Rand Paul and the Empty Box
About a year ago I was ruminating on the idea that if you took the singular value decomposition of the matrix representing American political opinions, you'd find that it's rank is effectively 1. Only one eigenvector would have a nontrivial value. Krugman is making the same observation here:
But why? Think of a stylized representation of issue space:
...
So why are these boxes empty? Why is American politics essentially one-dimensional, so that supporters of gay marriage are also supporters of guaranteed health insurance and vice versa? (And positions on foreign affairs — bomb or talk? — are pretty much perfectly aligned too).
Well, the best story I have is Corey Robin’s: It’s fundamentally about challenging or sustaining traditional hierarchy. The actual lineup of positions on social and economic issues doesn’t make sense if you assume that conservatives are, as they claim, defenders of personal liberty on all fronts. But it makes perfect sense if you suppose that conservatism is instead about preserving traditional forms of authority: employers over workers, patriarchs over families. A strong social safety net undermines the first, because it empowers workers to demand more or quit; permissive social policy undermines the second in obvious ways.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/07/rand-paul-and-the-empty-box/
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Take gun control, for example. It's hard to think that authoritarians would be opposed to gun control, when people talk about Second Amendment solutions and Lockean appeals. Granted, the authoritarians could be smart enough to realize that Second Amendment solutions and Lockean appeals have no bearing in modern society, and thus oppose gun control because they think such opposition will allow them to manipulate their constituents more sucessfully. But I think that grants them more intelligence than they have.
No, I feel (I wouldn't go so far as to characterize it as "opinion" or "thought"
that the conservative types are mostly animated by the two Ss, Selfishness and Schadenfreude. I feel Mr Krugman is trying to find underlying principles where there are none. The amount of flip-flopping these people do on various issues tells me that they have no convictions at all, except to get their own way and deprive others as much as possible. I do think schadenfreude plays a much greater role in these conservatives than is generally appreciated. It comes out when they rail aginst welfare recipients spending money on lobster and crab legs, welfare mothers driving Cadillacs. The attitude is not just the well-acknowledged "I got mine," but also an earnest desire to see to it that others don't get theirs.
-- Mal
These are a series of projections of the top-2 eigenvectors. You can see that even in the 2-D projections, the points inhabit an effectlvely 1-D manifold:
http://saweis.net/svd/
One example:
