THIS EXPLAINS A LOT

A new survey has come out today and boy, is it interesting.   The Wall Street Journal is running a story by Daniel Klein about a Zogby International survey on economics and politics.  For all those people who say liberal/progressives are clueless about the economy, guess what?

You're absolutely right.

Mr. Klein describes the survey:

Zogby researcher Zeljka Buturovic and I considered the 4,835 respondents' (all American adults) answers to eight survey questions about basic economics. We also asked the respondents about their political leanings: progressive/very liberal; liberal; moderate; conservative; very conservative; and libertarian.

Rather than focusing on whether respondents answered a question correctly, we instead looked at whether they answered incorrectly. A response was counted as incorrect only if it was flatly unenlightened.

By flatly unenlightened, he means a definitive wrong answer.  If the respondent answered 'not sure', it was not considered a wrong answer.  The five answer choices are:  Strongly Agree, Somewhat Agree, Somewhat Disagree, Strongly Disagree, and Not Sure.

The respondents were asked 8 questions:

"Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable." People were asked if they: 1) strongly agree; 2) somewhat agree; 3) somewhat disagree; 4) strongly disagree; 5) are not sure.

The other questions were: 1) Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those services (unenlightened answer: disagree). 2) Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago (unenlightened answer: disagree). 3) Rent control leads to housing shortages (unenlightened answer: disagree). 4) A company with the largest market share is a monopoly (unenlightened answer: agree). 5) Third World workers working for American companies overseas are being exploited (unenlightened answer: agree). 6) Free trade leads to unemployment (unenlightened answer: agree). 7) Minimum wage laws raise unemployment (unenlightened answer: disagree).

 
The political/ideological breakdown was as follows: Very Conservative, Conservative, Moderate, Liberal, Liberal/Progressive, and Libertarian. 
 
Eight questions, five possible answers for each.  The results are compelling (emphasis mine):
 

How did the six ideological groups do overall? Here they are, best to worst, with an average number of incorrect responses from 0 to 8: Very conservative, 1.30; Libertarian, 1.38; Conservative, 1.67; Moderate, 3.67; Liberal, 4.69; Progressive/very liberal, 5.26.

 
Of eight questions, progressives got, on average, five and a half wrong.  The big question is, on the remaining two and a half possibly right answers, how many of them were counted as correct but were actually answered "Not Sure"?   Mr. Klein does not say, but considering how poorly the liberal/progressives are doing steering our economy right now, it's tempting to think the other two and a half answers were not so much answered correctly as answered "Not Sure".
 
Kinda puts our current economic crisis and the failure of our liberal/progressive government's attempts to fix it into perspective, doesn't it? 

ELECTION RECAP

The final tallies are in and Republicans have taken the VA and NJ Gubernatorial races. Unfortunately, Conservative Doug Hoffman lost the NY-23 race in a four-point squeaker.

It's still a win of sorts, though, because it has (hopefully) taught the GOP a valuable lesson about what kind of candidates should be running - fiscally conservative, low tax, smaller government proponents. One can only imagine how much impact the $900,000 would have had if it had been spent on Hoffman, instead of Scozzafava. Not to mention the 5% of the vote Scozzafava got yesterday could have put Hoffman over the finish line even without the money.

The other bit of silver lining from this race is that we now know that independent candidates can be competitive, even in moderate areas. Which makes sense, really, because many conservatives I've spoken to are fiscally conservative, but more moderate on social issues (as long as they don't raise taxes or smack of socialism).

So although it would have been nice to have a clean sweep, overall I think the message has been sent to both parties.

BTW, Bill Owens, the democrat winner for NY-23 opposes the health care public option (and gay marriage, for that matter - hey, doesn't that make him a closed-minded bigot?), so he's still better than Scozzafava.