Posted on 06/13/2011 7:32:39 AM PDT by jda
The average score for all 2,508 Americans taking the test was 49%; college educators scored 55%.
100% correct on the 10 question test, and 31 out of 33 correct (93.94 %) on the 33 question test.
The original link had 10 questions, he discovered it and changed it.
See posts 36, 41 and 45.
See post 82.
On the second question, I still hold that my answer was no less right, and as or more correct, than the one they preferred.
The question was: "A flood-control levee (or National Defense) is considered a public good because:" To which their preferred answer is "a resident can benefit from it without directly paying for it." My answer, which I also noted is not a good one, but I picked it from the ones they presented: "government pays for its construction, not citizens".
Their definition of "public good", as met in their preferred answer is deficient. I showed it wrong by example. That example: While your health is of benefit to me, although I do not pay for your health care, your health is not a public good.
I could make other examples of a similar sort. You did not contest my example, not provide the definition you hold of the term "public good" except by inferred assent to their definition. So at this point I am confused. Can you bring a source for your definition of "public good", and how do you fault my example?
You answered 33 out of 33 correctly — 100.00 %
Totally agree - and this was true of a number of the questions on the quiz.
As for the "public goods" question, government financing is not part of that definition. Non-excludability (the correct answer on the quiz,) is. The air we breathe is a public good.
As I mentioned earlier, whether or not something is a public good ought to be one criterion for justifying public funding (not sufficient, but necessary.) But the fact that tax dollars paid for flood control levees or national defense in no way makes them public goods, or else every frivolous, wasteful and unconstitutional government program would be a public good - and they are not.
I also agree that many of these questions are best as measures of test-taking ability, and some are phrased awkwardly.
But on "public good" as I said before, I'm still more right with the alternate bad answer they provided, nor did you reply to the point I raised against the definition of public good you are applying, or the one they are applying.
Here's another reason I am right on this one:
public good
An item whose consumption is not decided by the individual consumer but by the society as a whole, and which is financed by taxation.From BusinessDictionary.com
If you are interested in reading more, you might read Tyler Cowen's Public Goods & Market Failures, which is a collection of articles on the private provision of public goods, and questioning the theory of market failure. Cowen is the General Director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University - a market-focused think tank. For a more liberal perspective (but the same definition of the term,) you might read Public Goods: Theories and Evidence, a textbook by Raymond Batina of Washington State.
The good in "public good" must be in the public domain not the private, or alternatively of the public as a whole, the definition that the test says is correct fails to include that restriction.
Well done, detective. :-)
It was a 5-4 decision - in the majority were Breyer, Ginsburg, Souter, Kennedy, and Stevens. Those dissenting were O'Connor, Scalia, Thomas, and Rehnquist.
Illustrating once again that, in this day and age, the law is what Anthony Kennedy says it is.
I am not trying to defend the test, and certainly not attacking you, but "public goods" is a widely understood and accepted term in economics. The definition is not at all controversial, and the relationship between public goods and government funding is a pretty bright line between liberal and conservative outlooks. Because of the way it is presented in the quiz, I would be very surprised if I were to learn that the authors are not conservative, because the question and answer, while entirely objectively correct, also support a conservative view.
To suggest that "public goods" are defined by government funding stands a generations-old debate on its head.
Again, what is meant or said or achieved by this quiz is irrelevant, but I'd really recommend that you do a little more reading before you have this discussion with a liberal.
Same here.
I'll take a wild guess that most 90 percenters are about the same age,
LOL :)
(1) You have never responded to my counter example disproving the definition provided in the test’s “correct” answer although I have repeatedly asked if you could.
(2) You have not provided a cite, besides your own say so, for your claim that their answer is correct. I have.
(3) When I provided a citation of a definition in a dictionary you deny that cite by claiming it is an “appeal to authority”, a term used to describe a false argument in logic. That claim itself is a false argument in this case. This discussion is all about the definition of the term “public good” and, here I have provided a cite from a dictionary. You have not.
For example if we get into an argument over which team won the World Series in 1928 it is quite proper to settle by going to the record books. That is what I did.
(4) I have proved the correctness my answer over theirs by providing citation and also by logic.
I now claim that point as well. My score on this test is thus 32/33. Thank you for you help in grading the test!
And I would suggest (again) that BusinesDictionary.com is not a legitimate authority on this subject.
Aside from all that, reason alone should tell you that your answer was incorrect, since the question never stated that the flood-control levee was, in fact, paid for by the government. You assumed facts not in evidence.
Good Grief, good grief, good grief ... you have not responded to my first objection to the “correct” answers definition of public good, and do not seem to be able to excerpt from web pages and paste the definitions you allude to.
Good old Kennedy...
If we had a Congress instead of a circus, they would have responded to this travesty and slammed this back as soon as the decision was released. Unfortunately, our representaives are immune and therefore incognizant; only peasants are subject to tyranny.
Because Google Books does not allow copy and pasting, I had hoped you'd be interested enough to simply click on the link and read. To save you a mouse-click, below is the introductory section from the Wikipedia article on public goods, but Google will generate many hundreds of more references if you are really interested. The first sentence is the shorthand definition, but this longer discussion is really important to understand.
In economics, a public good is a good that is nonrival and non-excludable. Non-rivalry means that consumption of the good by one individual does not reduce availability of the good for consumption by others; and non-excludability that no one can be effectively excluded from using the good. In the real world, there may be no such thing as an absolutely non-rivaled and non-excludable good; but economists think that some goods approximate the concept closely enough for the analysis to be economically useful.For example, if one individual visits a doctor there is one fewer doctor's visit for everyone else, and it is possible to exclude others from visiting the doctor. This makes doctor visits a rivaled and excludable private good. Conversely, breathing air does not significantly reduce the amount of air available to others, and people cannot be effectively excluded from using the air. This makes air a public good, albeit one that is economically trivial, since air is a free good. A less straight-forward example is the exchange of MP3 music files on the internet: the use of these files by any one person does not restrict the use by anyone else and there is little effective control over the exchange of these music files and photo files.
Non-rivalness and non-excludability may cause problems for the production of such goods. Specifically, most economists recognize that uncoordinated markets driven by parties working in their own self interest are unable to provide these goods in optimal quantities, if at all. There is a good deal of debate and literature on how to measure the significance of public goods problems in an economy, and to identify the best remedies. These debates are highly relevant to political arguments about the role of markets in the economy. While it does not follow that because markets will not spontaneously provide pure public goods, the state should do so, it may well be that if some public agency does not provide them, they will simply not be provided at all, notwithstanding effective demand for them. Public goods problems are also quite closely related to externalities since situations in which complex multilateral externalities are present, typically raise the same "free-rider" problem that occurs with non-rival, non-excludable goods and services.
Graphically, non-rivalry means that if each of several individuals has a demand curve for a public good, then the individual demand curves are summed vertically to get the aggregate demand curve for the public good . This is in contrast to the procedure for deriving the aggregate demand for a private good, where individual demands are summed horizontally.
I hope you find this helpful.
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