Ok I see your point, but that’s not what I meant. I meant that
“People die from the Ebola virus. True or false?”
was a badly constructed question, as it could be taken to mean all people, in which case it would be false, or some people, in which case it would be true.
And wow you know some picky biology students! 
We’re going around in circles here. My point is that the questions are not valid from an economics perspective. You say you have a background in economics, and yet you’ve misstated what the “law” of supply and demand is, and you are avoiding dealing with my clear statements.
You still have not provided me with a clear definition of “exploitation” and since we don’t have a clear definition, then the study question doesn’t mean anything. I am asking you directly to provide a definition for “exploitation.” If you can’t do it, then AFAIC, the study statement about exploitation is meaningless. In this thread, you have claimed that any sort of pay makes for a lack of exploitation. So you should be able to provide a definition of exploitation which makes that true. Please provide it.
That’s not anything like the study questions. This would be an equivalent: “The rate an object falls is too fast.” It has no right answer in the world of physics and is meaningless.
Okay, I thought of another:
A man that kills his wife is guilty of murder. Agree or disagree.
The moron at Wal-mart is going to disagree.
The college grad would agree.
The moron at Wal-mart knows people that killed their wife but were found guilty of something else like manslaughter. Meanwhile, the educated individual BELIEVES that murder is defined as “killing someone” and studied famous women killed by their husbands in which case the husband was convicted of murder.
A person with formal legal training would know to disagree. The act of killing doesn’t make someone guilty of murder, being tried and convicted by a jury of one’s peers does. Lots of people kill their wife and are not found guilty, lots of people are found guilty without having killed their wife. The question isn’t about nuance or what YOU think the definition of *murder *or *guilt *is.
Finally, a person that is “enlightened” knows both that guilt is based on conviction, and ALSO knows how to answer a question without imposing his own personal bias or nuance.
The beauty of this “study” was that it found 8 questions that the moron in Wal-mart was able to guess right. But that an educated person was able to convinced themselves to answer wrong.
You are so far off base as to not even be in the same stadium. Read the study, then come back and discuss it. As a hint, it has nothing to do with YOUR definition of “exploitation,” or whether or not YOU think people are being exploited.
Your misunderstanding of the physics question highlights what you missed in the study.
Whoa! Paul Krugman is a rabid partisan? Ms. Krugman’s boy, Paul? I wonder, do you find cottage cheese too exciting?
I apologize, my last post was unnecessarily snarky.
These questions were designed to be biased. The resulting pattern was:
Moron at Wal-mart, without formal economics training, guesses right.
College educated student, also without formal economics training, guesses wrong.
Thus the point of the study was to embarrass the liberal arts faculty by showing a series of entirely biased economics questions that morons at Wal-mart could guess right, but their own students guess wrong. Hence the title of the study, which has nothing to do with the title of this thread.
Now, you are simply trying to ascribe viewpoints to me that I haven’t expressed. I have not expressed any personal notion of whether or not people are being exploited. I have stated that the word “exploitation” resolves to a value judgment.
And then I have asked you repeatedly to provide me your econ 101 definition of “exploitation.” You could easily bring me to your side if you would just define the word in a clear way which doesn’t resolve to some vague value judgment. Why do you keep avoiding this? How am I supposed to know what YOU mean by “exploitation” if you won’t define the term?
There is evidence that some modest minimum wage increases do not increase unemployment, but the general reason for that would be that the prevailing wage is already higher than the new minimum. In which case, there also won’t be any benefit from a minimum wage hike.
CalMeacham, the Wikipedia article you linked to doesn’t just mention that house.gov paper. It cites numerous studies which show negative effects from minimum wages, and sharp criticisms from many economists on the one study that claimed otherwise. It also cites polls of economists which overwhelmingly support the idea that minimum wages reduce employment. For example:
So more economists think it would be better to eliminate the minimum wage entirely than to increase it.
In addition, the economists who support a minimum wage hike don’t necessarily do so for economic reasons, but for social justice reasons. They may agree that a minimum wage increase may cause increased unemployment, but that overall it will be good for the poor. This could be the case, for example, where social welfare benefits are already close to the minimum wage in terms of overall compensation for a displaced worker.
Yes and no. Let me recap and see if we’re in agreement:
The study shows that a ‘liberal’ education without including an economics component will result in students scoring worse on the 8 questions presented than someone who has no liberal education at all.
Would you agree?
Now, whether this is just meaningless trolling or says something rather significant depends on whether these 8 questions are fairly comprehensive, whether they’re ‘fair’, and whether they make up the bulk of what people need to know about economics to be good citizens.
Let’s establish that these students, even with the professor’s econ 101 class, are not going to be professional economists. Well, what’s the purpose of teaching them econ, then? I would assume so that they can be better employees, vote smarter, understand the world better and in general be better citizens. The typical reasons for a liberal arts education.
If that’s the case, then the challenge I’d put to you is to come up with 8 questions that a liberal student with no econ courses will do better in answering than would a non-college educated person. These questions should be as significant and broad in application to issues facing voters and workers as these eight questions were.
I’m sure you (or me) could come up with some very special circumstances that we could use to generate 8 questions that have answers counter-intuitive to your average conservative who does not have an econ education. But most of them would not be as broad in scope as these, and therefore not as relevant to the life of the student or to the performance of his duties of citizenship.
To get you started, I can think of one: “A tax increase will actually result in less revenue to the government because it will choke off growth.” I suspect your average uneducated conservative would say this is true. An educated liberal who has no econ training would say it’s false, which is closer to the correct answer in America today. An econ major would say it depends on the current levels of taxation and on the timeframe in which the change is measured.
This is a question that actually has significance in understanding political debate today and being a good, informed citizen.
Can you come up with seven more like that?
Crap, I had a response and it vanished.
I was thinking about other examples and came up with:
“UHC will cause rationing of care.” Agree or disagree?
The problem is that liberals NEED to disagree with this statement, but it’s true, it will cause rationing. The statement says nothing about the type of rationing, nothing about rationing in a private system, and doesn’t say whether or not the overall outcome is better or worse. It is dishonest to disagree with that statement.
Now, let’s look at this economics question again:
Relax, take a deep breath, and read it again.
It says NOTHING about how much it will raise unemployment, nothing about whether or not minimum wage laws are good or bad, and nothing about the overall benefits of those laws. The simple fact is that if you go into a country where a lot of people are making $4/hour and you set a minimum wage law of $6 some of those people will lose their jobs (a raise to unemployment). It’s okay to agree with that statement. You can still be for minimum wage laws, but you need to also be honest about the consequences. It’s also possible that if people were already making $8 an hour putting a minimum of $6 would do nothing, but also be rather pointless.
Looking back through the questions, they are all statements that liberals want or need to disagree (or agree) with in order to support their beliefs.
From dictionary.com:
ex·ploi·ta·tion
/ˌɛksplɔɪˈteɪʃən/ Show Spelled[ek-sploi-tey-shuhn] Show IPA
–noun
-> no mention of workers in third world countries or American companies.
If I use your first definition, then workers in third-world countries are being exploited by American companies (and so are workers in first-world countries), because they are being “utilized for profit.” So, your first definition disagrees with the “enlightened” answer of the study.
Your second definition is a value judgment (what does it mean to be “selfish”?). And your third definition doesn’t make sense within the context of the statement at hand. So you have provided one definition that conflicts with the “enlightened” analysis and another definition which simply reinforces my point: that the term “exploitation” resolves to a value judgment.
Yes, I would agree. As I said the questions were designed that way.
Well, no, I don’t really think that matters. This author wants econ courses required in liberal arts programs, that’s pretty much his end goal. It’s entirely possible that believing these “lies” makes people BETTER citizens. Sort of like how believing in Santa Clause makes kids behave around Christmas time.
A tax increase result in less revenue. [statement is essentially false, but conservatives will agree]
Tax breaks to the rich will trickle down to the poor. [statement is essentially false, but conservatives will agree]
Government stimulus plans represent the broken window fallacy. [statement is essentially false, but conservatives will agree]
If you increase taxes on the rich, they’ll move to another country. [statement is essentially false, but conservatives will agree]
The free market can solve all the worlds problems. [statement is essentially false, but conservatives will agree]
Okay, I thought of 3 that are all basically the same and then one that’s pretty much retarded. I personally think a conservative could more easily come up with 8 “fallacies believed by conservatives” easier than I can.
All you have to do is list 8 conservative economic principles (like supply side economics or government involvement) and then find a corresponding downside to each one. The point is that conservatives won’t want to agree with a fact that goes against their belief.
That’s what these 8 questions did, they highlighted topics that go against liberal beliefs.
You need to stop focusing so heavily on this, it’s not relevant to the debate. It shows that you’re not paying attention, and that you haven’t read the study. Here I am officially ignoring what you wrote.
I have read the study, and they haven’t defined the term “exploited” anywhere. The only reason you are ignoring me is that you can’t provide a definition of exploitation which isn’t a personal value judgment or doesn’t conflict with the study itself. All that specific question shows is that people have different value judgments about what constitutes “exploitation.” It in no way shows that people have or do not have any economics knowledge.
ETA: And I find this idea that simply because I disagree with your analysis of the study that I must not have read it to be the worst sort of argument. It is possible to read the study and not come to the same conclusions you want everyone to come to.
Let me see if I can make my point more clear by choosing an opposite tact. Here’s a statement that a lot of conservatives would agree with:
“Taxes are theft.”
Now, if we’re talking about legal enlightenment, that statement is obviously false. If we’re talking about economics, the statement is meaningless. This is rather, a statement of philosophy about what constitutes an immoral taking (note that under a legal analysis, taxes are certainly not an unlawful taking). I view this the same as some of the questions in the study. In the American political system, whether you agree with this statement or not is a decent proxy of whether or not you are conservative. But it doesn’t reflect what you know about economics.
I take your point, emacknight, but consider the following thought experiment. Sample another set of similar college students and ask them the same questions without the political ambiguity.
-Exogenous reduction of supply of a good will increase its price.
-Barriers to entry into the marketplace increases the price of a good offered.
-People in third world countries are paid less than their marginal products.
Hell, sample the same college students and check their answers for consistency. I am pretty sure that more students would answer the abstract questions without the political overtones correctly. The answers for many of these questions when you add in the nuance is maybe or sometimes. All we are really testing here is students’ thresholds for making confidence judgments that are either yes or no. No one is being asked to specify a model setup here or anything.
Here, go nuts.
Gotta wonder, how much of what is considered orthodox academic economics is skewed to reflect the interests and philosophy of the monied classes? Well, how many lefties endow economics chairs in universities? You’re the dean, there’s an opening to head the economics dept. You review your list of generous alumni, and pass over the guy favored by the Cato Institute and American Enterprise Inst. and pick the guy favored by the AFL-CIO?
There used to be Marxist economics, you know. Built on absurd principles, it couldn’t help but be an absurd study, but there it was. People took degrees in Marxist economics, published learned papers on the subject, engaged in petty squabbles over orthodoxy, got paid to supervise teaching assistants. The whole magilla.
And, of course, it was nonsense, because no academic study can have any objectivity if overwhelmed by a political orthodoxy, its like Lysenko all over again.
But who’s to say that there isn’t a roughly parallel situation here in the US? How much of such academic endowments and grants have to do with furthering science and how much to pay academic mouthpieces to lend intellectual dignity to a bankrupt system?
The guys who just drove the economy over a cliff, the alpha lemmings - did they take courses in economics? Was there anything in those courses that led them to think breathtaking ratios of leverage were a really, really good idea?
Please take this for what it’s worth, but given my profession, I know quite a lot of economists and political scientists, all in the dominant rational choice paradigm. They are almost to a man (and woman) unfailingly liberal. Some are more interventionist than I am; some less.
There used to be Marxist economics, but unfortunately, it turned out to be wrong in almost every way. As ideologically appealing as it might have been to some people, there’s really no helping that.
And they failed miserably, because anyone with any education at all knows that absolute statements like these are always false. All it takes is one counterexample to make a statement false.