MYSIDE BIAS
Re: David Catron’s
Democrat Economic Illiteracy Has Consequences:
You write:
That Democrats are generally illiterate about basic economics is
not a matter of mere conjecture. In 2010, Daniel B. Klein and
Zeljka Buturovic analyzed answers provided by a random sample of
4,835 Americans to a list of eight questions about economics. The
results, which noted the party affiliation of the respondents, were
not flattering to our friends on the left. “Those responding
Democratic averaged 4.59 incorrect answers. Republicans averaged
1.61 incorrect, and Libertarians 1.26 incorrect.” And these were
not arcane questions. They involved elementary concepts, like the
effect of price controls, covered in any Econ 101 course taught at
the lowliest community college and even some of the better high
schools. Yet the average Democrat respondent got nearly 60 percent
of the answers wrong.
So you cite that one study, as evidence that Democrats
don’t know much about the dismal science.
Daniel Klein has
walked back much of that claim, in the current issue of the
Atlantic.
If you were aware of that fact, and didn’t mention it,
that’s dishonest. If you weren’t aware, you should have been — a
quick Google search would have pulled it up. You obviously didn’t
write your summary of the Klein-Buturovic study from memory, so
while you were refreshing your memory about that study from last
year (or the WSJ piece about it), you should have came
across Klein’s volte-face. The web version of your piece is
time-date stamped 6:09 AM today, 12-8-11. Klein’s “I Was Wrong, And
So Are You” has been available for at least a week. Leaving out any
mention of Klein’s Atlantic piece is certainly not the
same as omitting criticism of the Klein-Buturovic study by others,
last year or this year, as Klein is the co-author of the study you
cited, and raises serious doubts about it in his new
piece.
Your editor should have caught this omission
also.
I suspect that this is an example of myside (confirmation)
bias, and groupthink… perhaps caused by only consuming media from
one side of the political spectrum — one’s own.
— Tom Oliver
MBA, Suffolk
University
Braintree, Massachusetts
I was sent your article “Democratic Economic Illiteracy
Has Consequences” by David Carton in an email and object to the way
your story was handled. The article is based on a study published
by Daniel Klein and Zeljka Buturovic that was promoted in the
WSJ editorial section. However, Klein later published a
retraction of his findings and attributed the results to using
biased questions. In an article to a follow-up piece published by
Klein in the Atlantic he attributes the flawed results to
have arisen from the fact that “several of the statements we
analyzed implicitly challenge positions held by the left, while
none specifically challenges conservative or libertarian
positions.” (Here is the
link to Klein’s retraction.)
Hopefully this information will help you correct the error
in your story.
— Ben Friedman
David Catron
replies:
Messrs. Oliver and Friedman aver that, as the latter putsit,
“The article is based on a study published by Daniel Klein…”
Actually, my conclusion that Democrats are illiterate concerning
economics is based on these facts provided in the introductory
paragraph: “These are, after all, people who believed that health
care would be made cheaper by a law that increases demand for
medical services while reducing the supply of health care
providers. Most would agree with the claim, made by
journalist-cum-cheerleader Jonathan Alter, that Obama’s economic
stimulus package ‘prevented another Great Depression.’”
Ignoring that clear “tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em”
passage, Oliver and Friedman construct a straw man using two
sentences that I quoted from Daniel Klein’s 2010 WSJ
piece, “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” They knock down their
straw man by accusing me of deliberately failing to note that Klein
has recanted in the December 2011 issue of The Atlantic
(which, according to Oliver, was posted on the web a week or so
before my piece came out).
As it happens, I hadn’t seen Klein’s mea culpa at the time
I wrote my column. Had I seen it, I probably
would have made a passing reference to it while noting that I find
it no more convincing than any other recantation extracted under
torture (i.e. the relentless abuse to which he has been subjected
since publishing his original WSJ column). Moreover, its
basic point is not that Democrats are literate in economics, but
that confirmation bias can taint the work of even the most
conscientious researcher.
Predictably, Oliver’s letter concludes with the assertion
that my column is “an example of myside (confirmation) bias, and
groupthink…perhaps caused by only consuming media from one side of
the political spectrum — one’s own.” In this, he displays the
well-documented progressive gift for unintentional irony.
Confirmation bias is precisely what caused him (and Friedman) to
ignore 1,200 words of a 1,300-word piece in order to assault their
straw man. And, if I were guilty of reading only material from my
side of the political spectrum, I would hardly subject myself to
the brayings of Jonathan Alter.
In reality, an objective reader can completely ignore the
paragraph referring to Klein’s WSJ piece and still see
that Democrats are in general clueless about economics. That a
majority of Dems actually believed PPACA would reduce health care
costs should alone be enough to convince anyone of their ignorance
of rudimentary economics. The same can be said of anyone who
credits the preposterous claims of Hilda Solis and her masters
about unemployment benefits and the results of ARRA.
