I Was Wrong, and So Are You


A libertarian economist retracts a swipe at the
left—after discovering that our political leanings leave us more biased
than we think.




By Daniel B. Klein













Back in June 2010, I published a Wall Street Journal op-ed
arguing that the American left was unenlightened, by and large, as to
economic matters. Responding to a set of survey questions that tested
people’s real-world understanding of basic economic principles,
self-identified progressives and liberals did much worse than
conservatives and libertarians, I reported. To sharpen the ax, The Journal titled the piece “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?”—the implication being that people on the left were not.

The op-ed set off fireworks. On The Journal’s Web site, the piece peaked at No.2 in most-e-mailed for the month it was published. The Examiner,
in Washington, D.C., ran two opinion pieces in response, one approving
and one critical. (The latter noted, correctly, that conservatives were
“happily disseminating the results across the right-wing blogosphere.”) The Washington Times reported,
“Liberals Livid Over Economic Enlightenment Gauge.” My inbox exploded
with messages haranguing me for cynically rigging my results or blessing
me for providing proof of a long-suspected truth.

The Wall Street Journal piece was based on an article that Zeljka Buturovic and I had published in Econ Journal Watch,
a journal that I edit. In short order, more than 10,000 people
downloaded a PDF of the scholarly article. The attention, while slightly
unnerving, was also pleasing, and I’ll confess that I found the study
results congenial: I’m a libertarian, and I found it easy to believe
that people on the left had an especially bad grasp of economics.

But one year later, in May 2011, Buturovic and I published a new
scholarly article reporting on a new survey. It turned out that I needed
to retract the conclusions I’d trumpeted in The Wall Street Journal.
The new results invalidated our original result: under the right
circumstances, conservatives and libertarians were as likely as anyone
on the left to give wrong answers to economic questions. The proper
inference from our work is not that one group is more enlightened, or
less. It’s that “myside bias”—the tendency to judge a statement
according to how conveniently it fits with one’s settled position—is
pervasive among all of America’s political groups. The bias is seen in
the data, and in my actions.







Let me back up for a moment. In 2009, a friend forwarded me an
e‑mail message he had received from Buturovic about her studies of
ideology. Buturovic, I now know, is a gifted researcher. She earned a
doctorate in psychology from Columbia University in 2009 and took a
research position at a leading public-opinion-polling company, which
conducted the surveys used in our articles.

Buturovic was exploring the possibility that ideological
differences stem more from differences in people’s beliefs about how the
world works than from differences in their basic values. It was in
pursuit of that thesis that she undertook the survey, and
designed the questions for it. But when I got my hands on it, I saw its
potential for assessing economic enlightenment.

Buturovic had asked people to respond to a series of statements, in the following format:




Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable.


1. Strongly agree

2. Somewhat agree

3. Somewhat disagree

4. Strongly disagree

5. Not sure

6. Other

7. (Refuse to answer)


Like many surveys, this one throws a single sentence at the
respondent, who has to conjure a likely context. Restrictions on housing
developments may have certain redeeming features. But by and large,
they do make housing less affordable. After all, restrictions restrict.
The odd case might turn out otherwise, but the range of responses allows
the respondent to register reservations without contradicting the
general claim (by answering “somewhat agree,” for instance).

And so, anointing ourselves economically enlightened, Buturovic and
I sat in judgment of the respondents, applying a fairly lenient
standard. We divided answers into two groups: Incorrect and Not Incorrect. For the housing-restriction question, for example, we counted only the two “disagree” statements under Incorrect.
We then reported the percentage responding incorrectly—focusing, in
other words, on identifying the people who “know what ain’t so.”

In constructing our paper from the already completed survey, we
selected eight statements, including the one on housing, with response
options that we believed to clearly constitute “knowing what ain’t so.”
The other statements, with the incorrect response in parentheses,
were: mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices
of those services (disagree); overall, the standard of living is higher
today than it was 30 years ago (disagree); rent control leads to
housing shortages (disagree); a company with the largest market share is
a monopoly (agree); Third World workers working for American companies
overseas are being exploited (agree); free trade leads to unemployment
(agree); minimum-wage laws raise unemployment (disagree).

The survey also asked people to fit themselves into one of several
ideological categories, and we tabulated the average number of incorrect
answers for each ideological group. On average, those who described
themselves as progressive (or “very liberal”) got 5.3 of the 8 questions
wrong, liberal 4.7, moderate 3.7, conservative 1.7, very conservative
1.3, and libertarian 1.4. These were the results published in Econ Journal Watch and broadcast in The Wall Street Journal. I concluded that latter piece:


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.




You may have noticed
that several of the statements we analyzed implicitly challenge
positions held by the left, while none specifically challenges
conservative or libertarian positions. A great deal of research shows
that people are more likely to heed information that supports their
prior positions, and discard or discount contrary information. Suppose
that on some public issue, Anne favors position A, and Burt favors
position B. Anne is more likely than Burt to agree with statements that
support A, and to disagree with statements that support B, because doing
so simplifies her case for favoring A. Otherwise, she would have to
make a concession to the opposing side. Psychologists would count this
tendency as a manifestation of “myside bias,” or “confirmation bias.”

Buturovic and I openly acknowledged that the set of eight
statements was biased. But these were the statements we had available to
us. And as we explained in the paper, some of them—including those on
professional licensing, standard of living, monopoly, and trade—did not
appear to fit neatly into a partisan debate. Yet even on those,
respondents on the left fared worst. What’s more, in separate research,
Buturovic found that the respondents themselves either had difficulty
classifying some of the statements on an ideological scale, or simply
believed those statements were not, prima facie, ideological. So
while we thought the results were probably exaggerated because of the
bias in the survey, we nonetheless felt that they were telling.

Buturovic and I largely refrained from replying to the criticism
(much of which focused on myside bias) that followed publication of the
article. Instead, we planned a second survey that would balance the
first one by including questions that would challenge conservative
and/or libertarian positions.

Here’s what we came up with, again with the incorrect response in
parentheses: a dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich
person (disagree); making abortion illegal would increase the number of
black-market abortions (disagree); legalizing drugs would give more
wealth and power to street gangs and organized crime (agree); drug
prohibition fails to reduce people’s access to drugs (agree);
gun-control laws fail to reduce people’s access to guns (agree); by
participating in the marketplace in the United States, immigrants reduce
the economic well-being of American citizens (agree); when a country
goes to war, its citizens experience an improvement in economic
well-being (agree); when two people complete a voluntary transaction,
they both necessarily come away better off (agree); when two people complete a voluntary transaction, it is necessarily the case that everyone else is unaffected by their transaction (agree).

Buturovic began putting all 17 questions to a new group of
respondents last December. I eagerly awaited the results, hoping that
the conservatives and especially the libertarians (my side!) would
exhibit less myside bias. Buturovic was more detached. She e-mailed me
the results, and commented that conservatives and libertarians did not
do well on the new questions. After a hard look, I realized that they
had bombed on the questions that challenged their position. A full
tabulation of all 17 questions showed that no group clearly out-stupids
the others. They appear about equally stupid when faced with proper
challenges to their position.

Writing up these results was, for me, a gloomy task—I expected
critics to gloat and point fingers. In May, we published another paper
in Econ Journal Watch, saying in the title that the new results
“Vitiate Prior Evidence of the Left Being Worse.” More than 30 percent
of my libertarian compatriots (and more than 40 percent of
conservatives), for instance, disagreed with the statement “A dollar
means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person”—c’mon,
people!—versus just 4 percent among progressives. Seventy-eight percent
of libertarians believed gun-control laws fail to reduce people’s access
to guns. Overall, on the nine new items, the respondents on the left
did much better than the conservatives and libertarians. Some of the new
questions challenge (or falsely reassure) conservative and not
libertarian positions, and vice versa. Consistently, the more a
statement challenged a group’s position, the worse the group did.

The reaction to the new paper was quieter than I expected. Jonathan
Chait, who had knocked the first paper, wrote a forgiving notice on his
New Republic blog: “Insult Retractions: A (Very) Occasional
Feature.” Matthew Yglesias, writing at ThinkProgress, summed up the
takeaway: “Basically, there’s a lot of confirmation bias out there.”
Nothing illustrates that point better than my confidence in the claims
of the first paper, especially as distilled in my Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Shouldn’t a college professor have known better? Perhaps. But
adjusting for bias and groupthink is not so easy, as indicated by one of
the major conclusions developed by Buturovic and sustained in our joint
papers. Education had very little impact on responses, we found; survey
respondents who’d gone to college did only slightly less badly than
those who hadn’t. Among members of less-educated groups, brighter people
tend to respond more frequently to online surveys, so it’s likely that
our sample of non-college-educated respondents is more enlightened than
the larger group they represent. Still, the fact that a college
education showed almost no effect—at least for those inclined to take
such a survey—strongly suggests that the classroom is no great
corrective for myside bias. At least when it comes to public-policy
issues, the corrective value of professional academic experience might
be doubted as well.

Discourse affords some opportunity to challenge the judgments of
others and to revise our own. Yet inevitably, somewhere in the process,
we place what faith we have.



Daniel B. Klein is a professor of economics at George Mason University. His book Knowledge and Coordination: A Liberal Interpretation will be published this month.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/12/i-was-wrong-and-so-are-you/8713/#.TsQSVqMHdMk.facebook