Public opinion polls have their uses.
Interpreted carefully – with due attention to issues such as the size of the sample, how it was taken, its implications for statistical significance, and how question wording and order can determine the outcome – surveys can provide important insights about public sentiment on topical issues. Actually, polling is particularly valuable when there is a straightforward choice among just two or three options, say in a political campaign, and less useful in situations where information is limited and the choices are complex and interrelated.
A good example of a polling outcome with little relevance to the real world can be found in today’s Charlotte Observer. Pandering to public concern about how long it took Duke Power to restore electricity last month in ice-laden sections of Durham, Charlotte, Greensboro, and other communities, some politicians are talking about ways to induce or force the utilities to bury their overhead power lines.
I’ve written before about the daunting nature of this enterprise. To bury all the power lines in North Carolina would require tens of billions of dollars, generated either through higher electric bills or lower returns to shareholders or both, and take a very, very long time. Given the rarity of week-long power outages like the ones we saw in December, this investment would pay an extremely low, if any, real return.
To gauge whether it is even worth considering, you’d have to have a reasonable projection of the future occurrence of outages, how much they would cost in terms of loss of personal property and retail business, and, most importantly, estimates of the real rate of return on alternative uses of those tens of billions of dollars. Just to put this in perspective, the project would likely cost two or three times the current annual General Fund budget of the state of North Carolina – a budget that funds all our public schools, community colleges, universities, prisons, mental hospitals, and state parks, just for starters.
In the Charlotte Observer poll, respondents were asked whether they would be willing to pay at least three dollars more a month to fund underground power lines. Not surprising, given that they were provided no context or alternatives with which to evaluate the idea, respondents overwhelmingly said yes. Of course, this is nothing like the aggressive project politicians were originally talking about. At that rate, it would take centuries to bury the power lines just in Mecklenburg County. If respondents knew that their measly three dollars a month would have no noticeable impact on power outages during storms like the one we had last month, would they have favored even this modest effort? I doubt it.
The public policy problem is that taxing everyone to pay for taking a few miles of line underground a year generates a multitude of losers and only a few gainers. Yes, if the losses are minimal and the gains huge, supporters can push such an idea through (that’s called public choice economics, for those interested in more info). But the gains here are hardly worth trouble. And neither, unfortunately, was the poll.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.