Right-thinking vs left? There are reasons for why the right is underrepresented at our high-end retirement community, simply judging from our occupational groupings, usually determined in young adulthood and often biased by inherited traits, as twin studies have shown.
Perhaps ten years ago, I looked up the academic literature on faculty opinions at ten major research universities, subdivided by department. They may not map onto Skyline’s residents, but they do indicate how young adult mindsets lead them to specialized educations.
Right did not achieve a majority in any departmental category. The closest was 44%.
For Left, the highest was 80% for the social science professors, maybe 70% for the natural sciences and a bit less for such professional schools as law, medicine, engineering.
So, which subjects attracted more right-thinkers? That 44% figure came from those teaching business accounting and the runner-up was civil engineering, both likely to be suspicious of innovation, where their teaching stresses that there is a right way to do things and that alternatives lead to disaster. But be careful about pigeonholing: both departments still had a left-thinking majority when averaged over all ten institutions. And major research universities are not likely to be representative of the many small colleges where the emphasis is on teaching full-time.
Now some speculation. One of the major insights from the last 40 years of behavioral economics is that many subjects will work harder to retain the $100 they have recently earned than they will to earn another $100. Tax experts figured that out long ago, judging from withholding taxes, so that most taxpayers are not having to write big checks from what’s already in the bank. (That result is mostly from college-age subjects, not those about to retire.)
I had long puzzled over why conservatives were called conservative–after all, they were not predisposed to conserve environmental resources or to protect minority rights. I now tend to think of conservatives as a group to be more determined with holding on to what they already possess, not sharing as readily or as concerned with other peoples’ problems.
There are, of course, many other routes than occupational attractions to being pushed left or right along the way: family politics, religion, getting mugged, etc. But I cannot think of any that might apply to the people who self-select for Skyline–except for St. James Cathedral across the street (and I’m not sure which direction that tilts Skyline, even though bishops as a group, like other property managers, tilt to the right).
