Averages can tell you a lot but sometimes it is even more interesting to look at the distribution of all the responses, which you can see in this chart:
Free exchange | Polling the experts
Why do top economists think the recovery has been so slow?
By M.C.K. | WASHINGTON
EVERY four years, we poll the top American economists to get their views on the presidential election. This week’s print edition explains many of the results from our 2012 survey, which was conducted between September 18 and September 28. One particularly interesting set of results was generated when we asked economists why they thought the recovery had been so slow. This chart shows how various subpopulations rated the importance of six factors we chose:
As you can see, there was a broad consensus on the relative importance of most issues. The two exceptions were fiscal austerity and policy uncertainty. Both factors got a grade of 4 or 5 from around 40% of the sample but also got grades of 1 and 2 from another 40% of the sample. There was some overlap—about one-fourth of people who thought fiscal austerity was important also thought uncertainty was holding back the recovery, and vice versa. Nevertheless, the economists’ political preferences can generally be predicted by their beliefs about why the recovery has been so anemic. In particular, those who think that fiscal policy is too tight believe that Mr Obama has a superior grasp of economics than Mr Romney. Similarly, economists who think that policy uncertainty is hobbling the recovery generally believe that Mr Romney has a firmer command of the discipline:
How can we hope to make informed decisions when the experts are this divided on such basic questions?
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