Michael Ranney likes asking questions.Being a professor of education at UCLA, he has plenty of young people around who can act as guinea pigs. For example: For every 1,000 U.S. residents, how many legal immigrants are there each year? How many people, per thousand residents, are incarcerated? For every thousand people, how many computers are there? How many abortions?Few of us spend our leisure hours looking up and memorizing data. But many of us flatter ourselves that we know about these issues. And yet …
On abortion and immigration, says Ranney, about 80 percent of those questioned base their opinions on inaccurate information. For example, students at one college typically estimated annual legal immigration at about 10 percent of the U.S. population (implying 30 million legal immigrants every year). Nonstudents guessed even higher. The actual rate in 2006 was about 0.3 percent. That is, even the lower estimates were more than 30 times too high.
The students’ estimates for the number of abortions varied widely, but the middle of the range was about 5,000 for every million live births. The actual figure in the United States in 2006 was 335,000 per million live births—67 times higher than the typical estimate.
The good news: Many respondents found the correct answers so surprising that they adjusted their political views on the spot.
Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot
The Numbers Game
