Naïve Reconstruction Of Macro-economic Causality

At the Rome IAREP conference I talked with the presenter of this paper which sounds really interesting.
Naïve Reconstruction Of Macro-economic Causality
David Leiser, Ronen Aroch
The functioning of the economic system is extremely complex and technical. For its part, the general public is constantly presented with information on economic causality. It is important for its members to assimilate it, whether to further their personal goals or in order to participate advisedly in the democratic process. We presented naïve and economically educated participants with questions of the form: If VARIABLE A increases, how will this affect VARIABLE B ? for all possible combinations of 19 key economic indicators. Naïve participants were willing to commit themselves on most questions, despite their medium to low self-report of understanding the concepts involved. Analysis of the pattern of responses reveals the use of a simple but powerful heuristic: the economic world functions in either a virtuous or a vicious circle. An increase in one good variable will increase the values of other good variables, and decrease those of bad variables. This yields a sense of competence without requiring understanding of the causality involved. The good-begets-good heuristic does not imply the ability to explain causal links. The depth of explanation of economic concepts is low in all segments of the population (Leiser & Drori, 2005), and indeed, the lack of explanatory depth seems to be a general feature of human understanding.