But when pollsters looked at religious knowledge, the results were similar to the findings about whether the earth revolves around the sun. Another Gallup poll found that despite the fact that three-quarters of us believe in God, only half could name any one of the four Gospels, only 42 percent could recite even five of the Ten Commandments, and the same percentage, 42, could not name who delivered the Sermon on the Mount. Another researcher, George Barna, found that 12 percent of his respondents believed Noah's wife was Joan of Arc. (He didn't ask if the wedding was in the Ark of the Covenant.)

Given these levels of ignorance, when it comes to the government we get, do we have any basis to complain?

De Tocqueville visited America and was inspired to say, "People get the government they deserve," and our own H. L. Mencken added, "And they deserve to get it good and hard."

Interpolating these polling results to politics, do I have any reason to trust the public's good sense, or to do little more than to throw up my hands and emigrate?

After we also cast blame on our education system as well as our intellectually incurious culture, what is to be done?

I was prompted to write this post after reading one by Nate Silver, the guru of political prognostication at fivethirtyeight.com, who correctly predicted the outcome of 49 out of 50 states in the 2008 presidential election. Silver recently posted "Health Care Polls: Opinion Gap or Information Gap?" in which he argues that opposition to health care reform is based on misinformation and lying--kind of like believing we should rewrite our textbooks to take into account all the people who believe humans lived with dinosaurs or Noah married Joan of Arc. He analyzes the latest Kaiser Health Tracking Poll, and concludes that surveyed respondents would likely support a bill that had particular provisions, but they were often unaware the either the Senate or the House bill had those provisions. In many cases, their opposition to the bill was based on ignorance about what was actually in the bill.

"What we see is that most individual components of the bill are popular -- in some cases, quite popular. But awareness lags behind. Only 61 percent are aware that the bill bans denials of coverage for pre-existing conditions. Only 42 percent know that it bans lifetime coverage limits. Only 58 percent are aware that it set up insurance exchanges. Just 44 percent know that it closes the Medicare donut hole -- and so on and so forth," writes Silver.

Yet, when made aware that the bill does contain such provisions, support for it increases dramatically. Awareness of bills mandated inclusion of pre-existing condition coverage increases support by a net of +39, for example.

"How would public opinion change if people were fully informed about the content of the bills? It's hard to say for sure, but on average, the individual components of the bill are favored by a net of +22 points. An NBC poll in August also found that support went from a -6 net to a +10 when people were actually provided with a description of the bill," Silver observes.

He is not optimistic about perceptions changing in the short term, but if the bill were enacted, he argues its popularity would increase over time when citizens realize, for example, they wouldn't lose coverage if they lost a job.

The problem with selling the bill is that opposition can be expressed in easily digestible sound bites--even if they are false--while support requires the attention span to understand the actual contents of the bill. In an earlier post, "Is Health Care Reform the New Iraq War?" he looked at how untruths about Iraq--their possession of weapons of mass destruction including a nuclear capability, Saddam Hussein's ties to Al Qaeda--initially created a very favorable climate of support for the war. Once the public relied how untrue these claims were, both the war and the administration proclaiming them sunk in popularity.

Silver sees a similar dynamic at play with health care: "Once again, one side has told a lot of lies to help alter the course of public opinion. Some of these lies, like death panels or the government takeover meme, are not very subtle. Others are a little more clever: the notion, for instance, that we could easily require insurers to cover all people with pre-existing conditions without either adopting an individual mandate or substantially escalating premiums."

The difference in opinion that occurs when people are correctly informed, points to the benefits of a methodology called Deliberative Polling, which embodies the idea that knowledge is empowering.

Deliberative Polling was developed in 1988 by James Fishkin, a political scientist at Stanford, who describes it as "a practice of public consultation that employs random samples of the citizenry to explore how opinions would change if they were more informed."

Presaging Silver's recent postings, the web page for Deliberative Polling states the problem: "Citizens are often uninformed about key public issues. Conventional polls represent the public's surface impressions of sound bites and headlines. The public, subject to what social scientists have called ‘rational ignorance', has little reason to confront trade-offs or invest time and effort in acquiring information or coming to a considered judgment."

In the case of health care reform, rational ignorance might be: "I have a good health care plan. Is it worth my time and effort to study the issue to see if it would benefit others? I'd rather watch American Idol or Emma or football, which gives me guaranteed pleasure. And, besides, there's very little chance that my informed vote would make a difference."