On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 7:55 AM, David Green <davegreen84 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> "The second article found that religious people were more inclined not to
> discount the future as much; in effect, they were more future oriented or, as
> Joe Hill used to say, more concerned with pie in the sky. For two and a half
> centuries, economists, such as Adam Smith, tended to attribute people who
> attained status as a capitalist to their capacity to be more future oriented. Max Weber, and to some tiny extent, Marx himself tended to attribute the
> development of capitalism to Protestantism. "
>
> Hi Michael,
>
> I've read your blog post, as well as this one by Thomas Edsall: http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/what-the-right-gets-right/?ref=opinion
>
> It seems to me that the reification of "liberalism", "conservatism", and "religious" in relation to political psychology, especially in academia, isn't very helpful in clarifying problems of social class and political behavior. When I try to read Edsall's piece with a critical attitude, I'm constantly reminded not of the psychology of the people that these thinkers are supposedly explaining, but of their own political psychology, as academics operating very much within the limits of allowable capitalist liberal/conservative debate.
>
> To put it more simply, I think the article by Edsall largely reflects a high-minded mess of propaganda regarding both "liberals" and "conservatives", at best a complete distraction from issues of economics and politics.
>
> How do you think political psychology can truly illuminate leftist perspectives?
>
> David Green
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-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
530 898 5321 fax 530 898 5901 http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com