Where AI Thrives, Religion May Struggle
A series of studies suggests an inverse relationship between automation and religiosity.
Where AI Thrives, Religion May StruggleJosh Stunkel
An expert panel discusses why the popular debate over climate change is so far away from the scientific consensus.
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Hal Weitzman: When meteorologists declared this winter that the icy weather in the United States had been caused by a phenomenon known as the polar vortex, conservative commentators screamed foul. US senator James Inhofe wondered how there could be global warming when there was so much snow. Charles Krauthammer declared proudly in his Washington Post column that he was a global-warming denier, while Rush Limbaugh, the radio personality, said the idea of a polar vortex was a hoax designed to back up left-wing claims of climate change.
Some 58 percent of Americans say they worry about global warming, that’s down from five years ago, while two-thirds of Americans say global warming will never affect them.
So why is the popular debate over climate change so far away from the scientific consensus, and what does the research tell us about the media and general public’s understanding of science?
Welcome to The Big Question, the monthly video series from Capital Ideas at Chicago Booth. I’m Hal Weitzman, and with me to discuss the issue is an expert panel.
Jesse Shapiro is the Chookaszian Family Professor of Economics at Chicago Booth. Much of his work brings economic models to the study of the media. He’s a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a coeditor of the Journal of Political Economy.
Jane Risen is associate professor of behavioral science at Chicago Booth. She researches judgment and decision-making, intuitive belief formation, magical thinking, stereotyping and prejudice, and managing emotion. She’s a faculty member in Booth’s Center for Decision Research and an affiliated faculty member in the University of Chicago’s social psychology department.
And David Archer is a professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books on global warming, including The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate, and The Warming Papers: The Scientific Foundation for the Climate Change Forecast. He teaches a class on global warming for nonscientists.
Panel, welcome to The Big Question.
David Archer, let me start with you. Tell us how strong is the scientific consensus on climate change?
David Archer: Well, it’s absolutely ironclad that greenhouse gasses play a strong role in the climate of the Earth. If we didn’t believe in the greenhouse effect, we wouldn’t be able to explain anything about Earth’s climate. It’s ironclad that human activity is increasing the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere. And it’s very clear that the Earth is warming over the last couple of decades, if you look at the global average, a cold winter or so notwithstanding.
So how strong is the scientific consensus that we are making it warm? There’s no model or argument on the other side that has any substance. Nobody has a model into which we can just put CO2 in the atmosphere and it won’t cause severe degradation.
So the argument on the con side is mostly sort of snipping about, “Well, the clouds aren’t very good in this model” or things like that that are sort of red herrings.
Hal Weitzman: But give us a sense of you know, you said the con side. How many people are we talking about? Is this a significant proportion of the scientific community that studies?
David Archer: No, this is a handful of people who do this. A lot of times they’re the same people as spoke out about cigarettes not causing cancer and things like that. Those kind of people.
Hal Weitzman: OK, and Jesse Shapiro, that’s . . . when it comes to public perceptions of what’s going on, climate change, how worried we should be, what’s causing it, we see something quite different.
Jesse Shapiro: Yeah, depending on how you measure it, either a very sizable majority, a very sizable minority, or a majority of the US population is in some sense skeptical of climate change, and what’s more striking is that a large fraction of Americans think that there is an active scientific debate on settled matters like, “Is the Earth getting warmer?” Or, “Is there a greenhouse gas effect?” Which, as we just heard from David, are not really open to scientific debate anymore.
Hal Weitzman: That’s something, as I said in the introduction, has come up again, David Archer, this idea that global warming is not settled science. There’s still a debate about it. It’s just a “theory.” What do you make of that?
David Archer: Well, theory . . . settled science is never settled because theories are always open to challenge. The theory of gravity, for example. You could come up with something better. It could happen, it’s not impossible.
Hal Weitzman: So, strictly speaking, it’s not settled? What you’re saying is that is not the way to think about science?
David Archer: Well, and then there are pieces that are not settled. Like it’s not totally clear if hurricanes will get stronger in a warming world. There are reasonable people on both sides of that question. It’s impossible to say if a given winter, or a given event is caused by global warming even by the nature of the question. So there’s always going to be uncertainty.
Hal Weitzman: It is confusing because often the debate often seems to hinge around particular events. This winter was cold. This summer was hot, therefore X. But you’re saying that often leads to confusion.
David Archer: It’s like trying to decide if a pair of dice are loaded by tossing them once. You could have gotten whatever you get by chance. You have to toss them a few times before you can do the statistics and see.
Hal Weitzman: And Jesse Shapiro, let me go back to you, because much of your research is on the media and, in this case, on how the media portray climate change and the effect that has. Tell us briefly about what you did and what you found.
Jesse Shapiro: Well, I’ve been trying to understand why the American public seems to be so persistently skeptical of climate change, even on aspects of climate change where scientists are not skeptical, where scientists are essentially in consensus.
And one of the things that I’ve found and that others have found is that skeptical voices from, either from the scientific community or from the political community have received disproportionate weight in the media relative to their importance in the scientific debate.
So the major news outlets in the US devote a significant amount of attention to positions on climate change that don’t have a real role, say, in peer-reviewed research on climate change.
Hal Weitzman: And is that . . . how do you explain it? Is it just because journalists are kind of looking for counterintuitive voices, or they don’t really understand the science, or they just have this preconceived notion that balance is good? What are they doing there?
Jesse Shapiro: Well, one thing that I think is very clear is that journalists think that balance is very important, that objectivity is essential to journalism, and that objectivity means, at least in part, presenting both sides of every issue. And I think on topics like climate change, where one side has a lot more scientific weight behind it than the other side, that kind of balance can be misleading to the public.
Hal Weitzman: I mean, but often we see science reported in the mass media as fact. You know, we’re not debating the structure of the human body or whatever. But this, like a few other choice issues, evolution being the most obvious example, is one where there does seem to be a need, somehow, for the media that they feel they must balance it. Why is it that some science needs to be balanced and some doesn’t?
Jesse Shapiro: I think part of what’s different about climate change is that there’s a significant interest community on the other side of the issue. Because it’s political and because it relates to a lot of public policies, there’s a significant community with resources on the other side that wants to have a voice in the public debate.
And the same was true, for example, of what you saw on, like, environmental tobacco smoke, secondhand smoke, where the tobacco companies had a significant interest in getting their narrative into the press and they were effective at doing that.
Hal Weitzman: How much of this is really about the public not really understanding what science is, how science works? David Archer, you talked about, you know, a theory and nothing’s really settled science. Jane Risen, how much do you think that the public and the media really understand the parameters of the debate?
Jane Risen: I think that there’s . . . it’s certainly the case that they don’t understand the details of the debate. And I think that you give a great example of sort of the idea that science is always gonna be a theory and not a fact, you know. They’re not going to appreciate that sort of comment.
I think for global warming in particular, some of my research has suggested that part of what we’re basing our belief on is coming from a very sort of intuitive belief. So we have some sort of rough sketch, rough representation of what it means for global warming to occur. And then we use inputs into that that aren’t necessarily part of what the science would actually be. And so we find that the physical experience of warmth is going to influence people’s judgments of how true and how likely it is that global warming is a real thing. And that’s, I think, largely because people’s representation of global warming includes the idea of warmth and the physical sensation of warmth.
And so it’s often going to be driven much more by the, by intuitive cues rather than scientific consensus. So even if you’ve got a very clear message from the scientific community, you’re still going to be sort of up against, a little bit, how much that can really be sort of integrated into the way people think about these issues.
Hal Weitzman: So you’re suggesting almost that people have their own proprietary opinion on climate change and, you know, forget about what the scientists think they know. I feel warm.
Jane Risen: Well, I think it’s because of the way, I mean, it’s going to be a combination because it’s part of . . . it’s the way that it’s defined. So for a long time, especially when you use the term global warming, that’s in particular associated with this idea of warmth and this feeling of warmth. And so that’s going to be a strong cue, and so even if you sort of put that up against . . . they’re not gonna be able to necessarily get a good takeaway from a meta analysis or all of the scientific fact.
Now, something like climate change doesn’t necessarily have the exact same associations, just the term climate change. And so what’s going to actually sort of push people’s beliefs around is largely determined by what sort of . . . how we’re representing these different issues.
So the way we think about these issues is certainly determined by the media narrative and what science is producing, but sort of in the moment and sort of how I’m going to form my beliefs is going to be influenced by many other things other than just what the scientific consensus may be.
Hal Weitzman: David Archer, as a scientist, as a physical scientist who deals with these issues, is it frustrating to have the public so far away from the scientific community?
David Archer: I think there’s sort of a psychological denial because it’s just so horrifying to think that our way of life is destroying the world. You know, I’m gonna fly to Vancouver next week and I’m sort of consumed with guilt by it. I feel like, if there were any adults in the room, I wouldn’t be allowed to do that because, you know, we just shouldn’t be allowed to do this to the planet. It’s a hard thing to come to grips with, and I’m gonna fly there anyway because I’m sharing in this denial as well, I mean, how can we not?
Hal Weitzman: Right, you mean if we actually admitted the scale of the problem, it would kind of, we’d all be frozen.
David Archer: We are.
Hal Weitzman: I don’t mean actually frozen.
(laughing)
David Archer: Yes, psychologically frozen. Yes. I think it just takes time and, you know, getting used to the idea and maybe turn over of the population before we can come to grips with this emotionally.
Hal Weitzman: Right, so this could be a multigenerational process.
Jane Risen, since you referred to your research, tell us more because it’s fascinating this idea that, you know, feeling warm makes you kind of more susceptible to the argument that global warming is occurring. So tell us about your research on this.
Jane Risen: So we ran a handful of different studies. Some of them are sort of just looking at it outside. So we find a correlation or relationship between how warm it is outside and people’s beliefs. And that can be accounted for by a sort of a host of different psychological processes that can give rise to that.
So there is this tendency, people don’t have a good sense that . . . we rely on available information in a way that doesn’t actually sort of comport with what the actual information we should be using. And so if today happens to be very hot, we might think of that as, you know, a good example. And there has been, there have been other studies to suggest that that’s true.
But beyond that, we actually found that the actual physical experience of warmth is also playing a role in it. So when we bring people indoors, and put them in a cubicle and just either warm the cubicle up for 15 minutes before they come in, and then take that out, that people will also report feeling more strongly when they’re in the warm cubicle. And this doesn’t go away even if you ask them about the warmth, which is sort of a trick that psychologists often use. If we think that you’re unintentionally using a cue that you would correct for if you could, we draw your attention to it. But that doesn’t get rid of it. And we find that the same thing happens, actually, if you make people thirsty, then they believe more in drought.
So the physical experiences that we’re having are powerful cues.
Hal Weitzman: And that’s even more extreme than the example of going outside on a sunny day because you’re controlling the environment.
Jane Risen: There’s no information right? Our hope was that the same is true in the cubicle, where there’s no way that the room that I’m in can’t be because of the Earth warming, but maybe that’s even more clear with a practical example. So we have people eat pretzels to get thirsty, and they think that drought is more likely to occur.
And what we find with the global warming in particular is that what’s happening is that when people are feeling warm, they are simulating, they’re imagining a world that is, sort of, more . . . it’s easier. They have a clearer mental representation of what a world plagued by global warming would look like.
So sort of, pictures of hot deserts and things like that are clearer to them than to people who aren’t in that room. And that clarity seems to be driving their judgment.
So it seems to be that feeling warm just makes it easier to imagine that this is gonna happen. And so when we think about how you might, sort of, push people around: making it easier to feel, and to believe that this is actually this terrible experience, if you make that easier for them to picture and easier for them to imagine, I think it could have an impact on people’s general beliefs.
Hal Weitzman: And does this tie into your research, Jesse? Because, you know, you write a lot about the media and their portrayal of climate change, but actually polls suggest that the public think, many people think, that the media exaggerate the problem. Even though, you find, they’re actually balancing too much.
Jesse Shapiro: The way I think about it is, we as citizens don’t have time to research every public policy issue and become experts on every issue. And part of the way we handle that is we rely on the media to aggregate information for us and go out and find relevant facts and put them in front of us. And so how the media portray topics like climate change is essential for shaping the public debate. And in this case, the media have really emphasized, in many cases, the narrative of debate: One side says this. The other side says that, even where, really, the debate, at least in the core scientific community that really is expert on this topic, the debate has been over for a long time on many elements of what we consider the kind of modern climate-change consensus.
Hal Weitzman: David Archer?
David Archer: I did an interview with the local Fox News station a couple of weeks ago when it first got cold, and later read an analysis that Fox only mentions climate change when it’s really cold out. So you know, that would be a way of doing the opposite of what you are doing to try to make it seem ridiculous for, you know, a preconceived end they had in mind. It ties the whole thing together.
Jane Risen: And it becomes interesting, even your choice of words. So at least one study, and you may know this better, Jesse, suggested that conservative think tanks use “global warming” more and liberal think tanks use “climate change” more, and it’s because especially, if you’re going to talk about it when it’s cold, that seems completely . . . it seems like it’s evidence against global warming. If we can sort of broaden what it means, what the actual sort of consequences are, if it also includes extreme weather and things of that sort, if people recognize that that was part of what the effects might be, then other patterns may not seem discordant, but actually sort of fit with their theory. But if you think about it just as hot days suggest that it’s getting warmer and any cold day is proof that this isn’t happening, then you have problems.
David Archer: I told the Fox guy it was global weirding and he seemed to like that.
Jane Risen: Yeah?
David Archer: Yeah. You know how they go . . . they cut to the people sitting behind the desk after they, “Global weirding, how about that?”
Jane Risen: Yeah. I actually think that’s a great term.
David Archer: But it’s like a fever. I mean you have a fever of a few degrees and it doesn’t, what you feel is not the warmth, you feel sick and, you know, it’s the add on things. Same way with climate, it’s more than just the temperature.
Hal Weitzman: Jane Risen, I was gonna ask you, your research suggests that people are quite easily, sort of . . . they’re malleable. Their views will change depending on what their circumstance is. Does that mean that these views that we hold—we tend to think of conservatives as being generally skeptical, more skeptical of climate change than liberals—does that mean that these views actually aren’t very deeply held, that we’re quite easily suggestible in one direction or another?
Jane Risen: So from my perspective, all preferences, beliefs, goals, attitudes, they’re all malleable to some extent.
So when I look to see something moving around, I don’t necessarily take that to mean that it’s not deeply held. So my taste for coffee is stronger in the morning than in the evening. It doesn’t tell me that I don’t really like coffee. It just tells me something important about the fact that time of day matters. And so I think of the same thing with the global-warming research is that, yeah, we can push people around. We’re not getting someone from, you know, someone who—ours is on a 9-point scale—we’re not going from 1 to 9. We’re shifting people, sort of, I think the conditional differences are about 1 point. So they’re not huge, but what’s important is what’s moving them, so it’s the experience of warmth that’s moving them.
And interestingly, unlike a lot of other research that’s been done in this topic area, where you sort of present arguments and you look at who agrees with things, you see a lot of these ideology differences between liberals and conservatives. In our work, we don’t see that. So we see that there are baseline differences in terms of how much they agree, but, at least within our sample, the liberals and the conservatives are influenced to the same extent by the experience of warmth.
Hal Weitzman: But they start from different places?
Jane Risen: They start from different places and they end in different places, but the amount that we’re moving them with our, with the manipulation, is the same. Such that, it turns to a pretty picture if you happen to split it up, that we get basically that a warm conservative ends up looking like a cold liberal in our particular study, which doesn’t mean very much but you can sort of, within our sample, if you think about the comparison of the size of these effects.
Hal Weitzman: I see. Jesse Shapiro?
Jesse Shapiro: One of the things that I think is interesting and that ties together some of what David is saying and what Jane is saying is that during the recession, there was a big increase in public skepticism about climate change. And I mean I don’t know for sure, but I think part of what’s going on is the recession made people realize, “Hey, we have other priorities right now. This is not the most important policy issue that we’re facing.” And so part of how people express that was not that, “Well, climate change is certainly happening, but we shouldn’t take policy action today,” but more, “No, I don’t really believe this is happening.”
So part of what people are expressing is their beliefs about the science or about the fact are also really reflecting their beliefs about policy priorities, and those are very malleable.
Hal Weitzman: So is that just that someone says, “Well, I’d rather have a factory job and have that factory, you know, create carbon emissions that damage . . . that might cause global warming than not have a job and help the environment”?
Jesse Shapiro: I think that is what it is, but what’s interesting to me is it comes out even if you ask people questions that don’t relate to policy, like, “Is there solid evidence that global warming has begun?” or “Do scientists generally agree that global warming is occurring?” Even on those questions, you saw the recession have a huge effect.
So even when you’re asking people about the science or about what scientists think, which shouldn’t be affected directly by what policies they want to enact, they’re still letting their policy priorities influence their judgments of the science or of the climate.
Jane Risen: And do you think that’s because there’s not, during the recession, when other things matter, the media is not reporting on it as much? Or do you think it’s because just the idea that I could sort of simultaneously believe that this terrible event is going to happen and I don’t care about it? That that’s hard for people to sort of adjust to?
Jesse Shapiro: If I had to guess, I’d say it’s the second of those, because during the entire 2000s, basically there was a general pretty big increase in attention to climate change in the media, and I don’t think it fell dramatically during the recession, but I do think people have a hard time, would have a hard time saying, you know, “I think we should ignore this problem now because we have other things to worry about, but yes, indeed, the scientific consensus is quite strong and it is a severe issue that we are eventually going to need to confront.”
Hal Weitzman: So they’re basically shaping what they think of the scientific consensus depending on what their view is at that particular moment?
Jesse Shapiro: That’s my reading of the evidence, yeah, I do think they’re doing that.
Hal Weitzman: So they do care. They kind of do care about the scientific consensus, which brings me back to you, David Archer. Presumably this matters because it affects public policy. The public think that there’s more of a debate than there really is, then politicians, as we said at the top of the program, they also think that there’s more of a debate than there really is. What could scientists do to shake these perceptions, to do more? Is it about getting more information out there, or is it about telling the story differently?
David Archer: It’s my job, huh?
(laughter)
Hal Weitzman: Well I’m asking, or do you care? Maybe it’s not important.
David Archer: Well, it’s certainly something that I’ve spent a lot of time trying to do. I, you know, if you look from one year to the next, things can be discouraging, the latest recession or even winter, you know, everything falls apart. But, if you look over decades, it does seem to me that there is evolution on this toward, you know, treating it as the ethical issue that it is.
I sort of draw a parallel with the institution of slavery, which persisted, you know, our revered founding fathers had slaves, how can that be? But, you know, they probably couldn’t imagine, couldn’t cope with life without, you know, the way things were, and so they didn’t deal with it. I think that’s where we are now and we’re getting where we need to go slowly, but I think it can be quickly enough. If we can ramp down carbon emissions in the coming decades, that’s what we need to do, and that’s the time scale in which it seems to me people’s perceptions are evolving. I try not to get too depressed every time I go to the airport or read the newspaper or something, but that’s my optimistic perspective.
Hal Weitzman: You drew a comparison earlier with the tobacco industry, which is fascinating because in that case, there were big vested interests pushing the other side, pushing the side that we later found out—
David Archer: Well, there are big vested interests here too.
Hal Weitzman: Right, and Jesse Shapiro, your work touches on that, doesn’t it? The vested interests who are kind of pushing these other voices.
Jesse Shapiro: Yeah.
Hal Weitzman: And balance the consensus.
Jesse Shapiro: I think that’s right. I mean, we don’t know as much about what’s going on behind the climate skepticism as we do about what went on behind the tobacco skepticism because that was longer ago and we now have documents that we can review.
But there is a very organized set of interest groups that oppose climate change or oppose the climate consensus or think it’s wrong or think it’s gonna misdirect policy and want to change the public perception and make sure that the public does not converge to the scientific consensus. And those folks are pretty energetic and they’re organized and they have good media training and they sound good and look good on camera. . . .
Hal Weitzman: And they tend to say controversial things.
Jesse Shapiro: And they tend to say controversial things that make it attractive to put them on programs like this.
Hal Weitzman: Well we haven’t had any on yet. Maybe we should have invited some to come along. I was more interested in how the issue was perceived.
David Archer: It seems to me this is an American issue in particular, would you agree? I mean in Europe, they seem much more on board with sort of precautionary principal in all kinds of issues.
Jesse Shapiro: Yes, I think the evidence is very clear among developed countries, the US is by far the most skeptical. European countries are much more . . . the European public is much more in line with the climate consensus, and the European media give much less attention to climate skeptics than the US media, definitely.
Hal Weitzman: Am I not right that the BBC actually, a couple of years ago, put out a note to their reporters saying “you do not have to balance stories about climate change”?
Jesse Shapiro: Right, the previous BBC editorial guidelines had said something like, “We have to be fair in presenting both sides of an issue.” They revised, I think in 2010, the editorial guidelines—partly because of comments about climate change—they revised the editorial guidelines to make clear that being fair to both sides does not necessarily mean giving equal weight to both sides if both sides don’t have equal weight in the relevant expert community.
Hal Weitzman: And you also have some data from Germany I think about climate change? Tell us about that.
Jesse Shapiro: That’s right. So the German public believes and is about twice as convinced as the American public about anthropogenic climate change, and German news media devote way less attention relative to the American press to climate skeptics. And if you ask American journalists, “What do you think objectivity means?” They say, “Objectivity means presenting both sides of an issue. If you ask German journalists what objectivity means, they say, “Making clear which side has a better position,” which is very different and I think is associated with very, very different coverage of topics like climate change.
Hal Weitzman: Where does that come from?
Jesse Shapiro: That’s a very good question, and people have been debating that question for a very long time. Some people think that the American tradition of objectivity came about in the early 20th century because the US had such a strong and well-organized public-relations sector trying to influence the press, so journalists basically circled the wagons and said, “We’re going to protect ourselves from public relations by always mechanically reporting both sides of an issue.” And that’s one theory that people have put forward for why this develops so much strongly and so much earlier in the US than elsewhere.
Hal Weitzman: And it’s also institutionalized here, isn’t it, in things like the Federal Communications Commission that have mandated balance, at least on party issues?
Jesse Shapiro: Right, I mean there was this principle called the Fairness Doctrine, which the FCC used to apply to broadcast journalism, but they’ve sort of backed away from that, and so that isn’t really a big factor now. And it’s never applied to print journalism in the US. So the print media have, in general, in the US been almost totally unregulated. They can say essentially anything and they don’t have to present both sides of an issue but they do.
Hal Weitzman: Jane Risen, we were talking earlier about what scientists can do, and David Archer, you suggested that naturally things are, the views are getting closer together between the public and the scientific community. What do you think? Is there something more that the scientific community could do that would move the public’s opinion?
Jane Risen: Probably a lot of the things that Jesse mentioned for the other side. So if it was as organized and as, you know, you had people prepared and well funded and everything, that would obviously help.
I think just a recognition about what it is that people are relying on is important. So I actually, I did . . . I haven’t heard this term global weirding. And what I really like so much about it is that it just immediately captures the sense of: it’s gonna lead to weird things that you’re not used to.
And so what that means is that when I experience any sort of unusual event, an unusually cold winter, like the polar vortex, or an unusual hurricane, or things that are sort of out of the norm, that’s actually going to be very easy for me to sort of put that, and have that sort of be compelling.
Now I don’t actually know whether the scientists would say, “All of those things should go in, right? There’s going to be some debate about some of those.
But I think for, in terms of peoples’ perceptions, if that was the way that you could get people to sort of think about the issue, that you change what counts in terms of their perception, then you’re going to have a much easier time moving them.
Hal Weitzman: And your research would almost suggest that the more that those effects happen in the climate, then the more people will kind of believe in the global—
Jane Risen: Right, which I mean, to the extent that, if global warming is causing these, you know, these different weather patterns, and these different weather patterns then lead us to believe more then that’s good, right? At least, then, we’re all going in the right direction. Maybe the order is a little silly, but at least that’s all moving in the same direction, right?
So as long as we’re sort of . . . the actual effects of global warming are being tracked in peoples’ minds as really sort of fitting in with their representation of what that is, then I think you would have more success pushing it.
Hal Weitzman: Jesse Shapiro, what do we know about the way that people learn about this issue through the media? If they read more, if they know more about it, do they tend to go more toward the scientific community?
Jesse Shapiro: On just about any issue you would look at, if you were to compare, say, people who read the newspaper every day to people who don’t read the newspaper every day, you would see a huge gap in knowledge. People who read the newspaper every day are much more likely to know what party controls the House of Representatives or who’s the secretary of state. But on climate change, actually, people who read the newspaper every day and people who don’t read the newspaper every day look almost indistinguishable. And that’s true no matter what political party they come from. They, people seem not to be very well informed by the media the way they are on so many other issues.
Hal Weitzman: OK, so the answer is: don’t read the newspapers, just feel warm.
(laughter)
Well, on that note, my thanks to our panel, Jesse Shapiro, Jane Risen, and David Archer.
For more research, analysis, and commentary, visit us online at chicagobooth.edu/capideas and join us again next time for another The Big Question.
Goodbye.
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