Education, redistribution, and markets

I have had several posts (this, this, and this) about change in the effect of education on opinions about redistribution and government obligation to help the poor:  after controlling for income, education used to go opposition to redistribution, but now it makes little difference. But education still seems to make a difference in general attitudes about markets.  Educated people are more likely to support free trade rather than the protection of domestic industry.  More generally, they are less sympathetic to at least some kinds of direct regulation. 

In July 2008, a Gallup/USA Today poll asked "Thinking now about some of the solutions offered to address the energy situation in the United States, please say whether you would be more likely or less likely to vote for a candidate who supported...establishing price controls on gasoline?"   "More likely" got 75% among people with no college, 55% among those with some college, 50 percent among those with a college degree, and 43% among those with graduate education.  Education still made a difference after controlling for income, and in fact made more difference than income, if you go by the standardized regression coefficients.  The same survey asked about a number of other possible actions--the education effect for this item was the strongest of all. 

Why would more educated people be less in favor of price controls?  One possibility is the direct influence of what they studied.  However, my guess is that most college graduates didn't take a course in economics, and most don't recall many specific points from their courses.  So I think it's more likely to reflect a general way of thinking--more educated people are less likely to believe that simply forbidding people to do something will be effective. 

So even if more and less educated people are now similar in their general support for redistribution, there are some differences in the types of policies they support to achieve it, and that difference may create problems for parties of the left. 

Since it's been a relatively long gap between posts, I'll add a bonus to this one.  In most surveys, the highest income category is something like $100,000 and up,  so you can't make fine distinctions at the high end.  But this one included more detailed categories, of which the highest was $500,000+.  When asked about who they thought they would vote for in November 2008, people in the top group went for McCain by 9-2. The income groups below that were pretty evenly split.  The difference could have been just the result of chance (the p-value for the hypothesis of no difference among the highest income groups was something like .07), but it is intriguing.  If other Gallup/USA Today surveys from the same time used the same income groups, you could combined them to see if it holds up.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]