Liberals Flunk Econ 101
John Zogby recently interviewed nearly 5,000 American adults and asked them eight basic questions about economics. The eight questions have easily provable answers.
Here are the bottom line results published in a Wall Street Journal article titled “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader:” the more conservative people did the best and the more liberal people did the worst. In fact, as a group, the moderates to very liberal all failed. Out of eight questions, here is the average score of each group:
Very Conservative (1.3 wrong)=84% correct
Libertarian (1.38)= 83%
Conservative (1.67)=79%
Moderate (3.67)= 54%
Liberal (4.69)= 41%
Very Liberal (5.26)=34%
Here are the results by party affiliation:
Republicans (1.61)= 80%
Democrats (4.59)=43%
Going to college was no indicator of intelligence in this survey. On half the questions folks without a college education scored better than those that had one. In fact, in their abstract, the authors of the article wrote, “for people inclined to take such a survey, basic economic enlightenment is not correlated with going to college.”
Why then these results? Could it be that liberals and conservatives have two radically different views of human nature that influence them to answer in the way they do? Conservatives tend to understand that human nature is fallen and thus, when it comes to economics, needs incentives. Liberals tend to think against all the evidence that humans are inherently good and will do the right thing without incentives (even in the face of disincentives).
My friend Neil Mammen, who has an excellent new book, puts it this way on page 255: “Socialism depends on every man working as much as he can and only taking up as little has he needs. Yet in reality human nature is such that we work as little as we need and take as much as we can. Anybody who advocates socialism is essentially helping man continue to be mired in his sin nature.”
I used to think that many liberals were denying the facts. Now this survey makes me think that they just don’t know them. Maybe that’s because their false worldview causes them to never question what they already think is true. Sometimes it’s not the things we don’t know that cause us trouble– it’s the things we think are true but really aren’t.
June 27th, 2010 at 4:13 am
This reminds of that poll taken after the 2008 elections wherein it was proved that most democrats didn’t even know who held the majority in congress, the difference between reality and an SNL skit, who Joe Biden, B. Frank, H. Reid, Pelosi was, etc. but they could all tell you whose 18 year old daughter was pregnant. I realize that Dr. Turek and the above mentioned authors are very diplomatic but I must say it: To be a leftist is to be a nimrod. And no, I don’t mean a hunter.
To come to this conclusion I asked myself, “What is more stupid - an -as yet- lack of knowledge on a given subject/subjects or, premeditated and willful ignorance carried out via some sort of self-blinding instructions as designed by people who have nothing but absolute failure/destruction to their names?” (see: Obama, Alinsky, Gore, Engels, Castro, Carter, Cornel West, Chavez, Chomsky, Che, etc.)
It’s not a matter of intellectual capacity - it is a matter of an innate hatred of truth. The necessary information is available to us all and yet, some want -passionately- to apply the same old prescriptions for disaster that have already been proven a thousand times over to be not only ineffective but actually harmful to all living things. Their utopian based actions harm economies, ecology’s and all humanity.
All mankind has a flesh based, sinful and self-destructive nature and when you eliminate God from his view he will journey headlong into utter destruction. Simple truth is: decent people are what allows for the folly of idealistic twits pontificating about the ills of the greatest earthly force for liberty ever - The United States of America.
Problem is: those the pontificators have “taught” are now running the show, and that is a dark reality that looms over us.
If you’re not sure which of the aforementioned groups you fit into, here’s a clue, whether or not my reference(s) to “mankind” as “he”, etc. was bothersome to you very likely is an indicator.
June 27th, 2010 at 3:58 pm
Actually they were asked 16 questions. But the results are only based on 8 of the answers, which is a bit suspicious to start with.
As for the rest: “In the USA, more often than not, rich people were born rich?”
How are they defining ‘rich’? It’s pretty ambiguous. And aren’t economists about evenly split when it comes to the minimum wage? “More often than not, employers who discriminate in employee hiring will be punished by the market?” What recent academic research is there on this?
June 27th, 2010 at 4:03 pm
[…] Frank Turek reports on a new study published by the Econ Journal Watch which reports that libertarians and conservatives tend to know far more about issues of basic economics than do their liberal counterparts. ? According to the study, which you can read here: [The] 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. […]
June 27th, 2010 at 5:30 pm
Is this really what passes for an ‘economic’ survey in the religious world? The right-wing has a knack for taking things they believe and presenting them as unbiased fact. Couple that with a very slanted pollster like Zogby and you get reinforcement of flawed ‘beliefs’. This is similar to a liberal group presenting a survey on sociology and the first question being: If you are Conservative, are you more or less likely to be a racist? Of course, liberals would answer yes, hence, according to the methodology presented here, liberals must be ‘experts’ in sociology and the right must be ‘ignorant’ as frank described the left today. Wouldn’t the world be great if every survey of fact just asked us to agree with all the things we already believe and then told us how right we were about it?
June 27th, 2010 at 6:55 pm
Nathan,
Unless I misunderstand you, you appear to be doing exactly what I think the problem is. Instead of questioning your economic worldview, you are questioning the facts of the survey which challenge your worldview. Even if you throw out one of the questions, the general conclusions still stand.
Now, one of the misuses of survey data is to take it and apply it to specific individuals. Just because the average liberal scores badly on a test, doesn’t mean that you, an individual liberal, will. So I’m not saying you don’t understand basic economics, but your reaction to this survey makes me wonder if you are open to having any of your mistaken ideas about economics corrected. Are you?
Blessings,
Frank
June 28th, 2010 at 4:27 am
Frank, you’ve heard of the sharpshooter fallacy? You shoot a bunch of shots in a wall, then draw targets round them and claim you’re a deadshot.
If they’re asking a bunch of questions, then only choosing the answers that fit the theses they’re trying to prove, then that is bad polling and bad use of stats.
And I’m sorry but how do you go about proving that “In the USA, more often than not, rich people were born rich?”, when you’ve not established what ‘rich’ means? How much richer would a person have to become before you can say ‘They weren’t born this rich”? How rich would they have to be to start with for you to be able to say ‘They started rich’? The question is meaningless, and thus so is any analysis of people’s answers.
What you’re left with is ‘Right-wingers are more likely to agree with economic ideas that I, a right-winger, also agree with’.
On a wider point, these polls come along quite often. There was one a couple of years back showing that Fox News viewers were much more likely than viewers of other News Networks to believe falsehoods like ‘Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11′. And there are others that show Right-wingers are the most likely to believe falsehoods like ‘The world is only a few thousand years old’.
And those are points with a lot more evidence to support them scientifically than the economic points here.
If I presented you with such polls, you might well give a similar response to me, instead of questioning your scientific worldview, you might question the facts of the survey which challenge your worldview.
June 28th, 2010 at 7:21 am
Apologies above, the ‘rich people not born rich’ was among the 16 original questions, but the answer wasn’t used in the results listed here.
However, of the remaining eight there is still plenty of vague wording. “Third World workers working for American companies overseas are being exploited”
What - all or some or any? What exactly do they mean by ‘exploited’? How do you objectively test for exploitation? Some people might view inability to form a union exploitative, others might not. Some people object to child labour on principle, others might say it’s better than prostitution. What is the onus on US employers regarding working conditions in a third-party factory? These are all points worthy of debate, and regardless of where you fall on the issue, it’s ignorant to call someone who disagrees with you ‘objectively unenlightened’.
“So I’m not saying you don’t understand basic economics, but your reaction to this survey makes me wonder if you are open to having any of your mistaken ideas about economics corrected.”
Frank, I haven’t given you any of my own answers to the questions, so you are in no position to guess about whether my economic ideas are mistaken or not. I am certainly open to having my mind changed on economic issue, and have probably moved further right over the past year or so, based on my reading of the issues (I’ve recently enjoyed Tim Harford’s ‘Undercover Economist’ books).
Rather, my issue with Klein’s essay is with:
a) The claim that there is no debate whatsoever among economists on the answers to these questions.
b) Questions that at any rate can be interpreted different ways (see above), such that there IS not ‘objectively correct’ answer, even if we did have all the data to calculate it.
c) A set up vulnerable to cherry picking which answers to base the results on (see previous post).
d) Finally, unreliable polling. This was based on self-selected participants, with no weighting to make for a representative sample.
June 29th, 2010 at 10:50 am
I think Nate Silver’s headline of “Are You Smarter Than a George Mason University Economics Professor?” sums this up very well.
The fact that this poll was featured in a major newspaper, and treated as if it had something to offer the world is an excellent data point showing exactly what is wrong with this country.
If I had to put my money on something, I’d actually say that conservatives have a better grasp of economic forces than liberals, but this poll proves no such thing, and I can’t imagine anyone actually believing it did any such a thing once they got past the headline.
It really is simply mind numbing.
You can find Mr. Silver’s critique by googling the title. It will give you at least a basic introduction into the many, many things wrong with this poll.
June 29th, 2010 at 11:09 am
Another good take-down of it can be found by googling “A Biased Study on “Dumb” Liberals”.
I agree with you Luke, I wouldn’t be surprised if Conservatives have a better understanding of economics (though I don’t know), just as I’d suspect that liberals have a better understanding of world affairs (ie, stuff going on outside of the US) and of science.
But this poll does nothing to support that idea. It appeals to those on the right who WANT to believe it, and who will grab any poll that SEEMS to support it, no matter how poorly constructed.
What’s surprising is that the pollsters haven’t even tried to cover up the questions all being attempted ‘gotchas’ for liberals. There’s not a single question where the answer they give as the reasonable one could not be followed by “…And THAT’s why we should all be libertarians!”.
It’s like if I put together eight science questions, and deliberately chose ones where the ‘correct’ answer would contradict strict bible fundamentalists, rather than including at least a few neutral ones like ‘How long does it take for the earth to go round the sun’. *
If anyone put together such a poll it would be quite obvious that they were starting with the thesis that fundamentalists are ignorant of science, and were then attempting to find the data to prove it. This alone wouldn’t make the poll completely worthless, but the shoddy way of finding participants, and the ambiguity of the phrasing of the questions does.
* In fact, when people HAVE asked the public these kind of basic science questions, Americans seem to do very badly:
Science Literacy - American Adults ‘Flunk’ Basic Science, Says Survey,
Are Americans bad at science? If so, are they worse than anywhere else? We know the answer to one of those questions. A new national survey commissioned by the California Academy of Sciences and conducted by Harris Interactive says that the U.S. public is unable to pass even a basic scientific literacy test.
eg Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.
July 1st, 2010 at 8:10 am
I’m not surprised by these findings. I suspect if we constructed a survey that passed Nathan’s muster, conservatives would still fare better than liberals. I know this from personal experience–over fifteen years ago, while in college, I was a liberal. I operated more on heart than head; I just wanted everyone to have a ‘fair shake’. Once I examined how a ‘fair shake’ works out in a world of scarcity, I understood that liberalism doesn’t work in theory OR practice. I am now very conservative.
OT: Dr. Turek, might you post a blog on Christopher Hitchens soon? Your debates with him are fascinating and informative. Though I disagree with Mr. Hitchens on religion, I find him intelligent, likeable and witty. I’m deeply saddened to hear of his diagnosis, and am praying for him. I’m also praying for you, Douglas Wilson, William Lane Craig, and the many Christian men who have debated him over the years. I have not given up hope that the author of “God is Not Great” might yet find that He IS great. If Paul can accept Jesus Christ, then there is most certainly hope for Mr. Hitchens!
Thank you, Dr, Turek. May God bless and increase your work.
July 5th, 2010 at 11:35 am
Most conservatives, especially the loudmouths like Hannity, were vehemently rallying around the GOP talking point stating “the fundamentals of the economy are sound/strong”, as we slid into a financial collapse rivalling the great depression. I remember many “liberal” economists being shouted down as they tried to warn about an impending collapse.
I also heard emphatic claims that the Bush economy was far superior to the irrational exuberance of the Clinton economy. And I still hear it. Talk about delusion.
That alone tells you far more about the conservative grasp on economics than a vaguely worded poll.
August 2nd, 2010 at 3:24 pm
The Ghetto/Trailer Parks or Affluent Neighborhoods; which one tends to have more government dependence? Extreme polarity ,I know, and I don’t mean to offend, but can you see the piont? Those that are born in either environment have the same human potential, but where are the standards and who is setting them?
August 2nd, 2010 at 3:30 pm
Um, please excuse me, but what I meant is that being liberal by leaning toward a more socialist position = Ghetto/Trailer Park and Conservative..well I think you get the picture now. Just want to make sure we have a mutual understanding.