Doug

How facts backfire seems to do a reasonable job of summarising the literature on political ignorance: the finding that voters (mainly in the US) overwhelmingly (a) don't know much about politics, but (b) are convinced they do, and (c) are not only resistant to contrary evidence, but can even end up even more convinced of their erroneous views when you present them with corrections. So much so not terribly new news to me, although it does gather it together nicely.

The thing that stuck out for me was one particular study, summarised thusly:

A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong.

.That's pretty startling. I'm clearly better informed than most of the people in this research - I could readily answer most of the questions that they set, despite them being about the US, not the UK. In fact I'd be rather happy to find that I was factually right about 90 percent of political things - although I'm probably underestimating my likely score here since the relevant one would be UK-focused. (The sorts of questions they're talking about are pretty basic: names of party leaders, local representatives and their affiliation, who has a majority in which part of the legislature, and so on, plus basic information about current political issues.) So I'm almost certainly in their 'politically sophisticated thinkers' demographic, and so their research suggests that I'm really very resistant to correcting my beliefs where they're wrong.

That bothers me. I like to think I'm reasonably open to changing my mind about things, and particularly about facts (as opposed to moral principles) when I get more information. But this study suggests I'm not.

I have managed to track down the study in question - I think it's C. S. Taber and M. Lodge, "Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs", 2006, American Journal of Political Science, 50(3), 755 - 769, Published Online: 21 Jun 2006. Alas, there seems to be an ongoing issue with the authentication system (which has been bothering me for a few weeks now, really must bother some of my librarian chums about it) and I can't get hold of it.

Anyway. It seems quite likely that I'm not only incorrect about some important political facts, but would be pretty resistant to being corrected. It's easier to admit you're wrong in front of people you know and trust, so you folk could help me out here.

What political facts do you think I'm wrong about?

I'm not so much interested in fundamental moral orientations (obviously, most of you aren't pacifists or anarchists) but specific, verifiable facts. So, for instance, I'm not looking for an abstract argument against anarchism, but I would be interested - or rather, I like to imagine that I'd be properly interested - in good evidence running counter to my relevant and strongly held belief that industrial production in Catalonia went up, not down, in 1936 when the mode of organisation of labour shifted to a much more decentralised, bottom-up one.

Here to help is a list of tenfourteen things (I tried to do ten off the top of my head, on the slightly-spurious grounds that at least one is likely to be wrong if the 90% stat is right, and rattled off too many). These are facts that are very relevant to current political issues that I believe to be true.
- The UK is facing a very, very large deficit, both in annual PSBR terms and cumulative total debt terms; this is largely the result of the recession, but contributed to by substantial deficits over the last ten years or more.
- The bank bailout did substantially increase the UK's national debt, but also added substantially to national assets; the net position for the taxpayer in the medium/long term is uncertain but reasonable guesses suggest a modest profit
- Very bad social consequences will flow if the UK's annual deficit is not substantially reduced in the medium to long term.
- Spending cuts of the magnitude under discussion (25% in many Departments) are (a) unprecedented, (b) spectacularly painful, and (c) almost impossible to deliver in practice
- Substantial, across-the-board spending cuts (even of a much more realistic, deliverable magnitude) will all-but-unavoidably tend have the largest bad effect on the least well off and the most vulnerable.
- Support for the LibDems has almost halved since the election, with the balance going slightly more to the Tories than Labour.
- Inflation in the UK is over the Bank of England's target, at around 3% (CPI -about 5% on RPI), and has been for months if not years; interest rates are pegged around 0.5% and have been for years; so real interest rates have been negative for quite some time, like a year or more.
- The US is technically out of recession but the economy is growing very slowly, and facing prolonged high unemployment.
- The Eurozone is in all sorts of economic trouble, facing profound fiscal and monetary challenges that are probably even worse than the UK's.
- On a timescale of decades, greenhouse gases are increasing dramatically in the atmosphere, which is causing increasing overall warming of the planet, which has the effect of changing the climate, and this change (a) is largely driven by human action and (b) can - at least in principle - be mitigated by human action.
- There is considerable scope to generate more of our (the UK's) electricity from renewable sources, but not to generate the majority of it that way.
- Using the tax and benefits systems to reduce income inequality has direct positive outcomes on society.
- People on substantially lower incomes than I am (a) have to do much more form-filling to get the benefits they're entitled to, (b) find each individual form a lot harder to deal with than I find the ones I have to do, and (c) find the level of income instability caused by errors in the process harder to deal with than I do.
- Persistent social problems like poverty, long-term unemployment, problematic substance dependency, abuse, and homelessness are complex in origin and are not fixable with simple measures, although there are many interventions known to help which are not as widely deployed as they could be.

So what do you think? Or rather, what do you know? Correct me if I'm wrong!

Be warned: I deliberately picked 'facts' I'm quite strongly attached to, so I'll take some convincing. I'd be interested to know if you disagree with them, but you'll have to do a bit better than that to get me to change my mind. No need to limit yourselves to the ones in the list, by the way - if you can think of other things you think I think, but you think I am wrong to think, that'd be good too. I think.