What U.S. Consumers Know About Economic Conditions

This post is prompted by a discussion about critical thinking and online facilitation in the UofW graduate online course Collaborating Communities. That discussion revolves around the role that facilitator feedback might play in facilitating critical thinking.

As I thought about this discussion, I reflected on the role that knowledge and a simple recall of that knowledge played in critical thinking. That is, can humans construct critical thinking in the absence of knowledge?

Richard Curtin of University of Michigan in 2007 shared information about the state of knowledge and he begins this excellent descriptive piece with the following from Aristotle:

'The natural inquisitiveness of people was noted long ago when Aristotle began his book Metaphysics by saying “All men by nature desire knowledge.” The acquisition of information about economic conditions has been a common facet of life since the dawn of civilization.'

Curtin's paper goes on to attempt to reconcile the Aristotlean view of the nature of humanity with actual behavior.

For those of us with experience in education the nature of human desire for knowledge is always floating about our design and delivery of our content and often springs to the front of our consciousness during assessment.

Curtin writes about the ideal that people desire knowledge that:

Unfortunately, that is not the case. Nearly every profession has been disappointed with the amount of knowledge ordinary citizens possess, whether they are political scientists, physicians, mathematicians, physicists, or economists. It is an all too frequent occurrence that some survey finds that a surprisingly high proportion of people could not name their representative in the legislature (Delli Carpini and Keeter, 1996), have accurate knowledge about common medical conditions (Lucas, 1987), correctly know about planetary orbits (Lucas, 1988), how to do rather simple arithmetic operations (OECD, 2006), or the current rate of inflation or unemployment (Blendon, et al. 1997; Blinder and Krueger, 2004).

I look forward to any comments you might have about this topic and the question that Curtin ends the introduction of his paper with:

How can the often widespread lack of knowledge be reconciled with Aristotle’s view that people naturally desire knowledge? Or was Aristotle simply wrong? Plato was skeptical about our ability to know the absolute truth, and suggested that people can only dimly perceive the truth from its shadows. Policy makers may find Plato’s allegory compelling, as they often feel trapped in a cave making decisions based on shadows of truths that last only as long as the next data revision. The implications of Plato’s views cut more deeply, however.