It doesn’t even seem strange to me. The obvious thing for most people to do is to respond with the “correct” signal. But amongst those who actually do think about the question, there’s still a matter of interpretation:
A dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person
I might answer “no”, depending on what I thought they meant by “means”. If I was thinking of it as a symbol and was considering what its semantic value was, I would probably think it was the same for both rich and poor people—they both correctly understand what is meant by “dollar” and value that thing differently.
gun-control laws fail to reduce people’s access to guns.
I might think this was true, depending on what you mean by “fail” and “reduce”. Since it’s trivially true that a gun control law should reduce people’s access to guns by some extent, the question when interpreted charitably would seem to be asking whether gun control laws are effective at their goals of significantly reducing criminals’ access to guns.
I might also wonder what “reduce access” means; it could mean “for each person, it is harder to get a gun”, or it could mean, “some people who could formerly get guns now cannot”. The latter seems strictly false, since industrious people can find some way around any law.
My general take on “A dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person” is that, unless the respondents were chosen only from the subset of people with a basic grounding in economics” the researchers likely felt that they could not use the statement “The marginal value of an additional dollar is greater to a poor person than in it is to a rich person” because they could not assume that respondents would understand the concept of marginal value. Possibly just mind projection on my part, but that is what I assume this statement was supposed to “translate” to.
Of course, the fact that we have do discuss the meaning of the statement is already evidence that the researcher assumed to much when creating the question.
Anecdotally, I have on numerous occasions encountered arguments against redistributive taxation based solely on deadweight loss (ignoring the declining marginal value of the dollar), so the mistake in question certainly exists. It’s difficult to say how much more it exists among conservatives and libertarians than among liberals, however, because conservatives/libertarians and liberals are likely to have divergent opinions about redistributive taxation anyway for tribal and other reasons.
I interpret the gun control proposition using a supply-and-demand model. Legal prohibition increases costs for producers (and to some extent for consumers) -- the costs associated with evading enforcement. These costs function like a tax, shifting the supply curve. Since this results in less total guns being sold, I take the proposition to be false.
It doesn’t even seem strange to me. The obvious thing for most people to do is to respond with the “correct” signal. But amongst those who actually do think about the question, there’s still a matter of interpretation:
I might answer “no”, depending on what I thought they meant by “means”. If I was thinking of it as a symbol and was considering what its semantic value was, I would probably think it was the same for both rich and poor people—they both correctly understand what is meant by “dollar” and value that thing differently.
I might think this was true, depending on what you mean by “fail” and “reduce”. Since it’s trivially true that a gun control law should reduce people’s access to guns by some extent, the question when interpreted charitably would seem to be asking whether gun control laws are effective at their goals of significantly reducing criminals’ access to guns.
I might also wonder what “reduce access” means; it could mean “for each person, it is harder to get a gun”, or it could mean, “some people who could formerly get guns now cannot”. The latter seems strictly false, since industrious people can find some way around any law.
My general take on “A dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person” is that, unless the respondents were chosen only from the subset of people with a basic grounding in economics” the researchers likely felt that they could not use the statement “The marginal value of an additional dollar is greater to a poor person than in it is to a rich person” because they could not assume that respondents would understand the concept of marginal value. Possibly just mind projection on my part, but that is what I assume this statement was supposed to “translate” to.
Of course, the fact that we have do discuss the meaning of the statement is already evidence that the researcher assumed to much when creating the question.
Anecdotally, I have on numerous occasions encountered arguments against redistributive taxation based solely on deadweight loss (ignoring the declining marginal value of the dollar), so the mistake in question certainly exists. It’s difficult to say how much more it exists among conservatives and libertarians than among liberals, however, because conservatives/libertarians and liberals are likely to have divergent opinions about redistributive taxation anyway for tribal and other reasons.
I interpret the gun control proposition using a supply-and-demand model. Legal prohibition increases costs for producers (and to some extent for consumers) -- the costs associated with evading enforcement. These costs function like a tax, shifting the supply curve. Since this results in less total guns being sold, I take the proposition to be false.