WSJ columnist: Lefties flunk basic economics … so why are they in power?

When I walked into my polling precinct this morning I was cognizant of how people tend to self segregate. Democrats in certain booths and Republicans in others. The dunces and the discerning.

I’d just read Daniel Klein’s piece in today’s Wall Street Journal titled “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” and was thinking about the choices each party was making today and which will rise like cream in November after a curdling election season.

Klein, a professor of economics at George Mason University (pictured at right) writes about a Zogby International survey of 4,835 respondents that he and Zogby researcher Zeljka Buturovic studied. The survey asked eight basic questions about economics, questions with well-established correct answers. Then they broke down the number of incorrect answers by political persuasion — from very liberal to very conservative and libertarian.

As Klein succinctly states, “The left flunks Econ 101.”

Those surveyed were asked for a range of agreement — strongly agree to strongly disagree — on such simple statements as:

• Rent control leads to housing shortages. (It does.)

• Minimum-wage laws raise unemployment. (They do, but 92.5 percent of very liberals got the answer wrong.)

• Third World workers working for American companies overseas are being exploited. (They aren’t.)

• Free trade leads to unemployment. (It does not.)

On average the very conservatives incorrectly answered 1.3 of the eight questions, while libertarians missed 1.38. The very liberals, of course, incorrectly answered a majority of the questions, 5.26.

Klein concludes that “the left has trouble squaring economic thinking with their political psychology, morals and aesthetics.”

Broken down by party, since there are a few Southern conservative Democrats left in this country, the researchers found Democrats averaged 4.59 incorrect answers; Republicans, 1.61; and card-carrying, upper-case Libertarians, 1.26.

The findings were first published in Econ Journal Watch in May.

The online pdf of the findings also reveals that on four of the eight questions those with high school degrees or less education answer correctly more often than those with college degrees or higher.