Given the choice, Statastico would rather read expertise than opinion. Recent polls concentrate on the latter. More interesting, however, is the wide gap between the public’s opinion and the opinion of experts. So why the obsession with public opinion polling?

The media use polling data not only to guide their own stories and advertising, but often as the basis for stories. So reporting what people think to the people who are thinking it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.

And then there are the politicians. They guide their district gerrymandering, their campaign messages and financing with public opinion polls. And of course politicians themselves also guide public opinion. Just look at how many times the phrase “addicted to oil” has appeared in the media, and you’ll understand why the public suddenly has a passion for energy independence.

But experts are polled less often. The Atlantic Monthly often polls its foreign policy experts, and Foreign Policy recently released polling data highlighting the divide between the experts and the public. These types of polls are crucial to moving debates forward.

So what informs public opinion? The average American is not devouring policy blogs, obsessing over exit strategies in Iraq, evaluating the efficiency of turning corn into ethanol; they’re not even reading newspapers. They’re thinking about what to have for dinner, searching for low airfares, and keeping up with the latest news about Brangelina.

The public is also increasingly fragmented. The Internet facilitates specialization of interests and opinion, so Americans who do pay attention to the news are more likely to get it from a partisan source. Public opinion polls supposedly help us understand the political climate, but politics are shaping that opinion. Polling the public on important issues is no more than politicians’ PR departments checking to see whether their messaging sticks.

So please poll the experts. Statastico doesn’t care what the American public thinks about pulling out of Iraq. We should care about what Iraqis think. We should care about what experts in the State Department think. Instead of obscuring scientific consensus as the Bush administration has done with global warming, help us understand possible solutions. Scientists and experts are not always right, of course. But politicians’ job is to listen to the experts and help the public understand real options for hard problems.

Sources:

1: http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_publi.htm#earth

2: http://web1.foreignpolicy.com/issue_julyaug_2006/TI-index/thepopularfront.html

3: http://abcnews.go.com/images/Politics/1009a1GlobalWarming.pdf

4: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686

The polling data about scientific consensus and global warming is based on a scientific review of 928 scientific papers related to global warming. None of the papers reviewed, “disagreed with the consensus position.” Several scientists do disagree with different aspects of global warming. Here is a list of scientists who disagree with the global warming consensus.

Today the U.S. Interstate Highway system celebrates its 50th birthday. A nationwide network of roads had been envisioned since the at least the 1930s, but it was the Cold War that provided the necessary political impetus for the ambitious network to get off the ground. And on June 29, 1956 Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act.

Initially, the system was intended to cover 40,000 miles of road, including 2,000 miles of existing toll roads. Today there are 46,837 miles in the national highway system, including 261 beltways, ushering millions of commuters from the suburbs and exurbs to work. These miles constitute only 3% of all roadway miles in the U.S. but they transport 8 times more vehicles than all other U.S. roads.

Media stories about the horrors of a crumbling system have marked the today’s anniversary. ABC reported that,

“Traffic jams, which annually cost the nation $200 billion in lost productivity, suggest that repairs and expansion of the system are long overdue.”

I’m not sure that $200 billion of traffic jams suggest that we need to repair and expand the system. It seems like we’ve already created an expansive system and that the results speak for themselves. In the last 50 years, we have increased the number of miles that each person drives annually by 271%, and we have 237 million vehicles on the road, nearly one car for every American of driving age.

I know we can do better. More cars! More roads! More traffic! But you’ll have to tune in tomorrow for the rest of statastico’s story about the future national highway system, including a bizarre twist ending …. But for now, here are some statastics with delicious lime-colored Smart car graphics.

^*Including passenger and commercial vehicles, there are currently an estimated 237,000,000 vehicles in the U.S. today.
^#In 1956, 168,903,031 Americans drove 626 billion miles annually. In 2006, 299,092,260 of us drive approximately 3 trillion miles annually.