Hasn’t it been entertaining watching all those “pollsters,” and the MSM stooges who ludicrously believe they are “scientific,” scramble for excuses about why they were so off base in New Hampshire! I just can’t stop laughing every time Faux News puts the neocons’ Young Frankenstein, Frank Luntz, on the air to bloviate about the “results” of one of his phony baloney “focus groups.”
One of the very first things I remember being taught as an undergraduate economics student more than 30 years ago is that economists have almost no confidence in opinion poll data because what people say is so often different from what they do. Thus, economists rely on the revealed preferences of consumers, for example, through their actual spending. When we want to find out how responsive the demand for gasoline is to changing gasoline prices we don’t take opinion polls, we gather historical data on how gasoline consumption has varied in the past with changing prices (and other variables) and use various statistical techniques to determine the answer.
What a racket!
12:03 pm on January 10, 2008 Email Thomas DiLorenzo
