It also comes as no surprise given that standards of living have increased more in the past 8 years than in the last two decades of the Soviet Union, ;)
--- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
>
>
> [WS:] This comes as no surprise. People tend to
> "prefer" currently existing
> social-political institutions to ones that exist
> only in memory or
> imagination.
>
> A materialist explanation of that phenomenon is that
> being determines
> consciousness, not the other way around. People
> "prefer" what they
> materially experience, as opposed to experiencing
> things that they "prefer"
> (contrary to neo-classical economic fantasies.)
>
> A cognitive-institutional explanation is that
> existing institutions define
> the cognitive frame of reference for most people and
> in that frame of
> reference they score favorably over alternative
> institutions . In other
> words, social-political institutions define their
> own standards against
> which they are evaluated, which gives them a
> preferential treatment in
> people's judgments over alternatives.
>
> A corollary to the above is that asking for people's
> "preferences" to define
> a course of political action (e.g. opinion polls,
> etc.) is like counting
> clouds in the sky to predict weather. It is a wild
> goose chase, and
> exercise in futility. If changing social-political
> institutions becomes a
> fait accompli, changes in people's preferences and
> opinions will follow.
>
> Wojtek
>
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