What I didn’t know about myself was that I was a “libertarian leftist”. I had always considered myself a liberal, which I had been told meant I was so-called “left of center”. Where the terms left and right came from, I really didn’t know before now. It’s always bothered me that we describe our politicians, our economists, our professors, our teachers, our historic figures as either “left wing” or “right wing”; is the socioeconomic spectrum really only one dimension? Turns out it’s not, and now there’s a new tool for measuring your social/economic position in two dimensions.

Welcome to the Political Compass

According to the homepage of the Political Compass:

The old one-dimensional categories of ‘right’ and ‘left’, established for the seating arrangement of the French National Assembly of 1789, are overly simplistic for today’s complex political landscape. For example, who are the ‘conservatives’ in today’s Russia? Are they the unreconstructed Stalinists, or the reformers who have adopted the right-wing views of conservatives like Margaret Thatcher?

On the standard left-right scale, how do you distinguish leftists like Stalin and Gandhi? It’s not sufficient to say that Stalin was simply more left than Gandhi. There are fundamental political differences between them that the old categories on their own can’t explain. Similarly, we generally describe social reactionaries as ‘right-wingers’, yet that leaves left-wing reactionaries like Robert Mugabe and Pol Pot off the hook.

Take this test, see where you fall in the social and economic spectra. Personally, I thought that as a teacher of Economics, a science dominated by a neo-classical, free market perspective, that I would have ended up in the quadrant of the libertarian right. I guess those old left-wing ideals of my college years are more ingrained than I thought!

Hat tip to Gregory Mankiw for the link!

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About the author: Jason Welker is a teacher at Zurich International School in Switzerland, where he teaches Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate Economics. Jason was an international school student in Malaysia before studying economics at Seattle University then earning his Masters in Education. He calls Seattle and Northern Idaho home. In addition to maintaining an economics wiki and this blog for economics student and educators, Jason also gives presentations on using Web 2.0 tools in education at workshops and conferences around the world. His economics wiki won the 2007 "Best Educational Wiki" award from the "EduBlog Awards".

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