junk economics
A study about "economic enlightenment" (abstract, PDF) was trumpeted by the WSJ to defame the economic knowledge of liberals and claim that "the left has trouble squaring economic thinking with their political psychology, morals and aesthetics." Although the study made pretensions toward objectivity,
Several of the questions would seem to be fairly neutral with respect to partisan politics, particularly the questions on licensing, the standard of living, monopoly, and free trade. None of those questions challenge policies that are particularly leftwing or rationalized on the basis of equity. Yet even on such neutral questions the "progressives" and "liberals" do much worse than the "conservatives" and "libertarians." (p. 185)
it was clearly biased in favor of conservative economic orthodoxy. Ron Chusid wrote at Liberal Values that the survey is "really it is really a test of agreement with conservative economic theories" and Anonymous Liberal observed that "When you take a look at the survey, it's pretty easy to see why it got the results it did:"
And if you look at those eight questions, it is readily apparent that a) many of them are confusing and don't have a clear right answer and b) they are specifically designed to trigger different responses from left-leaning and right-leaning respondents.
After examining the questions one by one, AL noted that even those which are "closer to having objectively correct answers...are still somewhat ambiguous and confusing." Jesse Taylor noted the "shocking truth" that "liberals are really bad at agreeing with poorly worded questions" and that we shouldn't be graded incorrect for "voic[ing] any reservations [about] sweeping statements that take complex economic patterns and boil them down to ten words or less." He summarizes:
The main problem here is that this isn't economic thinking - this is economic catchphrasing. [...] This isn't a matter of accepting broad economic theory or not, this is a matter of starting from a series of assumptions purposely designed to tweak liberals and then calling liberals dumb for voicing the accurate reservations you knew they were going to have.
Nate Silver ripped it apart at 538, saying that "basically, what you're left with [is] a number of questions in which people respond out of their ideological reference points because the questions are ambiguous, substanceless, or confusing [...] this amounts to junk science."
That sounds perfect for Faux News!