Elite Human Capital Is Always Liberal

Ideology and intelligence as an inherently causal relationship

Conservatives are supposed to be IQ realists, while liberals tend to be deniers. This makes it ironic then that, as a recent paper making the rounds has shown, in the United States there is generally an association between conservatism and lower cognitive ability. This is not a new finding, and it is confirmed by not only academic papers focusing on the topic, but also data on voting patterns, which show a tendency for highly educated and higher earning regions to vote Democrat.

How should we think about this fact and what it means for politics? I think that it’s important to distinguish between things that have an inherently causal relationship, and those where the relationship is incidental. For example, IQ certainly predicts your reading ability, and for obvious and straightforward reasons. Being smarter practically by definition means you are better able to consume and process information. There’s also a relationship, I’m sure, between high IQ and eating avocado toast. This may in fact be because smart people have more sophisticated tastes, but it’s more likely that the impact is due to fashion. Individuals of different classes separate themselves and develop their own cultural characteristics. High IQ might in fact directly cause a preference for avocado toast, because intelligence leads to a higher socioeconomic status, and puts you in social circles where this is considered a normal meal. The relationship may be causal given our circumstances, but it’s not inherent. Forty years ago no one in America was eating avocado toast, and it’s quite feasible to imagine a society where it is mostly preferred by the lower classes. Finally, there are spurious correlations. Smarter people tend to be taller, but this may be because both characteristics are a sign of health, or it might be a case of pleiotropy, where the same genes influence multiple phenotypic traits.

When determining which relationships are inherently causal, on the one hand, and which are incidentally causal or spurious correlations, on the other, we mostly go off what sounds plausible. An inherent relationship between IQ and the ability to do algebra simply makes sense. One between intelligence and preference for a certain food seems less so, though the possibility of course shouldn’t be dismissed completely. When we’re not sure, we can look at data across different societies. You’re certain to find a relationship between IQ and reading or mathematical ability anywhere you look. But if the correlation between a taste for avocado toast and intelligence only exists under certain conditions, we can dismiss the relationship as not likely to be inherently causal.

Cross-national comparisons of course aren’t perfect, because ideas and memes cross borders. The upper-class American taste for avocado toast can be a trend that is also adopted by elites living in other nations. This should bias us towards finding that more things seem inherently causal than actually are. At the same time, this consideration can make us more certain about our conclusions when we find relationships that don’t appear inherently causal. If, despite trends and cultural fashions crossing borders, the correlation between trait A and trait B is still inconsistent, then we may believe that there is not likely to be much of a natural association between them.

That said, how should we think about whether and how stupidity causes conservatism? The short answer is that the totality of the evidence suggests that the relationship between intelligence and ideology is inherent with regards to social issues, and mostly non-inherent or a spurious correlation when it comes to economic views. The grounds for thinking this is that while social conservatives are stupider everywhere, the relationship between intelligence and economic preferences varies across societies, and if anything smarter people are more often relatively pro-market. Here I discuss why all of this might be, and some of the implications for understanding politics.

Economic and Social Conservatism Are Weakly Correlated

First, it’s important to note that social conservatism being associated with support for smaller government and more pro-market positions is far from universal. If anything, America is in the minority. For the sake of clarity, in this essay I’ll use the terms “economic conservatism” and “social conservatism” in their American senses, but keep in mind that the former usage is arbitrary, and in a global context it would probably be more accurate to call a pro-market orientation “economic liberalism.”

Social views here includes not only sexual morality and attitudes towards women, but also nationalism and immigration policy. Some individuals might combine say openness to immigration with hostility towards LGBT, but that seems rare. If you know a political party in any part of the world has socially conservative views on women, you can probably assume that they are relatively hostile to open borders, but without more information you can’t predict much about what they think about taxes and redistribution. Of course there are exceptions, and a mismatch of right- and left-wing views on abortion and immigration is more common than on abortion and LGBT.

Malka, Lelkes, and Soto (2017) looked at public opinion data from 99 countries and found that economic and cultural conservatism are usually negatively correlated with one another. The graph below shows the association between preferences regarding social welfare policy, on the one hand, and views on sexual morality, immigration, and the role of women, on the other.

Here we can see that the US is something of an outlier. In the figure above, America has the strongest correlation between economic views and sexual morality in the conservative direction, the second highest between economic views and immigration policy, and the sixth highest between economic views and the role of women. If you only knew about American politics, you might think that support for say lower taxes, restricting abortion, and having a tough immigration policy are a natural combination, but it’s quite rare. Western nations usually follow the American pattern, while in poorer countries and Eastern Europe, social conservatism and support for government control over the economy tend to go together.

When Malka et al. totaled things up, they found that countries are much more likely to have a negative than a positive correlation between economic and social conservatism.

A 2017 paper on public opinion in China found support for democracy, markets, and social liberalism to be strongly associated with one another. China is much more normal in this regard than the United States, where the people who want economic freedom are more eager to restrict social freedom and vice versa.

Based on cross-national data, and our understanding of history, then, it makes sense to treat economic and social views as distinct. The current Communist Party of the Russian Federation, for example, has a reported 500,000 members and dozens of seats in the Duma. Unsurprisingly, it supports things like progressive taxation and the renationalization of businesses, but also opposes LGBT rights and wants to encourage larger families. Examples like this across the world are not hard to find.

The fact that social and economic conservatism are distinct and often uncorrelated among movements and individuals should make one skeptical of theories that rely on universal explanations about political differences based on how coalitions happen to line up in the United States. In any particular country, the correlation between the two is a product of contingent historical forces, not a reflection of tendencies inherent to these things we call the “Right” and “Left.”

The Role of IQ

The negative relationship between social conservatism and IQ appears to be practically universal. Whenever you measure people’s intelligence, or a proxy for it, and ask about their views on anything related to race, gays, foreigners, or religion, respondents who hold liberal attitudes are smarter. One study looked at a representative sample of Britons born in 1970 who had their IQs tested at 10 years-old. Smarter people were more “antiracist, pro-working women, socially liberal, and trusting in the democratic political system.” The correlation between intelligence and a latent trait measuring social liberalism was 0.46, which is quite strong. Stankov (2009) found similar relationships among foreigners who took the TOEFL exam, and also American community college students based on their SAT scores. Education and income are both correlated with support for gay acceptance and less nationalistic attitudes in China.

Even without survey data, we can simply look at how parties line up or debates over populism. Practically everywhere you look, elites are more in favor of LGBT rights and welcoming newcomers than the masses are. No fewer than 35 American states have enacted constitutional or statutory bans on gay marriage, but these were invalidated by the 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell. On the other side of the world, the Taiwanese legislature legalized gay marriage in 2019, despite two-thirds of the population voting against doing so only one year earlier. Pew Research recently polled 32 countries on attitudes towards gay marriage. In 22 of them, more education was associated with higher support, and in 10 countries there was a positive correlation with income. Even when the results weren’t statistically significant, the relationship between higher human capital and support for gay marriage was usually in the expected direction. I got the underlying data from this study, and the results are represented below.

Source: Pew Research, 2023. For most countries, “higher education” means having completed postsecondary education or above. In Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Brazil, the higher category is secondary or above.

Source: Pew Research, 2023. Income cutoff between high and low is the median for each country.

None of this is new. Elites have always had more open-minded sexual norms than peasants. In the US, civil rights, opening the borders, feminism, and the secularization of public life have been top-down phenomena. The leaders of Middle Eastern countries have usually been less devout than their populations, a constant source of tension. Iran is a notable exception, but despite holding power and being able to censor its opponents for over four decades, the clerical regime still finds itself in constant tension with its Elite Human Capital. Even the Ancient Greeks and Romans had a strain of religious skepticism among their elites, which we can also see in an even more consequential form among the American Founders. We don’t have surveys or voting data from most previous historical eras, but I would be surprised if there have been many times and places where the smartest and wealthiest individuals were less socially liberal than the masses.

Meanwhile, there is an inconsistent but perhaps slightly positive relationship between IQ and economic conservatism. Sometimes pro-market people are smarter, sometimes they are dumber, and sometimes there is no correlation at all. Below are the results of one meta-analysis of 23 different studies from the US, the UK, Sweden, Denmark, and Turkey.

The relationships are weak, with the US showing no association at all when studies are averaged out and the rest trending towards positive. The recent Edwards et al. paper mentioned in the opening paragraph above showing smarter Americans being more economically liberal has to be understood in this context. That result isn’t consistent cross-nationally, and isn’t even consistent in the US depending on when and how you measure economic attitudes. In recent years, our two major parties have seen increasing educational polarization. What’s probably been happening is that as more educated citizens become turned off by the Republican Party in response to its attitudes on social issues and immigration, they start adopting more left-wing economic views. Polarization works in the other direction too, as citizens who are naturally socially conservative begin repeating the economic mantras of the leaders who seem to be sticking up for them. This is why Trump doesn’t lose any of his working-class support when he cuts taxes for the rich or opposes labor unions.

Let’s return to China, where we can see that, as already mentioned, higher education and higher income are both correlated with more pro-market policies, in addition to greater support for social liberalism and democracy and less nationalism. The correlations are quite substantive. The gap in social liberalism between the most and least educated respondents is about a standard deviation.

Similarly, a study from Sweden shows that twins who are smarter want more privatization, lower taxes, and less redistribution, while being more pro-immigration and socially liberal. As mentioned, in Britain kids with higher IQs tend to grow up to be less prejudiced and sexist adults. But a different study using the exact same methodology showed smarter children ending up more economically conservative in their early 30s. Findings like these are quite common, but one practically never sees measures of social conservatism being positively associated with IQ.

Why Elite Human Capital Rejects God and Nation

In wondering why there is a universal association between social conservatism and low intelligence, we must leave the realm of social science and enter into that of informed speculation. First, I think that the relative lack of relationship between economic views and intelligence can be dispensed with on the grounds that most people don’t study economics. Nobody expects the public to have an opinion on how planes fly, and if you asked them to explain the technical details, being more intelligent is no help when you have not done any research on the matter. Most people, smart or dumb, lack intellectual curiosity and independence of thought. Therefore, whether higher IQ individuals end up adopting more pro- or anti-market talking points is contingent on the political circumstances of the society in question. When Republicans were seen as normal people in business suits, smarter Americans were more receptive to their arguments about small government. As the party has started doing things like featuring Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan at its national convention, Elite Human Capital is now more attracted to the messaging of its opponents. I believe that there is an inherent relationship between intelligence and economic conservatism since pro-market positions are correct and difficult to understand for people of limited cognitive ability, but that inherent relationship is weak enough to be outweighed by other factors depending on the place and time.

On social issues, the most obvious potential explanation for the universal pattern we see is that social conservatism is stupid. One could argue that as soon as smart people from different cultures start to think about questions of sexual morality and how they should relate to outsiders, they converge towards liberalism because it is more logical and likely to be correct. Jason Richwine points out that it’s possible for there to be a negative relationship between socially conservative positions and IQ even if most smart people are conservative. To understand how, imagine a nation where smart individuals are 90% likely to believe in God, and all stupid people do so. Yet this is not what we observe in modern societies, as left-wing positions like support for gay marriage and secularism have large constituencies.

I believe a version of the argument that social liberalism is just correct. It is a good assumption that smarter people being more likely to believe in something is decent evidence that it is true, all else being equal. If intelligence didn’t predict getting the right answer on most things most of the time, then it wouldn’t be that useful of a trait. That said, this is only one thing to consider. Smarter people being more socially liberal doesn’t necessarily mean that conservatives should simply let go of all their beliefs and join the side of Elite Human Capital. Appeals to authority are bad arguments, and so are appeals to a majority, no matter how that majority is defined.

Consider immigration from the perspective of the argument that social liberalism is simply correct. Individual A is born on one side of a border, Individual B on the other. Without knowing anything else about these two people, the conservative treats the well-being of A as much more valuable. Many smart people find such an argument unconvincing, especially if they engage in any careful thought at all about ethics. Even immigration restrictionists today say they reject “racism,” and once you’ve declared preferences based on ancestry illegitimate it seems inconsistent to have strong views based on where strangers were born. Conservatives try to make an analogy between nationhood and preferences for family members, but you don’t need to write essays and books trying to convince people to prefer their relatives over strangers. Obviously, nationalism is not nearly as rooted in human nature, giving us the option to either accept or reject it.

Similarly, intelligent people are much more likely to reject religion because it is fundamentally irrational. Even if you yourself are religious, you must think that other people’s religions are wrong, so you should be able to relate at least somewhat to the views of secularists in most other societies. Although some try to make secular arguments for the Christian positions on topics like euthanasia, abortion, and LGBT, very few people find such arguments convincing unless they’ve already accepted a religious framework. Richard Lynn gathered a good deal of data showing religiosity and IQ having a negative correlation both cross-nationally and among individuals, and this seems to me to be as good a candidate as any for an inherently causal relationship.

Maybe those who believe in pro-life, anti-LGBT, and more restrictive borders are correct. My argument is that the relationship between social conservatism and stupidity is inherent, given overwhelming cross-national and historical evidence, but that doesn’t mean that the causal pathway has to take the form of individuals thinking through issues and coming to rational conclusions based on facts and logic. Another possibility is that being smart makes you susceptible to accepting certain fallacies. Or perhaps when smart people get together, they are subject to specific dynamics that lead them astray.

Let’s take wokeness. I think that if you’re dumb, you are simply shut off to moral appeals made by outgroups. We all grow up with prejudices based on our social class, era, and culture. To overcome them and have empathy towards those who are different or engage in unfamiliar ways of thinking, it requires some minimum level of IQ. But being open to alternative viewpoints makes one subject to manipulation by supposed representatives of outgroups or clever ideological hucksters. So in a society with slavery or feudalism, intelligent people are more likely to be in favor of liberty because they can take the perspective of groups that are oppressed. At the same time, when legal equality has been achieved, they are subject to going along with demands for special favors and privileges. On feminism, stupidity might be protective against women’s tears. Men who are dumb find it hard to empathize with women at all, and if one is screaming or crying they may be prone to dismiss her concerns. “Bitches be crazy,” as our urban aristocrats like to say. I think Westerners who oppose wokeness today are correct, but I still believe most of them would be defenders of slavery or feudalism if they were born in a different historical period.

LGBT can perhaps be understood in a similar way. The masses dislike homosexuality and want to see people who are sexually nonconforming put in their place. As soon as someone starts advocating on their behalf, smart people say it’s not for me, but what’s the harm? Social conservatives who are also intellectuals argue you have to think of the higher-order effects of moving away from heteronormativity. Maybe they’re right, maybe they’re wrong, but the point is that the masses aren’t thinking about that when they demand that their government engage in gay bashing. They simply want to ban LGBT because they think it’s gross or God hates it. If the Low Human Capital crowd is right about the need to suppress homosexuality or not grant it equal status, it is usually for the wrong reasons. The same likely applies to conservative views on immigration. The reason boomers with rotting brains watching Fox News oppose illegal immigration isn’t that they’ve been reading Garett Jones; it’s because they’re racist and not smart enough to see that stories about things like terrorists crossing the Rio Grande are fake news.  

Another possibility is that different classes are accepting values that are generally adaptive for their own lives. People with intelligence and self-control can experiment a bit with casual sex and drugs while those lower on these traits can’t. This is similar to what Charles Murray has argued, and has something in common with Rob Henderson’s idea of luxury beliefs. Religion becomes the mechanism through which poors can better police the behavior of themselves and others. Having different rules for groups that are different makes sense, but understanding how other classes function in the modern world requires a level of imagination that even Elite Human Capital lacks, which may be why they tend not to support social conservatism out of a sense of noblesse oblige. This has become increasingly true as society becomes more segregated along the lines of IQ and other important traits, and the middle and upper classes have fewer and fewer sustained direct interactions with the poor, therefore making them less able to understand the kinds of social structures the latter need. A theory like this would explain why Elite Human Capital universally being relatively socially liberal is a more modern phenomenon, although one of course finds evidence for it in the past.

What’s a Rightoid to Do?

I think all of this is very bad news for social conservatives. Either smart people reject your views because those views are wrong, or because, even if your views are correct, individuals with higher IQs find them inherently unappealing. No matter which interpretation of the data is correct, it’s going to be very difficult to influence elite institutions.

This might be one reason why there is often a relationship between conservatism and authoritarianism. When you leave the press, academics, and other kinds of Elite Human Capital to assume their natural leadership roles, they will make society more liberal. One could argue that only a strongman with the support of the masses can stop them. But even that often doesn’t work. Look at what happened to Spain after Franco, Chile after Pinochet, and how much elites in Iran hate their theocratic government.

Creating a world in which Elite Human Capital is socially conservative runs into the problem of human nature — a concept that is usually invoked by conservatives but in this case refers to the ways elites tend to think and form institutions. It may be theoretically possible to go against the grain, but any equilibrium achieved will always be fragile. Every new generation will be naturally inclined to challenge the status quo, and disrupt the unusual conditions that made social conservatism succeed in the first place. I’m not saying that a modern society led by socially conservative elites over the long term that is not a dictatorship is impossible, only that we haven’t seen evidence that such a thing is likely. When I talk to Yarvin about these things, he says I’m being parochial in my thinking and history provides plenty of examples of this, but it seems reasonable to me to believe that things have fundamentally changed since the Industrial Revolution and with the advent of instantaneous global communication. The days when China could completely close itself off from the world and remain in ideological homeostasis indefinitely are long past. Maybe when Yarvin leads his ideological revolution this will create new circumstances that change the relationships between intelligence and political attitudes, but again, we have to wait for evidence that this can happen.

If they don’t want to go the dictator route, social conservatives may just try to do politics really well to achieve their desired outcomes to the greatest extent possible. As I’ve previously suggested to Republicans, one thing you might want to do when realizing that Elite Human Capital is not on your side is to try and create a world where power is more fragmented and decentralized. Social conservatives won’t ever get Harvard or Yale, but they can work to make the Ivy Leagues less impactful and put increasing power in the hands of institutions that are more likely to be run by people with views similar to themselves. Smart women will always want the right to have their abortions, but you can pass laws to force them to give birth anyway and do that for as long as possible. The Iranian government might be a model here. Their most intelligent and accomplished citizens hate the regime, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to collapse any time soon.

If there’s one particular socially conservative cause you care about like pro-life or anti-woke, one strategy might be to try and cleave it off from the rest of the conservative meme complex. One can sell opposition to abortion or ending affirmative action on classical liberal grounds. This might be harder to do than riling up the chud masses to take up your cause, but any victories achieved will be longer lasting. In contrast, any comprehensive anti-liberal social program or agenda is likely to face an uphill battle and ultimately fail.

Economic conservatives, for their part, have more hope of winning over elites. But they will often face a dilemma. If they ally with social conservatives, they can hitch their wagon to a cause that is popular with the masses and therefore achieve electoral victories, but they at the same time turn off Elite Human Capital. This is the bargain that has been made in the United States, and I’d say it’s been successful all things considered. Ideally, economic conservatives would like to live in a society where they can be on the same side of Elite Human Capital, but for unique historical reasons this is probably not possible right now in the contemporary United States and maybe some other countries. The thing that stands in the way of economic conservatism succeeding most of the time isn’t universal hostility from elites, but the views of the masses and interest group politics.

It’s always important to understand not only the political reality one faces, but also what aspects of that reality are historically contingent and which are more akin to laws of societal development. The ideas of social conservatives not appealing to Elite Human Capital appears to be in the latter category. This has deep implications for their hopes of ultimately achieving political successes and whether we should want them to. After all, even if you think a faction is correct on a certain constellation of issues, do you really want to hand over power to them if it means reducing the average IQ of those in charge, and creating a situation where your leaders can only accomplish their goals through more authoritarian means?