Even when the results coincide with my views, I have a jaundiced view of polling data. In large part, this is because the answers often depend on how a question is framed.
That being said, I periodically link to polling data about economic policy if I think we can glean some insight from the data.
I assume, for instance, that trends can be accurately detected if the same question is asked year after year, regardless of whether the question is fair or slanted.
This is why I posted this poll showing that Americans are increasingly hostile to the federal government.
Similarly, I showed this data on how a growing number of Americans see the federal government as a threat to freedom and liberty.
I also like multi-country polls. Whether the questions are straightforward or tilted, you can at least learn something about differences in national attitudes.
One of my favorite polls, for instance, compared the degree to which Americans and Europeans think it’s okay to mooch off government.
I’m not sure, though, how to react to this latest survey data. Published in the New York Times, it shows widespread global support for more regulation. Here are the results (click the image to enlarge).
These results obviously are not good news for supporters of deregulation – especially since the burden of red tape already is so onerous.
The only bit of good news, at least for American chauvinists, is that people in the United States are more likely than others to think there is “too much” regulation.
But if you look at the data from a different perspective, people in Singapore and Sweden are least likely to say there’s “not enough” regulation.
The most puzzling bit of data is that people in Hong Kong appear to be the most sympathetic to regulation. Considering that Hong Kong is the most economically free jurisdiction in the world, this doesn’t make much sense.
International Liberty 
[…] important, why didn’t they factor in the impact of other government policies (trade, regulation, government spending, monetary policy, etc)? Taxation is just one small piece of the […]
[…] important, why didn’t they factor in the impact of other government policies (trade, regulation, government spending, monetary policy, etc)? Taxation is just one small piece of the economic […]
Troubling indeed. The mix of majorities supporting more regulation and politicians who inherently derive power from passing laws, is a pernicious combination.
But it is also troubling for a more profound reason…
I have long argued that while democracy remains the best system of governance and while I’m a strong supporter of it, democracy seems to be losing some of its importance, in a mobile world, where the proportion of “global citizens”, or in vulgar leftist parlance, “economic prostitutes who will migrate to whichever environment will let them produce most and keep the most reward from their production” keeps increasing. True mobility is a truly new phenomenon in human history and still only accessible to a small proportion of the world’s population – but that is just the beginning.
Democracy’s declining importance is not due to any changes in democracy itself. Other than the introduction of constitutional limits (in essence a mechanism to introduce some inertia into the whim of the masses) democracy has changed little in the past two-three centuries. Democracy’s declining importance, is because in a mobile world, even dictatorships are being increasingly forced to compete — to attract and retain truly productive people, lest, for better or for worse, the fundamental realities of economic Darwinism take over, regardless of political system. The fundamental forces of nature e.g. [prosperity= equals= production] cannot be legislated by humans, in spite of the inherent dynamics of politics where politicians (and Paul Krugman) invariably attempt, and in most cases succeed, to convince electorates that there are shortcuts to prosperity.
In the past, dictatorships quickly degenerated into oppression as they could hold citizens captive to ever increasing oppression and ultimately counter-production policies, and they could only do so because true mobility was virtually non-existent. The physical barriers to emigration were too great and dictatorships could oppress with short and mid- term impunity. In the long term, still, decline was the eventual punishment of oppression and inevitable economic inefficiency. But today, with mobility, the feedback loop is becoming much-much shorter and mobility on a truly global scale is only just emerging.
So, I do really wonder whether or not the essential competition of the future will not be between the democracies whose citizens seem to have an intrinsic propensity towards economically suicidal tendencies on one side, and, technically oppressive regimes kept in check by the realities of economic migration on the other side.
This is after all similar to the corporate world. Every company is essentially a small dictatorship (how many things do you have voting power over at your company?) BUT they live in a highly mobile workforce environment where they have to compete — so they must treat their employees well, in a manner commensurate to the employees contribution, lest their success turns into demise in short order. This is, after all, the irony of why, the less democratically controlled US corporations (overall less accountable to the people through government), ON BALANCE, treat their employees much better than their European counterparts, when one considers total opportunity compensation, such as ease at finding a job, compensation, growth potential, and other total benefits that determine the effort-reward ratio (were that not the case we would have massive migration of US workers to European corporations, rather than the opposite — of course, as America becomes more European, this influx of competent people into American corporations will stop – to the myopic delight of protectionists and America’s more accelerated decline).
In summary, mobility is the new element in the evolution of human civilization. This is the first time in human history where such a large proportion of citizens are mobile, and the percentage is only bound to increase. This is the first time in human history that individuals experience true mobility and is a freedom that is roughly a mere three decades old. While the total effect of global mobility is, by far, positive, this may not bode well for democracies and, write or wrong, that tends to make me uneasy.
In the end, just as entropy in the universe will keep increasing, democracy or not, efficiency will prevail. It will be up to each individual democratic electorate whether they survive or not.
Don hits it right on the head.
There is no way that the people of Hong Kong would say that they are over-regulated, since they have no idea what that phrase means.
The only way to usefully look at this data set is to compare countries at similar levels of regulation.
Do you think your neighbor beats his wife too much, not enough or the right amount?
This is a trick question and trying to analyse the results is not possible.
If your government has a few or no regulations – too much is not a valid answer.
If your government tries to regulate everything from salt intake to the amout of water you can use per flush – the answers maybe more in line with the US result.
Perhaps it’s because people think others “should” act like them. And then believe there “should” be a law to enforce their, err… preferences, sorry I nearly wrote prejudices…
Regarding those in Hong Kong, I’m inclined to wonder if it’s a matter of naiveté, if they simply are so unaccustomed to the regulation that exists outside of their borders that they more easily buy the standard sales pitch of their would-be regulators who tell them that such actions would somehow ameliorate their circumstances. To my mind, it’s all the more reason for us to stress a rights-based argument for economic freedom with the same emphasis with which we argue for its superior functionality.