People are Ignorant
Tuesday, May 12th, 2009And Matt Yglesias has the data to prove it:
The YZA’s take on this:
Given a choice of three options, just 24 percent of voters can correctly identify the cap-and-trade proposal as something that deals with environmental issues. A slightly higher number (29 percent) believe the proposal has something to do with regulating Wall Street while 17 percent think the term applies to health care reform. A plurality (30 percent) have no idea.
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The political press has a very strong structural bias toward overestimating the extent to which the public has real opinions about hot political issues. I wish more pollsters would put these kinds of polls in the field that do something to probe the extent of public ignorance. Polls that attempt to directly probe the public’s views about cap and trade wind up measuring a lot of pseudo-opinion. As you can see right in this result, people are incredibly unwilling to admit that they “don’t know” something or other. Thus 46 percent of the public says they know what cap and trade is about even though they don’t, in fact, know what it’s about.
Yglesias is absolutely right about the media’s tendency to overestimate the general public - a tendency understandably shared by politicians. He’s also right that this is a good reason to view opinion polling about policy matters skeptically. If people were polled about what should be on display at the MOMA, they’d have answers, but that doesn’t mean many of them would notice or care when the decision was actually made.
On the other hand, Yglesias is way off in his number crunching, leading him to be far too kind to John Q Policywonk. He reasons that since 29% believe that cap and trade has to do with finance, and 17% believe it has to do with health care, 46% of the population is clueless but happy to bluff. The addition is spot on (credit where it’s due) but this only makes sense if you believe that of all the people who blindly guessed between three options, not a single one guessed right. I do not believe that. The disparity between the two wrong answers shows that not all options are equally attractive to those guessing - Wall Street regulation does very well, perhaps because it’s the most visible story right now and because the word ‘trade’ makes it sound financial. So one can’t immediately extrapolate the number of dumb luck answers in the survey. But zero is a very bad guess. I’m inclined to think the correct answer would do at least as well as health care. If that’s even close to right, the number of people who actually know more or less what cap and trade is about is in the single digits.
On the other hand, this is the whole point of cap and trade. People might not understand exactly what a carbon tax is, but they do know it has the word ‘tax’ in it, and that things with the word ‘tax’ in them generally make them angry. That a cap could - depending on the implementation - have much the same effect on consumers is well known to those who know even a tiny bit about it. But polling suggests that that isn’t a demographic worth worrying about.
