Do self-identified conservatives or liberals have a better understanding of basic economics?

Educated conservatives and liberals have a better understanding of economics, even though they may not agree. Both Volker and Greenspan are brilliant men, but could not be more different in their market approaches. Economics is more of an art than a pure science. Unfortunately on these yahoo forums, there is little knowledge exhibited from either conservatives or liberals.

There's so many problems with those questions, it's difficult to know where to start, but a few problems stand out --

Vague much? Asking someone to agree or disagree with statements like "Free trade leads to unemployment" is just silly. Unemployment where? measured how? Unemployment among auto workers in Michigan? Unemployment in the US over all? Unemployment in all of North America?

Likewise the monopoly question is deceptively worded. While it's true that the company with the largest market share is not necessarily a monopoly, a monopoly would certainly have the largest market share.

Furthermore, the questions are so skewed as to be practically meaningless. They worded everything so that what they considered the "enlightened" answer paralleled the world view of your average fiscal conservative. It would have been more interesting to ask people to explain the economic forces that cause housing shortages, unemployment, the high cost of professional services, etc., though I'm afraid most people would fail miserably at that. Mindlessly parroting your party line doesn't make you an economic genius.

Interesting poll design. Reading the questions, it's designed to pick out questions that liberals will tend to answer incorrectly because it picks out the negative impacts of policies that Democrats tend to favor, assuming those policies are not done in an intelligent manor (as most Democrats prefer) to lessen those negative impacts. It also ignores the positive impacts that Democrats tend to feel make those policies worth it. Most people are uneducated about economics and would tend to answer positively toward policies with which they agree and negatively toward policies with which they disagree, whether the correct answer in the question calls for that or not. If you were to conduct a similar poll and ask other basic economic questions like "At the same dollar levels, government spending puts more money into the economy than tax breaks, agree or disagree?" Most Republicans will get it wrong and most Democrats will get it right. But Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal wouldn't write an article about that poll...

Rednecks know if they win the lottery this week then they can pay the bills buy beer and stay home watching Fox news on the biggest TV that they can fit through the trailer door.Buy new guns and ammo and wait to see what happens next.That's what I call a economic windfall.That is real basic.

Apparently neither.

Both complain about spending and all this debt, but when all those crooks finally get together and amend bills and try and cut back on spending they end up spending more, or water the **** down.

Both have been spending like devils in a dust storm since 2001 -- so apparently neither of Liberals or Conservatives have an basic understanding that when you spend money you don't have, and print money out of thin air it tends to cause an economic meltdown..

Don't you know that anytime you post a poll that shows libs on the short end, it is obviously biased? Yet polls from "credible" sources such as the Huffington Post and MSNBC are great.

Bottom line if you believe in supply-side economics and monetarism, you are a realist and have a pretty good grasp on economics. If you believe in the theories of John Maynard Keynes, then you are a theorist with little grasp on reality or how real economies work. Spending more to make more does not work. Robbing Peter to pay Paul does not work. Supply and demand does work.

Typically, but not always, true conservatives and libertarians are monetarists, and liberals and RINOs are Keynesians, so again, this poll seems to reflect that.

Those "economics questions" are by and large, opinion questions. The people who ran the study decided that the conservative answers were the correct answers and "graded" the "test" accordingly. Only two of the questions they asked were academic questions that one might find on a test in an economics class.

I think it is about the tenth time this phony survey has been seen on Y/A and it isn't any more valid now than it was the first time. Basically the WSJ asked questions and declared those who agreed with their bias to be "informed" and those who disagreed with their bias to be "uninformed" This proves nothing about anyone's understanding of basic economics, but it tells us volumes about the analytical shortcomings of anyone who cites this as valid.

Obviously this is difficult to answer, I will jsut say that the 2 democratic presidencies in the last 40 years had far far better economic performance than the repub ones

I still would like to know what an opinion on whether a person feels if a Third World worker working for American companies overseas is being exploited has to do with economics.