Hopefully it doesn’t go underappreciated the wealth of information this book contains. Drawing on over 100,000 surveys across up to 40 countries, Bobby Duffy compares average perceptions against reality on a host of important social, economic, and political issues and metrics. With this information, we can get a sense of how informed the public is concerning important topics, in essence testing the hypothesis that confirmation bias (and associated biases and fallacies) essentially creates mass delusion.
So what do the 100,000+ surveys tell us? The conclusion is clear: most of us don’t know the first thing about health, finance, wealth, immigration, taxation, poverty, violence, risk, and just about anything else of social or political importance, as Duffy so masterfully explains. Duffy takes the reader through an analysis of the surveys, a comparison of perceptions to reality, a tour of the several biases and fallacies that lead to the discrepancies, and a comparison of the performance of different countries, making for a highly fascinating and timely read. Duffy even reveals in the penultimate chapter which country performed the worst.
I won’t spoil the numbers, because part of the fun of reading the book is trying to make your own guesses regarding some metric and comparing that guess to both the reality and the average survey response. Suffice to say that most people are way off on just about every measure of importance.
Which says two things. First, the voting public is massively misinformed. It’s hard to know what to do about an issue when you have no clue as to the current state of affairs. In France, for example, the average person thinks that the top 1 percent should receive more of the share of wealth (as a percentage) than they currently get in reality, despite also thinking that the 1 percent already have too much. This is because the French massively overestimate the share of wealth for the top 1 percent in the first place.
Second, the source of many misconceptions is a lack of basic statistical and scientific literacy in the population, which I consider to be a failure of the public school system. When a significant percentage of people estimate that their retirement account need only be around 50,000 to receive an annual salary of 25,000 during their retirement years, there is a big problem.
It’s easy to blame others for this. Common targets are the media, politicians, or technology, but as Duffy suggests, we for the most part get the journalism and politicians we deserve or demand. Scientifically illiterate people vote for scientifically illiterate politicians and consume statistically meaningless and sensationalistic news stories that revolve entirely around anecdotes. Sure, journalists and politicians are partly to blame (by never covering statistics or trends), but our delusions are the result of a complex mix of factors that begins with our own emotional innumeracy and biases, chief among them confirmation bias.
In the final chapter, Duffy outlines several potential solutions to the problem, all oriented around better, deeper, and more intellectually honest engagement with the issues. I share Duffy’s optimism that facts still matter and that people can and do change their minds. While we will never eradicate bias completely, we can make progress, in part by demanding more sophisticated coverage of issues by journalists and politicians that includes scale and trends in the data.
The bottom line seems to be this: if we want to improve the state of the world, the problem is ignorance, and the solution is better education (public and self-directed) that centers on critical thinking, statistical literacy, and awareness of common biases. This book is an excellent step in that direction.
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