Brilliant.org has a fun interactive explainer of the Overton Paradox, at least as enacted in the US.
The paradox is as follows: Why is it that on average people are more likely to say that they’re politically conservative when they get older, but yet when you ask them about their actual beliefs they appear to have become a little more liberal?
Along the way, we learn about the difference between age effects and cohort effects, which is important to understand in many domains of analysis.
Spoiler: the theory suggested is along the lines of:
- Firstly, people judge their left/right position relative to the perceived center of the population rather than by adherence to certain policy ideas.
- The center has being trending more liberal over time, faster than the average drift an individual person makes over their lifetime.
- Whilst both are likely real effects, the main driver of the centre shifting is the net replacement of older people of one generation, typically more conservative, with younger people from a newer one who are typically more liberal.
- Nonetheless, each group, whether self-proclaimed conservative or liberal becomes more liberal as time goes on: a liberal from the 1970s has similar beliefs to a conservative from 2022. They’ll just think they’re more conservative because the baseline has changed.
Anyway, if that was a bit too much wall-of-text, then checkout the much prettier and more engaging Brilliant.org interactive explainer.