opinions-political-policyForDiversePersonalityTypes

if you are thinking about how some aspect the world should work, one difficulty is that there are different personality types and you may not be very well acquainted with all of them. For example, in business sometimes people say, well, it's optimal for people to be hired and fired all the time, get used to it. In political economy, sometimes people say, well, it's optimal for people to live in close proximity to their neighbors, or it's optimal for people to be able to build whatever they want on their property without worrying about the neighbors, or it's optimal for investments to be risky, get used to it. These sentiments (or their opposites) sometimes seemed to be formed in ignorance of the diversity of personality types and instincts.

One important dimension of this is the value placed on stability and predictability. An example of someone who places less value on this is me. I would be OK if every night i had to sleep in a different place, and owned very few personal possessions, provided that copies of the various things i use (toothbrush, books, etc) were provided in each new sleeping place. By contrast, I know someone who has literally been upset for more than 24 hours because he misplaced a dime; this person places great value on coming home to the same place, everyday, and finding everything EXACTLY where they left it. Some people worry a lot if they aren't very sure that things won't change, and others do not.

Another dimension is possessiveness. Some people don't care about sharing stuff; other people want THEIR stuff. Another dimension is territoriality (how much personal space and alone time you want). There's plenty of others.

Putting some of these together, imagine a communist utopia where people don't own property, rotate living quarters, live with other people, and are reassigned to jobs based on what is needed. This would be great for a person with little need for stablity, little possessiveness, territoriality, but terrible for the opposite type. By contrast, imagine a socialist system where people own property and real estate and cannot be fired from their job. This would be great for the opposite type of person, but the person who would be happy in the former situation would be bored and lonely and alienated.

A particular problem comes when there is a selection bias that causes the distribution of preferences in the population of policymakers to differ from the distribution of preferences in the population at large. For example, I once attended a grad student government meeting where the issue was brought up that some students were bothered by noise made by others in student housing when the noisemakers socialized. The students bothered by the noise had sent a petition asking that some section of student housing be designated for quiet people, and the quiet people could opt to live next to other quiet people. It seemed a reasonable suggestion to me, but the student government representatives didn't think so. In fact, even the person delivering the petition was opposed to it (they were just fulfilling their duty to communicate the suggestions of their constituents). Most of the reps seemed to think that surely the people complaining would have their own parties and make lots of noise sometimes. To me, it seemed obvious that there are many grad students who just don't party and won't ever make noise. I think the reason for the dissonance between my perceptions and the perceptions of the reps is that student government reps, due to selection bias, are more likely to be the type of person who likes to (or at least is comfortable with) interacting with other people. The people who never have people over are more likely to be the type of person who does not like to want to interact with other people as much. In other words, student government reps are more likely to go to parties themselves, to have parties themselves, and to know other people who go to parties and have parties; they are likely to underestimate the prevalence of the other sort of person. (of course, take this analysis with a grain of salt, because it implies that i have a more accurate read on the grad student population distribution than a student government rep; a dubious proposition).

Another example is in business. It seems to me that a lot of people don't like working and would prefer to work less. Why, then, do we work as much as we do? Part of this is surely necessity, but I don't think that's the whole story. Before the 40-hour workweek was decided upon, people worked more than that; when they changed it to 40, we survived. My theory is that the people who are in charge are, understandably, the people who work more than others; these people tend to think that everyone else should work more. Worse (I can back this up with only anecdotal evidence), I think that many of the people in charge think that work is a pleasant thing that most people look forward to.