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There's a lot of kind of discussion of what the political beliefs of
Silicon Valley elites and founders are, but we actually have no hard data on what
they actually believe when it comes to politics and policy.
>> Some people say Silicon Valley is really libertarian, other people say,
Silicon Valley, they're all just like loyal democrats, Silicon Valley, they all
just care about the social issues and they're very far left on social issues.
However, although there's no a lot of thinking about, for
example, people on Wall Street, how do they think about politics?
What do they want?
How do they interface with the political system?
There'd be much less thinking about that same question on the context of
Silicon Valley.
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>> Technology elites are basically liberal on every dimension you could think of
except regulation.
And this is actually really interesting because there is no other group
of people that we surveyed, that have this constellation of political beliefs.
And specifically when you come to economic issues, they are not easily categorized as
libertarians, because they believe in the redistribution of income, for
things like health care and education and poverty reduction.
But at the same time,
they believe that government should not be regulating business.
And some people have now called this new type of political animal, the libertarian.
So they're trying to find new words and terminologies, and so
it's been kind of interesting to see our people try to Introducing new categories
to match the results we've been finding.
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>> A lot of Silicon Valley companies right now are innovating and labor markets.
Uber is a great example, where there's a question of whether gig workers for
Uber should be treated like regular workers or as contractors.
You can imagine labor unions see that as a classic case where
it's important these workers receive protections,
all the protections that would be associated with traditional employees.
Whereas technology entrepreneurs look at this and they say,
no, we shouldn't be regulating how these companies treat workers,
we should give them freedom in the marketplace.
And so that's a classic example where I think in a lot of states that usually
starting to come do ahead and
you could imagine that is sort of thing that those who were to protect companies
who were doing more donating in democratic campaigns are going to say,
actually we disagree with the labor unions that are endorsing you.
We think you should take this other position on this issue.
So those kinds of tensions within the democratic party,
we think they going to become increasingly common.
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>> A lot of historical research has found that parties usually change when there's
important groups within those parties that agree with them on most things, but
disagree with them on a few things, and
then they shape the party in that direction.
So a classic example is that the AFL-CIO,
the CIO portion of it before it merged, was very tolerant of racial progress.
And at the time,
the democrats had a lot of virulent racist people as leaders in that party,
and they sort of used labor, which they agreed with the Democratic Party on, and
shifted the Democratic Party to being more of a ProCivil rights party.
And this pattern has emerged over and over again in American history.
So one prediction our research suggests is that, as technology leads become more
important part of the Democratic Party, in terms of its fund raising apparatus,
they're going to double down and promote traditional democratic interests when it
comes to social policy, redistribution, foreign policy, immigration.
But try to move it towards the right on issues when it comes to regulation,
particularly of labor markets.
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I think a big question right now in politics is the gap between elites and
masses.
And for the whole post World War period, there's been sort of an agreement
that we would devolve some power to elites who would then look out for
like everybody's interest.
But increasingly we've seen populist revolts going on in the United States and
all the way across the world.
What people and the masses have kind of realized are wages have stagnated,
expenses in real terms have gone up on things like health insurance and
college tuition etcetera, and our children are going to be living worse lives
with a worse standard of living than we did.
And so there's a lot of discussion about well, how does our democratic institutions
going to survive if there's not going to be cooperation between masses and elites?
So I think a lot of this research has to continue to explore this question more.
I think Dave and I are just generally interested in kind of understanding, well,
who are the elites and what does that mean and what do they believe?
And before we did a study like this, there really was no data, and
it's because these are very hard people to interview and get their opinions on.
And I think just future work needs to be done in this topic so
we can understand the contours and
potential fault lines in politics, both in the United States and abroad.
>> The other transformation you've seen economically for a lot of Americans is not
only have we just stagnated, but people are exposed to increasing risk.
And so a lot of the kind of government run programs that technology entrepreneurs can
be more skeptical of.
They're not just about transferring resources,
they're about some form of social insurance.
And so I think as people are exposed to more and more risk,
that might be an experience that technology entrepreneurs haven't directly
experienced as much, and so that's another gap that I'm interested in looking at.
>> I'm a big believer that I think social science should be addressing questions
that are important to the broader world.
That if the world says, these are the issues that are important
to how human beings are going to have to grapple with their democracies,
their societies, then that's what academics should be studying.
So that's one reason I was very proud of this study, is that these issues of
inequality, automation, technology, this is what the world is facing right now,
and so I think it's important to address questions that are relevant.
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