On Wed, 15 Feb 2006, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Read the paper <http://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/homer.pdf> ["Homer Gets
> A Tax Cut"] Bartels ... marshals evidence showing that it's not just a
> matter of being poorly informed
I'm not sure that's entirely true. When Bartels separates people into informed and uninformed (in order to run correlations), he does it entirely on the basis of a single self-evaluation question about general knowledge about political affairs (footnote 37, page 29). But earlier he cites a Kaiser poll about people's knowledge about tax matters (on page 20) that shows that vast majority of people are completely ignorant of literally the first thing about tax matters, namely whether they paid more income tax or payroll taxes -- 85% either didn't know or were wrong.
My take-away from that is when it comes to taxes, none of these people are very informed. And that could explain the whole mystery right there. Bartels shows that the "informed" people were massively more likely to be against the Bush income tax cuts than the "uninformed." The mystery that remained for him was, Why was half of even this group still for the cuts when they were against their interest? And the simplest answer would be, maybe only half of them understood that. Afaics, that answer is entirely compatible with this data. (Unless I'm missing something.)
And this view, the even dumber showing for the inheritance tax might simply indicate that even fewer people understand that -- which I think makes perfect sense, since people pay income and payroll taxes every year, but estate taxes are rare events. Almost everyone I know is sure they'll have to pay taxes when they inherit their mother's house -- even though it isn't true. If people believe that -- and are anxiously depending on that house to be their retirement income -- it might indeed all be explained by ignorance.
Personally, I find this idea of pervasive ignorance of the key facts when it comes to tax matters pretty easy to believe based on the people I know and even on myself. Most people have math anxiety and tax anxiety, and discussions of details between warring wonks makes them glaze over and go amnesiac.
So I'm not convinced this study has shown it these results *can't* be explained by being poorly informed. I think you could just as well interpret Bartels' correlations as showing that, if you use *very* rough proxies for being informed, it matters a lot. But that if you want to explain the residual -- the informed people who choose wrong -- then you need much a better measure of being specifically informed about the issue at hand.
Mind you, this doesn't necessarily make our task any easier. But it changes the question from Why are people irrational (i.e., Why does being informed not matter) to How can we inform people -- how can we make people understand issues that turn on numbers?
> I wonder if Canadians and others would react the same way as Americans, or if
> this is yet another case of American exceptionalism.
I don't know about Canadians, but I've always been impressed by the way the unveiling of the British budget is a biannual political event that all the news circles around. It seems to me that by being presented as a whole, it always makes clear the fundamental budget issue -- that there are trade offs. Which is precisely the key thing that we Americans don't seem to grasp.
Michael