Information disclosure requirements

I was trying to fill in Wellington election papers. I remain a conscientious non-voter at central government level, but councils are more like local clubs. And Wellington is such a freaking mess. 

In most other areas where people make choices, there are all kinds of government regulations mandating information disclosure - even if there are plenty of easy sources of information.

When we bought our car, there was the compulsory sticker on fuel economy and running costs. But you hardly need that. A quick Google search will give you fuel economy comparisons between cars. 

Food has compulsory nutritional labelling and ingredients listing. 

You can't go out and buy insurance without getting a lengthy and tedious compulsory disclosure statement from your insurance advisor. Piles of compulsory climate disclosures are coming. 

So surely surely it would be dead simple to look up the voting records of incumbents. Wellington uses a ranked voting system. So I wanted to punish everyone who had voted for the convention centre, or the expensive library rebuild, or who had ever voted against housing (whether intensification or expansion), and reward those who'd done the opposite, while sticking new challengers between those. 

And similarly for Greater Wellington Regional Council. Punish everyone who voted for the draft Plan Change 1 on the Regional Spatial Plan that basically bans new subdivisions. 

But while government mandates tons of often-superfluous information disclosure in other sectors, it is impossible to tell how councillors voted on different issues unless you know when the vote happened, in which committee, and are happy to wade through council minutes to find it. 

A snippet from my column in the Herald this week:

But because no voter is particularly likely to change the outcome, few would spend the time and effort that would be required to gather the information needed to cast an informed ballot.

While it would be relatively simple for councils to set up and maintain websites tallying each vote, rather than burying them in impenetrable minutes, it has not happened.

Compulsory information disclosure is most warranted when the public interest in a better-informed decision is high but the private incentive to gather information is low.

Central government believes we need fuel economy stickers on car windows – despite the ease of finding the same information online. The case for requiring councils to provide basic information on councillors' votes is stronger than the case for fuel economy stickers on car windows, and it hasn't happened.

We can't be certain that making it easier for local voters to reward and punish incumbents based on their voting records would substantially improve turnout or improve local government outcomes.

But surely it's worth trying. Democracy depends on voters being able to "throw the bums out" when necessary, but that requires being able to tell who they are.

It should be a lot simpler.

One fun game in ranked-ballots. Clearly unfit people sometimes put their name in the hat. People who, if elected, might result in central government appointing a Commissioner instead. 

If you'd prefer a Commissioner rather than some set of candidates for mayor, ranking the unappointable person ahead of that set of people is basically a game of chicken with Central Government...

Evening roundup

I was out on leave last week, touring around Lake Taupo with the family, hoping desperately for snow that didn't come. 

We had fun anyway. 

But the browser tabs... a week's worth of emails, and stuff saved up... egads. 

Some worthies as I try to clear six different Chrome instances...

• Wikipedians don't like research on IQ. They're even slowly memory-holing the Flynn Effect.


• Time to end the Canadian Dairy Cartel


• Neat evil DMCA hack: create a fake-dated earlier version of content you don't like, then claim the original is a copy. 


• DevPolicyBlog on reducing remittance costs in the Pacific. I hadn't known that getting money from Oz/NZ to the Islands has some of the highest remittance costs in the world. But it makes sense: NZ is overly enthusiastic about AML, and that's a fixed cost in a small place. 


• John McDermott on the case for another Saturday Night Special. When credibility is lost, getting inflation back under control is costly. The RBNZ forgot its job, and we will all bear a cost. 


• Jem Traylen tries to figure out why the government won't fast-track residence for migrant nurses. There are no good answers. 


• The Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration has approved Moderna's Covid vax for under-5s. Unclear that Medsafe has even started looking at it. 


• The McGuinness Institute maintains an archive of Government Department Strategies. There are 221 operational GDS and 327 archived ones. I did not know there were so many. 


• Frank Newman on a few problems in the government's Three Waters financial modelling. Oh - and the IT systems alone could cost half a billion. 


• I wonder how much income protection insurance premiums are going to go up because of Long Covid risks. Would be fun if cautious mask-wearers could get a discount...


• Survey evidence of misperceptions could just be miseducated guesses. But wouldn't that predict unbiased means?


• The flu-normal sucks.


• New Zealand's defamation law is even worse than I'd thought. Its reach extends to America.


• Prof Beaglehole on Smokefree 2025.


• Three cheers for the three Christchurch councilors who voted against the stadium.


• Infometrics warns inflation expectations look unanchored. 


• Cameron Bagrie warns of a lack of expertise on the RBNZ Board. I remember Suzanne Sniveley telling us at the NZAE meetings that all is fine. 


• This is just lovely. How the world's worst golfer kept getting to play at big golf tournaments. Great fun story. 


• Pandemic-related losses in education. New Zealand did manage to get through the early period with some of the shortest periods of school closure in the developed world. But we're still showing shocking results on literacy and numeracy - though tough to tell whether it's worse than pre-Covid. 


• Russ Roberts' chat with Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan was great while we were on our drive back from Taupo. Just such an enormous amount of core data work in that project on immigration and outcomes. Here's Noah Smith with Boustan.

Knowledge of International Affairs

The ignorant will despair at this one. 

Pew's latest survey finds that only 56% of Americans knew that Ukraine is not part of NATO.

Sure, we can wonder what the heck is wrong with the other 44%. Ukraine is at war with Russia. Russia invaded it. If Ukraine really were a NATO member, the collective security provisions would be invoked. NATO soldiers, fighters, tanks, ships and bombers would be directly involved in fighting. 

There wouldn't have be wondering about "Oh, can we really set a no-fly zone? Wouldn't that mean direct confrontation between allied and Russian forces that would trigger a broader war?" That cost would have been sunk. We'd probably have already seen nukes flying around rather than far-too-limited shipments of arms to Ukraine. 

And, more to the point, Russia would not have invaded if Ukraine were part of NATO.

Just what has to be wrong in your model of the world to even make it possible to believe that Ukraine is part of NATO? 

It seems unfathomable. 

Well, unfathomable except to those of us who are not ignorant about the ignorance revealed in public surveys of this sort.

Two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis that had NATO on the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union over the Soviets' attempted placement of nuclear weapons in Cuba, only 38% of Americans surveyed knew that the Soviet Union was not a member of NATO.

However screwed up people have to be to think that Ukraine might be part of NATO right now, how much more screwed up do you have to be in 1964 to fail to notice that a security agreement set to defend against the common Soviet enemy was not particularly likely to have the Soviet Union as a member?

I suppose what I'm saying is that, if anything, this latest survey is weak evidence of improvement and should be celebrated by those of us who had set our expectations appropriately, and despairing at the result is a bit of a tell about your own knowledge of the state of public knowledge. 

Civic knowledge

The Initiative commissioned a poll earlier this year, pre-Covid, checking on whether voter knowledge about some basic civics had improved since the last iterations of the New Zealand Election Survey.

It hasn't. 

Our report on it came out this morning; I chatted about it with Duncan Garner, Jenny-May Clarkson, and Mike Hosking.

None of the results were particularly surprising for those who pay attention to voter knowledge surveys. The NZ Election Survey regularly finds that roughly half of voters don't get how MMP works; we found the same. NZES often finds 16-17% of voters not knowing the lead party in the governing coalition; we found a bit over 30% can't identify which parties are in Parliament. As usual, Green Party supporters had more political knowledge than supporters of other parties. In prior work on the NZES, that looked to be the case even accounting for Greens' higher education levels; in this one, it looked to be explained by those higher education levels. 

I had thought that this kind of thing was more common knowledge, so I learned something too! I didn't know that it wasn't!

We made a couple of suggestions about ways of improving things. Civics education is the standard one, but I'm a bit of a pessimist on that one. Nearly ubiquitous civics education in the US hasn't seemed to have done much there for civic knowledge, and one rather neat experiment found that what is taught washes out a couple years after the classes are over. In that experiment, a civil liberties group tested whether an intensive instructional module on the US Bill of Rights might improve appreciation of civil rights. They found it did nothing to change student views on civil liberties, and only increased understanding of the Bill of Rights, as compared to a control group, shortly after the course was done. Two years later, there were no differences. 

So maybe it's worth trying, but only as an experiment: try it in a few spots, see if it works, see if the knowledge holds, and see whether it's crowded out instruction on other things. 

We had a bit more fun with another suggestion, stolen shamelessly from Bryan Caplan and adapted to local circumstances. Basically, you need to improve the incentive to acquire political knowledge. Rational ignorance is a tough beast otherwise. We suggested a few options, but one fun one would just have the Electoral Commission publish ads with some of the civics basics, then give a prize to the enrolled voter who, on getting that morning's random-draw phone call, successfully answered a question drawn from those basics. Even a $10,000 daily prize would only cost $3.65 million over the course of a year - plus the cost of the ads and the staffing of course. But the all-up costs wouldn't be that high relative to curriculum pushes, for example. 

You could even think about an extended version, like I'd discussed in Newsroom a while back (ungated), that would add in questions drawn from the headlines of papers and outlets covered by the press council.

The Herald covered the report here.

Media funding

The third column in our Insights newsletter is usually a little tongue-in-cheek.

I'm not entirely kidding about this proposal for supporting the media though. But first, a bit of back-story. 

The basic problem, as I see it, is that there is very little real demand for actual news. That by itself wouldn't be a problem, but there are reasonable social benefits from a better informed public. For one thing, a better informed public will do a better job in voting. And when an investigative journalist finds things like, say, a town councillor used a tip-off about a zoning decision to make some land investments - well, that stuff getting found out and published encourages better behaviour.

For a long period, we were in the happy spot where people were very happy to pay for classified advertising, and newspapers and news magazines could provide a profitable bundle. Subscribers would receive a paper for less than the overall production cost; those willing to pay for access to readers covered the rest of the cost. The papers were the most effective way of getting ads in front of people. 

That's all unwound where there are far more effective ways of running classified ads and of getting other advertising in front of people. Newsmedia have spent much of their lobbying effort on taxing the new and better alternatives for ad delivery - mostly focused on Google and Facebook rather than on Ebay and TradeMe. 

But the case for taxing them to cover the costs of media is, bluntly, ludicrous. The snippets that Google will serve up as teaser do not violate copyright and drive traffic to the news outlets' sites, where people could see ads hosted by the newspaper. If that weren't the case, every news outlet has a simple solution: block the search robots from accessing their sites. It is easy to not have your content linked by Google. 

Newspapers just aren't the best way for advertisers to find people any more. The bundling of advertising with news worked for decades and made sense in that period, but that world is gone.  

I worry that bailouts or, worse, taxes on tech companies to directly fund media will prevent entrepreneurial discovery of better models for funding the news. 

If the underlying problem is private demand for news on current events being less than the socially optimal amount, then interventions should be aimed at boosting that demand rather than directly subsidising existing providers. There is no policy interest in that any particular provider continue to exist; there is a policy interest in that there is a well-informed public. 

The Stigler Centre's recent report on digital media suggested a form of voucher funding. Everyone would get a small amount of money as a voucher that they could use toward news subscriptions; unused vouchers would see their funds distributed across outlets proportionately to how used vouchers were allocated. 

That still has a problem in deciding which kinds of outlets are eligible for vouchers (the report suggests a fairly broad range should be eligible). 

It seems less bad than some other options for government funding of media. It at least doesn't have political appointees deciding which news outlets are worthy of support; it isn't hard to imagine how a Trump appointee would handle that. 

Anyway, all that said, I proposed something a little different, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, in our Insights newsletter. 

Here it is:

Some commercial radio stations encouraged people to listen by running regular lotteries. They’d dial up a random phone number and if the person answering could name the last song played by the station, the lucky listener would get a hundred dollars.

Perhaps the government could set up a $36.5 million budget line for prizes. Every day, one lucky Kiwi gets the call. If they answer that day’s question about the key events of the week – with the different news editors supplying the questions – they win that day’s $100,000 prize.

It’s a lot cheaper than other kinds of bailouts. And it could encourage people to start paying attention.

It wouldn't be all that expensive in the grand scheme of things. If you wanted to splurge, you could just keep calling until somebody won that day's prize. Then the budget line would be the full $36.5m rather than 'up to $36.5m in prizes'. Folks would have stronger incentive to become informed, and would figure out what news option was best for them in doing that. 

Sure, it isn't perfect. But it seems less obviously bad than trying to force Google to fund the newspapers. 

Uber ignorant

A lot of people who should have failed intermediate microeconomics like to make the following argument.

1. The theory of perfect competition has perfect information as an underlying assumption
2. Nobody has perfect information
3. Therefore, government must regulate to protect people from bad choices because market failure.

It's wrong on a pile of grounds. First, and most importantly, the first welfare theorem gives us sufficient conditions for optimality, not necessary ones. But even leaving that aside, we need a Demsetz move into comparative institutional analysis. How do people act to overcome their information problem? Are there profitable opportunities for some entrepreneur to bridge the knowledge problem so that consumers and producers can meet up successfully? Are there heuristics that consumers use in response to information problems and how close to optimality do they get us? And, most importantly, do the legislators and bureaucrats have any better clue themselves?

On that latter point, here is how New Zealand's Parliament covered itself in glory this afternoon in the select committee hearings on Uber. Parliament's deciding how to modernise the transport regs so that innovation can happen. There are some problems in the proposed legislation, but the Transport Committee has the MPs who are most expert in the committee's area. The best of the best. Here's what they thought about how Uber works:

Appearing before Parliament's Transport Committee, Uber New Zealand general manager Richard Menzies tried to argue that the company should not have to adopt outdated taxi requirements like logbooks, signage and stringent driver and vehicle checks.

But first he was forced to explain to the committee, over and over again, that Uber was not a "rank and hail" taxi company.

National MP Alastair Scott was the first to bite.

"We're concerned that you could get some gypsy operators who are not licensed by anyone appearing on a taxi rank."

Labour MP Sue Moroney interjected, offering a more politically-correct term: "Cowboys".

"Cowboys, gypsies, whatever," Scott said.

Menzies politely explained that an Uber vehicle could only be ordered through its app.

"People can't simply spot at Uber and jump into random car," he said.

Labour MP Sue Moroney wasn't convinced.

"How do you know that? How do you know that people who are your drivers are not sitting at taxi stands or being hailed?"

Menzies, looking slightly bemused, said: "We don't use taxi ranks."

None of these people seems to have ever used the service, or ever to have talked with anyone who has.

Green MP Jan Logie noted that the law change would allow Uber to use taxi ranks - how did Uber feel about that?

Menzies, again: "The way our system is currently set up, we don't need taxi ranks."

The whole point of Uber is to not have drivers sitting around at freaking taxi ranks, idling. They go to where demand is expected.

As it was becoming apparent that no MP on the committee had ever used the Uber service, National MP and technophile Maurice Williamson piped up that he was a "massive fan".

But he did not favour the ordinary Uber, he said. He wanted to know when Uber New Zealand would roll out Uber Black - the company's VIP service.

By now, Uber's committee appearance had gone well overtime. But Moroney wanted one last shot, asking Uber whether it would actually follow any rules set by Parliament.

"All I want to hear is that you won't be breaking the law," she said.

Menzies raised his hands in front of his face, wordlessly, as the committee chairman brought the session to a close.

I have a different argument we might wish to consider, in place of the one with which I opened. I think it works better.

1. Good laws don't require that MPs have perfect information about the industries that they're attempting to regulate, but they should be at least half-way to having a clue.
2. They don't. Not even close. And the feedback loops that help normal people get a clue when they make mistakes - those don't operate for MPs. They can be wrong, forever, with no personal consequence. They may even be more likely to be re-elected rather than less if they're wrong in particular ways.
3. Therefore, Parliament should get out of the way. Stop pretending you're protecting me from bad cab drivers or whatever with rules that protect incumbents when you have absolutely no clue how Uber even works. Get Out Of The Way. Everything else has far more risk of doing harm than of doing good. 

Things we know that ain't so

Today's Herald highlights public ignorance of basic policy facts.

Before you read any farther, go and take the Herald's quiz to see how well you do.

Here are the main errors (but don't read this part 'till you've gone and done the quiz yourself) where those choosing the wrong answer were in the majority.

• Overestimating Kiwis' average age (66% chose the answer that was 7 years too old).
• Underestimating the percentage of MPs who are female (70% chose the answer that was 7 percentage points too low).
• Underestimating female labour force participation rates (55% chose the answer that was 12 percentage points too low).

But there were other interesting failures. 41% of respondents believed that New Zealand's wealthiest 1% own 50% of the country's wealth - that's a figure that's roughly right for the top 10%, but not the top 1%. And it also ignores that those with a lot of student debt (and consequently negative wealth) have huge human capital that offsets things.

Update: Ipsos summarises this one nicely:

Looking across the 33 countries included, many are even more wrong ...

1. The top 1%: most developed countries greatly overestimate the proportion of adult wealth the wealthiest 1% in their country own. Britain is the most inaccurate (estimating it to be 59%, over twice the real figure of 23%), but France, Australia, Belgium, New Zealand and Canada are all at least 30 percentage points out of line. A few countries, though, underestimate how much of their country’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of the top 1% - Peru, India, Israel, Brazil and Russia (where the top 1% actually own an incredible 70% of all wealth). There is a lot of variation between the countries on what they think the figure should be, though most of them think it should be lower than it really is – with Russia again standing out as having the highest gap between the amount of wealth they think the top 1% should acceptably own (23%) and the true figure (70%).

Wow. You'd almost think there were some kind of coordinated international effort in OECD countries to fuel overestimation of the amount of wealth held by the richest.  

The languages of Omecron Perseii 7 and Omecron Persii 9

Since none of us can really affect political outcomes, it's generally irrational to pay too much attention to politics. On that measure, men are far less rational than women - or at least by the studies of political knowledge I've come across (two examples), and my own work on New Zealand.

This general finding is supported by a very different kind of method. Schwatz et al trawled through 700,000,000 words, phrases and topics provided by 75,000 Facebook volunteers. The authors were interested in personality differences and language. But the gender difference in propensity to talk about politics was stark. Here are the word clouds, sorted by gender. I apologise for the curse words.

At least in this Facebook sample, women talk disproportionately about relationships and feelings; men disproportionately curse, talk about sports and video games, and talk politics.

If we look at the topic clusters, women's focused on family and feelings (emotions, cute things, happiness, friendship, family/friendship); men's were politics, sport, war, video games, economics-politics, and cursing. Or at least that's my summary of each of the topic clouds. Within the central core, government shows up on the men's side; nothing policy-related shows up on the women's side. Or, at least, these are the words that are most *distinctively* associated with each gender. If somebody on Facebook is talking about the economy, tax, budget, the government, freedom, democracy, rights, or liberty, it's likely to be a guy - at least in this sample.

HT: Max Roser

Theories about Conspiracy theories

Four nationally representative survey samples collected in 2006, 2010, and 2011 indicate that over half of the American population consistently endorse some kind of conspiratorial narrative about a current political event or phenomenon and that these attitudes are predicted by supernatural, paranormal, and Manichean sentiments. These findings suggest that conspiracism is not only an important element in American political culture, but also is expressive of some latent and powerful organizing principles behind American mass opinion.

So say J. Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood in the AJPS, in an article I missed when it came out last October.

Read this table and weep.

TABLE 1 Percentage of Americans Agreeing with Various Conspiracy Theories, 2011
Conspiratorial Narrative	Heard Before?	Strongly Agree	Agree	Neither	Disagree	Strongly Disagree
The U.S. invasion of Iraq was not part of a campaign to fight terrorism, but was driven by oil companies and Jews in the U.S. and Israel (Iraq War)	44	6	13	33	22	27
Certain U.S. government officials planned the attacks of September 11, 2001, because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East (Truther)	67	7	12	22	18	41
President Barack Obama was not really born in the United States and does not have an authentic Hawaiian birth certificate (Birther)	94	11	13	24	14	38
The current financial crisis was secretly orchestrated by a small group of Wall Street bankers to extend the power of the Federal Reserve and further their control of the world’s economy (Financial Crisis)	47	8	17	38	20	17
Vapor trails left by aircraft are actually chemical agents deliberately sprayed in a clandestine program directed by government officials (Chem Trails)	17	4	5	28	21	42
Billionaire George Soros is behind a hidden plot to destabilize the American government, take control of the media, and put the world under his control (Soros)	31	9	10	44	16	21
The U.S. government is mandating the switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs because such lights make people more obedient and easier to control (CFLB)	17	4	7	24	24	41
Note: N = 1,935 cases.
Source: Modules of the 2011 Cooperative Congressional Election Surveys.

Table 3 is even worse: 27% believe we're in End Times; 33% believe in ESP.

All that's left is figuring out how to do away with Manichean dualism and superstition; education seems to be the strongest preventative measure, along with having political knowledge.

Or maybe that's just what they want us to believe.

Really, all the voting boxes are rigged and that the Illuminati are not only making sure your vote won't count but also keeping track of how you vote? Haven't you noticed that the chemtrail planes are concentrated in areas where your preferred party's support is undercounted because of the Illuminati? Think about it. Voting's dangerous. Chemtrails.

 

Say's Law of Humbug

Demand for that which cannot be done brings forth supply of charlatans. Baum knew it:

Oz, left to himself, smiled to think of his success in giving the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman and the Lion exactly what they thought they wanted. "How can I help being a humbug," he said, "when all these people make me do things that everybody knows can't be done?

The Munchkins had a latent demand for humbug satisfied by the entrepreneurial Oz.

Chris Dillow points out a nice modern example: demand for expert forecasts. Subjects in Powdthavee and Riyanto's experiment were run through "The System" - a classic scam where you send a random set of stock market or horse betting predictions, toss from the set anyone to whom you sent the wrong prediction, do it again, then offer to continue sending predictions (for pay) to folks who received a few lucky hits in a row. What happened in the lab? Says Dillow:

And here's the thing. Subjects who saw just two correct predictions were 15 percentage points more likely to buy a prediction for the third toss than subjects who got a right and wrong prediction in the earlier rounds. Subjects who saw four successive correct tips were 28 percentage points more likely to buy the prediction for the fifth round.

This tells us that even intelligent and numerate people are quick to misperceive randomness and to pay for an expertise that doesn't exist; the subjects included students of sciences, engineering and accounting. The authors say:   

Observations of a short streak of successful predictions of a truly random event are sufficient to generate a significant belief in the hot hand.

It's easy to believe that this happens in real life. For example, the people who are thought to have predicted the financial crisis of 2008 are invested with an expertise which they might not really have.

The paper's excellent title? "Why do people pay for useless advice?"

I wonder whether basic training at high school in financial literacy and classic scams might do any good. But it's hard to overcome the demand for humbug. And the paper finds that student subjects with more correct answers in a statistical test didn't spend less on predictions. If these were the results for college students, how awful would a general sample look?

An ignorance teaser

The teaser for my upcoming public lecture was in last Thursday's Christchurch Press but unfortunately isn't available online. Here's the text. Hope to see Christchurch readers there tomorrow night!

The most surprising finding in Fairfax Media’s recent poll on voter preferences in the electoral referendum was that only a third of voters confessed inadequate knowledge to form a preference among the alternatives to MMP. If they were honest, both with themselves and with the pollster, rather more would have disclosed not only a near complete lack of knowledge of different electoral systems, but also a shocking level of ignorance even about the workings of our current system.

Political ignorance is neither unique to New Zealand nor a recent phenomenon. In a 1964 survey of Americans, only two years after NATO stood at the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis, a mere 38% of Americans knew that the Soviet Union was not a member of NATO, the treaty organization formed to defend the West against the Soviets. The broad consensus of the international literature suggests voters know remarkably little about their own electoral systems, about their systems of government, about the policy positions espoused by different parties, about what the government spends money on, and about the likely effects of policy.

The causes of widespread voter ignorance are reasonably well known. Information is costly, and so people economise on it. Where the cost of an additional bit of information exceeds the benefit I expect to draw from learning it, I’ll do something else. We are all rationally ignorant about just about everything – we all could, if we wanted to, learn a lot more about everything from automobile mechanics to the history of the space programme. All it costs is time, but time is precious. And, for most people, the benefits of acquiring political information really aren’t worth the cost. We might learn enough to avoid looking silly in conversations with our friends, keeping in mind that they too are rationally ignorant.

What does this mean in New Zealand? The New Zealand Election Survey asks, at every election, a few questions establishing respondents’ basic grasp of the system. The 2011 results have yet to be released, but in 2008, results really weren’t very good.  A bare majority of respondents correctly identified the party vote as being more important than the electorate vote; a third thought they were equally important, and the rest didn’t know. About a fifth of respondents did not know that Labour was in government – they lacked even the basic knowledge necessary for supporting or opposing the incumbent.

Among those respondents indicating a preference for MMP over First Past the Post [FPP], about ten percent reckoned that a party earning forty percent of the popular vote should earn more than half of the seats in Parliament: a result more consistent with FPP. Among those supporting FPP, about forty percent said that a party earning fifteen percent of the popular vote should earn about fifteen percent of the seats: a result remarkably unlikely under FPP. A quarter of FPP supporters also favoured coalition over single-party government. It’s not wrong to favour either electoral system, but it is a bit odd to favour options that work against the outcomes you think important. It’s more than a little disappointing that, in the fifth MMP election, voters understood so little.

The academic literature has moved from establishing the basic facts of voter ignorance to debating its likely consequences: can voters make sufficiently competent decisions to ensure decent outcomes? There are a few ways this can happen. If voters who know very little cancel each other out on election day – effectively flipping coins when at the ballot box – the election then is decided by the choices of more informed voters and ignorance does little to affect outcomes. Alternatively, the kind of political knowledge embodied in answers to quiz questions may have little bearing on the choices voters need to make at the ballot box; I would fail any quiz on mechanical engineering, but that does not prevent me from making sound decisions when buying a car.

Unfortunately, there is reasonable evidence that political ignorance affects party and policy preferences, even after correcting for the kinds of demographic factors, such as education and income, that affect political knowledge. And, the effects are large. In analysis of the 2005 NZES, I found that those with less political knowledge were substantially more likely to disagree with the consensus of most economists on fairly basic economic matters.  The NZES asked respondents whether, to solve New Zealand’s Economic Problems, the government should control wages or prices by law. I have a hard time imagining a single economist who would agree that wage and price controls would solve any problem faced by New Zealand in 2005. But a third of survey respondents supported wage controls; a fifth supported generalized price controls. And lack of political knowledge was a stronger predictor of disagreement with basic tenets of economics than was a lack of education. Further, the more politically ignorant were more likely to support both spending increases and tax cuts – either of which alone can be a defensible preference, but which tend not to go well together.

We cannot do much to improve the general state of voter knowledge. The incentives for individual voters to become well informed are too weak and, for many voters, the costs are high. While many voters do take their democratic responsibilities seriously and work to cast an informed ballot, the evidence suggests a reasonably large proportion do not. What can we then do? The evidence suggests that non-voters have, on average, less political knowledge than voters; strenuous efforts to get out the vote then seem likely to reduce the average quality of the vote. Further, when considering the desirability of different electoral systems, we should put some weight on the relative cognitive demands placed on voters. A good system will make it easy for uninformed voters to support the incumbent if they like how things are going, or to replace the government otherwise. At the margin, this lends support to systems that elect single-party governments. 

Look into the abyss

I've been doing a bit of trawling through the old New Zealand Election Surveys, partially in preparation for a talk I'm giving in a fortnight on voter ignorance, partially in preparing a paper with Bryan Caplan, Wayne Grove, and Ilya Somin on voter ability to correctly attribute political responsibility for outcomes.

One small bit of the darkness: respondents were asked a few quiz questions assessing how well they understand a few basics. Here's the set from 2008, including a new one on Treasury. Correct answers are in bold type.

Question	True	False	"Don't Know"
The term of Parliament is four years	19%	78%	3%
Enrolling as a voter in New Zealand is compulsory.	65%	30%	5%
It is not necessary to be a New Zealand Citizen to be eligible to vote in New Zealand	28%	58%	14%
Interest rates in New Zealand are set by the Treasury	42%	37%	22%
New Zealand is a member of the World Trade Organization	81%	2%	17%

Maybe this answers Matt Nolan's question about why the #OWS folks protested outside of the wrong agency. They may simply confused about who is responsible for what.

88% of respondents agreed it is a citizen's duty to vote.

The 63% who did not know who sets interest rates in New Zealand ought to read Brennan's argument that those choosing to vote have a duty to vote well.

Show business for ugly people?

Well, maybe only for those who are only ugly on the inside. Ugly on the outside: that'll turn off voters.

A new Massachusetts Institute of Technology study found that so-called “low-information voters” — those who watch a lot of TV but who aren’t up-to-date on policy issues — are most likely vote for a candidate based on looks alone.

For every 10-point increase a candidate gets because of his or her appearance, about half of that increase comes from the voters with the least amount of political knowledge and the most time spent in front of the TV.

The study analyzed data from two surveys conducted during the 2006 midterm elections: the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, which surveyed voters on their candidate preferences and television-watching habits; and a study headed by Princeton University professor Alex Todorov, which asked participants to rate ’06 Senate and gubernatorial candidates based solely on appearance.

“People judge other people all the time when they first meet them, but once they learn more about them they update their impressions and forget their initial judgments,” said MIT associate professor Gabriel Lenz, who co-authored the study. “The problem with democracy is that we ask people to vote in all these elections where they don’t know all that much except their first impression.”

Here's the full paper.

In equilibrium if we've a thick market of potential candidates, I can't see how this generates any particular inefficiency. Sure, it gives an additional dimension over which parties need to optimize in candidate selection, but in sufficiently thick markets, the tradeoff in moving from the slightly less attractive to the slightly more attractive candidate won't be that large. The only problem is if you've got thin markets such that the quality gap on other margins is large as you move up the beauty scale. But that too should be a disequilibrium phenomenon. They've said that politics is show business for ugly people. Well, if the returns to beauty start ramping up in political markets relative to other markets, more beautiful people start selecting into politics rather than other endeavours. Hamermesh found that the beautiful select into professions where beauty is rewarded; why should this be any different?

Alternatively, suppose that one of the main outputs of politicians is preening on television. Policy is secondary. Don't we all enjoy greater consumption benefits from seeing attractive people on television than from seeing unattractive people? Marketers clearly think so; check the cast of the average sitcom or commercial.

If your expectations of policy and politicians are sufficiently low, it's harder to get worked up about how things could be worse. The losses from idiot voters choosing the most attractive candidate seem unlikely to be particularly worse than the overall losses from idiot voters full stop.

New Zealand data from 2005 suggested the most politically ignorant voters disproportionately leaned Labour. Is this confirmatory or contrary evidence?

Converting individual ignorance into collective wisdom

Results from the latest CNN poll on Americans' estimates of US Federal government spending.

If you take the median estimate of the proportion of the budget taken up by each programme, and sum across all programmes, the US spends 137% of its total expenditures. Net interest on the debt is not a listed category.

Here are median public estimates of US government spending along with actual 2010 figures (where easily obtained from Wikipedia).

Programme	Estimated proportion	Actual proportion
Medicare - the federal health program for the elderly	20%	12.8%
Medicaid - the federal health program for the poor	15%	8.2%
Social Security	20%	19.6%
Military spending by the Department of Defense	30%	18.7%
Aid to foreign countries for international development and humanitarian assistance	10%	0.8%*
Pensions and benefits for retired government workers	10%	?**
Food and nutrition assistance for the poor, including the program that used to be known as food stamps	10%	2.8%*
Housing assistance for the poor	7%	1.34%
Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding for public television and public radio stations	5%	.1%***
Federal funding for elementary, secondary and higher education	10%	1.8%****

*Sourced from 2012 budget proposal as I can't easily find it for 2010
** No clue where to find this one; it'll be mixed in as part of each department's funding
*** Sourced elsewhere; too small a proportion to make it into any of the big figures
**** Includes a bunch of training programs that might not be considered part of these categories, sourced from 2012 proposed budget.

In general, Americans overestimate the proportion of spending on all these parts of the budget.

Let's deflate things by asking how Americans rank programs relative to spending on Medicare. Even if the total amount spent is kinda ridiculous, maybe folks get the rank order and relativities approximately right. In the table below, Medicare is numeraire.

Programme	Estimated size relative to Medicare	Actual size relative to Medicare	Relative inflation or deflation
Medicare - the federal health program for the elderly	1	1	1
Medicaid - the federal health program for the poor	0.75	0.64	1.17
Social Security	1	1.5	0.65
Military spending by the Department of Defense	1.5	1.5	1
Aid to foreign countries for international development and humanitarian assistance	0.5	0.06	8
Food and nutrition assistance for the poor, including the program that used to be known as food stamps	0.5	0.2	2.3
Housing assistance for the poor	0.35	0.1	3.4
Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding for public television and public radio stations	0.25	0.001	32
Federal funding for elementary, secondary and higher education	0.5	0.14	3.6

On the big ticket items, they're not far out. Folks correctly guess that military spending is about 150% of Medicare spending, even if they've no clue about the actual proportion of the budget taken up by either.

It's on all the small programmes that folks massively overestimate spending. But, somewhat surprisingly, it's not overestimates of programme spending that seem to drive partisan opposition. Tea Party supporters give roughly the same estimates of foreign aid and public broadcasting spending as do Tea Party opponents: 31% of supporters and 34% of opponents correctly identify public broadcasting as taking up less than one percent of the federal budget. And a lot more Tea Party opponents radically overestimate spending on public broadcasting: 22% of Tea Party opponents think spending on public broadcasting is over 10% of the federal budget; only 9% of Tea Party supporters overestimate things that badly.

It would be awfully interesting to have the raw data to see if individual-level misperceptions of federal spending correlated with desired changes in the budget. But that's unlikely to be the driving force. 37% of Tea Party supporters (to 8% of Tea Party opponents) want public broadcasting funding eliminated entirely; differences in perceived spending on broadcasting were fairly trivial.

More worrying is that there's no support for funding decreases to any of the major spending items. 12% support decreases in Social Security spending - the single largest budget item. 37% supported decreased military spending; 30% want it increased. 14% support decreases in Medicare spending; 24% support decreases in Medicaid spending. Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and Military spending make up about sixty percent of the budget. It'll be tough to balance the budget on the back of cuts to public broadcasting and foreign aid.

Update: it is especially troubling that there is more support for Medicaid cuts than for Medicare cuts. The former helps poor people. The latter helps old people regardless of income.

Quimby was right.

A pack of fickle mush-heads.

From the latest PIPA survey:

It's no wonder that politicians like to rail against wasteful spending without giving too many specifics. Voters have no clue what's in the budget, but they're sure there's a lot of waste.

Voters have been overestimating spending on foreign aid for a long time. Economists have done a bit of jumping up and down about it, but the problem isn't getting any better:

This set of questions has been asked repeatedly since the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) first asked them in 1995, and it was subsequently asked by other organizations as well. Over the years the most common median estimate was that foreign aid represented 20 percent of the budget, most recently in a 2004 poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

Thus the most recent number represents an increase of 5 points in the median estimate. Steven Kull, director of PIPA comments, "This increase may be due to Americans hearing more about aid efforts occurring in Iraq, Afghanistan and Haiti over the last few years. There have been some increases in foreign aid under both Presidents Bush and Obama, but, of course, nowhere near to the perceived level."

And, as usual, education predicts being (more) sensible (though it may be confounded by IQ):

In the current poll estimates of foreign aid vary by education, growing more accurate with higher levels of education. Among those with less than a high school education the median estimate was that foreign aid represented an extraordinary 45 percent of the budget, those with only a high school diploma 25 percent, those with some college at 20 percent. However, even those with a college degree or higher still overestimate by a wide margin, with a median estimate of 15 percent of the budget.

Steven Kull comments, "It is quite extraordinary that this extreme overestimation has persisted for so many years, even among those with higher education."

Overall, the percentage of respondents who estimated anywhere near the correct amount was quite small. Only 19 percent estimate that foreign aid is 5 percent or less of the budget.

I like that the New York Times's budget simulator puts foreign aid cuts right up top so folks can quickly see that cutting foreign aid in half saves about as much money as a 5% pay cut for federal workers. Of course, it's only budget geeks playing the simulator anyway; we'd expect them to have a better idea about the composition of the budget.

I suppose you could square things by reckoning that the median voter counts a lot of military spending as foreign aid. I'm not sure that puts voters in any better light.

You've got to know to ask...

In my work on political ignorance, I found that, correcting for other covariates, folks without much political knowledge aren't much helped by having access to cueing groups: the social groups which might help otherwise ignorant folks in sorting out for whom to vote.  The usual story says that political ignorance doesn't much matter if there's a smart person around that you can ask for help.

But you have to know to ask.

And so both BoingBoing and Marginal Revolution today point to this:

Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight.  What made the case peculiar is that he made no visible attempt at disguise.  The surveillance tapes were key to his arrest.  There he is with a gun, standing in front of a teller demanding money.  Yet, when arrested, Wheeler was completely disbelieving.  “But I wore the juice,” he said.

Apparently, he was under the deeply misguided impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to video cameras.

...

As Dunning read through the article, a thought washed over him, an epiphany. If Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber — that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity.

Dunning wondered whether it was possible to measure one’s self-assessed level of competence against something a little more objective — say, actual competence. Within weeks, he and his graduate student, Justin Kruger, had organized a program of research. Their paper, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments,” was published in 1999.[3]

Dunning and Kruger argued in their paper, “When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.”

It became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect — our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence.

At least in bank robberies, you get pretty quick feedback that your "lemon juice makes me invisible" strategy isn't really viable. Shame there isn't such feedback in voting.

Vowles on the 2008 NZ General Election

Liberation points to a chapter by Jack Vowles on the 2008 New Zealand election.

In the 2008 general election, half of voters (51%) thought there were only ‘minor differences’ between the parties during the campaign, while only 38% thought there were actually major differences between the parties. Furthermore, when survey respondents were asked to place the parties on the left-right spectrum, ‘A third could not place Labour or National’. These findings from the New Zealand Election Survey surely reflects the policy convergence of the parties, and are detailed in Jack Vowles’ new academic chapter about the election.

But in the 2005 NZES, 18.9% of respondents said "don't know" when asked National's ideology (with a further 6.7% leaving the question blank); similar proportions had problems identifying Labour's ideology. 23% of respondents either answered "don't know" or left the question blank for both of National and Labour. A further 11 percent of the sample placed National to the left of Labour (among those who did not answer either "don't know" or leave a blank for either National or Labour). So, a third of the 2005 sample could not place National relative to Labour. I wonder what proportion of the 2008 respondents placed National left of Labour....

He goes on to argue that the shifting of the parties to the center opened up room for valence issues. I certainly agree that 2008 was far less ideologically charged than 2005. For 2008, Vowles reports (on a left-right spectrum where 0 is left and 10 is right) that voters placed Labour at 3.7 and National at 6.7. But those registering an answer in 2005 didn't answer that much differently: Labour scored a 3.6 and National a 7.1. So the average gap closed from 3.5 points to 3 points. But if we look at individual respondents' reported distance between National and Labour in 2005 (for those registering an answer), the standard deviation of that difference variable is 4.8. Is a half point closing of the ideological gap really then significant?

Reasons to distrust petitions

The girl at 3:00 who winds up signing...sigh.

Some folks turn him down, some because they know hyperinflation is a bad idea, some because they don't want the hassle of dealing with him. But most folks sign the petition, supporting an increase in inflation to 100% this year and 100% for each of five years subsequently. I wonder how many signatures he could get if he spent a few more days at it.

HT: Brad Taylor
Update: original source site here.

Doctors and the public on health

The Sydney Morning Herald reports on a study comparing doctors' and tradesmen's knowledge of nutrition and exercise. The full study is here, from Australian Family Physician, a publication of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners. Table 1, below, has the results.


Six of twenty questions were answered incorrectly by a majority of doctors, compared to eight of twenty for the tradesmen.

The authors don't run a t-test for differences in mean group responses. Across the set of all questions, we can reject equality with a p-value of 0.017 on a two-tailed test: doctors scored better than the public, with an average "percent incorrect" score about 10 points lower than the public (median difference 6 points). Doctors' mean % incorrect fell below the public's 95% confidence interval nine times out of twenty and was never above that confidence interval.

Another problem: the authors note that "many of these statements remain controversial", with the authors picking "true" or "false" based on their best read of the evidence. But surely they'd then need to assign a confidence interval to their own estimates of whether the statement is indeed true or false. If the state of the literature is that about 70% is consistent with the statement being true, and so the authors label the statement as true, it wouldn't be shocking to find 30% of doctors disagreeing with the statement and being labelled "incorrect". But where the relevant measure is the difference between the public and doctors, this shouldn't cause too many problems. A final problem: both groups were surveyed while going into some seminars on health. We might expect that the doctors going to these kinds of seminars might be drawn from the lower tail, but the tradesmen from the upper tail, of distributions of prior knowledge for their relevant groups.

All that said, though, not a great showing for the doctors. Normally these kinds of surveys (Caplan, Althaus) will build a measure of the "enlightened public": how members of the public would have responded had they had demographic characteristics equivalent to the expert group but not the expert training. That would likely be impossible in this case as there's almost certainly no region of educational overlap across the two groups: you need at least a few members of the tradesmen group who have about the same number of years of formal education as members of the doctors group. Doing that usually closes the gap, at least somewhat, between the "enlightened public" and the experts. But the gap here isn't all that large.

I'd suggest that the folks at Alcohol Action NZ note the "Fruit juice is about as fattening as beer" factoid, but that might encourage the creation of Fruit Juice Action NZ. Hit the link before you laugh, and note especially the story linked at the end.

HT: Peter Martin's picks

Political knowledge isn't improving

Some teaser findings from the latest Goldwater Institute Survey (HT: NotPC)

A majority of Arizona public high school students got only one of these questions correct, with 58% correctly identifying the Atlantic Ocean as being off the east coast of the United States, with 42% unable to do so. It was all downhill from there. 29.5% of students identified the Constitution as the supreme law of the land, 25% of students identified the Bill or Rights as the first 10 amendments to the Constitution (12% said they were called “The Constitution” and 16% “The Declaration of Independence.”)
Twenty three percent of Arizona public high schoolers identified the House and Senate as the chambers of Congress. Nine point four percent that the Supreme Court has nine justices. Only 25% of students correctly identified Thomas Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence. An almost majority of 49.6 percent identified the two major political parties, only 14.5% answered that Senators are elected for six year terms. Finally, only 26.5% of students correctly identified George Washington was the first President. Other guesses included John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Barack Obama.

Only 26% could identify the President as being in charge of the Executive Branch. All in all, only 3.5% of public school students passed the test by getting six or more items correct. That’s 40 students out of a sample of 1,134 district students.

There were no major differences in performance based on grade (Seniors did approximately as poorly as Freshmen) nor by ethnicity. Profound ignorance is quite equally distributed in large measure across students in the public school system.

Of course, this isn't unique to America.