January 4, 2008
Arnold Kling
Mark Thoma peers into the future to find this column by Bryan Caplan.
In 1996, Gallup ran a survey about the minimum wage. Some respondents were asked if they favored an increase. More than 80 percent said yes. The rest were asked instead if they would favor raising the minimum wage "if it resulted in fewer jobs available to low-paid workers." Support plummeted to 40 percent. You might think that the minimum wage is too much a part of our civic religion to depend upon mere facts, but you'd be wrong.
Gosh, by the time I get my copy, it won't even be yesterday's news.
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The old bumper sticker says, "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament," but men are actually slightly more pro-choice than women.
This remains unconvincing as a refutation of self-interest voting as ever.
What is true is that married and older people, who aren't likely to become single parents, are more pro-life than younger people. (They're also more likely to have had children and to identify a fetus with their kids, but that's not an explanation involving self-interest.) Young single women are more likely to be pro-choice, but so are young single men, who want to convince young single women to be willing to have sex with them.
It's absolutely true that the correlations are surely not as stark as voting one's self-interest, but it's blind to think that young single men don't have an obvious self-interest in legal abortion. Of course, the popular bumper sticker makes the same mistake, so some amount of corrective is useful, and the poll results do comes as a surprise to some.
