This may be the most disturbing economic news that I have seen in my entire life. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that American adults performed abysmally on a test of their knowledge of fundamental economics. These American adults presumably have the right to vote and it is fair to assume that many of them do vote. We the People are in a lot of trouble.
The test was designed to measure the differences, if any, in basic knowledge of economics relative to political view. The results are disturbingly revealing; those considering themselves progressive/very liberal answered 67.6% of the questions incorrectly while liberals missed 60.1 percent. Please note that the questions asked on this test were easy and respondents given plenty of room for error.
“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.”
These results are terrible and they explain much about how we are in the economic mess we are in today – a major segment of our nation’s voters are not only ignorant about basic economics but they are under glaring misperceptions. And it gets worse.
The New York Times reported that the more economics courses a student took in college the more they were likely to express conservative views later in life.
“In sum,” the study said, “those taking more economics classes favored less regulation or government intervention affecting prices for specific goods and services, including wages and salaries.”
Yet conservatives still managed to miss 22.3% of the questions (that’s a grade of C in my book) from the WSJ article, very conservative missed 17.6%, and libertarians missed 15.7%. These results are significantly better than the liberal and liberal/progressive results, but you can’t be happy if the top grade from your best students is a middle B in a fundamental class.
I am disturbed that any person with the right to vote, and therefore the ability to negatively impact others, would miss any question on this test. You too should be disturbed.
Folks, I encourage you to read the full article in the Wall Street Journal and pay particular attention to the specific questions asked. If you find that you miss ANY question on this test then I encourage you to either learn fundamental economics are else DO NOT vote in coming elections for any candidates to any office that impacts the economy of this nation, your state, or community. If you can not answer all of these questions correctly, considering that only the worst possible answers are considered incorrect, than you can not possibly evaluate a candidate’s economic proposals nor even his or her ability to make decisions that impact our economy.
Voters need to have an understanding of two areas if they are to vote responsibly; 1) how government works – the Constitution; 2) Fundamental economics. Without this knowledge you are hurting yourselves, your children, and the rest of this nation by voting. You are the problem.
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I’m sure there is a lack of knowledge of economic principles that our leaders do more to exploit than to fix, but this “test” is more a poll of political opinion than economics. If you wanted to test knowledge, you could certainly do so without tapping into “political sensibilities” as with a majority of the items. Were participants told this was a test of knowledge of economic principles or of opinion? How do we evaluate the 7.5% difference between liberals and conservatives without knowing the variability among the groups and the distributions?
I guess maybe you should have to know something about test construction to be allowed to write a blog…