiness, the UAE prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, claimed that the objective was to "align and drive government policy to create social good and satisfaction". The appointed minister, Ahood Al Roumi, was previously Director-General of the prime minister’s department and will apparently retain that position.

The appointment is part of a government shake-up involving appointment of more young ministers and more females. Women now make up more than one-third of all ministers in the government. The government of the UAE has previously announced the vision for their country to be among the best in the world in the Human Development Index HDI and to be “the happiest of all nations”. The UAE currently ranks 41st of the 188 countries included in the HDI.

It is tempting to dismiss all that as window dressing, but there is a chance that the government of the UAE is actually trying to find a way forward toward a better society. In terms of the “good society” indicators I used in Free to Flourish there is a lot of room for improvement in the UAE, even though it stacks up better than a lot of other countries. Of the 110 countries included in the analysis, the UAE ranks 39^th in terms of peacefulness, 24^th in terms of opportunity and 17^th in terms of economic security.

It will be interesting to observe whether Ahood Al Roumi attempts to use her new role to make the UAE a better society. 

What would self-actualizing politics look like?

It is difficult to observe democratic politics without getting the impression that it brings out the worst in people. We frequently see politicians elbowing each other out of the way as they struggle to gain power and influence. We often see them make promises they are not likely to be able to keep. We see some of them endlessly repeating slogans whose only virtue is that they once appealed to our basest instincts. We see others stating the obvious with great gravitas. We see quite a few advancing their personal interests at the expense of the people they are meant to serve.

So, how come there has been so much economic and social progress in the western democracies over the last century or so? If democratic politics brings out the worst in people, wouldn’t you expect outcomes to have been are a lot worse than they have been?

The findings of Christian Welzel’s research - which I reviewed on this blog- suggests that as a consequence of economic development people in an increasing number of countries have been able to climb an emancipation ladder (Welzel refers to it as a utility ladder of freedoms) analogous to Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. As economic development has proceeded in an increasing number of societies, people in those societies have tended to adopt emancipative values reflecting concern about such matters as personal autonomy, respect for the choices people make in their personal lives, having a say in community decisions, and equality of opportunity.

In an article published in Policy in 2014 I considered whether emancipative values might be morphing into an ‘entitlement culture’ that could threaten economic freedom and material living standards. My research left me feeling optimistic that if such a tendency exists, there is a good chance that it will be remedied by democratic political processes.

If my optimism about the future outcomes of democratic politics in high-income countries is well grounded the impression that politics brings out the worst in people cannot be entirely accurate. Actually, that cynical impression doesn’t even stand up to scrutiny when I consider the behaviour of some politicians I have met.

Those thoughts came to mind when I was reading Michael Hall’s Political Coaching:Self-Actualizing Politics and Politicians, published last year. Michael is a psychologist who writes about and teaches an approach to personal development strongly related to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I have read many of his books and attended a couple of his seminars, so I thought it might be interesting to see how he applied his ideas to politics.

Michael describes the political ideal as follows:

“Politics is designed to cultivate the good life. We create politics so that people in our social group can live the kind and quality of lives that they wish to live – to satisfy the basic human needs and then to fulfil the highest of human dreams and potentials. The design of politics is to create a human system whereby people can develop their own powers and freely use those powers in appropriate ways that simultaneously facilitates their highest and best and that supports the same for all in the community” (p15).

Immediately afterwards he acknowledges that the ideal he has described is not what immediately comes to mind when most people think of politics.

Michael argues that politics is inevitable because humans are social beings. The problem is not with the existence of politics but with how we do our politics. That depends on the quality of our relationships with each other, which in turn depend on our understandings, beliefs, meanings and experiences. He implies that a change in political culture can only occur if more people engaged in politics become self-actualizing.

I think the book is at its best in discussing principles for positive political conversations (Chapter 11). These principles include: showing willingness to listen to opposing views; approaching issues in a spirit of respectful inquiry; trying to understanding where other people are coming from; and looking for positive intentions and values in opposing views.

Unfortunately, Michael Hall doesn’t discuss the potential role of social media in promoting more positive political conversations and a better political culture. In my view social media has potential to make a large contribution to lifting the quality of political debate. However, that will not happen until more participants who are capable of lifting the quality of discussions actually seek to do so. I should be making more of an effort to lift my own performance in that regard.

Will the Swedes maintain their positive attitudes toward non-European immigration?

Attitudes toward non-European immigration are much more positive in Sweden than in other EU countries. This is illustrated in the following chart, based on a Eurobarometer survey.

EU countries in which the highest proportion of the population have positive feelings toward non-EU immigration

Note: SE = Sweden; DK = Denmark; FI = Finland. Norway is not a member of the EU.

Source: Eurobarometer 82; Survey Nov.2014; QA 11.2 (Abridged)

The high proportion of Swedes who have positive attitudes toward non-Western migration sits somewhat oddly with the difficulty that Sweden has had in integrating such migrants. That is apparent in Michael Booth’s book, The Almost Nearly Perfect People, which I began to discuss in my last post. Booth writes of “newly arrived immigrants being shunted off to places like Rosengård, where they are given just enough money to live on but often face insurmountable obstacles to progressing further in society”. He suggests that the Swedish welfare state creates “ghettos” for “clientification” of new arrivals. I guess clientification has come to describe the process by which people become dependent upon welfare because government welfare agencies pretend to run businesses in which welfare beneficiaries are viewed as clients.

Michael Booth notes that newly arrived migrants becoming dependent upon welfare is in sharp contrast to the situation in the US, for example, where immigrants generally have to work hard to survive. That comment presumably refers specifically to illegal Mexican immigration into the US. It brings to mind Milton Friedman’s comment to the effect that illegal Mexican migration is a good thing because illegal immigrants are not eligible for welfare benefits. Friedman also made the more general point that it is not possible for a welfare state to maintain open borders because that would disproportionately attract the kinds of migrants who are likely to become eligible for welfare benefits. (He was, of course, more favourably disposed to open borders than to welfare states.)

It is worth noting at this point that immigration programs are sometimes seen as making a net contribution to welfare systems. Immigrants to Australia have tended to be of working age and to have useful skills, so that, on average, their tax contributions have tended to exceed the welfare payments made to them. That probably reflects immigration policies designed to attract migrants with useful skills and would not apply under an open-borders policy with migrants immediately eligible for welfare benefits.

It would be difficult for anyone to argue that the ongoing positive attitudes of the Swedes toward non-European immigration stems from social cohesion that has been created by the welfare state. The Scandinavian countries with less positive attitudes to immigration also have large welfare states. Moreover, the weight of evidence seems to support the view that high levels of trust and social cohesion in the Scandinavian countries prepared the way for the welfare state, rather than vice versa. Michael Booth tends to support that position – he reports interesting interviews with protagonists on both sides of the debate.  The international evidence that I have presented in an earlier post supports the view that people in high trust societies tend to have greatest support for moving toward a more humane society, with more redistribution of income to reduce inequality. 

Michael Booth makes the point that many Danes take pride in the fact that they pay a lot of taxes. This is apparently a way for them to say how successful they are. Booth notes that the pride that Danes take in paying tax does not prevent them from evading tax by shopping enthusiastically on the black market. Evidence from a tax audit suggests that many Danes also engage in income tax evasion when they have an opportunity to do so.

It would be reasonable to expect that a high proportion of Danish taxpayers are proud of the support that they provide to other Danes who rely on welfare payments. High levels of inter-personal trust would be likely to make such sentiments more common in Denmark and other Scandinavian countries than in most other parts of the world.

However, different attitudes seem to apply in Denmark when tax revenue is used to pay welfare benefits to newly arrived migrants. In recent years Denmark has taken the path of applying a two-tier welfare system with different provisions for new arrivals. Denmark has also adopted a more restrictive approach to immigration.

This brings me to politics. The Danes, Norwegians, Finns and Swedes all have anti-immigration parties that poll a substantial proportion of the popular vote (over 20 percent for the Danish People’s Party). The Swedish Democrats have been less influential than the xenophobic parties in the other Scandinavian countries. They obtained a lower percentage of the vote (13 percent in the last election) but the main reason they have been less influential is because they have been shunned by the other parties in Sweden. My source for this information is an article by Alberto Nardelli and George Arnett on the rise of the anti-immigration parties in the Nordic States (published in The Guardian, 20 June 2015).

I hope the vast majority of Swedes will continue to set an example to the rest of the world by maintaining strongly positive attitudes toward non-European immigration. However, that looks to me to be a forlorn hope - unless they can find a sensible way to restrict welfare benefits to immigrants (perhaps accompanied by special policies to assist refugees to find jobs). In my view, other countries, including Australia, should also consider moving toward a two-tier welfare system. Immigration to countries with costly welfare systems has a lot in common with having new members join a club that exists to provide benefits collectively to its members. It is much easier for current members to remain positive about having new members join if they are required to make appropriate contributions before being eligible for the full benefits of membership.  

Are the Scandinavian countries almost nearly perfect?

This question is prompted by Michael Booth’s book, The Almost Nearly Perfect People. The author is English; he is married to a Dane and lives in Denmark. The subtitle (of the version I read) suggests that the author has exposed “the truth about the Nordic miracle”. The book is indeed informative, but the author’s main aim seems to be to entertain readers with his observations on the different character traits of the people in the five Nordic countries – Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark and Iceland - and what they think of each other.

The book could be viewed as essential reading for people thinking of spending time in Scandinavian countries. Visitors might need to be warned, for example, that Swedes tend not to be as well-mannered as observers of the on-court behaviour of Swedish tennis players might expect. Booth describes their behaviour when boarding public transport as “breathtaking rudeness” (but he comes from a country in which people do tend to apologize excessively).

The book also has much to offer people, like myself, with an interest in explanations for the high average happiness levels of these countries (as recorded in numerous international surveys) and those attempting to understand why Scandinavian welfare states have not yet collapsed.

The book was recommended to me by Jim Belshaw, an old friend and fellow blogger, because of my interest in happiness research. Jim has recently visited Denmark and has written on his blog about hygge – which translates as cosiness and has some similarity to the Australian concept of mateship – as well as about ethnocentricity and migration.

Michael Booth is bemused that the Danes tend to be consistently close to the top the world happiness rankings: even by comparison with the British they seem to be “a frosty bunch”. He suggests that the Danes are among “the least demonstrably joyful people on earth, along with the Swedes, the Finns and the Norwegians”. The author suggests that many Danes are themselves similarly bemused: “they tend to approach the subject of their much-vaunted happiness like the victims of a practical joke waiting to discover who the perpetrator is”.

It is often difficult to know when Booth is being serious, but he offers several more or less plausible explanations for the apparent contentedness of the Danes. These include low expectations resulting from their turbulent history, and a facility for denial of the costs of being Danish - including the high taxes and the loss of freedom of expression and individualism associated with hygge and Jante Law (the social norms of a small town). Such speculation is fun, but it may not be necessary to an understanding of why the Danes tend to be relatively satisfied with their lives. The relatively high average happiness levels of the Danes and other Scandinavians can be largely explained (statistically at least) in terms of such variables as average income, social support (having someone to count on in times of trouble), healthy life expectancy, perceived freedom to make life choices, generosity and relative absence of corruption. There is a good discussion in World Happiness Report 2015 (pages 21-26).

There is another possible explanation for Scandinavian happiness that I was hoping Michael Booth might have had some fun with. Last year Eugenio Proto and Andrew Oswald published exploratory research findings suggesting that cross-country differences in happiness are associated with “genetic distance from Denmark”. Apparently, the closer a country is to the genetic makeup of Denmark, the happier are the people in that country, other things equal. The study seeks to control for a fairly wide range of other variables. One part of the study is based on information on the incidence of people with short alleles (those who draw the short straw in terms of the serotonin-transporter gene) who have a genetic predisposition to overreact to stressful events. I was hoping that Michael Booth might have speculated about whether there might be something in the cultural heritage of the Scandinavians that could explain their genetic makeup. Unfortunately, the research paper was probably not published before his book was finished. When Booth did comment he cast doubts on the validity of the research findings, citing “the Dane’s record high consumption of antidepressants, which would appear to contradict the report’s assertions regarding clinical depression”. Well, who knows? More research might be required.

The thought of Scandinavians as being “almost nearly perfect” raises the question of how well these countries rate in terms of the “good society” characteristics, which I have previously proposed on this blog (in my most popular post) and in Free to Flourish as criteria that nearly everyone would consider to be important. For convenience, relevant information is summarised in the table below. The table shows data for the top 20 countries, according to their average ranking on the three criteria: peacefulness, individual opportunity and economic security. The shading - from green, through yellow to red - denotes levels of performance on each criterion from relatively strong to less strong for these top performers. (The indexes combine 15 indicators, using methodology described in Free to Flourish.)

It is obvious from the table that the Scandinavian countries are relatively good societies - according to the criteria I espouse. They rank very highly in terms of peacefulness and economic security - although, apart from Norway, they do not rank so highly in terms of individual opportunity. Equal weighting of the criteria might not be appropriate. If I had to choose whether it would be better for my grandchildren to live in a country offering greater individual opportunity or greater economic security, I would choose individual opportunity. However, my personal priorities are probably not widely shared in the Nordic countries. I wonder to what extent those priorities are shared among the large numbers of people who have migrated to Sweden in recent years.

The more contentious issue is whether these societies will remain “good” in the future. Michael Booth provides some hints in his discussion of productivity in Denmark:

“I have read numerous articles in Danish newspapers of which the gist has been ‘Well, things are going well for the other Scandinavian countries so they will probably go well for us too,’ in which no mention is ever made of Norway’s colossal oil wealth or Sweden’s manufacturing supremacy and major public sector reforms. Denmark’s economy is far, far weaker than its neighbours’, and the country is facing far more serious problems, but the Danes are oddly reluctant to address their private debt levels or their gigantic welfare state”.

So, what about Finland and Iceland? There is apparently more to the Finns than taciturnity, modesty, trustworthiness and binge drinking. As well as Santa and forestry, they have a substantial electronics industry (think Nokia). Research and development spending is relatively high as a percentage of GDP and relatively little of this is public money. The Finnish education system seems to be relatively good by OECD standards (average PISA scores are very high) for reasons which seem to be related to the high regard for teaching as a profession and the simplicity of the Finnish language. The future economic growth prospects of Finland have been rated highly by the World Economic Forum, among others.

Iceland’s economy was almost wiped out by the GFC, but it now seems to be recovering. That is an interesting story, but it doesn’t deserve space in this post because the population of Iceland is tiny (about 330,000). That is less than the population of Canberra (which is admittedly somewhat bloated).

Since I have mentioned population I should note in passing that world-wide interest in the Nordic countries seems to be disproportionate to the size of their populations. The total population of the Nordic countries is only about 25 million – not much larger than Australia's. Sweden is largest, with 9.6 million people; the populations of Denmark, Finland and Norway (5.6, 5.4 and 5.1 million respectively) are all smaller than that for Victoria (5.8 million).

Coming back now to the question of whether the Nordic countries will remain good societies, it looks as though Norway will continue to be helped along for a few more decades by the rents from oil resources, while the Swedes and Finns will probably get by without too much trouble on the rents from their past investment in intellectual capital. All the Nordic countries will be helped by their high levels of social capital (trust) which seems to make changes in policy direction relatively easy to achieve as they endeavour to make their welfare systems more affordable. At this point I should mention the impact of immigration.  (So, I have mentioned it.)

Before I end this long post I want to give you a better indication of the flavour of the book by referring to some of the author’s comments on what the people in the different Scandinavian countries think of each other. According to Michael Booth, their Danish neighbours regard the Swedes as stiff, humourless, rule-obsessed and dull, and the Finns see them as “slightly foppish”. These days the Norwegians have enough money to rise above ancient resentments – they pay Swedes to wait on their tables and peel their bananas (to make a sandwich spread). The Swedes, who are wealthier than their other neighbours, tend to remain aloof from regional resentments, but they are inclined to make sanctimonious comments about anti-immigrant policies adopted by the Danes.

The overall impression I am left with, however, is that the lingering resentments among the Nordic countries are fairly tame by comparison with those among the different national and regional groups in the British Isles.

How does economic freedom promote tolerance?

The headline of Tyler Cowen’s recent article in the NYT is: “Economic Freedom Does Not Necessarily Lead to Greater Tolerance”. Tyler has acknowledged on his blog that the headline “doesn’t exactly capture” the message his article that economic freedom does tend to lead to greater tolerance. The headline seems to me to be almost as bizarre as suggesting that sunshine doesn’t necessarily cause plants to grow.

Tyler Cowen’s article provides a good summary of research findings by Niclas Berggren and Therese Nilsson, particularly their paper “Does Economic Freedom Foster Tolerance?” I urge people to read Tyler’s article, so I will just provide the briefest possible summary of his summary.

The main points are:

• Societies characterized by economic freedom tend to exhibit greater tolerance toward gay people. There is a similar but weaker relationship between economic freedom and racial tolerance.
• This greater tolerance is strongly associated with certain features of economic freedom i.e. secure property rights and low inflation.
• Economic freedom has a closer association with tolerance in societies which exhibit high levels of social trust.

Niclas Berggren and Therese Nilsson suggest that economic freedom promotes tolerance through two main mechanisms: market institutions protecting private property offer a framework in which it becomes less risky to engage in transactions with unknown members of other groups; and market processes involving interaction between members of different groups lead to greater understanding and recognition that intolerance comes at a cost (e.g. loss of profit from failure to employ the best person for the job).

The authors suggest that these positive impacts are reinforced by social trust. Social trust can be expected to have a direct positive impact on tolerance – if you trust people you don’t know, you are more likely to be open and generous in your attitudes to people who are different. Social trust can also be expected to enhance the impact of economic freedom on tolerance – for example, because trust reinforces the expectation that the legal system will treat people equally and in accordance with the rule of law.

So, what do the authors say about the influence of economic development on tolerance? Per capita GDP is included as a control variable in their regression analysis, but the results seem to imply that economic development has no impact on tolerance.

At first sight those findings appear to conflict with other empirical analyses, which I have supported, which suggest that the widespread economic opportunity that tends to accompany economic growth also tends to foster emancipative values, including greater tolerance.

I think economic freedom shows up as being more important than per capita income levels because tolerance is more likely to be sustained if economic opportunities are growing - and because economic freedom fosters economic growth. It is reasonable to expect tolerance levels to be lower in high income countries where economic opportunities are contracting (e.g. where there is high unemployment) than in high income countries where economic opportunities are expanding. That was one of the points that Benjamin Friedman made in his book, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, which I discussed on this blog a few years ago.

The point I am coming to is that it still seems reasonable to expect that one of the mechanisms by which economic freedom promotes tolerance is by promoting widespread economic opportunities. When opportunities are expanding, people are more likely to perceive the potential for mutually beneficial economic interactions with others and are more likely to be open and generous in their attitudes toward people who are different. 

What makes people grumpy about life in Australia?

Most people who live in Australia seem to be highly satisfied with life in this country. Data from the 2013 AQOL Australian Unity wellbeing survey suggests that 75 percent of people give life in Australia a grade of 8/10 or above. Less than 4 percent of people give life in Australia a grade of less than 5/10.

Most of the people who give Australia a rating of less than 8/10 are not particularly grumpy, but there are some questions worth trying to answer about what makes them less satisfied than the rest. Are they particularly grumpy about some aspects of life in Australia, or are they less than satisfied with several different aspects? Are they grumpy because they enjoy grumping, or are they unhappy people? If they are unhappy, is this related to their personal circumstances?

In this post I use the survey data to compare the characteristics of the lower quartile – the 25 percent who gave life in Australia a grade of 7/10 or less - with the remaining 75 percent of the population.

I was pleased to discover that the lower quartile is not comprised disproportionately of grumpy old men. On average, the  age and sex of those who gave a relatively low rating to life in Australia was much the same as for the remainder of the population.

 Figure 1 suggests that those who are grumpy with life in Australia are somewhat more inclined to give any aspect of life in this country a failing grade (less than 5/10) than are the remainder of the population. They were most grumpy about government, but they shared that attitude with many people who were satisfied with life in Australia. (The survey was conducted in August 2013, not long before a Federal election which resulted in a change of government.) In proportionate terms, people in the bottom quartile were most grumpy about social conditions, the economy and national security.

As might be expected, Figure 2 suggests those in the lower quartile are more likely than the remainder to be grumpy with more than one aspect of life in Australia. Nevertheless, multiple grumpiness is not particularly common, even among people in the lower quartile. Only a tiny percentage of the population are grumpy about all aspects of life in this country.

Figure 3 suggests that people who are relatively dissatisfied with life in Australia tend to have lower satisfaction with their own lives. There do not seem to be many people who get a lot of personal satisfaction from being grumpy about life in Australia.

The people who are relatively dissatisfied with life in Australia cannot generally be characterized as being grumpy because they are particularly dissatisfied with personal relationships or health. Figure 4 suggests that they are more likely to be particularly dissatisfied with their future security and standard of living. They are also more likely to feel unsatisfied with the community in which they live. (The relevant question is: “How satisfied are you with feeling part of your community?”)

The general picture that emerges is that the people who are less satisfied with life in Australia tend to be particularly grumpy about the way social and economic conditions are impacting on their personal lives. Perhaps many of them are disappointed because their expectations of economic security and community support are not being met.