Does Reality Have A Liberal Bias?

Is this what explains why everything is liberal?

The academy is extremely left wing. So are the upper echelons of large corporations, journalists, and most of the other institutions that influence public life. Why is this? There are various explanations of this phenomenon, some about cardinal utility, others about educational polarization. But probably the most common explanation given by liberals is expressed by the quip “reality has a well known liberal bias.” In other words, the reason smart and highly-educated people are mostly liberals is the same as the reason smart and well-educated people generally accept that the moon landing happened—being smart causes one not to believe stupid things.

This position was defended in an article I stumbled across courtesy of Ari Shtein, where a professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at my university defended diversity requirements. The professor, named Silke-Maria Weineck writes, in one of the most self-satisfied paragraphs ever composed:

It is certainly true that University faculty skew heavily liberal, probably because Republicans and conservatives oppose so many well-supported theories about the world and human societies: that climate change is real and threatens our survival, that racism has significantly impeded the economic success and well-being of those it targets and continues to do so, that it is wrong to force women to stay pregnant against their will, that vaccines save lives, that neither sex nor gender are binary and so on. Most of us believe these things not because we are liberals — rather, we are liberals because the best data, the most cogent arguments and the best historical evidence tell us they are true.

Ah yes, professors of comparative literature nearly all have the same left-wing views because they are uniquely reflective in their understanding of subjects wholly unrelated to their profession, like climate models and vaccines. So thoughtful are they, that they think the abortion debate can be easily settled by noting “that it is wrong to force women to stay pregnant against their will”—an insight on the order of Newton’s discovery of calculus that no doubt eludes all the smartest pro-lifers.

Professors of comparative literature, not to mention gender studies professors and English professors, are uniquely qualified to evaluate climate models, and the reason they consistently think climate change threatens to end the world is because of their careful studies of those climate models. So profound is their expertise that their insights about climate change threatening to end the world have even eluded the overwhelming majority of climate scientists who, while recognizing that climate change will cause various major harms, do not think it will end the world. One leading climate scientist, for instance, commented the following in response to an article predicting the end of the world from climate change:

“This is a classic case of a media article over-stating the conclusions and significance of a non-peer reviewed report that itself had already overstated (and indeed misrepresented) peer-reviewed science,”

Even though I agree with lots of the positions that the author has, I think the idea that professors believe them because of their greater ability to discover the truth is completely ridiculous. If this is true, one would expect most left-wingers to have coherent things to say about abortion and gender, rather than desperately flailing around when the subjects come up.

Nearly all college professors support increasing the minimum wage. In order to figure out whether raising the minimum wage is a good idea, you’d have to figure out the effects it has on unemployment. This requires actually reading the rather tangled and complicated empirical literature. Do you think most left-wing professors have done this? Have they done any thorough investigation of the empirical literature surrounding the minimum wage—perhaps beyond reading a Vox article five years ago.

Careful and rigorous truth-seeking is difficult and rare. Few people do it. Most people get their political positions primarily from vibes and from listening to the people around them. Of the people confidently pronouncing on abortion, few have so much as read the best arguments of pro-lifers. Even fewer could summarize them accurately.

The “reality has a left wing bias” position also fits the facts extremely poorly. The most left-wing fields are the humanities. STEM is more right-wing, as is economics, especially on fiscal policy. To believe that people are left-wing because of their ability to reliably ascertain the facts, you’d have to believe that the reason that economists are further right than people in the humanities is that people in the humanities know more about economics than the economists. You have to believe that studying the literary qualities of Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway tells a person more about economics than studying economics.

It also doesn’t explain the presence of many professions that are almost exclusively right-wing. Many of these professions, like bond traders and priests, require significant education. In fact, while university does make people more liberal, it looks like the correlation is primarily based on liberals going to university. In other words, it’s mostly correlational, not causal.

Lastly, this fails to explain why so many in academia fail to believe obvious things. If you know anything about free trade, you know it’s a good thing. Certainly this is much more obvious than, say, abortion. There’s a reason that basically all economists support it. Yet left-wingers mostly don’t like free trade. If the reason they’re left-wing is that they’re good at ascertaining the truth, it would be quite surprising that they’re largely wrong about tariffs.

Similarly, it’s very obviously immoral to eat meat in present conditions. Yet most left-wing professors haven’t realized that! Conveniently, the only truths they’ve converged upon happen to be those that there’s social pressure to believe and are believed by their left-wing friends, even when those things are extremely non-obvious.

I remember when I was a twelve-year-old libertarian, I thought that everyone who disagreed with me about politics just didn’t get it. If they understood economics, I thought, they’d come to see that my positions were correct across the board—perhaps with a few exceptions where reasonable disagreement is possible. I grew out of that position when I was about 14. It seems that Weineck, like many of my fellow liberals, has never learned that lesson, and still has the unmitigated hubris to insist that anyone who disagrees with her must be a moron incapable of grasping basic logic.