After predicting he could guess most of an economist's positions after hearing just one of them, Russ Roberts takes a crack at guessing Noah Smith's positions on a variety of policies, and Smith grades him.

Smith is always interesting, and often unpredictable, and those are of course correlated.

Stricter Gun Control: Probably not. I grew up in small(ish)-town Texas, where tons of people had guns and there weren't any shootings that I ever heard of (though probably some accidents). Canada has relatively high gun ownership and very little crime, including few mass shootings. Brazil has a small fraction of the gun ownership we have, and much higher crime. Meanwhile, we've had a huge drop in crime in the last two decades with no real increase in gun control. Let's try to replicate that success before we start disarming the populace. I will admit that my stance on this has wavered recently, in light of the rash of mass shootings, but I still don't think gun control is likely to have a huge effect.

Noah's post-mortem is worth a read. I especially like this:

I think this exercise shows a number of different "failure modes" of attempting to model people's policy positions based on an assessment of their ideology. For example:

...

4. People disagree on the facts, not just on values. In general, people with heterogeneous priors about the state of the world will fail to reach agreement even after seeing all of the same evidence. And when people form their policy positions, they consider efficacy of policies, not just whether the intended effect would be a good thing. Russ probably didn't bet that I would be pessimistic about the efficacy of taxing the rich, the usefulness of the ACA's tax credits, or the effectiveness of gun control. He also probably underestimated my uncertainty about the effect of Obamacare on health costs, the usefulness of education spending, and the employment effects of minimum wage hikes.