I originally elucidated my thoughts on partisanship and different inequalities here; ironically the initial prompt was an offhand Cowenite comment.
Some other posts you might find of interest: temporal inequality and redistribution, social psych insights, health care reform from a med student point of view, and an underrepresented way of thinking about Chinese diplomacy.
Edited to add my followup comment from the thread:
Yes the labor wing of the left is shrinking, but support for redistribution is as strong as ever, whether that means higher marginal tax rates to lower the status of the richest, or more services to raise the status of the poorest. Either way the effect is to lower the importance of economic competition, relative to competition on looks, height, and social status.
I would argue that big business is actually relatively bipartisan, which makes sense since you’ll want a foot in the lobbying door. Either way, business lobbying is not part of this macro divide, it’s simply an example of self-interested parties doing what they do best. Ditto farm subsidies. On the other hand, the left is much more likely to favor government regulation of business as a whole, while the right prefers both less regulation and freer international trade.
Remember, furthermore, the Cowen/Hanson dictum that politics is more about group loyalties than about policy. A clearer way of seeing the basic impulses behind policy proposals is simply looking at attitudes of both sides towards different groups – what’s praiseworthy and what’s contemptible. And that “cultural” view clearly shows this money vs. social status dichotomy. (The one thing that DOES weaken my framing is the anti-immigration right, which is often framed as protecting poor natives from economic competition.)
The major contribution of my framework, as I see it, is a way to explain the appeal of social norms to non-conservatives, many of whom see norms as merely a way for the powerful to oppress the weak. To the contrary; if you look at “power” in terms of social status rather than belonging to particular groups, social norms are a protection of the weak against the excesses of the strong.
