Ezra Klein – Who graduates, who votes and who’s unemployed
Ezra Klein takes a look at unemployment rates vs. voting rates, broken down by educational attainment, in an effort to explain the weird discourse going on over tax cuts vs. unemployment extension. Klein’s takeaway is that people who’ve completed more education (some college or college grad) vote more and are experiencing lower rates of unemployment, as compared to people with less education (HS grad or less). The unspoken assumption here is that the agenda is set by college grads, who favor tax breaks over unemployment, because they’re more likely to personally benefit from the lowered tax burden. However, Klein’s explanation doesn’t account for the case of people with some college, but no degree, who are unemployed at nearly the rate that high school graduates with no college are and who vote at a rate that appears to be splitting the difference between the high school grads and the college grads. How is that the case, though, if unemployment is so much more popular than tax cuts? Are college grads lying when they’re asked about their support for these initiatives?
Obviously, these questions are mostly unanswerable – we’ll never know what secret policy preferences lurk in the hearts of college grads. My point, really, is that making policy decisions or recommendations based on polling data or perceived popularity is seriously problematic. We’ll never know how honest people are when they respond to surveys – stated preferences are often more altruistic than reality, which may be what we’re seeing in the case Klein’s discussing.
More importantly, though, popular policy is often bad policy. This isn’t meant to be an elitist sentiment. Popular policy shouldn’t be good policy – popular policy, by definition, should be policy that most people think are going to be in their own self-interest. Analysts, though, should be looking at the distributional effects, investigating which people are going to benefit and considering that when evaluating policy. Popular policy will almost always leave behind those with the quietest voices – it’s the analyst’s job to counteract that effect.
