Krugman's Simplification

Nobody likes to be a number, but Paul Krugman claims there is good evidence that a single dimensionless number can go a long way to pinning us down...

Here is a posting on his NY Times blog:

Dimensionality

A number of commenters on my Michelle Malkin post objected that it’s not possible to reduce political views to a one-dimensional, left-right scale.

That’s what I would have thought a few years ago. But then I became familiar with the Poole-Rosenthal work on Congressional voting. They use a clever algorithm to jointly map bills and members of Congress in a hypothetical issues space. The number of dimensions in that space is arbitrary — but they found that historically just two dimensions accounted for the great bulk of voting. One dimension corresponded to left-right on economic issues; the other was basically race/segregation.

And since the 1960s, with the great Southern realignment, the race dimension has collapsed. So Congressional politics is left versus right — end of story. Oh, and polarization along that dimension has increased hugely: the center did not hold, and there really isn’t any middle ground.

Now, real people may be more multidimensional than Congressmen. But I suspect that even among the general public, we’re more one-dimensional than you might think.

I agree that on first take it sounds ridiculously simplifying, but he claims scientific validation. I don't have time or talent to follow that up, but I do know that I love simplification, a rule-of-thumb, a synopsis, the moral of a story, the bottom line, a template, and other techniques to help me get through life with the minimal critical thinking is wonderful. Don't get me wrong. I love to think things out, but not everything! I love to puzzle over stuff that strikes me as fun. Trying to pin down politicians has never been my idea of "fun".