Economics - the "dismal" science - and how they get it wrong

Well, that's a simple minded title for this post. I've been reading economists and the history of economics for some years now - and I still find it fascinating. But it's like reading the old psychologists - it's amazing how powerful their insights and ideas were - and how wrong or incomplete they actually were in retrospective.

Let me tell you a story. I started off my academic life pursing the ONE thing everyone said was the most important - the study of theology. I mean, after all, if there is this deity thing, we should clearly be paying attention to it. But that eventually fell away. My friends thought psychology was important back then too - but it was a particular approach - Existential Psychology. None of this Freudian junk. This can really help people.

I was then fascinated by LAW - hey - we regulate ourselves, we control things with this legal system - that is the way to make a difference and I should learn more about that. A guy name of Ralph Nader was popular at the time. Well - I did that. And I'm not done learning on that score - but it's no magic bullet either. So, sociology and cultural change seemed the next best thing. I went to Africa and Nicaragua and talked with people, and read books about them. How do peoples and societies really change? Why are some nations more economically advanced than others? If you've been following along here - I think I have a handle on that - and it is useful - but we have a long way to go on that score before we can actually make a difference in the world. See: http://carlscheider.blogspot.com/2014/03/culture-is-key-to-development.html.

SO - ECONOMICS - this is really what runs the world. I talked with a local economics prof. He gave me some suggestions to read on histories of economics, and the theories of economic thought. I think I finally have a handle on that. It would take me another lifetime to really grasp it - but I think I know enough to make a comment or two about it.

My major learning was that economics and theology or religion, have a lot in common. They are both pretty much based on a commitment to believe some "rules" or "principles". You become an adherent of one school of economics, with a particular set of principles, and then you interpret everything that way. You pretty much ignore science and facts and research. Religion is very similar.

Turns out, it is the marriage of the current psychology and economics thought which is the real key to moving us all forward. We are, after all, highly sophisticated apes, who think more with our emotional of "affective" brain stem, than with our upper and frontal lobe. See Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman - who happened to win the Nobel Prize for economics! He's on to something there. He actually provided the foundation for a whole school of economics, called Behavioral Economics - instead of grand theories and models that people create in their head, he asked why we don't actually do experiments on human beings and see what they do in terms of economic decisions. He did quite a few, which led to the Nobel Prize - and it turns out we are not as rational as we would like to believe. He developed something called "prospect theory".

But somehow his research and conclusions are not well accepted by most economists. They continue to argue about models and theories that assume that humans are fundamentally rational. The nearest they can come to actually accepting that we are not really rational, is to pose a bunch of complexities in their models. They now talk about "reflexivity" and "uncertainty". These "forces" drive human behavior, so we have to pay attention to them. Well, DUH!

I am of a liberal or leftist or progressive bent - meaning that I think we are actually capable of changing things with rational and considered actions - and that we are not simply at the whim of some blind market or force of tradition and history. I am also NOT as afraid of upsetting the apple cart, as my more conservative friends are. I have hope. Despite our animal instincts, we have a rational component, and I think, given enough time we will figure out how to actually be in charge of this social and economics stuff. Hey - if we can master the structure of the matter that makes up this universe, we should be able to figure how how a few billion humans can interact on this one planet with some measure of success.

So I lean to reading folk like Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and the like. This recent article criticizing Krugman's theories is quite good.  http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/paul-krugmans-philosophy-of-economics-and-what-it-should-be/

The author is actually trying to help, not just criticize. I try to avoid people who are just NEGATIVE about things. That's the easiest thing to do in any field - especially the political. If you don't like it, tell me what would make it better. But this author is a "philosopher", so he is dealing with history and ideas. If he were a "psychologist", we might have had better advice about how humans actually work.

This piece offers Krugman the advice of including things like uncertainty and reflexivity in his theoretical models. Well and good - but we still are a long way from making any positive change in how things are going. We are trying to understand history, and come up with theories that may guide our fearless leaders - but we are still pushing on a string here. The factors which drive people are inside their heads. Until we marry our recent understanding of psychology and economics and politics - and put it into our elementary education system - we are going to be flopping about from one crisis to the next.h

I found a good shot at this is the more populist book, You Are Now Less Dumb. Don't be put off by the title. It's quite good. It gave me some good insights - which I insist on sharing here.

• People Love Stories. I learned this a long time ago, but it is really true. After a million years or so of listening to stories and songs around the fire, we are driven to listen to them, to love them, and to use them to guide our lives. But all of our stories are OLD, are focused on preserving tradition, and don't help us understand our current problems. 
• People Must Create Stories. Since are a tad above the apes, and we have some sense of self awareness, we are pushed to see out the meaning and purpose of our lives. After all, "What is the Meaning of Life the Universe and Everything? Ask Siri that and see what she answers. Or Google! Here we are, newly intelligent beings, and we are flopping about, wondering what the heck we are doing here. So we CREATE stories to explain ourselves to ourselves. Every people creates stories - not just the Jewish and Greek myths that we in the Western world find familiar. Joseph Campbell understood this. So we have the world religions, with their mythical stories, which empower our lives.
• We Need New Stories. The problem is that our stories, our myths, our sacred writings, are woefully out of touch with out current needs. They deal with things like creation, and family values, and the like. We teach them to our kids, and we are trying to preserve our traditions, but we need to create new traditions, new ways of understanding how we really make decisions. Kahneman clearly understands the problems with our mental processes, but his only advice on how to make better decisions is to "slow down", "think on it", "sleep on it". He seems to think that more time will make a difference in how people make decisions. It doesn't work that way. People respond immediately, from the gut, based on the "narrative" that is running in their heads about life, the universe and everything. The key to changing things, to moving us forward, is to provide people with new narratives, new stories to guide their gut feelings.
• Some examples. Nothing works like an example - I wish I had a few good ones. Can you come up with some?  

NEXT - Neuroscience
So, I've given up on all of these things, and I am off to neuroscience. Kahneman is pulling it into economics, so there is some hope for that "science".

But the real insight now is that we are barely rational. See: The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. After the venture into economics, and behavioral economics, I stumbled on this author. He has researched how people actually make decisions. It appears that we are barely rational. About 95% of what we do comes from our emotional brain, our FAST brain. He likens us to an elephant, with this "self" as the driver on top trying to direct the elephant. The elephant pretty much decides where it is going, and we agree to ride along. Rarely, can we stop, and actually THINK, and change the elephant's direction.

Evolution tuned our brain to watch for patterns, and to instantly respond to them. We look at a person, or a scene, and instantly our brain decides "friend or foe". If it is a truly dangerous foe, we start moving before we even consciously realize it. Try this experiment: when you meet someone new, wish them well - internally, in your mind. Their brain will see the subtle changes in you, in your face, in your posture, and it will cause them to respond in kind. They will NOT be aware of it at first, but it will do it. This happens all the time, but it takes considerable reflection to actually catch it happening. Our brain is a wondrous mechanism that has gotten us this far, but it is time we actually tried to get some control over it.

Haidt's study shows that conservatives and liberals differ in their basic approach to values - and never the twain shall meet. Our brains seem wired to one or the other inclination - which might be just the plasticity in our brain that lets us adapt to our peers and surrounding culture. For more on this, see my brief review of the book here:
http://carlscheider.blogspot.com/2016/02/why-are-those-idiots-from-other.html.

The downside to this research is that no one has yet figured out how to help us overcome this deep bias to act purely on our emotions and gut. More education does not seem to correlate, nor does intelligence. We are pretty much emotional animals. Some of the research even seems to indicate that we make decisions before we are even aware of them - this comes from MRI examinations. These researchers wonder if we truly have a free will. I choose to ignore that one - it does real damage to my sense of meaning and purpose. And it is my personal observation that, even though it is true that I have decided something before I am even aware of it, I CAN stop right there, reflect and move in a different direction. It takes work, but I can do it.

Which leads me to my next topic - moving right along. I have a suspicion that mindfulness, meditation, or activities of that ilk, might be able to help us overcome some of that instant, gut based decision making. I have not seen a really definitive study as yet - if you know of one, point me at it. And I'll repost here if I find something.

So . . . what do we do? Start teaching mindfulness in grade school? Is this the main benefit of religious belief - of SOME religious belief.

Your thoughts?

A POST NOTE as of 2022.10 - if you liked this. You really need to read this one:

The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better. Brilliant analysis of our need for and the power of stories. The primary story, of course, is the one we tell ourselves about ourselves. That story makes us who we are. If we encounter information that says our story is wrong - we automatically reject it - almost without thinking. It is too risky to go there. We need a new vision of how economics and politics just might work, of we can dare to go there.  See this book along those lines: Humankind: A Hopeful History

A Russian World View

If you have read any of these things, you should realize that I am fascinated by how different cultures see the world. There was a piece in our local paper last August that gave a very good understanding of how a Russian sees the world, compared to our view here in the U.S.

There is a piece in the Star and Tribune last year (Sunday, August 30, 2015) by a Russian immigrant. You can read it here:
 http://www.startribune.com/immigration-tale-a-russian-meets-america/323276891/ 
It is a fine essay on his experiences in coming to the USA 25 years ago. He is a very perceptive and reflective individual. I have been researching cultural differences for about 15 years now – since my first experience in Africa. This author, Oleg Voskresensky, has perfectly captured some of the differences between the US “world view”, and the one he grew up with in Russia. It’s nicely done, and it is very helpful to understand a bit what is going on in Russia.

If you have been following my writing here at all, you know that I am persuaded that some of the world’s problems come from the fact that the world view that we grow up with is very, very difficult to change.
http://carlscheider.blogspot.com/2014/03/culture-is-key-to-development.html

When things were static and stable, that was not much of a problem, in fact, it was a benefit. Our system of belief, our world view was formed over millennia, and it was tailored to help us survive. Those who embraced it survived, the outliers did not. But with today’s rapid change in economics and trade and technology, an outdated world view is a problem, an obstacle to economic growth and development, and to personal freedom and growth. But, by design, this world view does not change rapidly. That was the whole idea when our brain was evolving and changing. A rapidly changing world view is not going to come from our genetics. We need to choose it, and educate our children to learn how to adapt to it.

I highly recommend that you read the essay itself. I would like to further develop just a few of the cultural differences he identifies.

Personal Space – In my humble experience, folks from northern climes tend to have a larger personal space, Germans, Scandinavians, etc. I know Italians have less, so I thought it was related to climate. But apparently, Russians do not honor it much either.

Self Focus – He talks about how little we in the US know about the geography of the world – especially Russia. A person he met asks if he knows a friend of his from Prague. Really. This is not a world view, except it is. I have had this experience with French and German and Chinese friends. They know more about US history, literature and geography than we do about any other part of the world. I think their education system works in that respect better than ours, but there is also this self centered focus. We are, after all, the most powerful, richest, etc. -whatever superlative you want. We are much more focused on our stuff than on any other culture. Clearly, we need to get out more, and understand that we are not the best, greatest anything anymore – except in military expenditures. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should watch the opening sequence from The Newsroom – you can find it here:
https://youtu.be/q49NOyJ8fNA

I think the best investment we could make in our own country is to require our young people to dedicate 2 years of their lives to some socially redeeming work – preferably in another country and culture. Mormons do it – and Salt Lake City has the largest population of foreign language speakers in the nation. The Germans used to do that, and they had some benefits.
http://www.dw.com/en/germany-launches-program-for-youth-to-volunteer-abroad/a-2763919
http://www.dw.com/en/germany-plans-massive-volunteer-abroad-program/a-2309164

Independence Education Focus – Most of the world’s education system focuses on providing information to students. They are expected to learn things that are delivered to them. They are generally not taught how to find new information, or how to research. And most are not taught how to think about things, or assess the value of the information they are fed. That is one small product of our own cultural “independent” focus. We are much more independent, less collective, than any other culture. See Hofstede on this one (Cultures and Organizations). We are not driven to march lock step, one with the other. We are praised when we can develop a different track, a better way, a new idea. That also means that we have a lot of arguments and disagreements about how to proceed. Which eventually lets us develop something new on the planet – at least that is the hope. But it also helps us understand how difficult change is in other cultures.

Relationships - Russians see relationships as long lasting, requiring a lot of work, and not easily severed. We tend to view relationships as something to accomplish and to move on. The author sees this in personal friendships, but my guess is that it also applies to his sense of history. The Ukraine was “always” part of Russia. It should be reunited. End of discussion. No, we are not giving back California and Alaska.

Sense of Time – I have not experienced every culture on the planet, but some of the ones I have seen also share this Russian sense of time. Time is not really measured in Italy and Nicaragua and Eastern Africa. Things do not have specific start and stop times. In the US we are driven by our clocks – not our lives. I tend to like it, as it does provide order and structure, and is more efficient at getting things done. But it is not the way of many parts of the world. If you don’t learn that, you will have some problems. And if you think that your effort to help people from other cultures requires that they learn your sense of time – let it go. It is not going to change in any hurry.

This also is reflected in the value we place on old things versus new. In many parts of the world, the elderly, the tradition, the “way it has always been done” has much more power than the new, the innovative.

Community Minded – Individual Responsibility – This is the best insight of the essay, and it took the author a while to understand it. In my humble experience, most of the rest of the planet, outside of northern Europe and US and Canada, does not have any sense that they are in charge of things. In East Africa, no one is responsible for things. In Nicaragua, someone else has the responsibility to make changes. That seems to be the Russian view as well. The US one is clearly that we are in charge of our lives, of what is going to happen. That carries over to our national aspirations and efforts around the globe as well.

He puts the primary emphasis on communitarian versus individual, but I think it is also hierarchical – the Russian people think their leadership has the responsibility to do things, to make change, to decide. The common folk are charged to follow along, not to dissent. That sense of hierarchical leadership is deep in our genes, and the cultural bent to support it is quite common, even in northern Europe. It would help us understand a bit why the Russian people are so supportive of Putin, despite what he has done to their democratic institutions. I think that same cultural mind set is deeply operative in the entire Arab world – Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, etc. They are absolutely dependent on their strong leaders. Even after a major revolution, they tend to look to the new strong leader – not to a shared democracy.

So . . . there’s a lesson here. Learn to understand those cultures. Do not put a lot of your focus on changing that world view. It is not going away. Learn to work with it.

Addendum
By the way, this author has at a few other pieces published which show a similar insight into Russian thinking. It would behoove our fearless leaders to learn more about this as we try to resolve these world problems.
http://www.startribune.com/russia-and-the-u-s-and-so-we-grow-apart/305572181/

The Russian disrespect for law and order is deep seated. Corruption is not going away in any hurry. Their regard for authority is deep as well.

Rarely Rational - Indeed

Here's a brief post from the LA Times that sums up about 3 years of reading on my part. You might like it:
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-sapolsky-how-we-decide-how-to-vote-20160403-story.html

Our brain is a wonderful mechanism, amazing tool. It does MOST of its work without our even being aware of it. It is a beautiful pattern recognition beast - able to read a facial expression, a stance, a move, and register a decision on our behalf without us even being aware of it. And then we spend some actual "thinking" time trying to justify what our brain has already decided. Amazing.

That is also pretty scary when you come to economics or politics. Millions of years of evolution gave us rapid responses to survive in the wild - but they don't work so well in the "modern era". We are pulled around by these gut calls, and we can barely contain them. He does not seem to have seen Haidt's work on our genetic propensities to one side or the other, which only further complicates trying to be rational about decisions.

The article lists a bunch of experiments that prove this point. It's a good read. I am going to look for more by this author. BUT  . . . there does not appear to be any way to get us humans to be truly rational. The best we can do is learn this research and use it for one side or the other. Not a wonderful result. Have you seen anything better along those lines?

Thanks.

Is Capitalism Making Us Stupid?

Odd heading for this - but that is the name of the book cited and reviewed here.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/04/is-capitalism-making-us-stupid.html

I like the review a lot - it talks about a lot of things I am concerned about and have been thinking about for a decade or more. But when I finished reading it, I was not sure I wanted to buy the book. So I thought I would explore that a little bit myself, and share it - if I think it is worth anything.

Here's some of my basic premises that have developed over the last 15 years.

1. Capitalism is a pretty good system, provided we manage it intelligently.
   Economics is not well understood by most people, it is more governed by schools of belief than any scientific method - but  . . .  the market approach has great potential, if we use our brains to manage it.
2. Democracy is similar - could be worse. As Churchill famously said, it is the worst political system, except for all of the others. But we need to remember that we invented it, and we could still improve it. God did not hand it down. In fact, he (or she) seems prone to a somewhat more hierarchical approach. 
3. Humans are not rational - we make decisions by gut and emotion. That does not augur well for either capitalism or political systems, given the general failure to be rational about how we run them. I love the example cited of our innate ability to project the trajectory of a thrown object - Angry Birds - but the great difficulty we encounter to do the same for a dropped object. We "evolved" our society from blood feuds, dictators and wars. Why do we think this talking and negotiating approach is going to work?

What this reviewer, and I assume the book points out is:

1. Rational thinking is under attack. Our rationality is not only a biological imperative, it is under attack from a mass of "believers" who really do not value any rational approach to anything. How else explain the rejection of global warming, the mass attacks on information and data on any topic. Our political actors generally call on fear and loathing, belief and lies, rather than cite anything that resembles science or information. For heaven's sake, we are still fighting about evolution. 
2. Capitalism and Democracy were crazy inventions. Given the propensities of humans, neither should really work at all. We are competitive, vicious, fight to the death, hierarchy prone, strong leader followers. How can a "market" or a "consensus" approach ever lead to anything but disaster. The same was said for things like "invisible little beings cause diseases". Or "some problems with people's actions come from the physical make up of their brain and are not 'fixable'." We seem to have finally understood these two - it may take us a while to get to the evolution one. There seems to be some confusion with the "religious" stuff.
3. Advertising is not rational. Well, duh. And most political discourse is the same. I am not sure it is making us more stupid - we already have a lot of that. And our politicians are persuading us of lies and idiocies with the same techniques.
4. Being rationally informed about politics is not an efficient or rewarding investment. I've seen this before, but this brought it home. If you make a buying decision, you can be pretty effective about reading reviews, comparing products, pricing, etc. It takes some time and effort, and you have to overcome that instant urge to buy - but we can do it, and there is generally a reward. I get a good product at a fair price. The effort has a reward. But in the political world, my one vote has NO real positive returns. Why spend the time and effort to do any research, to meet the candidates, to understand the issues. Especially in the face of the barrage of misinformation that gets thrown at us. There is no reward to that effort. My vote makes no significant difference at all. So why should I undertake a lot of work to analyze positions and possibilities. Just go with the group.
5. Solutions to all of this are woefully lacking. I've been there. No one yet has any bright ideas on how to overcome all of this lack of reason in these two realms. I think the political one is key. If we could actually make decisions based on research and data, I am persuaded that we might adopt a "nudge" political framework, to help people make better, more rational decisions. I don't see any other approach that might work at the moment. 

Thanks for reading this far. Help me out here. What do you think?

Rational Or NOT?!

OK, if that last one on The Righteous Mind rang any bells, you really should read this one:

https://aeon.co/essays/we-are-more-rational-than-those-who-nudge-us

I have been stumbling along here reading a bunch of things in psychology and economics and culture and world views for about 15 years now. This piece cited above sums up about 5 books that I have found very interesting. Kahneman, and McCraney and Haidt, and Thaler.

The basic idea is that evolution has pretty much tuned us to be not quite rational. Oh, we have a brain, and that brain CAN stop and think about things, but mostly, it does not. And that is just fine - it works well. Just imagine walking into the supermarket and approaching the cereal aisle. You want to buy ONE box of cereal. If you were a purely rational animal, how long do you think that would take? Just think of the factors: cost, cost per unit, ingredients, health claims, packaging, etc. There are easily 4,000 choices in that one aisle. This could take a while - or NOT. For most of us, it is simple - I only want to spend 5 minutes at this max - good enough works just fine. It's called satisficing - an economist won the Nobel Prize for coming up with that idea for economic decisions.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/satisficing.asp

And that is the case when we KNOW we are thinking and we intend to make a rational decision. When we are not even aware of how we are leaning, it takes a lot less time. When the lion appeared in your path in the jungle, you were moving even BEFORE your brain registered the thing. MOST of our responses are that kind - an instinctive reaction brought about by the wonderful pattern recognition software in our head that KNOWS and reacts before our brain can even process it. It takes you less than a second to make a judgement about someone else - but it takes your brain about 8 seconds for that to register, and it takes your thinking brain somewhat longer to do anything about it.

The best thing about this article is that he holds out hope that we can figure out how to improve on our fast brain for the things that really matter. He cites Keith E Stanovich, Rationality and the Reflective Mind, who is persuaded that we can do better as a society, by reflecting together in a more civil way. Part of our genius, from Haidt, is that we have these powerful motivators that enable us to act as a larger group, to accomplish amazing things. If we can empower that group effort, with more civil discussion and reflective reasoning - we might have a shot at moving forward here.

I'm working on it - how about you?

Why Are Those Idiots from the Other Political Party So Crazy?

I just started a book I bought a few years ago. I wish I had read it then. This has the potential to be my “best book of the decade” – like I have never said that before. The book is The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt. If you liked Thinking Fast and Slow by Kahneman, this book applies those ideas to morals and politics. Research indicates that we act mostly from our instinct, not our reasoning.

When I watch the presidential candidates on the news, I always say to myself, how on earth can these idiots be so popular? They are clearly lying through their teeth. Don’t these people know about PolitiFact? They cannot possibly believe what they say. They are not in touch with reality, they are rude, uncouth idiots. People must be crazy to support them. Ahhhhh!

Come on – you’ve thought that too, haven’t you? Of course you have, and I KNOW I am right – just as you do.

When you look at the result of that in the political arena, and mix in a bit of brutish incivility, we end up with the current nightmare of idiots on both sides, unable to even talk to the other side, or treat them with respect. How on earth will we ever get out of this divide that is destroying our country? Other developed nations seem to be making good headway on important things, like health care and education. And they all seem to have a healthier attitude toward national defense spending. What is wrong with US? We are the most threatened people on the planet. We spend more on defense than the next 7 nations combined – and 5 of them are our allies!

http://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison

This book will help you understand a bit what is going on here with those “idiots”. It will help you see where these fears come from, and how people deal with them. It also offers a possible way out of this craziness. There is some hope – not much, but some. It may also help you to have a civil conversation with your neighbors across the back yard fence. They seem like nice people – what is wrong with them?

I will share more as I read the book – I’m only one third in – but I wanted to get this out there. Just watch the videos below. They say it pretty well. The first one is Steven Colbert in his old character, so it’s good fun, and it’s short. Colbert picks up on the important stuff in the book.

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/luw0ia/the-colbert-report-jonathan-haidt

We make snap judgments. We lose sight of the truth. Not me! But, yes, me and you. Absolute certainty? Hmm. I may have said that on occasion.

Next, watch this TED talk by the author. It’s a bit longer, but it is well done. The genius of this is that he uses what he learned in writing the book to present the information. He is appealing to your “elephant”, not your “driver”. The metaphors are wonderful, and so are the stories. They will stick with you.

https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind

All of this comes from experiments with people around the world. I am NOT making this up, and neither is the author. Here are the key ideas:

•   We are right! They are wrong. We are by nature self-righteous bigots. And that’s NOT a problem – it’s normal! We are always absolutely certain that we are right.
•  We go with our gut. Evolution has given us this gift of rapid decision making. If we weren’t so primed to jump to rapid conclusions, we would never make any decisions.
• Thinking comes after the fact. We marshal other ideas only to support our gut call. Rational arguments on the other side just confirm our belief. You can’t make the dog happy by wagging its tail.
• We tend to be a bit more conservative than not. It’s what worked! The guy who first tried that strange mushroom didn’t leave any kids.
• We work off 5 basic moral imperatives that are in our genes. They pretty much govern how we work. The flavor of the imperatives changes a bit given our “world view” or social culture, but they are key to our rapid decisions.
• Progressives / Conservatives are different. Progressives tend to use just two of our moral rules, while most Conservatives seem to use them all.
• We are Tribal. Team or tribal membership is a big part of us. And then our tribe blinds us to the real world. We take our values from the tribe, the culture we live in, the group we identify with.

The five foundations of morality:

1. Harm / Care.
2.  Fairness / Reciprocity.
3. In Group Loyalty. Only humans can form very large groups, which was a major step in enabling us to create civilization.
4.  Authority / Respect.
5.  Purity / Sanctity. Sex on the right, food on the left.

 www.yourmorals.org – You too can take part in the study.

The “liberals” or “progressives” work more from the values of harm / care and fairness / reciprocity. Conservatives tend to use all 5 more equally. The big insight for me was to understand that they feel that “order tends to decay”. I am usually on the progressive side – we need to move forward, to change adopt new technology and ideas. I tend to ignore the risks that this carries. The basic conservative position tends to be that civilization is pretty fragile, and we could lose it all if we are not careful. They see order as really precious, and anything that goes counter to the present structure is dangerous. It was also interesting to me that punishment seems to be a key part of our moral motivation – including religion and the threat of hell.

In another conversation, the author sums up his findings in this way:

But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.

Jonathan Haidt 
https://edge.org/conversation/jonathan_haidt-what-makes-people-vote-republican

Finally, here is a longer interview with the author by a Wharton School professor. This one focuses a bit on Business Ethics – which is another interest of mine. Where was this guy when I was teaching that course? This one is longer, but you will learn a lot more.

https://youtu.be/qN42ZLwNFBY

That said, I promise to come back and share more after I finish the book. Let me know what you think. The author also has a website and many other resources out there.
http://righteousmind.com/

I trust this helps a little bit to understand the "crazies". Later.