On Tue, 6 May 2008, Doug Henwood wrote:
> And: "At the same time, these results highlight the real limits of
> political education as a transforming force. In the case of the
> inheritance tax, even well-informed citizens who recognized and
> regretted the increasing gap in incomes between rich and poor in
> contemporary America were only about as likely to oppose repeal as they
> were to favor it. And less well-informed, less sophisticated people were
> correspondingly more likely to favor repeal, even if they recognized and
> regretted the fact that economic inequality has increased. Viewed from
> this perspective, the results in Table 7 suggest that, even if every
> person in America could be made to see that economic inequality has
> increased and made to feel that that is a bad thing, the overall
> distribution of public opinion about the inheritance tax would change
> very little."
I'm going to have to re-read this paper before I fully engage with you (and unfortunately alienated labor is calling me). But the paragraph doesn't support its own conclusions. It presumes there's only way to reason. It's perfectly possible for half the well-informed people who regret the growing income gap to feel the inheritance tax is an unjust way to fix it. And I daresay that's probably the case.
That premise -- that the inheritance tax is unjust to rich people -- is a moral premise. And there's nothing irrational about adducing a moral premise to reach a conclusion about policy. Bartels is right that more information won't change it. But that's kind of missing the point. This last part is about the problem of worldviews, not the problem of information or education.
Michael