Listening to Michael Savage is a guilty pleasure of mine. His presentation is not known for being measured in its delivery or factually precise in its content. Thankfully, there's a whole list of places listed on the right side of this page that one may visit to get one's fill of that. Savage is appealing because he is a politically incorrect bull in a cultural Marxist's china shop. As a middle level cog in a corporate machine who isn't industrious enough to make it as an entrepreneur, if I let fly like he did, I'd have a pink slip shoved in my face faster than all my casual acquaintances could unfriend me on facebook.
Sometimes his intuitive assertions also provide a good pretense to take an empirical look at just how accurate those assertions are. He regularly recalls from his youth that among the sharpest kids, those who turned out to be productive members of society (ie, conservatives) wanted to be doctors, while the nastiest ones (ie, liberals) all wanted to be lawyers.
The GSS allows us to look at the political orientations of doctors and lawyers in the US. The following table shows the political distributions of practitioners of law (n = 222) and of medicine (n = 108):
Stripping away Savage's value judgments, his characterization isn't too far off the mark. Parenthetically, it's not surprising that legal and medical professionals are more ideologically committed than the population at large is. Moderates tend to be of modest intelligence.
GSS variables used: ISCO88(2221)(2421), POLVIEWS(1-3)(4)(5-7)
Sometimes his intuitive assertions also provide a good pretense to take an empirical look at just how accurate those assertions are. He regularly recalls from his youth that among the sharpest kids, those who turned out to be productive members of society (ie, conservatives) wanted to be doctors, while the nastiest ones (ie, liberals) all wanted to be lawyers.
The GSS allows us to look at the political orientations of doctors and lawyers in the US. The following table shows the political distributions of practitioners of law (n = 222) and of medicine (n = 108):
| Occupation | Liberal | Moderate | Conservative |
| Lawyer | 39.3% | 32.2% | 28.5% |
| Physician | 32.5% | 21.4% | 46.0% |
Stripping away Savage's value judgments, his characterization isn't too far off the mark. Parenthetically, it's not surprising that legal and medical professionals are more ideologically committed than the population at large is. Moderates tend to be of modest intelligence.
GSS variables used: ISCO88(2221)(2421), POLVIEWS(1-3)(4)(5-7)
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