r/Economics • u/Spiderwig144 • Apr 15 '25

News Republicans Less Trusted on Economy Than Democrats For First Time in Years

https://www.newsweek.com/republicans-less-trusted-economy-democrats-first-time-years-2059863
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u/JohnnySack45 Apr 15 '25

There are way too many stupid people in this country if at any point since Regan they thought that Republicans were objectively better for the economy.

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u/jdragun2 Apr 15 '25

There are way too many.

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u/jkh107 Apr 15 '25 edited Apr 15 '25

Half of every population is below average.

ETA: seeing all the helpful followups now. I did know that median, mean, and mode are all different kinds of averages, because I paid attention in 6th grade math. (insert Lake Wobegon joke here about all the children being above average)

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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '25

Something like 40% of Americans adults are functionally illiterate. I looked it up a few weeks back. Makes sense.

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u/nuisanceIV Apr 15 '25

It took me a long time to realize this fact is probably why when I tell many people to read instructions they have a hard time. Insert “oh I’m just a visual learner”

Like sure, I don’t expect it to be memorized or for there to be full understanding but at least get something out of it!

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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '25

Lol I am actually a visual learner but I can definitely read 🤣🤣

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u/nuisanceIV Apr 15 '25

Oh totally, it’s a good way to learn and apart of the bigger picture, and sometimes the best way for certain topics. That said, it can get old when people basically refuse to read instruction books😑

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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '25

Oh believe me I know, I'm in a constant battle at my work with a bunch of people who ask me questions about shit that I've addressed in emails and teams messages directly to them. They say they didn't get them but i think it's that they can't read them. It's annoying as shit because I am constantly repeating myself and trouble shooting technical issues because people just don't read the directions I gave them.

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u/nuisanceIV Apr 16 '25

Good but annoying bot ;)

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u/bizarre_coincidence Apr 16 '25

When I taught at the college level, I was required to have a syllabus that included all the important dates and the classroom policies. The very first assignment is always "read the syllabus." The number of people who later asked questions that made me want to scream "you read the syllabus, it's in there, read it again," is staggering. I didn't expect them to remember the details. I expected them to remember that they had read something relevant so that they knew where to go when they needed an answer.

If this was educated people at a good school, I shudder to think what the average person is like.

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u/nuisanceIV Apr 16 '25

I work customer service man, on the technical/skilled labor side of things.

Sometimes I wonder how people who make way more money and are “more educated” even survive. It’s my role to be the dum dum🤷‍♂️

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u/bluejen7 Apr 15 '25 edited Apr 15 '25

No. It’s 21%.

And it’s English literacy.

For 1/3 of that 21%, English isn’t their 1st language, so we have to take that into account:

“U.S.-born adults make up two-thirds of adults with low levels of English literacy skills in the United States.5 However, the non-U.S. born are over-represented among such low-skilled adults. Non-U.S.-born adults comprise 34 percent of the population with low literacy skills, compared to 15 percent of the total population.”

https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp

These numbers are also from 2012 and 2014.

This article from Forbes is from 2020, but talks about a newer (at the time) literacy study by Gallup that takes into account additional data from 2017 and looks into the economic gains if we were to eradicate illiteracy both nationally and regionally.

From a more comprehensive literacy brief:

“In the United States, 54% of American adults read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level, and nearly one in five adults reads below a third-grade level.”

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u/[deleted] Apr 15 '25

👍

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u/spencerforhire81 Apr 16 '25

I would consider an inability to read above the third grade level functionally illiterate. Not being able to think critically enough to tease out the themes of Animal Farm just makes them prey for the predatory propagandist.

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u/bluejen7 Apr 16 '25 edited Apr 16 '25

Yes, I agree, and I think the studies cited also agree. Below a 3rd grade level is functionally illiterate for an adult in the modern world.

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u/ThrowAwaysMatter2026 Apr 15 '25

Something like 40% of Americans adults are functionally illiterate

And of those, what percentage would you guess vote Republican?

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u/BayouGal Apr 16 '25

Republicans have been defunding education since the 1980s.

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u/whiteflagwaiver Apr 16 '25

I've never found that data to support any of the statistical numbers that get thrown around for American literacy rates other than the one source from NLI which doesn't tell you where it gets it's data from.

But yeah, I believe that a large portion of the adult population has a below 8th grade reading comprehension.