1) Getting answers to collide when there's only two choices, Agree or Disagree, is simple, absurdly simple.
50% represents maximum dissension.
How many other questions were there? How did they coincide with the presented questions? What is the expected distribution if answers were assigned randomly?
2) A question that deals with global or national finance often can't be accurately stated in a single sentence. I look at, say, the minimum wage, or the sports franchise question, and I think, "It depends."
3) There's an assumption in the questions that contain "should". That assumption is that economists all share the same goals. They don't. The ones who do may agree about the methods to achieve it.
Agree. It's positively dangerous to assume a simple, selectively chosen set of questions are a basis for public policy recommendations.
Take the argument about minimum wages increasing unemployment amongst the unskilled and the young, for example. It's not too difficult to infer an implicit policy recommendation from the answer to that question...
If, however, you had asked the question "minimum wages increase unemployment overall" you would find a much lower level of agreement (not least empirical observations of the introduction of minimum wages in many jurisdictions have contradicted that claim). There's no inconsistency here since there are plenty of plausible economic mechanisms for believing that imposing a minimum wage leads to a countervailing increase in older, more skilled labourers, but even amongst the subset of economists that believe the actual effect of a minimum wage is to concentrate unemployment amongst the young and unskilled you'll find a large degree of dissent over whether this has good or bad implications for society and the economy as a whole.
It's possible to agree wholeheartedly with Mankiw's simple observation of minimum wages => youth unemployment whilst disagreeing passionately with any policy recommendation against imposing a wage floor, even using narrow economic efficiency criteria.
50% represents maximum dissension.
How many other questions were there? How did they coincide with the presented questions? What is the expected distribution if answers were assigned randomly?
2) A question that deals with global or national finance often can't be accurately stated in a single sentence. I look at, say, the minimum wage, or the sports franchise question, and I think, "It depends."
3) There's an assumption in the questions that contain "should". That assumption is that economists all share the same goals. They don't. The ones who do may agree about the methods to achieve it.