{"id":4035,"date":"2010-06-08T17:25:03","date_gmt":"2010-06-08T21:25:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=4035"},"modified":"2010-06-08T14:34:40","modified_gmt":"2010-06-08T18:34:40","slug":"questions-of-basic-economics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/06\/08\/questions-of-basic-economics\/","title":{"rendered":"Questions of basic economics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB10001424052748703561604575282190930932412.html?mod=rss_opinion_main\" target=\"_blank\">Daniel Klein<\/a> surveyed nearly 5,000 voting-age Americans on their basic comprehension of the political trade-offs on economic issues. He also asked them to identify themselves on the political spectrum. There were some interesting correlations:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Consider one of the economic propositions in the December 2008 poll: &#8220;Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable.&#8221; People were asked if they: 1) strongly agree; 2) somewhat agree; 3) somewhat disagree; 4) strongly disagree; 5) are not sure.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Therefore, we counted as incorrect responses of &#8220;somewhat disagree&#8221; and &#8220;strongly disagree.&#8221; This treatment gives leeway for those who think the question is ambiguous or half right and half wrong. They would likely answer &#8220;not sure,&#8221; which we do not count as incorrect.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p>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).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>H\/T to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ghostofaflea.com\/archives\/014364.html\" target=\"_blank\">Ghost of a Flea<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Daniel Klein surveyed nearly 5,000 voting-age Americans on their basic comprehension of the political trade-offs on economic issues. He also asked them to identify themselves on the political spectrum. There were some interesting correlations: Consider one of the economic propositions in the December 2008 poll: &#8220;Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable.&#8221; People were [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,79,84,53,13],"tags":[550,322],"class_list":["post-4035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-education","category-government","category-politics","category-usa","tag-libertarianism","tag-nannystate"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-135","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4035"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4039,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4035\/revisions\/4039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}