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It's a curiosity because without principles, what makes someone choose any particular side to begin with?
Familial/tribal/ethnic loyalties? Nobody is born into a void, into the "view from nowhere"; we're all born into a particular place, a particular family, particular conditions; embedded in a specific social context, full of unchosen bonds and obligations, which indelibly shape who we are.
You (generic/rhetorical "you," not making any assumptions here) love your family not because they're "the best family" according to some prior metric, you love your family because they're yours. Much the same with patriotism. To quote Chesterton, "Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her."
I'm curious what family, tribe or ethnicity have to contribute to considering the effects of certain economic policies like price controls, or law regarding the environment, or political and institutional design.
Would you say your family, tribe or ethnicity has helped you determine the answers to the above?
See e.g. the British Corn Laws. Those lined up very clearly with the aristocrats (who owned the land) and the farmers (who worked it) in favour of tarriffs on imported grain, with merchants / importers / speculators and urban industrial workers against.
Self-interest, life experiences and priorities often line up along familial, tribal and ethnic lines.
"What will the effect be of this 50% tariff?"
"I don't know. Are we talking about Hutus or Tutsis here?"
You can see how un-illuminating this is pretty quickly.
Because I don't know anything about either of those groups. I guarantee you they would be affected differently by tariffs.
I can look it up though:
The years following independence saw repeated massacres of Tutsis. There were also attacks on Hutus by Tutsis, who saw themselves denied political representation as the nation became a one-party State. Tutsis were denied jobs in the public service under an ethnic quota system which allocated them only 9% of available jobs. Tensions were further inflamed by increasing pressures on the Rwandan economy, resulting in rising levels of poverty and discontent.
So the Tutsis were a minority group that had been in charge in the early half of the 20th century and were then overthrown. When bad economic times struck Tutsis were hit by a double whammy of discrimination from the Hutus government and scapegoating from dissatisfied Hutus. Meanwhile the Hutus are likely propped up by the government and have more access to land and government support.
I strongly suspect that Tutsis would be hit very badly by 50% tariffs and the resultant economic problems. I also suspect that anybody who has serious business in Rwanda thinks about this kind of thing on a constant basis. The failure of foreign hegemons to consider very delicate inter-tribal dynamics in favour of academic theories about what should be important is a recurring complaint since the 1800s.
Good deep dive! But the point is that the effect of price controls - do they deliver the goods by keeping things affordable and available or not? - isn't determined by ethnicity or tribe.
"Is strongly suspect that Tutsis would be hit badly by..." is implicitly based on an understanding of the above, in fact.
And I’m answering: familial loyalties, suspicions of whether their tribe will benefit, aesthetic preferences, etc.
Who is having their goods delivered? Whose fault is it that what is happening is happening? Macroeconomics and the like are so nebulous, unreadable and unproven that you will find people’s opinions on the effect of price controls is strongly determined by their loyalties, and not the reverse.
I am come from an upper-class family, I went to the appropriate schools in the UK, I read the Soectator, etc. You could pretty easily predict my views on the merits of taxation and on the usefulness of the Laffer curve, my voting affiliation, my views on fox-hunting, on globalisation, all from those pieces of information.
Then Brexit happened and there was a big alignment but it’s amazing how you can predict people’s carefully worked out opinions on the results of certain policies once you know their class, gender, age and job.
Sure, you could, but it's not causal. But do you believe the veracity of what you think about the effects of taxation is really no more accurate than what a poor person thinks? It's all just situated selves determining so-called truth? Or are the effects real independent of you coming from an upper-class background?
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