Dan Klein's survey < (that's my blog post about it) has gotten a lot of attention. Some argue the questions are vague, ambiguous or otherwise not subject this Klein's preemptive answer in the original paper, which is:
We think it is reasonable to maintain that if a respondent disagrees with the statement “Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable,” the respondent betrays a lack of economic enlightenment. Challengers might say something like: “Well, not every restriction on housing development makes housing less affordable,” but such a challenger would be tendentious and churlish. Unless a statement in a questionnaire explicitly makes it a matter of 100%, by using “every,” “all,” “always,” “none,” or “never,” it is natural to understand the statement as a by-and-large statement about overall consequences. Do restrictions on housing development, by and large, make housing less affordable? Yes they do. Does free trade lead, overall, to greater unemployment? No, it does not. For someone to say the contrary is economically unenlightened.
Does this answer satisfy you?
I wish I had time to go into Nate Silver's weak critique. Suffice it to say that most of the critics are running squarely into the above. You can cook up exceptions and counterexamples, or quibble with the methodology, but I think the questions stand pretty well. Are some arguable from the point of view of nitpicking? Yes. Are they arguable from a by-and-large perspective? Not really.
(I've still got people arguing in social media that free trade increases unemployment. You never saw such epicyclical argumentation in your life.)
So, progressives still have some economics to catch up on.
Comments