A long footnote

 I published a piece in the Washington Post the other day on class differences in opinions about covid restrictions, or more exactly the lack of clear class differences.  When I last checked, there were almost 500 comments, but most of them didn't seem to be about the article itself--they were about what people thought of the restrictions, or the general wisdom of Republicans and Democrats.  I did notice one good question though--the headline referred to "elites," and I quoted Peggy Noonan as saying "we see the professionals on one side … and regular people on the other," while the article compared people with and without a college degree.  The commentator wondered why having a college degree disqualified you from being a  "regular person"--something like 35% of American adults are college graduates, so it's not a rare distinction.  This is something that has struck me too.  A few more quotes from Noonan, in piece that got a lot of attention (she got a Pulitzer prize for commentary in 2017 and they featured it on the award page):  

"The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful—those who have power or access to it. . . . they make public policy and have for some time.

I want to call them the elite to load the rhetorical dice, but let’s stick with the protected.

 They are figures in government, politics and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they’ve got some money."

 then near the end:

" This is a terrible feature of our age—that we are governed by protected people who don’t seem to care that much about their unprotected fellow citizens."

...

"In wise governments the top is attentive to the realities of the lives of normal people, and careful about their anxieties. That’s more or less how America used to be. There didn’t seem to be so much distance between the top and the bottom.

Now it seems the attitude of the top half is: You’re on your own. Get with the program, little racist."

So the "protected" shift from "those with power or access to it" to "the top half."   There's also the juxtaposition of "figures in government, politics, and the media"--a true elite--with people living in "nice neighborhoods, safe ones," having a family that functions and kids that go to good schools--a pretty large part of the population.    

The fact the Pulitzer Prize committee admired this stuff ("beautifully rendered columns that connected readers to the shared virtues of Americans") is interesting, and I'll talk about it  in a later post, but now I'll turn to the data.  I discussed two surveys from October which asked "Which of the following do you think should be the federal government’s priority: limiting the spread of coronavirus, even if it hurts the economy, or restarting the economy, even if it increases the risk to public health?"  There was little difference between the opinions of people with and without a college degree.  I also wrote about a survey from August which asked about specific restrictions, like banning indoor dining or organized youth sports.  There was an educational difference on six of the seven items, with less educated people giving less support to restrictions, although the differences were generally small.  So depending on which questions you looked at, you could say that there was some support for the idea of educational differences, or that there wasn't support.*  In the article, I said that there was no "consistent class difference"; in contrast, with gender, urban/rural residence, and race, the same kind of differences showed up in all surveys.  So you could at least say that class wasn't one of the more important factors.  But if you're specifically interested in educational differences, how can you reconcile these results?  I can think of two possibilities:

1.  Less educated people were more favorable to re-opening in the summer, but the difference disappeared by October.  Conditions were improving in the summer, but getting worse in October.  Views about restrictions are influenced by ideology and partisanship, and those are weaker factors among less educated people, so their opinions might be more influenced by reality.  In that case, class differences could increase, decline, or change direction depending on conditions. 

2.  Although there's no difference on the general question of giving priority to the economy or public health, less educated people are less likely to support specific restrictions.  They might be less accustomed to thinking in terms of tradeoffs, especially tradeoffs involving individual behavior, and more inclined to think that some authority--the government, employers, schools, etc., ought to do what is necessary so that people can safely return to normal activity.  

This is a larger question that applies to things other than covid restrictions. At this point, I don't think there's enough data to choose between these ideas.  

*There was also a survey from late April which suggested that less educated people were a bit more likely to take "extreme" positions--either that existing measures were too strict or not strict enough.