...Jonathan Haidt:
[T]he mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning—the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes—the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.
...The economists in the lower-left corner generally favor (as Dan puts it) “governmentalization,” while those in the upper-right generally oppose it. Many economists also lie across the middle, not too far from the red line. What’s especially striking is that no one is in either of the other corners. It seems that economists adopt an attitude toward governmentalization and then apply that attitude to both sets of issues. Is a basic attitude toward governmentaliztion the elephant lurking within the economist? Or is there some other explanation for this pattern?