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I saw this link posted by a random friend. It's in the Opinion section of the Wall Street Journal:
Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? Self-identified liberals and Democrats do badly on questions of basic economics.
I wondered what those questions might be and how I'd fare, so I read it.
The heart of the article was a survey of about five thousand Americans. The WSJ op-ed piece focused on the apparent divergence in answers between the participants who self-identified as progressive/liberal and those who said they were conservative or libertarian. The survey itself — you can get the PDF through here — was more concerned with correlating economic understanding with education level.
It's about then that I realized I had no idea what I was doing. I couldn't shake the feeling that there was something blindingly obvious that anyone with any training could identify with little to no effort that would reveal the conclusion or the survey itself to be invalid, but damn if I could stand in front of the class and point to it on a map. First, there was the company that ran the survey originally, in 2008. Then there were the authors of the May 2010 analysis paper. And the university they were affiliated with. And the author of the WSJ article (which was one of the two paper authors). And how the sample was selected, and how the results were interpreted, and whether the questions were valid. Any one of these might be discredited or unscientific or unqualified or biased. Any one might have a documented track record of errors or partisanship. Unfortunately, to me, every university and Ph.D. looks like any other, and criticism of political institutions by other political institutions is a given, so I couldn't trust any I found.
So I tweeted those links to see what some other, smarter friends thought and got a helpful earful from multiple sources that the very concept of a "basic" economics question, that can have a "correct" answer, is oversimplistic fantasy. Apparently I'd overshot from the beginning. The core problem (if these folks are right!) was that the survey wasn't really asking, "Can you answer these elementary questions correctly?" It was asking, "Can you answer these elementary questions correctly from the standpoint of one particular school of thought on how the world works?" with the inherent assumption that that school was correct. (That school, as you might expect, is one that conservatives tend to agree with and that liberals do not.) And the fight between them has been going on for decades, with economists from both sides winning Nobel prizes.
The number of textbooks I have to read now just tripled, I think. I really, really hate not just knowing this stuff off the top of my head like everyone else.
Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? Self-identified liberals and Democrats do badly on questions of basic economics.
I wondered what those questions might be and how I'd fare, so I read it.
The heart of the article was a survey of about five thousand Americans. The WSJ op-ed piece focused on the apparent divergence in answers between the participants who self-identified as progressive/liberal and those who said they were conservative or libertarian. The survey itself — you can get the PDF through here — was more concerned with correlating economic understanding with education level.
It's about then that I realized I had no idea what I was doing. I couldn't shake the feeling that there was something blindingly obvious that anyone with any training could identify with little to no effort that would reveal the conclusion or the survey itself to be invalid, but damn if I could stand in front of the class and point to it on a map. First, there was the company that ran the survey originally, in 2008. Then there were the authors of the May 2010 analysis paper. And the university they were affiliated with. And the author of the WSJ article (which was one of the two paper authors). And how the sample was selected, and how the results were interpreted, and whether the questions were valid. Any one of these might be discredited or unscientific or unqualified or biased. Any one might have a documented track record of errors or partisanship. Unfortunately, to me, every university and Ph.D. looks like any other, and criticism of political institutions by other political institutions is a given, so I couldn't trust any I found.
So I tweeted those links to see what some other, smarter friends thought and got a helpful earful from multiple sources that the very concept of a "basic" economics question, that can have a "correct" answer, is oversimplistic fantasy. Apparently I'd overshot from the beginning. The core problem (if these folks are right!) was that the survey wasn't really asking, "Can you answer these elementary questions correctly?" It was asking, "Can you answer these elementary questions correctly from the standpoint of one particular school of thought on how the world works?" with the inherent assumption that that school was correct. (That school, as you might expect, is one that conservatives tend to agree with and that liberals do not.) And the fight between them has been going on for decades, with economists from both sides winning Nobel prizes.
The number of textbooks I have to read now just tripled, I think. I really, really hate not just knowing this stuff off the top of my head like everyone else.
