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Comment by sradman | Hacker News Reader

> He does take a conservative approach to a lot of topics...

Sowell's book A Conflict of Visions: Idealogical Origins of Political Struggles [1] is, ironically, a very good starting point in understanding what makes Sowell "conservative" (the Constrained Vision) vs "progressive" (the Unconstrained Vision). I think this is the work that impressed Steven Pinker.

The categories get really messy, for example when he describes Marxism as a hybrid ideology, but the core idea is that people tend to believe either: 1. we are made of crooked timber and are made better by social structure, or 2. our potential is being held back by selfish oppressors/exploiters.

Regardless of which vision drives you, I imagine Thomas Sowell would do very well in Bryan Caplan's Ideological Turing Test [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Conflict_of_Visions

[2] https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.htm...

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Bryan Caplan also wrote a widely-circulated critical essay about A Conflict of Visions: http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/sowell

I agree with some of the criticisms, but in general I think the dichotomy of the two visions is appropriate for explaining why two individuals may irreconcilably disagree on a particular issue at a given point in time.

Reading the book description on Amazon, I don't associate Constrained or Unconstrained with Conservative and Progressive respectively.

It's a great book and one you should truly read before passing judgement on. It's helped me rationalize the various current political and social issues in the US a lot as I've read it.

I'll definitely add it to my list. I've generally found that a healthy study of psychology and economics, along with a deep dive into US history has given me a fairly clear picture of where things are today, how we got there and noticeable forces at work in public messaging/trends.

"Constrained" is in the spirit of Adam Smith, Burke and Hayek (all of whom would be aghast at being labeled "conservative"); "unconstrained" is in the spirit of Rousseau, and in particular his claim that "man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."

The Constrained vision assumes that the best we can do is choose a set of trade-offs that are least bad; the Unconstrained vision assumes that trade-offs are illusions imposed by defective institutions, and so if we improved/reformed/abolished the institutions, we could eliminate the trade-offs.

There's a lot more to it, so you should read the book, but that's the basic thesis.

"...the two key criteria for distinguishing constrained and unconstrained visions are (1) the locus of discretion, and (2) the mode of discretion..."

> If you ask a liberal or a saltwater economist, “What would somebody on the other side of this divide say here? What would their version of it be?” A liberal can do that. A liberal can talk coherently about what the conservative view is because people like me actually do listen. We don’t think it’s right, but we pay enough attention to see what the other person is trying to get at. The reverse is not true. You try to get someone who is fiercely anti-Keynesian to even explain what a Keynesian economic argument is, they can’t do it. They can’t get it remotely right. Or if you ask a conservative, “What do liberals want?”

Krugman overlooks that many conservatives were once liberals, while the reverse is typically not true. That doesn’t mean that those folks were wrong before and are correct now. But in terms of Krugman’s proposed test, they can probably at least articulate the opposite view based on having once held those beliefs.

Speaking for myself: I was a pretty standard agnostic coastal liberal back in high school, while wife was in Iowa reading National Review. We’re the same age and have experienced the same political history over the last 20 years. But I don’t think it was until recently that I could’ve cogently articulated her views on those various events. More importantly, I don’t think I could even have cogently articulated what she viewed as the parameters of what was being debated. (That is to say, I perceived a political debate being about X, while she perceived it being about Y.) She, on the other hand, is pretty good at articulating what I thought back then—like most young people her friends held liberal views.

> many conservatives were once liberals, while the reverse is typically not true.

Is there any data to support that claim? It’s the opposite of my own personal anecdata.

Opposite of my personal anecdata as well. In the 90s I was a National Review-reading, Limbaugh-listening conservative. It started changing in the early 2000s when GWB invaded Iraq. Voted for Obama in '08 (a centrist) and Bernie in '16 (a Leftist). Now I identify as a mostly Left of center progressive.

The curious case of Benjamin Button comes to mind.

It’s a byproduct of the fact that each cohort becomes more conservative with age: https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-millenn...

> On average, Americans identify as more politically liberal at age 18 and become increasingly conservative between their 20s and 60s.

Most young people of "political age" (over 16 or so) in the 60s, 70s, an 80s were to the left. Today, those older demographics tend to swing to the right. I suppose you could make the case that Democrats die earlier than Republicans, but I doubt that is what's happening here.

Just about every Marxist on the planet believes that we are "made better by social structure", so I think that characterization of what Marxists vs. non-Marxists believe is unhelpful.

I haven't read Sowell but is this what he means by a 'hybrid ideology'? My impression of Marxists is that they view the world through both lenses and believe #1 can be achieved when #2 is solved through revolution or other means.

A Conflict of Visions is not a book about Marxism, it is a description of a model to help us understand our ideological preferences. Like all models, it is wrong but sometimes it is useful.

Isn't that the opposite of what Marx believed? His world view was that a perfect society (communism) would arise when virtually all institutions were abolished, because in his view, the imperfections of human nature were all caused by "alienation" which itself came from the capitalist system.

Actual communists tended to start out living that creed: they'd systematically destroy any existing institution. But then they'd find society didn't work at all without them, so they'd pretty rapidly build new institutions, that all happened to be controlled by them.

Conservatives on the other hand are, by their nature, conservative about changing things. They tend to regard existing social structures as evolved and thus encoding great wisdom, even if it can't be easily articulated. To change those institutions is thus highly risky, even if it may not be immediately apparent why that is. This is the opposite of Marxism, which is a utopian ideology in which changing everything at once is not too much.

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