A few years ago, I said that beliefs about changes in crime rates were affected both by actual conditions and partisanship, but that the effect of partisanship seemed to be bigger for Republicans. This post will look at the issue in more depth. The Gallup Poll has two questions about change in crime rates; "is there more crime in the U.S. than there was a year ago, or less?" and "is there more…
Between March 2020 and December 2022, several polls asked people how much trust they had in Dr Anthony Fauci: a great deal, a fair amount, not much, or not at all. Most of the questions mentioned Covid--"trust him to provide reliable information on coronavirus." The means by party identification, counting "great deal" as 4 .... "not at all" as 1. In the first survey (3/21-34/2020) the average…
Ross Douthat recently had a column about "elite failure," which began by discussing Paul Ehrlich and his warnings about overpopulation. This is a strange example, because Ehrlich had no discernible effect on American policy. According to Wikipedia , he* recommended "a tax scheme in which additional children would add to a family's tax burden ... as well as luxury taxes on childcare goods ...…
A few days ago, Paul Krugman wrote that there has been a vicious circle in which rich people influence government policy to favor their interests, which allows them to get richer, which gives them more influence..... This post will mainly be about the political side of his story, but I'll start with a few points about the economics. The figure shows a general measure of income inequality over…
A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times published an op-ed by Adam Grant, Marissa Shandell, and Courtney Elliott called " The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week ." A few days ago, the Times promoted it in an e-mail, saying "Here’s what six years of data says is actually driving the push to get employees back to the office." The reason they propose is…
In 1999, Gallup asked "Overall, do you think the signers of the Declaration of Independence would be pleased or disappointed by the way the United States has turned out?" The question was repeated in June 2001, 2003, June 2008, 2013, and June 2026. In 2007 and 2010, CBS asked a similar question: whether the "founding fathers" would be pleased or disappointed. Finally, in 2010 (January and June),…
In May, the Guardian published a list of the 100 best novels "as voted for by authors, critics and academics worldwide." They just gave ranks, but I was interested in total scores--how much difference is there between first and 10th place, or 10th and 100th? I also wondered if there were novelists whose votes were scattered among a number of different works, so they would do better in a ranking by…
In a recent post , I found that people who believed that they were treated with "less courtesy or respect than other people" were more likely to vote for Trump in 2016 (and probably 2020). This post will look at it from another direction: who is more likely to think that they are treated with less respect?* I considered race, sex, age, and education. My expectations were that black people, younger…
Last year I had a post about the claim that men don't have as many friends as they used to. I noted that the 2021 survey cited as evidence of a large decline in friendship among men showed a similarly large decline among women. That survey used different procedures from previous ones, so it's not clear that we should accept it as evidence of a real decline in friendship, but if we do, it shows a…
It's often said that a large part of Donald Trump's support represents a reaction to the disdain that ordinary people receive from the educated middle classes. For example, in a recent opinion piece in the New York Times, Dylan Gottlieb writes "yuppies and their arrogance bred new resentments. In the 2010s, a brand of populist conservatism opposed nearly every tenet of the yuppie dream, from…
In January, I had a post about why Trump was renominated in 2024. I argued that it wasn't because he of strong support among ordinary Republicans, but because of support from Republican elites. Andrew Gelman recently discussed my post in his blog , which led me to some further thoughts. My post concluded by saying "'the base' didn't impose Trump on Republican elites; Republican elites asked for…
I wanted to write a post on opinion about redistricting, but there are only a few survey questions on the subject. Two points are clear: most people think it should be done by some body other than state legislatures and most people pay little attention to the issue (many don't know how it's actually done in their state). In the course of looking for questions, I ran across one that I'd written…
People are more optimistic about the future when their party is in power. This isn't surprising--in fact, it would be surprising if this wasn't the case--but you'd expect the effect to fade as they look farther into the future. There's a question that I've written about several times, " In America, each generation has tried to have a better life than their parents, with a better living standard,…
Clarence Thomas recently gave a speech at the University of Texas--Austin that's attracted a lot of attention. Thomas said that a new philosophy of "progressivism," which rejected the principles of the Declaration of Independence, emerged in the early 20th century and "has made many inroads into our system of government and our way of life." In his account, progressives don't believe in…
A few weeks ago the New York Times published a story on people who think that women should not have the right to vote, and more recently they featured it in an e-mail to subscribers. The story says "if a decade ago the idea was just another extreme provocation, today it is gaining adherents beyond the fringe." Most of the evidence is just assertions from the pastor of a church that opposes women's…
In my last post, I wrote about the rise of Donald Trump. In this post, I'll consider his return after being defeated in 2020. This question hasn't gotten much attention, because people just assume that he has an unbreakable hold on the Republican "base." I don't think this is true (see this post ), but in a sense it doesn't matter, because Republican elites never tried to break it. Although Trump…
One popular explanation of the rise and survival of Donald Trump is summarized by Senator Elissa Slotkin, who said that some of her constituents tell her "it’s like I’m a Stage 4 cancer patient. My life has been getting worse, from my grandfather to my father, from my father to me, and my kids are going to do worse than me, so I need experimental chemo. Trump is my experimental chemo." That is,…
My last post looked at subjective income: whether you think your income is above average, average, or below average. The number of people who say that their incomes are average has declined, while the number who say their incomes are below average income has grown--but so has the number who say their incomes are above average. So there's more dispersion, but no trend in the average rating (there…
Many people have observed that in the last 5 or 10 years, a gap has emerged between public ratings of economic conditions and standard measures like unemployment and inflation: people say that the economy is bad even when the statistics look pretty good. One view is that the gap is due to politics or the nature of media coverage; the other is that it's because the standard statistics miss…
A lot of the commentary after Paul Ehrlich's death said that his ideas were popular among liberals and/or "elites." For example, Nicholas Eberstadt writes : "In retrospect, what may look most amazing about Ehrlich’s career is the company he managed to keep. Despite his harsh and jarring rhetoric, his strident ideology, and his proclivity for veering off toward pseudo-science, Ehrlich was embraced…
In late 2022, I had a couple of posts about perceptions of moral conditions . I concluded that assessments had become more negative in the 1960s, and after that there might have been some further decline. It turns out that Adam Mastroianni and Daniel Gilbert were doing a similar study, which was published in Nature in 2023 . Their conclusions are completely different: "A linear model indicated…
Adrian Vermeule, a professor at Harvard Law School, writes that "the Supreme Court faces a serious problem in the court of public opinion . . . . If the Court, having invalidated the President’s tariffs, also invalidates the birthright citizenship order . . the Court will have invalidated the President’s two main or signature issues, on which he has campaigned since 2016 and twice won the…
I'll start with the new. The SAVE Act requires proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. If it were implemented, which party would it help? The most convenient form of proof is a passport--of course, people who don't have a passport could assemble the necessary documentation, but it's safe to say that many of them would not get around to doing it. There aren't many surveys that include…
A New York Times story yesterday said that the conservative organization PragerU had just released ratings of the American presidents, and that their top scores went to Washington, Lincoln, Reagan, and Calvin Coolidge. In contrast, a survey of members of the Presidents and Executive Politics section of the American Political Science Association in 2017-8 placed Lincoln, Washington, FDR, and Teddy…
At one time, it was often said that almost all Americans thought of themselves as part of the middle class, regardless of their actual economic circumstances. It turned out that when asked if they belonged to the "middle class" or "working class," about half chose middle class and half chose working class--this is still true, despite the social and economic changes since the question was first…