Libs vs Conserv in Econ 101

[BermudaSooner]

This should come as no shock, but liberals don't know squat about Economics.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703561604575282190930932412.html?m od=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read

Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?

Self-identified liberals and Democrats do badly on questions of basic economics.


By DANIEL B. KLEIN

Who is better informed about the policy choices facing the country—liberals, conservatives or libertarians? According to a Zogby International survey that I write about in the May issue of Econ Journal Watch, the answer is unequivocal: The left flunks Econ 101.

Zogby researcher Zeljka Buturovic and I considered the 4,835 respondents' (all American adults) answers to eight survey questions about basic economics. We also asked the respondents about their political leanings: progressive/very liberal; liberal; moderate; conservative; very conservative; and libertarian.

Rather than focusing on whether respondents answered a question correctly, we instead looked at whether they answered incorrectly. A response was counted as incorrect only if it was flatly unenlightened.

Consider one of the economic propositions in the December 2008 poll: "Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable." People were asked if they: 1) strongly agree; 2) somewhat agree; 3) somewhat disagree; 4) strongly disagree; 5) are not sure.

Basic economics acknowledges that whatever redeeming features a restriction may have, it increases the cost of production and exchange, making goods and services less affordable. There may be exceptions to the general case, but they would be atypical.

Therefore, we counted as incorrect responses of "somewhat disagree" and "strongly disagree." This treatment gives leeway for those who think the question is ambiguous or half right and half wrong. They would likely answer "not sure," which we do not count as incorrect.

In this case, percentage of conservatives answering incorrectly was 22.3%, very conservatives 17.6% and libertarians 15.7%. But the percentage of progressive/very liberals answering incorrectly was 67.6% and liberals 60.1%. The pattern was not an anomaly.

The other questions were: 1) Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those services (unenlightened answer: disagree). 2) Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago (unenlightened answer: disagree). 3) Rent control leads to housing shortages (unenlightened answer: disagree). 4) A company with the largest market share is a monopoly (unenlightened answer: agree). 5) Third World workers working for American companies overseas are being exploited (unenlightened answer: agree). 6) Free trade leads to unemployment (unenlightened answer: agree). 7) Minimum wage laws raise unemployment (unenlightened answer: disagree).
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How did the six ideological groups do overall? Here they are, best to worst, with an average number of incorrect responses from 0 to 8: Very conservative, 1.30; Libertarian, 1.38; Conservative, 1.67; Moderate, 3.67; Liberal, 4.69; Progressive/very liberal, 5.26.

Americans in the first three categories do reasonably well. But the left has trouble squaring economic thinking with their political psychology, morals and aesthetics.

To be sure, none of the eight questions specifically challenge the political sensibilities of conservatives and libertarians. Still, not all of the eight questions are tied directly to left-wing concerns about inequality and redistribution. In particular, the questions about mandatory licensing, the standard of living, the definition of monopoly, and free trade do not specifically challenge leftist sensibilities.

Yet on every question the left did much worse. On the monopoly question, the portion of progressive/very liberals answering incorrectly (31%) was more than twice that of conservatives (13%) and more than four times that of libertarians (7%). On the question about living standards, the portion of progressive/very liberals answering incorrectly (61%) was more than four times that of conservatives (13%) and almost three times that of libertarians (21%).

The survey also asked about party affiliation. Those responding Democratic averaged 4.59 incorrect answers. Republicans averaged 1.61 incorrect, and Libertarians 1.26 incorrect.

Adam Smith described political economy as "a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator." Governmental power joined with wrongheadedness is something terrible, but all too common. Realizing that many of our leaders and their constituents are economically unenlightened sheds light on the troubles that surround us.

Mr. Klein is a professor of economics at George Mason University. This op-ed is based on an article published in the May 2010 issue of the journal he edits, Econ Journal Watch, a project sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research. The article is at: http://econjwatch.org/articles/economic-enlightenment-in-relation-to-college-going-ideology-and-other-variables-a-zogby-survey-of-americans

[Frozen Sooner]

This should come as no surprise, but conservatives don't know squat about statistical rigor:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/06/are-you-smarter-than-george-mason.html

Are You Smarter Than a George Mason University Economics Professor?
by Nate Silver @ 4:23 PM
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I first came across this study by George Mason University's Daniel Klein and Zogby International's Zeljka Buturovic, which appeared as a journal article in Econ Journal Watch, which Klein edits, in a link at Tyler Cowen's site several weeks ago. Cowen links to about a dozen interesting pieces every day, and I thought Klein's study was so obviously flawed that it wasn't really worth commenting on. But now it has re-appeared in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, with the somewhat non-sequitur title, "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?".

Here's what Klein and Buturovic did. They took a survey using one of Zogby's internet panels, which is by far the worst polling instrument that they could have selected. The panel was not weighted and was not in balance. For example, McCain led Obama 49-43 among respondents to the survey, even though roughly the opposite outcome was observed in the actual election -- and only about 4 percent of the respondents were Hispanic and only 39 percent were female. Then they asked 16 "questions of basic economics", as the Journal's sub-head describes them, and arbitrarily included eight of them in their analysis but threw the other eight out.

If you were expecting fifth grade questions about supply and demand, you'd be wrong. Let me just say: I come at this as a University of Chicago economics graduate who indeed disagrees with the liberal orthodoxy on many economic matters. But questions such as "[Does] poverty cause crime?", which was one of the questions that Klein and Buturovic excluded without explanation, are more like Zen meditations than matters of basic economics.

Others were poorly phrased, for instance: "A company that has the largest market share is a monopoly?". This is confusing; having the largest market share is a necessary, though hardly sufficient, condition for being a monopoly, and no alternative definitions were presented. Is this question really an objective basis for determining whether someone is more or less "enlightened" (that's actually the term that Klein uses!) about economics?

Some come closer to having a technically correct answer, but are more within the realm of trivia. For instance, "In the USA, more often than not, rich people were born rich?". Notwithstanding that the definition of "rich" is ambiguous, you could probably develop an empirical answer for this question based around studies of social mobility. But unless you'd spent a great deal of time reading the academic literature on mobility -- something that few laypeople will do -- there's really no way that you'd know it.

Finally, there are some questions about which there is considerable disagreement even within circles of academic economists -- as Klein should know, since he's commissioned several surveys of them. Economists are about evenly split, for instance, when it comes to the minimum wage. There is much closer to being a consensus on free trade, but there are an ample number of heterodox views. And in other cases -- like the Rand Paulian view that "More often than not, employers who discriminate in employee hiring will be punished by the market?" -- there is very little in the way of recent academic research at all.

So basically, what you're left with a number of questions in which people respond out of their ideological reference points because the questions are ambiguous, substanceless, or confusing. Klein is blaming the victims, as it were.

There would have been much better ways to construct a study like this one. For instance, questions could have been developed from standardized tests of high school students, like the AP Economics exam, or from surveys of academic economists. Such studies might well support Klein's thesis. But between the poorly-considered questions and the poor choice of survey partner, this amounts to junk science.
113 Comments...

...see also economics, question wording

[OhU1]

I got them all right. Does that make me an ultra-conservative? Move over Tuba and Rush clone!

[BermudaSooner]

Frozen, those questions don't seem that ambiguous to me---isn't Nate Silver that baseball guy?

[Ike]

Some of the questions are fairly misleading.


1) Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those services (unenlightened answer: disagree). while it is certainly obvious that mandatory licensing of professional services increase the direct price of that service, In some cases they dramatically decrease the indirect costs of those services. Take the example of general practice doctor. It's mandatory that they have a license to practice medicine. If that were not the case, you can bet that there would be lots of unlicensed dolts out there trying to give very low cost medical care. Most likely with either no real result, or even bad results...resulting in lost productivity, and eventual higher costs for the paitent, and probably added costs to law enforcement as well as they try to track down fake doctors that might try to just go from town to town taking money and really doing nothing, or making things worse. So taking "disagree" as the unenlightened answer really only shows unenlightenment on the part of the surveyor for an unwillingness to consider that some people might include in their notion of the price of a service, the secondary costs associated with that service.


5) Third World workers working for American companies overseas are being exploited (unenlightened answer: agree).
This is so vague as to not even be answerable. Define "exploited"? More than likely, what they were really probing on this question was not economic knowledge, but various peoples sensibilities as to what constitutes exploitation.


7) Minimum wage laws raise unemployment (unenlightened answer: disagree).
I don't even think there is a consensus amongst economists on this one. Do they raise unemployment or build in short term price inflation?

[goingoneight]

Maybe I should ask the deadbeat hippies at QuikTrip a few questions and folow it up by asking the half-wit rednecks the same questions and see which answers are dumber...

Something tells me I won't have much faith in our country either way.

[Frozen Sooner]

Frozen, those questions don't seem that ambiguous to me---isn't Nate Silver that baseball guy?

Nate Silver is the guy who developed a statistical method for projecting a major league career, among other things, yes.

He also runs fivethirtyeight.com, which is an outstanding meta-statistical site for political polling.

[Crucifax Autumn]

You guys haven't noticed yet that neither side knows **** about ****????

[Leroy Lizard]

This should come as no surprise, but conservatives don't know squat about statistical rigor:

Let's not overgeneralize. I am a conservative and I understand statistical rigor. I rolled my eyes when I read the original article, just like you did.

[GKeeper316]

you can craft a survey to get whatever numbers you want.

[Frozen Sooner]

Let's not overgeneralize. I am a conservative and I understand statistical rigor. I rolled my eyes when I read the original article, just like you did.

Yeah, that's kind of what I was getting at-I was making light of the broad overgeneralization by the OP.

[C&CDean]

Well alls I know is libs are silly doo-doo faces.

[Frozen Sooner]

Well alls I know is libs are silly doo-doo faces.

Which explains why you tried to lick my face at the Tulsa tailgate.
Because conservatives eat poop. :D

[C&CDean]

Dude, you looked like 40-miles of dirt road that day. I might have kissed you on the forehead, but lick your poopy face? No way.

[Leroy Lizard]

The problem is not just the econ prof, but the media. They flunk statistical rigor as well, which is why they run to the presses to report every flawed experiment they find. How many worthless case studies and quasi-experiments get written up as fact by the media?

Here's an example of garbage science posing as research:

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/facebookusers.htm



“We can’t say that use of Facebook leads to lower grades and less studying – but we did find a relationship there,” said Aryn Karpinski, co-author of the study and a doctoral student in education at Ohio State University.

Relationship? Is that cause/effect? Correlation?

By the way, was this "research" culled from a scholarly refereed journal? **** no. It was "presented at a conference." What crap! (The fact that the conference was sponsored by the American Education Research Association is not a surprise.)

And guess who decided to go ahead and propagate it?

USA Today, Time, Computerworld, The Times (London)... just about everyone under the sun. And no one seems to have a direct link to the report.

[Frozen Sooner]

Dude, you looked like 40-miles of dirt road that day. I might have kissed you on the forehead, but lick your poopy face? No way.

Yeah, I felt like absolute **** that day. Note to self: do not fly all night, start pounding beer in the morning, play a round of golf, eat a wet burrito from El Guapo, then walk around in temps 50 degrees hotter than you're used to.

[C&CDean]

After being down in Alabammer for a while coming back to OK would be chilly.

You plan on trying to make any of the games this year, or have you converted to a Tide fan since the won the NC?

[Frozen Sooner]

I'd love to, but I don't have the time to make it out to Norman. Law school keeps you pretty busy. As I've told people before, I cheer for the Tide, but if OU plays Alabama, I'm wearing OU gear to the game. Heck, I left the LSU game right before Julio Jones made that huge reception to watch OU/Nebraska, and I missed Law Homecoming to watch OU/Texas. OU is my first love in college football. I pull for Alabama because, well, they pay me and I have season tickets. :D

Hm. Maybe I should stop doing that.

[Ike]

The problem is not just the econ prof, but the media. They flunk statistical rigor as well, which is why they run to the presses to report every flawed experiment they find. How many worthless case studies and quasi-experiments get written up as fact by the media?

Here's an example of garbage science posing as research:

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/facebookusers.htm




Relationship? Is that cause/effect? Correlation?

By the way, was this "research" culled from a scholarly refereed journal? **** no. It was "presented at a conference." What crap! (The fact that the conference was sponsored by the American Education Research Association is not a surprise.)

And guess who decided to go ahead and propagate it?

USA Today, Time, Computerworld, The Times (London)... just about everyone under the sun. And no one seems to have a direct link to the report.

I don't really have a problem with much of the above post except for the bolded part. In some fields (particle physics comes to mind), by the time an analysis makes it into a journal, it's old news. Usually the first announcement of results (especially major ones) happen at conferences, mostly coinciding with a paper being submitted to a journal, but not always. Generally by that time however, the analysis has been vetted by far more people than will referee it in a journal. So if a news org wants to get the 'scoop' on the latest in physics at least, conferences are the place to do it. Waiting till it's in a journal will just have you publishing stuff everyone else has already reported on.

And I don't really have a problem with that. We have an innate curiousity to know what the latest and greatest research is showing. What I do have a problem with are news organizations running with every new 'discovery' as though it must be gospel truth because it was brought to you by Science. If a later study comes along and contradicts the results of one previously reported, thats rarely covered. This kind of thing is especially true with medical studies. Media reporting of purported links between vaccines and autism is a prime example of this kind of stuff.


I should also note that refereed journals are no protection against the problems in media reporting. Science often gets things wrong....the first time. And these things get published just the same. As time progresses though, methods improve, further studies are made, and eventually we get closer to the truth.

[C&CDean]

Speaking of tailgates, when are you gonna come to another one Ike?

You make one while you live in Chicago, but not while you live in OK? You don't like us or what?

[Ike]

Speaking of tailgates, when are you gonna come to another one Ike?

You make one while you live in Chicago, but not while you live in OK? You don't like us or what?

I'm gonna make it to one, if not more this year. There's no excuses for me not making one last year. I just fell down on the job.

[Leroy Lizard]

I don't really have a problem with much of the above post except for the bolded part. In some fields (particle physics comes to mind), by the time an analysis makes it into a journal, it's old news. Usually the first announcement of results (especially major ones) happen at conferences, mostly coinciding with a paper being submitted to a journal, but not always. Generally by that time however, the analysis has been vetted by far more people than will referee it in a journal. So if a news org wants to get the 'scoop' on the latest in physics at least, conferences are the place to do it. Waiting till it's in a journal will just have you publishing stuff everyone else has already reported on.

And I don't really have a problem with that. We have an innate curiousity to know what the latest and greatest research is showing. What I do have a problem with are news organizations running with every new 'discovery' as though it must be gospel truth because it was brought to you by Science.

Essentially, we agree. It isn't so much that the researchers first reported their findings at a conference, but that the world ran wild with a story without even knowing if the study had been conducted properly.

It's not the researchers that are the problem here. The media simply loves to propagate a juicy story without any regard to its veracity.

I can trust particle physics research for the most part. The experiments are tightly controlled and there is far less shenanigans than that associated with social science research. (Carlo Rubbia excepted.)

Here is more on the study:


And the students who shared their grades weren't representative of all Ohio State students: Many participants were from the school of education, because Ms. Karpinski generally approached professors she knew. The survey only covered those students who showed up to those professors' classes on the days the survey was administered. And their grades and study hours weren't controlled for their field of study, meaning the sample was potentially skewed, which the study's authors acknowledge.

So read another way, the study might just as easily have erroneously concluded that "Facebook somehow encourages students to seek technical careers rather than humanities interests," notes Chris Dede, a professor of education at Harvard. "I would be very hesitant to conclude anything from a weak correlational study of this type." Other researchers and statisticians also questioned the study, with some saying it wouldn't pass muster at a peer-reviewed journal.

A badly performed study is not better than no study at all. Now we have just added to the noise that makes up social science research, making it that much more difficult to get at the truth.

The meta-analysis folks will now step in and "fix" the problem.