Jonathan Haidt says that people elect politicians and favor or oppose policies, not based so much on anticipated outcomes as on what appeals to their moral intuitions. He concludes from that that liberals should stop focusing so much on outcomes and purely utilitarian calculus and worry more about how to appeal to people's moral intuitions.
I think this is about half right for politicians and about two-thirds right for policies.
I agree that people elect politicians based on moral intuition, not on anticipated outcomes. But I think that people re-elect politicians based on actual outcomes. If the actual outcome is bad, no amount of intuitive appeal will make the politician popular when the next election comes around. Suppose either Obama or McCain had decided to put political expediency ahead of the public good in 2008 and come out against the TARP. Suppose he had led his party in the revolt against it and the TARP had failed. This decision would have been wildly popular. The bank bailouts violated everyone's moral intuitions in the worst way possible. The candidate who defeated them would probably have won by a landslide. Then the financial system would have crashed and the country fallen into a much, much worse economic downturn than it did. And the heroic candidate who defeated the bank bailouts would become increasingly unpopular and lose the next election. Granted, people might not recognize the cause and effect at work. They might not realize that allowing the financial system to crash caused the economic downturn. But the practical unpopularity of economic ruin would far outweigh the theoretical popularity of letting the banks fail.
This is not pure speculation. Consider Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt ran in 1932 as a "Tea Party" candidate, denouncing Hoover for his deficits and pledging to make deep cuts in federal spending and balance the budget. Clearly he thought this was a much more intuitively appealing approach than calling for a Keynesian stimulus.* And he was right. Throughout his tenure, Americans surveyed continued to reject Keynesian logic and tell pollsters they favored spending cuts and a balanced budget. But a funny thing happened. When Roosevelt ran huge deficits and the economy made a strong recovery, he was wildly popular. When he balanced the budget and the economy slumped, his popularity slumped along with it. Clearly practical results trumped intuitive appeal, no matter what people told pollsters.
Policies are a bit more complex than politicians. I do agree that people tend to favor or oppose policies based on what appeals to their moral intuitions rather than what the anticipated outcome is. Then again, most people assume that if a policy is intuitively appealing, it will automatically get good results. What if people's intuitions turn out to be wrong?
Well, if an intuitively appealing policy results in immediate catastrophe, it is unlikely to be popular for long. Raising the government debt ceiling goes against most people's moral intuition. Most people, after all, have credit limits and can't unilaterally raise them. It seems unfair that government does not have to play by the same rules the rest of us do. And running up more debt during bad times always seems improvident. So Republicans thought that refusing to raise the debt ceiling would be popular. No doubt failure to raise the debt ceiling would have been popular, but the results would not. The Republicans apparently assumed that people would consider the abstract principle that the debt ceiling should not be raised to be more important that concrete results. like, say, federal contractors not being paid, federal prisons not being guarded, border patrols ceasing, deposit insurance losing its federal backstop, no more air traffic controllers, and so forth. But as the date loomed closer and closer and people became increasingly aware of what could happen if the debt ceiling were not raised, refusing to raise the debt ceiling started losing its appeal. Moral intuition proved unequal to the challenge of the threat of catastrophic results. Imagine how well it would have stood up to an actual catastrophe.
But immediate catastrophes are the exception and not the rule. What of merely ordinary counter-intuitive policies with good results or intuitively appealing policies with bad results? Well, I think that if politicians bite bullet and pass a policy that goes against most people's moral intuitions but yields good results, most people will find a way to modify their intuitions to accept the good outcome. Certainly that is what supporters of Obamacare are hoping for.
But where I agree with Haidt is that unsuccessful policies that are intuitively appealing can be extremely difficult to get rid of. That is why, for instance, so many drugs remain illegal, even though their illegal status does nothing to suppress use and merely leads to criminality and ever more intrusive police surveillance. It is why there is such resistance to fighting AIDS by distributing condoms or needle exchange programs. It is why religious conservatives resist vaccinating their daughters against cervical cancer or insist on abstinence-only education. All of these things are about taking a stand against sin versus being complicit in it. Effectiveness is really not the point. Religious conservatives are well aware that sin isn't going away any time soon. But so long as it exists, they are not willing to adopt policies that condone it. Occasionally, the results of an intuitively appealing but practically disastrous policy can be so bad that even people who supported it end up admitting that their intuitions were wrong. See Prohibition as an example.
In short, I believe that politicians who are intuitively appealing but practically harmful are often elected, but rarely reelected. I believe that counter-intuitive but highly successful politicians and policies alike can overcome people's initial doubts. But I believe that intuitively appealing but practically harmful policies can be extremely difficult to get rid of. And I think Haidt should acknowledge the importance of outcomes as well as intuitions.
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*Okay, so Keynes didn't come out with his theories until around 1936, so this is an anachronism. But you know what I mean.
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