I am very interested in gaps between expert or academic opinion and public opinion. An important current example is stimulus policy during recessions. Sixty-two percent of Americans recently said that the stimulus bills “just created debt,” whereas 28 percent said the stimulus “helped the economy.”That’s consistent with the belief of 64% of Americans that “big government” is the most serious threat to the country. (They are given a choice of big government, big business, or big labor.) The Keynesian argument that governments should stimulate the economy by borrowing and spending during recessions does not seem to persuade many Americans.

Meanwhile, many (although not all) economists think that Keynesianism does apply in a recession like the current one, and they estimate that federal stimulus has lowered unemployment and boosted growth. Perhaps average Americans misunderstand economic theory, overestimate the degree of waste in government, or measure impact against the wrong baseline. (The question is not whether unemployment has gone down, but whether it would be worse without the stimulus.). One might conclude that inattentive or misinformed voters are a problem.

But matters are at least a bit more complicated. The CBO calculates that the stimulus “Increased the number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) jobs by 2.0 million to 4.8 million.” The stimulus cost about $787 billion. That means that each job cost between $163,958 and $393,500. The median full-time salary for a worker age 25-64 is just under $40,000. So the cost per job was equal to between four and ten salaries. Put another way, the stimulus cost about $26,200 per capita and budged the unemployment rate down just a touch. No wonder people are a little skeptical.

I don’t know why that is. I’m inclined to guess that the stimulus was highly inefficient either because it just isn’t possible to generate jobs efficiently after a financial meltdown or because too much of the money went to tax breaks rather than sustaining state and local government payrolls. But the fact remains that people aren’t crazy. It’s not that the stimulus was a great success and all we need is more of it. Maybe we need more and better, but the judgment that it was wasteful is a reasonable one on its face. (If I am missing why the American people are just off base, please let me know.)