Education and redistribution

  As a general rule, more educated people are more liberal than less educated people on most "social" issues and more conservative on most economic issues. I wondered if this pattern has changed, so I looked at a question the General Social Survey has asked since 1978:  "Some people think that the government in Washington ought to reduce the income differences between the rich and the poor, perhaps by raising the taxes of wealthy families or by giving income assistance to the poor. Others think the government should not concern itself with reducing this income difference between the rich and the poor." People are shown a card with numbers from 1 (should do something) to 7 (should not concern itself) and pick the number that best represents their views.  If we limit things to people who are not black and compare those who graduated from college to everyone else, here are the means:

  

There's little or no trend among people without college degrees, but a downward trend--that is, more support for redistribution--among college graduates.  There are some year-to-year ups and downs that apply to both groups (partly related to the party of the president), so if you look at the difference the trend is even clearer:

The drop in 2016 is unusually large--if you fit a trend from 1978-2014 and extrapolate to 2016, the standardized residual is -2.63--but the trend is clear even without it.  That is, there has been a gradual decline in the the difference between the opinions of more and less educated people.  Why?  One possibility is that it has to do with economic trends--the income gap between college graduates and other people has been growing since the mid-1970s, so educated people feel more generous or more guilty, and more inclined to do something.  Another is that it's about politics--more educated people have been shifting towards the Democrats over the same period.  Regardless of the original reason for the shift, once you start voting for a party, you'll tend to have more trust in its leaders, and adopt more of the positions usually associated with that party.  I'm sure there are others, but those are the ones that occur to me.