RALEIGH — In his Economic Scene column for the New York Times, Princeton University economist and former Clinton administration official Alan Krueger discussed the findings of a Brookings Institution study he recently completed with collaborator Alan Blinder on the gap between voter perceptions and the realities of the American economy.
The gap can be a wide one. For example, Krueger reports that nearly half of the survey respondents thought that Medicare already covered prescription drugs before the passage last year of the new Medicare prescription-drug plan. Americans also significantly overestimated the share of their fellow citizens who lack health insurance, while about half couldn’t even hazard a guess as to the size of the federal budget deficit.
A separate survey found that most Americans had a seriously flawed impression of the distribution of the federal tax burden. A majority of respondents mistakenly believed that middle-income families paid a higher percentage of their income in federal taxes than did high-income families, when in fact the top 1 percent of households paid 24 percent of their income in federal income taxes in 2000, while the middle 20 percent paid 5 percent.
Lest those on any side of the current political debate start patting themselves on the back for their compatriots’ superior knowledge, Krueger and Blinder report that these misperceptions can be found across the ideological spectrum. Indeed, one of the few constants they found was that ideologues per se were somewhat better informed that those self-described as not being particularly ideological, something to remember the next time a soothing “moderate” lectures you on the importance of bringing no fundamental principles to the table when debating public issues so that facts will be the only determinant of the outcome. (These folks actually are ideological, whether they realize it or not, being what amounts to either act or rule utilitarians).
Another interesting finding, though I can’t say it was surprising, was that when evaluating the economic knowledge of poll respondents, readers of magazines scored the highest. Newspaper readers scored somewhat lower, as did those relying on the Internet, books, and radio. But nearly half of respondents said their major source of economic information was television, and they had the lowest score of all media consumers.
This is the kind of research that gets chin-tugging academics all worked up about the “deterioration of the public discourse,” or some phrase like that, and I must admit to a strong temptation to stroke my stubble and say something profound about the future of representative government myself. But it’s also important not to exaggerate. Obviously, one reason why representative government is to be preferred to true democracy for any polity larger than a small village is that average folks with average responsibilities have little time to keep up with politics or study the fine details of public-policy debates. I wish more North Carolinians watched C-SPAN, read political magazines and op-ed pages, and visited the John Locke Foundations’ website to study up on the latest issues and studies. But I will never expect the majority of North Carolinians, or even the majority of likely voters, to do so.
Long ago, social scientists observed and described the phenomenon of rational ignorance. Given the inherent demands of everyday life, it often doesn’t make sense for people to invest their scarce time in developing expertise. They find others in whom they trust, perhaps because of a shared set of deeply held beliefs or a track record of performance, and defer to their judgment, be it about politics, religion, buying a car, or fertilizing the lawn (about which I am irrationally ignorant, apparently). While rational ignorance can generate perverse outcomes, as politicians and rent-seekers learn to manipulate it to serve their own ends, there’s a reason why it’s called rational — and why expecting human nature to change is quite the reverse of rational.
By all means, we should seek to expand the ranks of active, engaged citizens who are well-informed about the economic, fiscal, and social issues at the center of the political debate. But let’s also remember that politics is not a debating society, and probably never will be.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.