Overstating public incoherence on the deficit

Matthew Yglesias calls the public "ill-informed and hypocritical" based on a New York Times poll that found "Most Americans continue to want the federal government to focus on reducing the budget deficit rather than spending money to stimulate the national economy... [y]et at the same time, most oppose some proposed solution for decreasing it."

The problem, however, is that the available evidence doesn't support Yglesias's conclusion (which is encouraged by the way the poll is framed in the Times). When you look at the raw poll results (PDF), you'll see that the public prefers reducing the deficit to stimulating the economy 58%-35%, but 53% oppose cuts in public services and 56% oppose higher taxes. Those numbers may seem "ill-informed and hypocritical," but the problem is that we're dealing with aggregate data (this is what is known as an ecological inference problem). We can't draw any strong conclusions about the proportion of individual members of the public who have incoherent preferences about deficit reduction without access to the raw data. Ideally, we would break out the members of the public who advocate deficit reduction over stimulus and see how many of them oppose both higher taxes and reduced services. That's the quantity of interest, but it's unfortunately not available to us at this point.

Update 7/30 12:12 PM: Yglesias has generously updated his post to note that you "can't infer very much about individual preferences from this aggregate data."

Update 7/30 1:59 PM: Per Steve Greene's comment below, I want to make clear that there is (of course) substantial evidence that many individuals have contradictory preferences on public policy issues. It is therefore quite possible that the Times poll data will reveal that many people have incoherent views on deficit reduction. My purpose in writing this post was simply to clarify that we can't reach such a conclusion on the basis of aggregate data alone. Moreover, we should be cautious in condemning "the public" as a whole for incoherence when the proportion of the population that support deficit reduction but oppose any measures to achieve it might be relatively small.

Comments

[Steve Greene]

What you can do is look at similar questions on the NES at the individual level and see that the public is, in fact, ignorant and hypocritical. Based on past survey data, Yglesias' conclusions are quite reasonable.

[Foster Boondoggle]

Actually I think the two responses are coherent. “Government services,” to any individual, is not co-extensive with “everything the government does”. For most of us, for example, the hugely bloated defense/industrial complex (now accounting for >50% of global military spending) does very little (or is a net negative). I would be perfectly happy to see government spending on that fall by, say, 80%. And then my taxes could go down, too, while spending on other government services that actually benefit me could go up.

[Jeff]

Boondoggle, you are clearly a commie terrorist-coddling pedophile who hates America!

How dare you attack an institution that forces men to sleep and shower together while providing them shelter, four squares, healthcare, and guns all at other peoples' expense!

Wait...

Never mind.