Why Conservatives/Republicans Turned Against Science
A prediction: When all the votes have been counted and the reams of polling data have been crunched, analyzed, and spun, this will be clear: Few scientists will have voted for Republican candidates, particularly for national office. Survey data taken from 1974 through 2010 and analyzed by Gordon Gauchat in the American Sociological Review confirm that most American scientists are not conservatives. A 2009 study by the Pew Research Center found that only 9 percent of scientists self-identified as conservative, while 52 percent called themselves liberals. Only 6 percent of American scientists self-identified as Republicans. This state of affairs is bad for the nation, and bad for science.
It was not always this way. In the 1968 election, Richard Nixon won the votes of 31 percent of physicists, 42 percent of biologists, 52 percent of geologists, and 62 percent of agricultural scientists (compared with 43.4 percent of the popular vote). While these data do not include party affiliation, they suggest that the scientific community of the late 1960s was much more evenly divided between the two major parties than it is now, and, with the exception of physicists, slightly more conservative than the American voting public at large.
Why have scientists fled the Republican Party? The obvious answer is that the Republican Party has spurned science. Consider Mitt Romney's shifting position on climate change. As governor of Massachusetts in 2004, he laid out a plan for protecting the state's climate. As presidential candidate, he has said that climate change is real, but has questioned whether humans are causing it. His stance is consistent with the Republican Party platform, which unambiguously calls for expanding the production and use of the fossil fuels that drive climate change. In 2009, Paul Ryan accused climate scientists of "clear efforts to use statistical tricks to distort their findings and intentionally mislead the public on the issue of climate change," echoing false accusations leveled against climatologists at the University of East Anglia. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan exemplify the conservative turn against science, but what explains it?
It seems hard to believe today, but environmental protection used to be a bipartisan affair. In the early half of the 20th century, Republican and Democratic administrations pursued conservation, setting aside land as national forests and parks but leaving pollution control to local and state governments. By the 1950s, however, pollution became a national issue. Above-ground nuclear-weapons testing spread radioactive fallout globally, along with a fear of the consequences. Rachel Carson's 1962 book, Silent Spring, documented the adverse effects of pesticides, especially DDT. Less well remembered but equally important was the work of Clair Patterson, a geochemist at the California Institute of Technology, who showed that lead pollution from cars had reached Antarctica. By 1970 it was no longer plausible to argue that pollution was a local problem—a "neighborhood effect," as the economist Milton Friedman called it in 1962...........SNIP..........SNIP.
Much more at the chronicle of higher education:
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Conservative-Turn-Against/135488/
= new reply since forum marked as read
And the Republic party, with urging from the Tealiban has pushed this meme so they could continue to rape the earth of her natural resources for profit.
is because he rode the dinosaur's back, not hold it in his hand.
When Milton Friedman used the term "neighborhood effect", he didn't mean an effect that was limited to one local neighborhood, an area that was only a fraction of one city or town. He meant that the effect would be felt by people other than the participant(s) in an action or transaction. Those affected could well be many miles away.
It goes back to the "invisible hand" that's the basis for free-market economics. When a decision is to be made, the person involved will weigh the costs against the benefits, and choose only those actions that show a net benefit. Individuals will thus be guided, as if by an invisible hand, to acting in ways that benefit society.
This market mechanism doesn't work if the individual's action imposes costs on other people, though, because the decision-maker won't take those costs into account. Friedman called this a "neighborhood effect" but today the more common term is "externality". Friedman was a devout believer in the free market, who too often downplayed or ignored instances of market failure. To his credit, though, he recognized this one. Pollution is a classic example of a problem that the market can't handle. Even Friedman agreed that government regulation was required to limit actions that impose costs on other people (negative externalities), like pollution, and to encourage actions that confer benefits on other people (positive externalities), like education. (Friedman wrote something like, "The education of your child benefits me."
The linked article is dismayingly sloppy in its misinterpretation of the term "neighborhood" as used by Friedman.
