Economic Literacy Test
I have long believed that people on the left do not understand economics. On this quiz, they got more than half the answers wrong. But is it just a lack of knowledge? Or do they reject the economic way of thinking on principle? We report, you decide.
Source: Wall Street Journal
I’m not surprised self-professed Liberal Progressives scored poorly. Because most Liberal Progressives have a tendency to disbelieve the conclusions drawn from economic principles, they probably have little interest in learning the basic principles of economics in the first place. Because they never learned the basic principles of economics, Liberal Progressives are less inclined to believe in the conclusions of economic principles.
I think it’s a combination of both: they don’t understand and they don’t want to understand. The most liberal people I’ve met don’t care if their plans don’t mesh with reality. Reality is only a speed bump on the road to “the way it ought to be.”
No surprise here. It’s not that leftwingers don’t understand economics. If that were the only problem, it could be remedied by education. The bigger problem is that they reject economics. They refuse the discipline entirely.
Actually I’m surprised the difference wasn’t even more pronounced.
Please post the test…have some fb friends and myself who would like to take it!
I think we should give the test to Kathleen Sebelius and others in the Obama Administration.
hmmmm..you didn’t administer the test to any self-professed radicals? Is this economic literacy test comparable to the literacy test required to vote? And if “..we’re all Keynesians now,” to quote Nixon, why a need to measure such an innate characteristic?
No surprise for me…. After all the curent administration has avoided the obvious supply and demand issues that will be propagated by Healthcare Reform. I want to believe they just don’t understand economics but in the face of such an obvious disconnect, I have to believe they reject this basic economic principle.
How does Krugman do on this test? IOW, is this a test of economic knowledge, or buying into conservative ideology?
Krugman would pass the test with flying colors if he could be assured no one else was looking. Unfortunately he uses his column in the New York Times to encourage economic illiteracy. He often crafts carefully worded sentences — which might pass muster with other economists if they were minutely inspected, but which are nonetheless clearly designed to encourage the economically illiterate to remain economically illiterate. You can call this intellectual dishonesty if you like.
It is not that lefties do not understand economics! It is that economics is right-wing. DUH!