I resemble those remarks!
By Daniel Becker (DOLB)
Following up on Robert’s post which at it’s core is discussing the article: Economic Enlightenment in Relations to College-going….
I find it interesting (not alarming at all, at least not regarding the data) that the following combination is the ultimate economically enlightened member of society if you are:
very likely to vote next time, voted for McCain, libertarian, white, not Hispanic/Latino, a suburbanite, atheist/realist/humanist, born again, attend church multi times/ week, non union, married, consider America you residence, are military (or family in military), NASCAR fan, think your in the investor class, shop every week at Walmart, earn over $100K/yr, male.
One more thing based on their figure 2 chart: high school education or less. That group of educated had the highest economic enlightenment score. That group of educated had the highest economic enlightenment score. There is a bit of concern with this data piece considering two of their sited points:
The caveat that we see as most significant as pertains to the education variable is that the survey procedure likely tended to discourage low-IQ individuals from participation, thus artificially raising the observed economic enlightenment scores of the less educated groups…
And:
Meanwhile, Caplan and Miller (2006)…find that “the estimated effect of education sharply falls after controlling for IQ. In fact, education is driven down to second place, and IQ replaces it at the top of the list of variables that make people ‘think like economists.’”
Do I dare suggest that they are finding that the most economically enlightened are the smartest people who never finished high school? You know, when I asked 2 years ago if we could try a different school of economic’s I did not realize the one we needed was the non-schooled school.
Interestingly enough, you are most unenlightened if you are
progressive and college educated along with being: not likely to vote, voted green party, identify Green, African American, Hispanic/Latino, large city dweller, no religious affiliation, not born again and never attend church, union, civil union/domestic partner, consider your home the planet earth (no other planet offered), not military, not a fan of NASCAR (should have asked about horse racing), not of the investor class, never shop at Walmart (guess the other big boxes don’t count), $25K or less/yr (and they don’t shop at Walmart?), female.
This is an amazing study. It managed to show that there are two groups of people in this nation whose thinking regarding money is totally reflective of the common cliche’s heard during the political season (which is a season with no ends) and are often applied slanderously. They have proven that the cliche’s are true! But, then why would I expect anything else from this considering the following commentary from their “scholarly” piece of work:
At least since the days of Frédéric Bastiat, many have said that people of the left often trail behind in incorporating basic economic insight into their aesthetics, morals, and politics. We put much stock in Hayek’s theory (Hayek 1978, 1979, 1988) that the social-democratic ethos is an atavistic reassertion of the ethos and mentality of the primordial paleolithic band, a mentality resistant to ideas of spontaneous order and disjointed knowledge. Our findings support such a claim,
Ok, this economic ignoramus needs to go to his flower shop now. God help me if it goes under. I should have never gone to college. It’s my mom’s fault too.
***We put much stock in Hayek’s theory (Hayek 1978, 1979, 1988) that the social-democratic ethos is an atavistic reassertion of the ethos and mentality of the primordial paleolithic band***
Say what?
I have found that it sometimes helps to translate especially baffling prose into a foreign language then back to Englsh. Here is the above translated to Japanese, then back via http://www.babblefish.com.
“We are, in theory Hayek (Hayek 1978 1988 1979), the social democratic ideology atavistic reassertion of spirit and mentality of primitive Paleolithic band puts a lot of stock’. There, now, isn’t that clearer?
nice blog…
sunidesigns.com
Heh. One of the authors of this nonsense, Daniel B. Klein, is also the editor of Econ Journal Watch, our reference for the piece. What does EJW do? “EJW watches the journals for inappropriate assumptions, weak chains of argument, phony claims of relevance, and omissions of pertinent truths.” LOL! and bingo!
My AB friends should appreciate that a misplaced keystroke wiped out my original comment, which was much less polite and contained obscure Greek and Aramaic words for “crap” and “garbage,” and made broad, unwarranted critical statements about male human beings in general.
Noni
I kind of enjoy the blog, but boy are you lousy writers. Can you at least run a spell checker now and again? Have a look at CR sometime — it’ll do you good to see what an intelligible sentence looks like.
Haha. I was intrigued with using Babelfish to decipher that statement. So I tried it with Japanese and was a little intimidated with the funny alphabet they use. Then I tried Spanish and got this:
“We are, in the Hayek theory (Hayek 1978 1988 1979), reassertion atavic of the social democratic ideology of the alcohol and the mentality of the primitive paleolithic bandage puts much stock “
So I think he’s trying to say that progressives got drunk, fell down and bumped their heads.
But Divorced’ analysis of the implied body politic does explain why I feel so disenfranchised when election years roll around.
But why not take this a step further and construct the profile of a progressive economist?
He/she preference would be a female lesbian, of Central American Indian-African racial mix, has renounced both Catholic and Baptist faiths, is an illegal immigrant that considers Los Angeles home and does vote Democratic when given the opportunity.
She detests organized violence but thinks those participating in disorganized violence are misunderstood, and along with a domestic partner(girlfriend) adopted 5 kids in order to qualify for welfare. Both she and her domestic partner refer to themselves as Soccer Moms, and don’t even know what NASCAR is, but would be willing to try it as long as it doesn’t hurt.
Her undergraduate degree is from the Tijuana School of Economics and her straight A academic record qualified for a full scholarship to a PhD track at an Ivy League private university. She makes less than $25K because that is all that grad school stipends pay.
She shops at Nordstroms on a credit card, then declares bankruptcy upon reaching her credit limit. She lives in a home purchased with a no-doc loan and stopped paying on the mortgage when she learned she was being ripped off.
Her PhD work is on the subject of “what the individual can do about income inequality”.
What, me worry? I’ll let someone else profile the libertarian/conservative economist.
Haha. I was intrigued with using Babelfish to decipher that statement. So I tried it with Japanese and was a little intimidated with the funny alphabet they use. Then I tried Spanish and got this:
“We are, in the Hayek theory (Hayek 1978 1988 1979), reassertion atavic of the social democratic ideology of the alcohol and the mentality of the primitive paleolithic bandage puts much stock “
So I think he’s trying to say that progressives got drunk, fell down and bumped their heads.
But Divorced’ analysis of the implied body politic does explain why I feel so disenfranchised when election years roll around.
But why not take this a step further and construct the profile of a progressive economist?
He/she preference would be a female lesbian, of Central American Indian-African racial mix, has renounced both Catholic and Baptist faiths, is an illegal immigrant that considers Los Angeles home and does vote Democratic when given the opportunity.
She detests organized violence but thinks those participating in disorganized violence are misunderstood, and along with a domestic partner(girlfriend) adopted 5 kids in order to qualify for welfare. Both she and her domestic partner refer to themselves as Soccer Moms, and don’t even know what NASCAR is, but would be willing to try it as long as it doesn’t hurt.
Her undergraduate degree is from the Tijuana School of Economics and her straight A academic record qualified for a full scholarship to a PhD track at an Ivy League private university. She makes less than $25K because that is all that grad school stipends pay.
She shops at Nordstroms on a credit card, then declares bankruptcy upon reaching her credit limit. She lives in a home purchased with a no-doc loan and stopped paying on the mortgage when she learned she was being ripped off.
Her PhD work is on the subject of “what the individual can do about income inequality”.
What, me worry? I’ll let someone else profile the libertarian/conservative economist.
Haha. I was intrigued with using Babelfish to decipher that statement. So I tried it with Japanese and was a little intimidated with the funny alphabet they use. Then I tried Spanish and got this:
“We are, in the Hayek theory (Hayek 1978 1988 1979), reassertion atavic of the social democratic ideology of the alcohol and the mentality of the primitive paleolithic bandage puts much stock “
So I think he’s trying to say that progressives got drunk, fell down and bumped their heads.
But Divorced’ analysis of the implied body politic does explain why I feel so disenfranchised when election years roll around.
But why not take this a step further and construct the profile of a progressive economist?
He/she preference would be a female lesbian, of Central American Indian-African racial mix, has renounced both Catholic and Baptist faiths, is an illegal immigrant that considers Los Angeles home and does vote Democratic when given the opportunity.
She detests organized violence but thinks those participating in disorganized violence are misunderstood, and along with a domestic partner(girlfriend) adopted 5 kids in order to qualify for welfare. Both she and her domestic partner refer to themselves as Soccer Moms, and don’t even know what NASCAR is, but would be willing to try it as long as it doesn’t hurt.
Her undergraduate degree is from the Tijuana School of Economics and her straight A academic record qualified for a full scholarship to a PhD track at an Ivy League private university. She makes less than $25K because that is all that grad school stipends pay.
She shops at Nordstroms on a credit card, then declares bankruptcy upon reaching her credit limit. She lives in a home purchased with a no-doc loan and stopped paying on the mortgage when she learned she was being ripped off.
Her PhD work is on the subject of “what the individual can do about income inequality”.
What, me worry? I’ll let someone else profile the libertarian/conservative economist.
Don’t know what happened here. I only hit the post button once. Honest.
jackjohnson
i am glad you don’t use capital letters either. now with just a little more enlightenment you will stop overvaluing spelling. i think it was ben johnson, but my memory is getting old, who said spelling the same word the same way twice shows a lack of imagination.
back before my memory got old i would have smiled at that and been glad to get 100’s on my spelling tests. But now I know that he was right, I try to urge people like you to ease their grip a little and give the important stuff a chance to breathe.
btw
thanks dan and noni.
i had something to say about liberals and conservatives and why they might have different views about the science of economics, but i think your observations are more pertinent than mine.
what i was gonna say was that what Waldman said was determinative: he said he did not think that the consequences of supply restricitions etc was necessarily bad. but the conservative goes very simply from the “supply restricition” to “bad” with no intervening nor extraneous thougts. the progressive is first of all reacting against the conservative and is not so much saying he doesn’t believe the “economics” as that he doesn’t want to concede anything to the conservative.
me, i am too much an enemy of sterotypical thought to be willing to grant the economists even that much. they might be right. probably are. but in life there are too many complications to waste much time with generalizations. please note, i know the economics as well as the conservatives. maybe better, because i know when to stop taking it as “it’s as simple as that.”
Cedric
unless i am wrong, you can come back and delete two of those copies. but be careful, sometimes deleting one deletes all. it’s a glitch in the system. not much hope of getting it fixed. most web designers are high iq and college educated.
in other words, the conservatives know this stuff because they have been told it over and over again by their minders, to whom the “therefore conservative policies are the only intelligent policies” is the necessary next step.
and yes, low iq folk won’t likely know the economic theory, but they do tend to know what’s bad for them. with a degree of sophistication born from experience that you average college man is incapable of acquiring because he already knows the right answer. he learned it in school.
Happens a lot. All better now.
and anyone who didn’t read ken’s post (like me) ought to go read it. turns out some economists are smarter than others. but they don’t get the press for some reason.
Jack:
You are making two different comments about DOLB’s psot, spell check and intelligible sentences. I ran the post through MS spell check and there are a few minor glitches and nothing major. I read the post and I understood it.
I am not sure what your beef is?
Off topic, but the return and legitimization of IQ tests should ring alarm bells. Highly unequal socieities require the need to invent scientific reasons for their inequalities.
Maybe it’s because mainstream economics is bogus.
Bill Mitchell takes on Mankiw:
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=7446
JackJohnson
I always run a spell checker. Well almost always. Not this time. It was after the jump and I warned you it was a waste of time.
Run note the plural. Might not have been about DOLB at all.
“A good speller is the sign of a wasted youth” — T Roosevelt
I am an economist and I think that much of mainstream economics is bogus. However, the post I largely copied didn’t assert that all (or most) of mainstream economics is not bogus. The assertion is that the three claims rejected by most progressives are not only implications of economics 101 (first semester) but also empirical claims strongly supported by evidence.
Take rent control. You don’t need any faith in any theory to look at what happens when rent control is introduced and when it is removed. It is an ofen repeated policy experiment.
I do think that I should have added another two explanations of progressives’ rejection of the 3 assertions.
First some people recognise them as orthodox economics and reject orthodox economics. This is similar to recognising the first step in a right wing argument and rejecting it but not the same, because mainstream economists are, on average left of center politically (this is the result of another poll — I forget where).
second, all sensible people must be suspicious of statements about the real world based on economics 101 (first semester). If you accept that reality is where the demand curve and the supply curve meet, then you must conclude that there is no unemployment and that fiscal and monetary policy can’t affect output and all sorts of stuff. I suspect that the authors of the study do accept all of that stuff and think it is proven by economic theory.
I won’t try to read their minds, but I will introduce prof. strawman who says
“Even if all you know is the first semester of economics 101, you know that progressive policies are bad.”
When he should say “If and only if you know the first semester of economics 101 and no other economic theory, then you will think that economic theory implies that progressive policies are bad.”
This isn’t just about curricula. In the history of economic thought, there have been many things that economists used to know and don’t know anymore. Many conclusions which were believed by top economists in the past (and are presented in introductory courses) are the implications of assumptions made for simplicity. Economists hoped that those assumptions weren’t needed for the conclusions and could be relaxed over time. Again and again, when economists developed the mathematical tools to do without the assumptions, it turned out that without those assumptions the conclusions don’t hold.
Now one might fear that this means that economic theory is all a big mistake. That everything economists think we have learned from theory is the implication of assumptions we don’t believe and make for convenience. This is my belief.
In some fields as one goes on to learn more about theory, one learns to answer more questions, in economics one learns to question more answers.
But back to my long ago original claim. That doesn’t mean that economic research is all a big mistake. Empirical research based on experiments and natural experiments often relies only on assumptions which sure seem true. Economics has become much more empirical in the past 25 years. Theory without evidence has lost some of its strange prestige. And the claim that rent control leads to a shortage of rental housing isn’t
Cedric
for me the funny thing here is that i have been advising progressives for years to have a little more respect for that “ atavistic reassertion of the ethos and mentality of the primordial paleolithic band.”
i think those folks may have a handle on some of the “wisdom” that saw us through the last 50 thousand years. But progressives are as anxious to get rid of the social restrictions of that “village” as the conservates are to get rid of the economic (decency) restrictions.
either way it doesn’t look good for us primitives.
[no. i am not saying we should all become fundamentalist christians. merely pay attention to what they are ultimately worried about. and don’t scare them into the arms of the right.]
purple
not so off topic as you might suppose. but you don’t want to arouse the ire of the high i.q. lobby. damn it; they are smarter than you. and they can show you their scores to prove it.
no. robert. it isn’t. but it isn’t that simple either. as you know.
Robert
Youth is wasted on the young. GBS
I got a chuckle too out of the “secular progressives” spooking the evangelists by convincing them they are going to steal Christmas. But the evangelists are taking it seriously, and some of them can be dangerous. Would you want Rush after you? I think not.
…except in retrospect. –N. Mausa
Cedric
not sure i get the point. the right has understood how to play the fears of the folks against them. The left routinely plays into the right’s fear mongering by being as offensive as they can be to the sensibilities of the people who don’t know much, but know what they are afraid of.
on the whole the poor are used to being poor, and they don’t trust the left all that much in the first place. so when the right says the left is going to steal christmas the poor are afraid they might, and when the best the left can come back with is a civil liberties union that thinks the best use of its resources is to get nativity scenes removed from public buildings.. the right has won a battle.
Exactly. Seems like that backfired. Kind of like antagonizing a bee hive with a stick.
Saw O’Reilly and Hannity on Fox News go wild with that one.
I used to switch back and forth between Fox News and CNN so I could experience media bias in real time. But I got tired of it and don’t do that anymore.
I am intent on getting an answer to my questions regarding the validity of a basic premise of the article. I posed this question on Waldman’s prior post, but a totally irrelevant reply by Cardiff seemed to side track attention to it.
Can we get a little attention to this statement from the original study?
“We choose to confine our report to the eight questions that most reliably gauge economic enlightenment.”
“Most reliably gauge economic enlightenment”? On the basis of what scale of enlightenment? Look especially at items 6, 7, and 8. Where is the validity for the authors’ assumption of the “enlightened” (correct?) answer?
Jack,
It was that statement and a few other declarative statements without a reference that made me write my post.
For a couple PhD’s, this article is a piece of crap. Not one declarative statement is referenced back to the list of references. I guess that is why the reference list is not numbered. They felt no need to follow the most basic of scholarly authorship learned in high school science lab classes.
But, click on some of the links they present. One in particular used 24 questions to asses what they are assessing. This article by NCEE: What American Teens and Adults know about Economics finds just the opposite to their article regarding education.
“Those with only a high school education are 5 times more likely than college graduates to get a failing grade. (46% vs 9%).”
“College graduates are 4 times more likely than those with only a high school education to get an “A” or “B” on the quiz (61% vs 15%) Twelve graders are just as likely as adults with only a high school education to get an “A” or “B” on the quiz (14% vs 15%)”
To publish a piece of research with the prime conclusion completely opposite of one of your references while providing no reference to work first proving the validity of their questions to actually measure what they say they are measuring means there is no validity to their work. Basically they are saying NCEE’s work is wrong without providing any support that their questions do a better job, are more valid, or take in considerations NCEE did not and thus would explain the difference. Then again, they did not note this difference at all in their report and that is just plain dishonest scientific writing.
Now, I don’t know, maybe writing “science” in the economic field has a different standard for their publishing? However, based on my field (health care) and my educational background, this piece would have never made it past the journal editor never mind the peer review. Heck, there are lawyers here, you all know how references work. References are what makes the chain of logic strong (it’s not a rope of logic).
I hope others with experience in writing science or law will respond. It would help the public learn just how much manipulation is taking place under the guise of being science.
Hi Robert,
>In the history of economic thought, there have been many things that economists used to know and don’t know anymore.<
In more than a few cases, selective amnesia has become a prerequisite for employment as a mainstream economist.
For example, after Henry George it became very important to forget that land and capital are two entirely different things. This is something most economists today don’t seem to know.
I don’t see many mainstream economists making distinctions between earned and unearned income unless they are calling the latter “investment” income and trying to grant it special tax breaks.
DOLB,
Thanks, I needed that! By academic training I was into exp. psych. The key word? Demonstrate the validity of your constructs. Present some semblance of measured responses that relate to the concepts that are being suggested as significant In other words,
don’t just make shit up. And the corollary to that notion, no cares what you think. What is it that you can demonstrate through reliable measurement? Science is supposed to consist of stuff like that. I’m getting real pissed off at hearing some people being referred to as geniuses for little more than arm chair postulation. We can all read Aristotle and Plato for that kind of mental masturbation.