I was talking with a friend who is running for office again.  He wants to change the world through his political campaign by changing the way that people think about minimum wage laws, head taxes and space colonization.  I suggested that he might improve his performance by finding out what the county government is actually spending money on.  This might make him appear more competent and knowledgeable.

I doubt that he would win in any case since his ideas in these subjects are so unpopular.  If he wants to change everyone's opinions in all of these subjects then he is fighting an uphill battle.  To me it all seems like an exercise in futility.

So how do things change?  Clearly they do.  Only a few years ago we would consider it unrealistic to support marriage equality, as far as allowing people of the same gender to marry each other.  A slow change in public opinion can suddenly tip the balance.  However, I don't see public opinion moving in his direction.

On the issue of gay marriage, which has taken us by surprise, it might pay to describe what social forces were in play.  I suspect that the relevant change was urbanization.  According to this Wikipedia article the urbanization rate in the U.S. climbed from 40% to 80% from 1900 to 1990.  Another factor is that the social welfare state has, to a certain extent replaced churches in the provision of social services.  The main causes of this are probably urbanization and feminism.  Once women were given the right to vote, they have used their political power to increase the size of the social welfare state.  Women are both more religious and further to the political left than men.

Organized religion, at least in the Christian or formerly Christian West, has traditionally been morally opposed to homosexuality.  When the Church declines in influence, gay rights naturally improve.  Governments find that the social welfare state is easier to maintain in a gay friendly environment.  Particularly when education is seen as a local responsibility.  Openly gay people tend to have fewer children, so you tend to have families that have two adults who work and pay taxes, but no children, who require that the government shell out money to pay for schools.

But if this is the case, why would the church oppose homosexuality?  One is, of course, tempted to say that it was in order to keep people stupid.  We should note that literacy has steadily improved up to 1979.  From 1993 to 2002 the trend is mixed, but I think still on the whole positive.  However, I doubt that the explanation that the church actually wanted people to remain uneducated is valid.  It doesn't explain why it was that so recently in the past large numbers of people found homosexuality repulsive, and why this is no longer the case, at least to the same extent.

Part of the explanation must surely be familiarity.  If people haven't seen many gays and lesbian couples hold hands, for instance, then one is much more likely to find this repulsive.  Gays and lesbians are a minority in any society.  It will always be the case that the majority are heterosexual.  Unless one is in a very large city, there are unlikely to be many gays and lesbians.  Gays and lesbians will always want to establish residence in a community where it is more comfortable to do so.  The modern highly mobile urban proletariat has come to dominate current times.  It is much easier for people to move.

Prior to the industrial revolution, the economic elite often wanted to keep the peasantry immobile.  Hence the church wasn't really competing for gays and lesbians to support the base for tithes and offerings.  Travel was expensive relative to wages.

In short all of these trends worked for greater acceptance of homosexuality.  There are no comparable changes that would similarly effect how people think about minimum wage laws, for example.  I suspect that changes in this area will have to come from the type of government that we have.

A likely change in our type of government is toward more direct democracy.  Initiatives and refferenda will be more widespread.  This is unlikely to make minimum wage laws easier to oppose.  In fact it is likely to have the opposite effect.  On the brighter side, direct democracy of this sort does have the impact of reducing the tax burden.

What I argued that we need is for government to be more accountable.  That is we should allow representatives to select policy and then have the people evaluate them on the basis of whether or not the legislation had good results.  For example, if minimum wage laws really do cause unemployment, we should have a political system that punishes elected leaders for unemployment regardless of the cause.  The people will not be responsible for determining whether minimum wage laws cause unemployment, which is beyond their competence.  They will only need to know that there is unemployment and that is bad.

I have suggested that we have a legislature and that voters have the opportunity to choose what proportion of the legislature should be replaced.  The appropriate number will be selected at random and dismissed.  New members will be selected at random from either the population at large, or that proportion of the population that achieved a minimum score on an examination.  I haven't seen any popular movement in that direction and haven't seen any trends in our society that would make such a change more popular in the future.

Perhaps as a result of more direct democracy, it will be easier to implement this kind of change.  Some states allow voters to change the state constitution.

Well, anyone can predict the past.  It takes somewhat more effort to explain it.  However, we cannot be quite as certain as we would like to be that the explanations that we have come up with are valid.  Lots of ideas that sound plausible aren't true.  The test of a theory is its predictive value.  What trends can we expect in the future?  I suspect that secularization is the next big one.  There is likely to be much more separation of religious and political symbols.  We may well move to a point in time when governments are somewhat hostile to religion and the courts intervene in order to protect religion.