Also, if there was very low variance in the factual beliefs of the economists surveyed, it may be that this study doesn’t capture “ignoring the facts” at all. For example, if all economists believe that employer-provided health care shifts a *little* of the cost away from employees and customers (because of economies of scale (or believed in a narrow band of opinions close to this), because employers can’t perfectly pass through costs to customers, etc.), then, on those beliefs, both positions about whether employers should provide health care have consequences that reasonable people could defend. We’d expect to see variance in positions due to ideology. What we wouldn’t see is the change in positions as economists had different factual positions, because the n for the contrary factual position would be too small.

Robin Hanson begins his health econ class with a heavy dose of disillusion: I teach Health Economics starting today, and…

If we are prepared to take “values” as primitives (which in most cases is probably a bad idea but will work here), then it could easily be the case that some questions will depend more on values than on facts, and so the facts (whether agreed or not) will play little role in policy preferences. Beliefs about facts should predict policy preferences only in those cases where agreement on the facts would lead people of widely different values to the same policy conclusion. There certainly are such matters (just about everyone would agree that whether or not it is OK to sell a bottle full of liquid and marked “DRINK ME” should depend on whether the liquid is a poison). But the topics discussed in the post don’t seem to be of that variety. So I don’t really see how this is bias, and I certainly don’t see how it should generate shame in being human.