A few people have pointed out this Pew poll that shows an inconsistent public. The public, for example, thinks the states should balance their budgets, just not by raising taxes or cutting spending.
Now, some people really might want the states to balance their budgets by magic. However, you don’t need that to get the results Pew finds.
Suppose that you have three people. Adam, who believes in cutting spending to balance the budget. Bill who believes in raising taxes to balance the budget and Chris who believes that state balanced budgets are a pro-cyclical economic destabilizer that should be alleviated by federal transfers, or as he likes to say, “lame.”
Now we are going to ask a few questions.
First we ask: Should the state stick to its balance budget requirement? Adam and Bill say yes. Chris says no. We confidently conclude that the public wants balanced budgets.
Second we ask: Should we cut spending? Adam says yes. Bill and Chris say no. We confidently conclude that the public doesn’t want to cut spending.
Third, we ask: Should we raise taxes? Adam and Chris say no. Bill says yes. We confidently conclude that the public doesn’t want to raise taxes.
But wait a minute! Is the public insane! How can we balance the budget if we don’t cut spending or raise taxes.
No the public as individuals are completely sane, but when aggregated into a whole they become irrational. And, importantly there is no clear way to make them rational, since each person is answering truthfully and with complete knowledge of the facts.
[We are going to leave out intensity scoring for now because its complicated and I don’t think it actually gets you what its proponents think it gets you]
This is one of the reasons why “the individual” is special level of organization. Trying to go below the individual, for example asking what kind of policy your parietal lobe wants, usually yields no meaningful answer. Going above the individual exposes you to this fundamental aggregation problem.
How the brain goes about solving this aggregation problem is still a mystery to us. If it feels like there are dozen distinct urges and desires pulling you in different directions, its because there are. Somehow, however, the brain integrates them into a surprisingly rational whole. As a society we don’t know how to do that.
One practical solution to this problem, employed by the founders of most modern democracies, was to create some form of deliberative legislature where people could hash out deals.
Sometimes these deals would include side payments. For example, Adam and Bill agree to build a bike ramp for Chris if he’ll vote for modest tax increases and modest spending cuts.
Today that type of deal making is under attack. Politicians are lambasted for voting against their party’s preferences. Side deals or pork are criticized as corrupt and immoral.
This is unfortunate because if Pew snapshot is correct, then a legislature that is purely faithful to its voters is a legislature inescapably bound by aggregate irrationality.
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Saturday ~ February 12th, 2011 at 5:24 pm
buddyglass
So the poll should give choices, e.g.
“I want to ask you some questions about state budgets. Let’s assume your state faces a deficit. Which of these most closely matches how you feel about that situation:
a. The state should balance its budget and it should do so primarily by cutting spending,
b. The state should balance its budget and it should do so by primarily by raising taxes,
c. The state should balance its budget and it should do so by cutting spending and raising taxes in approximately equal shares,
d. Neither: It is not important that my state balance its budget,
e. Neither: It is important that my state balance its budget, but an exception should be made given the current state of the economy.”
I’m thinking you’d get very few people answering B or D. Democrats and moderates would answer C or E, and those on the right would say A.
Sunday ~ February 13th, 2011 at 12:07 am
Notes From the American Underground
[...] at Modeled Behavior, Karl Smith points us to a Pew Research poll which seems to suggest that people want a balanced budget but they [...]
Sunday ~ February 13th, 2011 at 7:23 pm
Jehu
Bear in mind a lot of people would be willing to accept an across the board cut of X%, but aren’t willing to commit to any specific cuts. That’s because they’re afraid of being played for suckers (with good reason). They’d consider the goring of their own sacred cows ONLY if everyone else’s are going to get gored too, in at least the same amount. Think about it, there is NO incentive for any single group to stand up and be ‘the adults in the room’.
Monday ~ February 14th, 2011 at 4:56 pm
Ryan P
The above example requires that the issue space not only be multi-dimensional, but that empirically people’s opinions actually look multi-dimensional (i.e., a left-right spectrum couldn’t possibly capture most of the variation of opinions, no matter how you define “left” and “right”). So, serious question: do we really see a whole lot of that? If not, then I wonder if aggregation is the problem
(To clarify: I’m not asking if you can come up with something like the libertarian diamond or whatever. I’m asking if you actually see people all over the diamond or if it’s mainly along one axis.)
Monday ~ February 14th, 2011 at 6:32 pm
Jeff
Although we’d need to be able to look through crosstabs in some detail to know for sure, as an account of why we get poll results that look like these in the aggregate, I really don’t think this is likely to be right. You can get a profile that looks like this several different ways without people explicitly thinking the budget can be balanced by magic.
First, an anecdote: I know someone who has always been conservative, but is now somewhat isolated and gets all of his information through particular sources. A while ago, I sent him a link to a website from the NY Times that let you try to balance the budget through various means. He couldn’t do it. He complained that the site wouldn’t let you balance the budget through tax cuts. After all, when you cut taxes, revenue goes up; so you can balance the budget if you are just willing to cut taxes far enough. Now, I don’t know how many people believe this, but it is perfectly consistent with his worldview, and the sources from which he gets his information. Moreover, it is consistent with the aggregate profile above without fitting into any of your hypothesized character profiles.
There are other possibilities. The poll only listed a few programs. It is perfectly reasonable to imagine that many people would support spending on the programs listed, but think that a lot of money is spent on other programs (which they may or may not be able to name) and that those should be cut. For example, there have been polls asking people how much of the federal government’s budget goes to foreign aid, and there have been respondents who have said more than 50%. In addition, people seem to believe that there is a lot of ‘fraud, waste, and abuse’ that could easily be cut.
Sorry about the multiple-paragraph comment, but in the absence of any evidence for your Adam, Bill, and Chris thought experiment, I find it utterly unconvincing.