The winters of our discontent

 Back in 2011, I wrote about a question first asked by Gallup in 1952:  "As you look to the future, do you think life for people generally will get better, or will it get worse?"  I've also  had several posts on a question first asked in 1983:  "In America, each generation has tried to have a better life than their parents, with a better living standard, better homes, a better education, etc. How likely do you think it is that today's youth will have a better life than their parents--very likely, somewhat likely, somewhat unlikely, or very unlikely?"  Then I recently ran across two questions on how much confidence you have in the future of the United States:  one gives a choice of quite a lot, some, very little, or none; the other gives a great deal, quite a lot, some, or very little.  The figure gives the results, summarized as positive minus negative answers, for all four questions:*  

  I fit a model in which answers are a combination of question plus year effects: the next figure shows the year effects, which can be regarded as representing the general view of the future in that year.  The zero point on the y scale is arbitrary, but the ups and downs are meaningful.

There is clearly a downward trend, but also a lot of year-to-year variation.  It dropped substantially in 2017, then bounced back in 2018 and 2019, before dropping to new lows after 2021.  

However, although all of the questions involve the future, the first two are about individual standards of living, while the last two are about the "United States."  Asking about the United States may make people think about institutions, particularly governmental institutions, so the trends might be different than for the questions about conditions of life.  Unfortunately, because of gaps in when the questions were asked, it's hard to be sure. But looking over the period since the 1970s, the downward trend seems to be stronger for the future of the United States than for the future of standards of living.  In 2016, net opinion on the "today's youth" question was +10, about the same as it was in 1995-96.  That is, views about the future of the economy were similar in  the year when incumbent Bill Clinton won easily and the year when Hillary Clinton was upset by Donald Trump.  I've said before that discontent with politics and political institutions is not primarily a symptom of discontent with the economy or everyday life, and I think that this is further evidence for that position.  

*For the questions with four options, I count the first two as positive and the last two as negative.  As a result, "some" is counted as positive for the first future of the US question but negative for the second.  An alternative approach would be to count a great deal and quite a lot as positive--ie, one out of four for the first question and two out of four for the second.  I chose to do it the way I did because people don't seem to pay much attention to the exact wording of the answers for questions of this type.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]