{"id":3140,"date":"2008-11-10T20:41:59","date_gmt":"2008-11-10T20:41:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/11\/10\/whats-the-matter-with-your-def\/"},"modified":"2008-11-10T20:41:59","modified_gmt":"2008-11-10T20:41:59","slug":"whats-the-matter-with-your-def","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/11\/10\/whats-the-matter-with-your-def\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s the Matter With Your Definitions?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at Slate<\/cite>, Daniel Gross has a really dumb piece on rich people voting for Obama “against their own economic interest”<\/a>. There are many dumb things about this article, starting with the fact that it doesn’t even attempt to answer the question in its title, but the main thing that’s dumb is the framing of the question:<\/p>\n

\n

While there has been job loss and economic anxiety throughout Fairfield County, I don’t think that economic problems alone explain the big Democratic gains in the region. In Greenwich, economic stress for many people means flying commercial or selling the ski house (while maintaining the summer house on Nantucket). There’s something deeper going on when a town that is home to corporate CEOs, professional athletes, hedge-fund managers, and private-equity barons, the people who gained the most financially under the Bush years and who would seem to have the most to lose financially under an Obama administration, flips into the Democratic column.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The problem here is that “economic interest” is being defined in the stupidest manner possible, namely as paying the smallest amount in taxes in the short term.<\/p>\n

Maybe, just maybe, the wealthy people in Greenwich are smart enough to know that their economic interest extends somewhat beyond their immediate, short-term tax bill, to encompass things like broadly sustainable economic growth for the whole country, not just CEO’s and hedge fund managers. And it might just be that they’ve noticed that the economy as a whole tends to fare better under Democrats than Republicans (particularly mind-bogglingly incompetent Republicans, like we’ve had the last eight years).<\/p>\n

Nah…. That’s just crazy talk. It must be hippies putting drugs in the water, or something.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at Slate, Daniel Gross has a really dumb piece on rich people voting for Obama “against their own economic interest”. There are many dumb things about this article, starting with the fact that it doesn’t even attempt to answer the question in its title, but the main thing that’s dumb is the framing of… Continue reading What’s the Matter With Your Definitions?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class_issues","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}