What matters?

 In March, a survey about which values were important to people got a lot of attention.  It seemed to show that people had shifted away from concerns with family and community and towards a concern with money.  I raised some questions about the interpretation of the survey and said that I would look for other data, but forgot to follow up on it.    I was reminded by a column by David Brooks the other day.   It's called "To be happy, marriage matters more than career," and the summary on my phone says "Yet parents sends the opposite message to the young."  Presumably Brooks didn't write those (and nobody copy-edited the summary), but they give a pretty good distillation of his column.  Basically it's the same conclusion that he (and others) drew from the earlier survey:  that people are turning away from personal relationships and focusing on careers and money.  

Before addressing that question, I'll have a digression about money, marriage and happiness.  Married people definitely report being happier than unmarried people, and it's a big difference.  But it's not clear that marriage makes more difference than money.  Here are two tables calculated from cumulative GSS data.  One compares (limited to those aged 30 and up) people or are or were married to people who have never married; the other compares people with a family income of less than 100,000 to those with an income of $100,000 and up, using a GSS variable that converts the original values to constant dollars. Both of the classifications produce roughly 90%/10% splits of the sample.  

                               Very         Pretty          Not too
Ever married            35%          54%            11%
Never married          19%          61%            21%

Less than 100K        31%           56%          13%
> 100K                     43%           52%            5%

The gaps are of similar size.  The more usual way to look at it is to contrast married people with unmarried people--that produces a bigger gap.  However, if you marry, you have a chance of eventually becoming divorced or widowed; if you don't marry, you don't.  So in terms of how getting married will affect your chances of being happy over your lifetime, the comparison of ever married vs. never married is better.

Back to the main topic.  One of Brook's pieces of evidence is from Gallup surveys:  "Fewer people believe that marriage is vitally important. In 2006, 50 percent of young adults said it was very important for a couple to marry if they intended to spend the rest of their lives together. But by 2020 only 29 percent of young adults said that." But the Gallup report concludes by noting that a large majority of unmarried people say that they hope to get married someday and says "their evolving attitudes about marriage may reflect increasing acceptance for how others lead their lives rather than a profound shift in their own lifestyle preferences."  

 Brooks also cites a Pew survey in which "88 percent of parents said it was 'extremely or very' important for their kids to be financially independent, while only 21 percent said it was 'extremely or very' important for their kids to marry."   But the Gallup interpretation can apply here too--with marriage, most parents will support whatever choice their children make.  With work, there is a sense that it's obligatory.  This is partly practical, but partly moral--if someone said that work just didn't appeal to them, and that they intended to get by on a combination of government programs and private charity, many people would be indignant.  But to say that people need to have a career is not the same as saying that people should put their career ahead of everything else.

The kind of question we need to choose between these interpretations is one that directly asks people to choose which is more important--personal relationships or money/careers.  I found one that comes pretty close in a 2011 CBS News/60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll:  "If you had to say, which one of the following things do you think is most important in determining how happy you are in life.
1. A rewarding career,
2. Being close with your family,
3. Having good health,
4. Having a lot of money, or
5. The area where you live?"

56% said family, 27% health, 6% where you live, 6% career, 3% money, and 3% didn't know.  The standard demographic variables didn't make that much difference, except for age--younger people were more likely to choose career as important and older people were more likely to choose health.  Those differences probably represent age rather than generational shifts.  In any case, family was by far the leading choice in all age groups, with 50%-60%--the shifts involved the other choices.  

This question hasn't been repeated since 2011, and in principle there could have been a big shift in values over the past few years.  But I doubt it---changes in things like that tend to be gradual.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]