Jag har tidigare rapporterat om forskning som tyder på att aktiehandel påverkar människors politiska attityder och preferenser. Den nya studien ”Valuing Peace: The Effects of Financial Market Exposure on Votes and Political Attitudes” visar på detsamma, mer specifikt att handel med aktier gör människor mer positivt inställd till fred i den israelisk-palestinska konflikten:

This is the first paper to measure the causal effects of providing incentives for individuals to trade in the stock market on their attitudes toward peace and their electoral choices. We find that providing individuals with both means and incentives to trade in the stock market systematically shifts their voting choices toward parties more supportive of the peace process. These effects appear to persist a year after the experiment ended.The evidence suggests that the treatment effects are not primarily driven by direct monetary incentives, but rather by changes in policy preferences. Furthermore, the change inpolicy preferences largely reflect a combination of an increase in salience of economic issues and a reassessment of the risks and returns to the economy of concessions for peace relative to status quo policies.

Detta resultat stärker, påpekar forskarna, det vetenskapliga stöder för Montesquieus berömda doux commerce-tes:

Indeed, the hypothesis that market exposure affects attitudes toward conflict is very old, dating back at least to Montesquieu (1748): “Commerce is a cure for the most destructive prejudices; it is almost a general rule that wherever the ways of man are gentle, there is commerce; and wherever there is commerce, there the ways of men are gentle.”

En motvikt till dem som tror att aktivt deltagande på finansiella marknader nödvändigtvis och enbart leder till sämre sociala utfall.