We’re used to assuming that most Americans don’t know a whole lot about government and public policy. Over the years I’ve been inclined to think that those of us in the commentariat tend to be overly cynical about this. Voters often can’t explain their opinions very clearly and often have a hard time getting the answers to quiz questions right, but they operate off a higher level of knowledge than we often give them credit for.
Many of the sneering comments about the participants in last week’s hundreds of tea parties across the nation were premised on the idea that these people didn’t know much about public policy. The hostile CNN reporter (Rush Limbaugh might call her an infobabe) who told tea party attendants that they were going to get tax rebates was an example of that. It was also an example of the condescension of so many in the media: ordinary people should be satisfied with getting a few extra bucks now and shouldn’t worry about the long-term effects of huge increases in government spending and government debt. As I wrote last, the idolators who attended Obama events last year seemed entranced by the candidate’s persona, while the tea party participants seemed preoccupied with serious issues of long-term public policy. Which side was more intellectually serious?
So I was heartened to see a poll, conducted March 26-29, by Pew Research, which showed that most of the American public knows knows more about the economic crisis than one might have thought. Large majorities know that TARP money is intended to get banks to lend more and that China holds more U.S. government debt than any other country. People are evidently paying attention, and to a greater extent I think than they usually do. Pew asked several quiz questions, and in the past I’ve thought that these tend to underestimate the degree of people’s knowledge.
You can forget, as you go about your daily work, the name of the Secretary of the Treasury, even while remembering significant things about him (he has Wall Street experience, he didn’t pay all of his taxes). But the Pew interviewers found that Americans do pretty well on quiz questions these days. A 53% majority said that national unemployment was around 8% and 40% said that the Dow Jones average was hovering around 8000. As you might expect, college grads were more knowledgeable than those less educated, high earners (and middle earners) more knowledgeable than low earners, older people more knowledgeable than young people. Republicans were also considerably more knowledgeable and Independents more knowledgeable than Democrats. And, to a greater extent than I had expected, men were much more knowledgeable than women.
One reason might be the fact that nearly 80% of the jobs lost in the recession have been lost by men. (H/T Instapundit.com) Unemployment is 8.8% among men and 7.0% among women. This seems odd in a country where majorities of college students and students in many graduate schools are women, but it may reflect greater knowledge among men than women in the older age groups (though when you think about it, it’s only among those now 65 and over that women were much less likely than men to be in the work force for most of their adult lives).
So what do our surprisingly knowledgeable fellow citizens think the government should be doing about our economic problems. Pollster Scott Rasmussen reports that 52% of Americans now worry that the government will do too much to fix the economy. That’s up (insignificantly) from 50% in March and (significantly) from 43% in mid-February. Only 31% fear the government will do too little, down from 40% in March and 43% in February. To put it another way, Americans in April worry that the government will do too much rather than too little by a 52%-31% margin, while Americans in February were split 43%-43% on whether the government was doing too much or too little. That’s a significant shift of opinion over a short period of time.
My conclusion: Americans are pretty knowledgable about our economic problems, and as they watch public policy evolve they’re becoming more wary of major government involvement in the economy. The tea party participants, (whose numbers have been estimated at “300,000+,” by Obama backer Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com and “more than 623,000,” by tea party sympathizers at pajamasmedia.com,) are evidently more in line with the trend of widespread public opinion than the mainstream media would like you to think.
