I don't need no doctor, part 2

 In August, I had a post about confidence in Anthony Fauci to provide reliable information on the coronavirus.  In March 2020, it was high among Republicans, Democrats, and Independents.  After that, it dropped among Republicans and (less strongly) independents, but stayed the same or maybe increased a little among Democrats.  This one looks at confidence in Donald Trump:  

I show two lines for each party:  one is for surveys by the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the other is surveys by other organizations.   There is a downward trend among everyone, although the difference between the KFF and other surveys makes it hard to be sure about the exact size of the trend.  But it's clear that Republican and independent loss of confidence in Fauci was not accompanied by an increase of confidence in Trump.  In the last survey (March 2022), 18% of Republicans said they trusted him a great deal, 31% said a good deal, 32% not much, and 19% none at all.

Many accounts treat Trump's support as unshakeable--that as he once said, he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and wouldn't lose any voters.  But in terms of public support, he's not that different from other politicians:   he has a core of enthusiastic supporters, but also people who support him on some things but not others, and even some who don't think much of him but regard him as better than the alternatives.  In fact, although Trump has changed the Republican party, the Republican party (specifically, the right wing of the party) has changed Trump:  on issues where he was once seen as moderate or at least flexible, he's adopted right-wing positions.  On this one, he could have pivoted to talking about the success of Operation Warp Speed, but instead tried to appeal to anti-vaccine sentiment and continued to downplay the risk of Covid.  I think this helps to explain the decline of support in his second term--when things go wrong, he doesn't think of moving towards the center, but tries to generate more enthusiasm from his base.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

How many more years?

 On September 11, Matthew Yglesias wrote that after the terrorist attacks 25 years before "trust in the federal government soared, temporarily reversing the secular increase in cynicism that’s been happening since Watergate and the decline of the three-network news oligopoly."  I've had several posts about long-term changes in trust in the government which suggested that the decline started earlier.  Those were based on the American National Election Studies, which only happen every two years, so they don't tell much about the influence of specific events.  But one of the ANES questions "How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right--just about always, most of the time, or only some of the time"--was picked up by other organizations in the 1970s and asked pretty frequently.  It hasn't been asked since 2017--it's been replaced by questions including one or two additional categories for less than some of the time--but it still covers 60 years.   

Here is the percent who choose most or almost all of the time

It peaked in 1962, then declined steadily throughout the 1960s and 1970s.  After that, there were ups and downs, but more downs:  all/most responses didn't fall below 20% until 1993, but were pretty consistently below 20% in 2013-17.  9/11 had a big impact, but it didn't last:  in July 2003, after initial success in the Iraq war, 36% chose all or most, which put it about equal with November 1974, when the economy was in a recession and Gerald Ford had recently issued an unpopular pardon of Richard Nixon.

So the major story is of a general downward trend that started well before Watergate and the decline of network news.  I think that the underlying cause is the growth of education and the mass media, which led to a decline of deference:  people became less likely to assume that government officials knew better than they did.  Of course, these were long-term developments, but in the 1960s there was a cascade effect--the media became more critical, so people became more confident in expressing any negative views they might have, so people were surrounded by a more negative climate of opinion.  

Taking a closer look, here is the percent who choose "almost always".   Most of the surveys also recorded some volunteered "never" or "almost never" responses.   There is probably some additional variation because of differences among survey organizations, but the general pattern is clear:  the decline in confidence continued after the 1970s

I've mentioned before that the public mood seemed to become negative in the first half of the 1990s.  It's not clear why--there was a recession in 1991-2, but it wasn't that severe and the decline in confidence continued after it was over.  It's also not clear why confidence grew in the late 1990s:  the economy did well, but the main political events were the attempt to remove Bill Clinton from office and the the appearance of standoffs over debt limits, which seem like they should have had a negative impact.  But in any case, the experience of the 1990s may have some lessons for today.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

  

Too little information

     I've seen a few things on social media saying that the Republicans stole the 2024 presidential election, but didn't pay much attention to them until a recent post by Andrew Gelman pointed to an article in Votebeat by Carter Walker and Jessica Huesman.  The basic story:  Walter Mebane, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, has developed a model that is supposed to detect election fraud.  When he applied it to data from Pennsylvania, he got estimates ranging from about 25,000 to 200,000 "fraudulent" votes.  Trump's margin in the state was about 120,000, so the analysis suggests that voter fraud might have made the difference.  But other political scientists criticized his analysis and said that there was no evidence of significant voter fraud. Although Walker and Huesman found the critics more credible, that seemed to be based on personal impressions rather than evaluation of Mebane's model: they speak of "complex assumptions and unfamiliar methods."  So here is my attempt to state the assumptions in a reasonably simple fashion.   

The model uses only two pieces of information:  turnout rates and party support at the precinct level.  How can you get evidence of fraud from such limited information?  Mebane's model implements the ideas offered a paper by Peter Klimek et al.  They propose that very high turnout and lopsided support for one party may be a sign of fraud.  This seems reasonable--if one party has complete control over the voting or counting of votes, you would expect them to run up the score.  But you don't need complex methods to identify those cases of potential fraud--you can just look at the figures for turnout and votes.  Their second kind of fraud, which they call "incremental fraud," involves adding (or switching) a moderate number of votes in a large number of precincts--e. g., changing 60% turnout and 50% Republican vote to 70% turnout and 60% Republican vote.  But in this case, you can't just look at the numbers for individual districts, since they aren't unusual.  Instead, you compare the distribution of the total numbers--are there more 70%/60% districts in the voting records than there are in reality?  But then you need a standard for "reality"--that is, the true distribution of turnout and votes in different precincts.  Klimek et al. assume that it follows a normal distribution, and I think Mebane does too.**  But there's no compelling theoretical reason to think that the actual distribution of turnout and voting choices follows a normal distribution, or any other specific distribution.  Another justification for using the normal distribution as the standard would be if data from elections generally agreed to be fair almost always followed a normal distribution, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence of this kind.  So we can't be confident about the true distribution, and therefore can't say whether the observed distribution differs from it.  Even if there is "incremental fraud," there's no way to identify it from the data on turnout and voting choices alone.  Cases of extremely high turnout and lopsided support may result from fraud (although they may occur naturally), but Mebane identifies only nine precincts like that out of about 9,000, involving a total of about 2,000 votes, which is much smaller than the margin in Pennsylvania.     

  * Another part of the story was the use (and maybe misuse) that the Election Truth Alliance had made of Mebane's analysis, and how much responsibility he had for that, but I'll leave it aside and just consider the model.

**I say "I think" because I found his paper hard to follow and I wasn't really motivated to figure it out--the important point is that there's no justification for any assumptions about the true distribution.

The plague years

 I'd heard about a decline of self-reported happiness in recent years, but I hadn't looked at the numbers until I saw a post by Noah Smith a few days ago.  He gave a figure showing that the percent who said they were "not too happy" was almost twice as large in 2021-2024 as it had been in 2015-9.  My first thought was that the numbers should be broken down by year--it's understandable that people were unhappy during the Covid pandemic, but things probably bounced back in 2024.  However, it turns out that average happiness (3=very happy, 2=pretty happy, 1=not too happy) in 2024 was lower than in 2022 and not much higher than in 2021 (data are from the GSS, which is conducting their 2026 survey now but hasn't released the data).  

My next thought was that it was because of political polarization.  Traditionally, partisanship affected views about the state of the country--people were more favorable when their party had the presidency--but had little or no effect on individual happiness.  But as partisanship gets stronger, it might affect a wider range of things--that is, if you think the economy is in bad shape and we're at risk of war, it's reasonable to be unhappy.  However, once again my thought was wrong:

Republicans were consistently a bit happier, but the gap didn't change depending on the party in power, even in recent years.  

I looked at differences by various demographic variables--age, gender, race, education, and more.  Although changes weren't exactly parallel, they were similar in all groups--a big decline between 2019 and 2021 and only modest recovery (see this paper for a more detailed analysis).  Then for some reason I compared people born in the United States to people who were born outside.

The 2019-2021 drop was smaller and the 2021-2024 recovery was larger among people born outside the United States.  Their 2024 average was just about the same as the average over the whole period (2.13 vs. 2.16).  Why the difference?  My hypothesis is that it reflects a difference in expectations:  because of a combination of the nation's wealth and power, a government that functions pretty well, and good luck, Americans have become used to thinking that things will work out.  So when Covid turned out to be as bad or worse than people had expected and recovery was slower, it was a shock.  Most of the people who were born outside were from places with more history of misfortune and misgovernance, so their expectations were lower.  

Of course, I developed this hypothesis after looking at the data, but Gallup collects annual data on happiness (using a somewhat different question) in a large number of nations.  My hypothesis has implications for the size of post-Covid changes in happiness in different nations.  I may look at that in a future post.  

Can't complain?

 In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, Gregory Conti and Aaron Sibarium wrote "as race and gender preferences became more overt and widespread, so did the grievances of young white men, who saw their professional opportunities diminish."  The widely-discussed article by Jacob Savage that they link to says the growth of racial preferences began around 2014 and continued until very recently.  Coincidentally, in 2013 I wrote about a General Social Survey question--"What do you think the chances are these days that a white person won't get a job or promotion while an equally or less qualified black person gets one instead? Is this very likely, somewhat likely, or not very likely to happen these days?"--and found that since 1990, white opinions had moved in the direction of "not very likely" and black opinion had moved in the direction of "very likely."  As a result, black/white differences in opinion had become smaller.  Has there been a change in the direction of opinion since then?

White opinion has continued to move in the "not very likely" direction.  However, there seems to be a change in the direction of black opinion--since around 2010, it's also moved towards seeing it as less likely, and the difference in opinions by race has increased slightly.

It's generally agreed that if there was a growth in racial preferences, it happened in professional and managerial jobs, not in blue collar or routine service jobs.  If we break down white opinions by race:

Whites who didn't graduate from college have continued to move towards seeing it as less likely but white college graduates seem to have moved towards seeing it as more likely, or at least stopped moving towards seeing it as less likely.   

So the change in the opinions of white college graduates is consistent with Conti and Sibarium's account.  I don't think that's had much effect on voting patterns--growth in Republican support among whites has been stronger among less educated people.  But regardless of whether it does, it's an interesting development.  At the same time, the fact that less educated whites have continued to move towards seeing it as less likely that an equally or less qualified black person would get a job or promotion is also important.  That is, this question doesn't show a general white backlash against "wokeness."  

  

For better or worse

 A few years ago, I said that beliefs about changes in crime rates were affected both by actual conditions and partisanship, but that the effect of partisanship seemed to be bigger for Republicans.  This post will look at the issue in more depth.  

The Gallup Poll has two questions about change in crime rates; "is there more crime in the U.S. than there was a year ago, or less?" and "is there more crime in your area than there was a year ago, or less?"  Both of them have been asked almost annually since 1989, usually in October.  The percent who think that there is more crime in the nation, by party ID:

The effect of partisanship is clear:  for example, between 2024 and 2025, Republicans became less likely to think that crime was increasing while Democrats became more likely.  Judging the effect of actual crime rates is more difficult, because "crime" can include a lot of things, most of which aren't well measured, but here are homicide rates:

Here's the percent who think there's more crime in their area, by partisanship:

If you regress beliefs on party of the president and homicide rates:

                             Constant          Rate       D
Reps, nation:           32                 4.7          16
Dems, nation:          38                 5.0         -9.2

D is one if a Democrat is president, 0 if a Republican is.  So if a Democrat is president, Republicans are more likely to say that the crime rate is increasing and Democrats are less likely.  The estimated size of the partisan effect is larger for Republicans, although the difference is not statistically significant.

                             Constant       Rate          D
Reps,  area:             25                 1.9          18
Dems, area:             28                 2.4        -3.5

It's the same general pattern, but the difference in partisan effects is larger (and statistically significant).   It might seem odd that the effect of partisanship on beliefs about local conditions would be as strong as the effect on beliefs about national conditions, but even getting a clear view of "your area" goes beyond personal experience.  

The effect of partisanship seems to be growing.  The average gaps (Republican minus Democratic percnet) by administration:

                         Area       Nation
GHWB              -7.3         -1
Clinton                3.5          3.8
GWB                  -9.5        -14.8
Obama                10.3         15.4
Trump-1              -3           -2.5
Biden                  34.8         39
Trump-2                9            8

There's also a more subtle point:  in the two Bush administrations, Republicans were less likely to think that crime was increasing than Democrats were, but if you average the two Trump administrations, there's essentially no difference.  That doesn't mean the effect of partisanship has disappeared--look at the Biden administration--but that Republicans have become more negative in general.  Although the 2025 homicide rate was the lowest of the whole period, Republicans were more likely to see crime as increasing than they were in 1998-2004.  This fits with something Paul Krugman mentioned the other day:  that Trump seems reluctant to talk about the decline in crime:  although he talks about the decline in Washington DC, he suggests that things are terrible in the "blue cities."  But it's noteworthy that the increasingly negative mood among Republicans seems to apply to perceptions of your area as well.  I wonder if it's a general rule that it's easier to influence your followers in a negative than in a positive direction.  That seems plausible, although I don't know of any research on the subject.  

Note:  the regression estimates are  OLS, but regressions allowing for serial correlation in the residuals produced similar results.  

[Data from Gallup and the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

I don't need no doctor

 Between March 2020 and December 2022, several polls asked people how much trust they had in Dr Anthony Fauci:  a great deal, a fair amount, not much, or not at all.  Most of the questions mentioned Covid--"trust him to provide reliable information on coronavirus." The means by party identification, counting "great deal" as 4 .... "not at all" as 1.

In the first survey (3/21-34/2020) the average level of trust was almost identical among Democrats, Republicans, and independents.  Democratic trust seemed to increase a little in 2020 and then declined, but the changes were small.  Republican trust dropped sharply in the second survey (late August/early September 2020), and then continued to declined at a slower rate.  Independents were just about halfway in between.  The gap between average Democratic and Republican trust:

There's very little change between June 2021 and December 2022.  That is, the partisan polarization of trust took place between March 2020 and June 2021--nothing that happened in the next 18 months made much difference.  It's also a high degree of polarization:  in June 2021, 61% of Democrats said they had a great deal of trust in Fauci and only 5% said they had none; among Republicans, 11% said they had a great deal and 50% said not at all.  A few days ago, Bret Stephens wrote "I was prepared to cut Fauci and others in government a lot of slack in the first months of the pandemic, when the take-no-chances approach seemed like the safest course. But at some point many of the measures that he insisted were necessary .... felt both onerous and performative, and guaranteed to create a backlash."  Whether or not that was true for him, it doesn't seem to have been true for most Republicans--they shifted against him right away rather than waiting.  

There were also several questions about trust in national public health officials or the CDC.  They followed the same basic pattern:  no partisan differences at the beginning and then a split, but the eventual partisan gap was smaller than with Fauci.  Finally, there were some questions about trust in Donald Trump to provide reliable information about Covid.  Of course, there was a partisan split on Trump from the beginning.  But did it also get bigger, or had it already reached its ceiling?  I'll look at that in a future post.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Elite Failure?

 Ross Douthat recently had a column about "elite failure," which began by discussing Paul Ehrlich and his warnings about overpopulation.  This is a strange example, because Ehrlich had no discernible effect on American policy.  According to Wikipedia, he* recommended "a tax scheme in which additional children would add to a family's tax burden ...  as well as luxury taxes on childcare goods ...  incentives for men who agree to permanent sterilization before they have two children ...  a powerful Department of Population and Environment which 'should be set up with the power to take whatever steps are necessary to establish a reasonable population size in the United States and to put an end to the steady deterioration of our environment.' The department should support research into population control, such as better contraceptives, mass sterilizing agents, and prenatal sex discernment (because families often continue to have children until a male is born). ...  Legislation should be enacted guaranteeing the right to an abortion, and sex education should be expanded."  Abortion laws were loosened and sex education was expanded, but none of the other policies were adopted or even seriously considered.  Ehrlich also recommended that foreign aid should be given only to countries "with sufficient programs in place to limit population growth."  That also didn't happen.  

Douthat gives several more examples of elite failure, and they don't hold up either.  One is "left-wing politics in the Covid era, when bad ideas emanated from academia and were laundered through other credentialed institutions."  The major bad policy supported by the left was delay in returning to in-person schooling, but that wasn't particularly an "elite" idea--it was broadly popular.  And the largest policy failure was on the right:  resistance to the vaccine, which didn't come from academia.  The next is DOGE, which he acknowledges "partly reflect[s] a populist unwillingness to listen to credentialed experts about the sheer difficulty of budget cutting. But the belief that a group of high-I.Q. outsiders can come in and remake a complex system is itself a characteristic elite temptation."  However, DOGE wasn't an effort to remake the government--the idea was that there was a lot of  obvious waste, fraud, and abuse.  Finally, the war with Iran:  "the voices in Trump’s coalition who were supportive ... included members of the pre-Trump G.O.P. elite and think-tankers who had been making the case for intervention for years. The voices raised in opposition often belonged to the populist wing, including some of its most paranoid factions. "  Although some Republican elites have called for a harder line with Iran, those elites haven't had much influence on the actual policy.  A few weeks after Trump's inauguration, I wrote that there was an approach to international affairs that was popular among the general public, but not among elites: "impatient with diplomacy, international agreements, and long-term obligations:  we should intervene when the nation's interests are at stake and then get out."  That's been Trump's approach to the war, and the results show why it's not popular among elites.

Douthat's model seems to be that academic and intellectual elites come up with ideas and those ideas trickle down to political decision-makers and the educated middle classes.  Since academics and intellectuals lean to the left, that means that elites, even conservative elites, are influenced by the left.  For example, Douthat's description of the "elite temptation" to remake complex systems is similar to the Hayek/Schumpeter/von Mises account of why intellectuals are attracted to socialism.  

There are two problems with this model.  One is that the spread of ideas often isn't a process of trickling down.  Ehrlich was an elite academic (a professor at Stanford), but he wasn't an expert in human populations--his research was on insects.  But (again according to Wikipedia) his public writing and speaking on overpopulation attracted the attention of the executive director of the Sierra Club and the publisher of Ballantine Books.  Ehrlich also became a frequent guest on the Tonight Show.  I don't know how he got his initial invitation, but presumably he was invited back because he was good on TV.  That is, even in the days of media "gatekeepers," the process of getting public attention was entrepreneurial.  Although sometimes entrepreneurs create demand for something new, often they fill a demand that is already there. A second problem with the model is that policymaking elites have some distinctive views that set them apart from all parts of the general public.  Some of these are the result of the influence of experts--people who have specialized in studying an issue.  With population, the specialists had noticed that economic growth and modernization were generally followed by declines in fertility.  There's no information on elite opinions at the time, but my guess is that they were less concerned about overpopulation than the general public because they were aware of this pattern, so they continued to treat economic development as the priority.  

Of course, this doesn't mean that elite ideas always right, or even usually right--getting things right is hard.  But general claims of "elite failure," at least those that I've seen, are unconvincing.

*Apparently The Population Bomb was co-written with Anne Ehrlich, but Paul was listed as the sole author.  

The few or the many?

 A few days ago, Paul Krugman wrote that there has been a vicious circle in which rich people influence government policy to favor their interests, which allows them to get richer, which gives them more influence.....  This post will mainly be about the political side of his story, but I'll start with a few points about the economics.  The figure shows a general measure of income inequality over time:

It grew from the 1970s to the early 2000s, but has leveled off.  What about wealth?*

The share of the 99.0-99.9% peaked in 2018 and is now about where it was in 2009, but the share of the top 0.1% has continued to increase and is higher than ever.  So although you could argue about whether "inequality" is increasing, the very rich have been pulling ahead of the rest of us.

Krugman presents a figure showing the decline of corporate tax rates since the 1940s, which he says is a major cause of the gains at the top.    He says that the decline of corporate taxes reflects the power of the "oligarchs," and have happened "in the teeth of very broad public opposition," and points to a Gallup question about whether corporations "are paying their fair share in federal taxes, paying too much, or paying too little?"  The last time that was asked (2025), 21% said fair share, 7% too much, and 70% said too little.  

However, although agreement that corporations are paying too little in taxes may be broad, I don't think it's very deep.  First, when you mention specific rates, there's less support for an increase.  In 2021, an ABC/Washington Post survey asked "The top tax rate on corporate profits used to be 35 percent, then was cut to 21 percent. Would you support or oppose raising the corporate tax rate to 28 percent?"  58% were in favor and 36% were opposed.  That's a majority, but the question isn't even about returning to how things were, just going halfway back.  There aren't many other questions that specify rates, but back in 1986, Harris asked about raising the minimum rate to 25%:  61% were in favor and 33% opposed.  However, in 1985 a Business Week/Harris poll asked about "A gradual reduction of the maximum corporate income tax from 46 percent to 35 percent," and opinions were almost evenly divided, with 42% in favor and 47% opposed.  Second, in 2011 a CBS/New York Times survey asked "If you had to choose one, which would you prefer in order to reduce the federal budget deficit--raising taxes on corporations or cutting government spending?":  32% favored increased taxes on corporations and 64% favored cutting government spending.  As far as I know, this is the only question of its kind, but there's lots of evidence suggesting that people think that there's a lot of room to cut spending without losing services.  Third, strong majorities say that the middle class pays too much in federal taxes.  Putting these points together, the usual Republican package--cuts in corporate taxes combined with with smaller cuts for middle-income people and vague promises of savings by cutting waste, fraud, and abuse--can be fairly popular.  On the other side, when Democrats propose increasing taxes on high-income people and corporations, people may suspect that the increases will wind up applying to them too.  

Finally, here's a summary of the Gallup questions about taxes on high-income people, middle-income people, the poor, and corporations.  The numbers are percent who think the group pays too much minus the percent who think they pay too little:

Although federal taxes on corporations and upper-income people have declined over that period, public opinion hasn't moved towards saying that they pay too little:  in fact, there's been some movement in the other direction.  

So overall, I think that policy doesn't reflect the strength of oligarchs so much as the weakness of popular support for high taxes on anyone, even rich people and corporations.  This doesn't mean that Democrats shouldn't try to increase taxes on rich people and corporations--just that such attempts won't be especially popular.  Public opinion is likely to be pretty evenly divided, as it was with the Clinton and Obama tax reforms.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research] 

*Data from the Federal Reserve

Get back

 A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times published an op-ed by Adam Grant, Marissa Shandell, and Courtney Elliott called "The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week."  A few days ago, the Times promoted it in an e-mail, saying "Here’s what six years of data says is actually driving the push to get employees back to the office."  The reason they propose is narcissism--that many CEOs are narcissists, and narcissists want people to display deference to them and find displays of deference more gratifying when they are done in person.  The op-ed is based on a paper by Shandell, Elliot and Grant published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes with the title "Worship Me at the Office Altar."  They collected statements about remote work and several qualities that they regarded as measures of narcissism for a sample of about 250 CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and found that CEOs who ranked higher in narcissism were more negative in their comments about remote work.

Their argument for a connection seems unconvincing to me.  Fortune 500 companies are large organizations, so the CEO never has face-to-face contact with the average employee.  If the general claim about narcissists is correct, it would be relevant to the top management team--CEOs who rank higher in narcissism would want them to return to in-person work more quickly--but wouldn't have any implications for ordinary workers.  However, they do appear to have strong evidence of a connection (t-ratio of about 4), so how do I explain that?  

One factor is that the usual t-ratios assume that the errors are normally distributed.  In fact, the residuals from the regression aren't normally distributed:  

With an error distribution like this, the standard errors will tend to be underestimated so the t-ratios will be overestimated.  There is no perfect way to address this, but I tried a few reasonable alternatives and they produced t-ratios of about 2.5.  That's less impressive, but still reasonably strong evidence by conventional standards.  

The more important factor involves their measure of narcissism.   They propose four indicators:  size of signature on the annual reports, size of the CEO photo, cash compensation relative to the second-highest paid executive, and non-cash compensation relative to the second-highest paid executive.  If you have multiple measures of the same underlying concept, all of the measures should be positively correlated with each other.  In fact, the correlations among these variables range from -.113 to .160, with an average of .044.*  There are two possible interpretations:  either there is no underlying quality to measure, or that at least three of the four "indicators" are not good measures of that quality.  I'll go with the poor measures interpretation:  in particular, even CEOs don't have complete control over their own compensation or the compensation of other managers.   

 If you include the individual variables as predictors in the regression, relative cash compensation consistently is statistically significant, relative non-cash compensation sometimes is, photo size sometimes scrapes in as "significant at the 10% level," and signature size is never close.  So there's pretty good evidence that CEOs who are highly compensated (relative to the next highest paid employee) expressed more opposition to remote work.  How would I explain this?  My proposal is that managements generally wanted to get employees back to in-person work--maybe not all the way back, but faster and farther than the typical employee would want--and that more prominent CEOs took the lead in delivering the bad news.  "Prominence" could be understood as status within the profession--high compensation is a sign that someone is regarded as an outstanding leader.  Or it could be within the organization:  high compensation could indicate a hierarchical organization in which nothing was final until you heard it from the big guy.  In less hierarchical organizations, the CEO could stand back and let subordinates deliver the bad news.   

Although I disagree with their interpretation, Shandell, Elliott, and Grant deserve credit for collecting and compiling the data (the link is on p. 5 of their paper, which I think is open access).  Unfortunately, they don't include the names of the companies, which would let other researchers add to the data set.  Confidentiality isn't an issue, since all of the data are from public records.  

*If you're interested in Cronbach's alpha, it's about .125.  

Done them proud?

 In 1999, Gallup asked "Overall, do you think the signers of the Declaration of Independence would be pleased or disappointed by the way the United States has turned out?"  The question was repeated in June 2001, 2003, June 2008, 2013, and June 2026.  In 2007 and 2010, CBS asked a similar question:  whether the "founding fathers" would be pleased or disappointed.  Finally, in 2010 (January and June), 2011, 2016 and 2017 Fox News asked if the founding fathers would be "proud of the country if they could see it today."  Here is the percent positive (pleased or proud) answers:

The breakdown by party identification (June 2010 and June 2016 are unavailable):*

Partisan differences were small and Democratic and Republican opinions moved in the same direction for the first decade or so, but then diverged in 2010.  The next figure shows the gap between supporters of the President's party and supporters of the opposition:

    For some evaluations, like economic conditions, partisan differences have increased steadily in the 21st century:  growing from Bush to Obama, Obama to Trump, Trump to Biden, Biden to Trump II.  This is different:  the partisan gap was bigger under Obama than in either Trump term (unfortunately the question wasn't asked in the Biden years).  Why is this question different?  My guess is that people focus on the political situation when answering, and evaluation of the political situation involves views of the opposition as well as the party in power.  That is, someone might think that the president was doing a good job but that the founders would be distressed to see the amount or kind of opposition that he was encountering.  Of course, Democrats were upset about Republican opposition during the Obama years, but I think they were still somewhat hopeful about winning a clear majority or achieving some bipartisan successes.  As a result, they were more optimistic in assessing the general political situation than Republicans are now.  

*I don't show independents in order to keep things simpler.  As you'd expect, they are generally in between supporters of the president's party and the opposition, and I don't see any clear changes in their relative position.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

That's great

 In May, the Guardian published a list of the 100 best novels "as voted for by authors, critics and academics worldwide."  They just gave ranks, but I was interested in total scores--how much difference is there between first and 10th place, or 10th and 100th?  I also wondered if there were novelists whose votes were scattered among a number of different works, so they would do better in a ranking by authors.  This article by Jarrett Kobek  has a link to a spreadsheet with the choices of individual voters.  I calculated scores as 10 points for a first choice, 9 for second, .... 1 for 10th.*  

There were 172 voters, who selected 670 different novels.  The distribution was highly skewed--the leader was Middlemarch, with 446 points, and at the other end there were 67 novels that got a single point (ie, one voter placed them tenth).  To make the top 100 required only 18 points--twelve novels had exactly that total.  Turning to authors, 474 received votes.  The top 25:

                                        N    points Guardian

George Eliot                 60    469 83.45
Virginia Woolf                64    407 84.35
Jane Austen                    63 390 82.50
Leo Tolstoy                    47     379 65.95
Toni Morrison                 57    361 75.05

James Joyce                 39 295 53
Charles Dickens         44 269 57.45
Marcel Proust                 27 201 37.05
Gustave Flaubert         22 159 29.95
Vladimir Nabokov         27 157 34.85

Henry James                 29 151 36.55
Gabriel García Márquez 23 126 29.30
Charlotte Brontë         21 121 27.05
F Scott Fitzgerald         21 120 27.00
Herman Melville         18 116 23.80

Emily Brontë                 15 114 20.70
Fyodor Dostoevsky         17 110 22.50
Laurence Sterne         18 109 23.45
Franz Kafka                 18 107 23.35
George Orwell          20 104 25.20

Kazuo Ishiguro         19 97 23.85
Chinua Achebe         15 94 19.70
Salman Rushdie         15 86 19.30
Miguel de Cervantes 11 84 15.20
Muriel Spark                 16 83 20.15

On the other side, here are some well-known novelists who didn't get much support:

                                points
Balzac                        7
Stephen Crane            9
Richard Wright          10
Zola                            13

In 1998,  the Modern Library offered a list of the top 100 novels published in English in the 20th century.  Novels from that list that got no support in the Guardian survey include Brave New World (#5), Darkness at Noon (8),  An American Tragedy (16), Native Son (20--Wright's points in the Guardian poll were for Black Boy), Henderson the Rain King (21), Sister Carrie (33), All the King's Men (36), The Heart of the Matter (40), and Lord of the Flies (41).  

One pattern that seems clear is that realist novels of the 19th and early 20th century don't get much support from the Guardian voters.  Why not?  The basic realist plot is that an outsider tries to get somewhere but is defeated, partly by social injustice but partly by his/her flaws and bad decisions.  I think that accounts for their poor showing in the Guardian survey:  educated middle class people are increasingly uncomfortable with anything that seems to express a critical view of disadvantaged people.  Another pattern is that novels by Americans and Europeans which are set in the rest of the world don't do well in the Guardian survey.  In addition to the examples of Henderson the Rain King and The Heart of the Matter, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano ranked 11th in the Modern Library list and got only 9 points from the Guardian, which puts it about 250th.  There's one big exception:  Heart of Darkness gets 42 points, for a rank of 40.  I think there's a reason for that:  it's about the damage done by colonialism.  Conrad gets only 9 points for all of his other novels (Modern Library had The Secret Agent ranked 46th, Nostromo 47th, and Heart of Darkness at 67th).  Finally, two novels with political themes do well in the Guardian ranking:  1984 at 16th and The Handmaid's Tale at 36th. But that's about it--several of the Modern Library picks that got no support in the Guardian survey seem at least equally relevant to contemporary politics.  Overall, the Guardian list seems to reflect the view that writers should "stay in their lanes."  

*The Guardian used a different formula:  1 point for being chosen and then a bonus of 0.5 for first, 0.45 for second, .... 0.05 for tenth.  That doesn't make sense to me--it makes the difference between 11th and 10th more important than the difference between 10th and first.   

Highly respected, part 2

 In a recent post, I found that people who believed that they were treated with "less courtesy or respect than other people" were more likely to vote for Trump in 2016 (and probably 2020).  This post will look at it from another direction:  who is more likely to think that they are treated with less respect?*  I considered race, sex, age, and education.  My expectations were that black people, younger people, men, and less educated people would be more likely to perceive disrespect.  Age turned out to be the most important factor, followed by race, with no clear differences by education and sex.  But although the overall average is about the same for men and women, there is an interaction with age:

Young men perceive more disrespect than young women, but middle-aged women perceive more disrespect than middle-aged men.  Or looking at it in terms of the relation with age, perceived disrespect declines steadily with age for men, but stays about the same or even increases until about age 40 or 50 for women and then declines.  There's also an interaction between education and sex:  education makes a difference among men (less educated men perceive more disrespect), but not as much (maybe not at all) among women.  There are also interactions involving race:  black men perceive more disrespect than black women.  In fact, the means for white men, white women, and black women are very close, and are consistent with the hypothesis that race doesn't make any difference among women.  Finally, there's an interaction between race and education:  among whites, people with college degrees perceive less disrespect; among blacks, there's no clear difference.  I looked at possible interactions between race and age, and education and age, but found no evidence of them.  I also looked at the possibility of a three-way interaction between race, sex, and education, but the numbers are too small to say anything definite.  

A belief that you are treated with less respect than other people could reflect experience--you really are treated with less respect--or greater sensitivity--you are more likely to interpret the same treatment as disrespect.  The group differences probably reflect a mix of both, but there's no way to distinguish them in these data.

*In my previous post, I asked "whether the association involves support for conservatism in general, or a specific kind of populist conservatism... I'll try to shed light on that by looking at the association with various political views."  I did that analysis, and found that among people with college degrees, feeling that you are treated with less respect is generally associated with more conservative views, but it's not possible to be more specific, partly because the number of cases isn't that large and partly because the GSS questions on politics aren't very well suited to identifying populist conservatism.

A distinction without (much) difference

Last year I had a post about the claim that men don't have as many friends as they used to.   I noted that the 2021 survey cited as evidence of a large decline in friendship among men showed a similarly large decline among women.   That survey used different procedures from previous ones, so it's not clear that we should accept it as evidence of a real decline in friendship, but if we do, it shows a decline among people generally rather than men specifically.  

A few days ago, I read an interview of Laurie Santos, a professor of Psychology at Yale, by Derek Thompson.  Santos said there was a decline in friendship, and "that decrease is much worse for men. One study found that if you look at what’s standardly considered a good level of friendship -- do you have six close friends you could talk to? -- men have shown a decrease in that number by about half in the last couple of decades. And if you ask how many men say they have no close friendships at all, you see around 15% of American guys in midlife saying exactly that. That’s a fivefold decrease since folks have been running this survey."  Then there was this figure, summarizing the same 2021 survey I wrote about:

The share of men who reported six or more close friends indeed declined by more than half, from 55% to 27%.  The share of women who reported six or more friends declined from 41% to 24%.  That's a decline of 51% among men and only 41% among women, but it's just one possible comparison:  the share who report 10 or more declined by 62% among men and 61% among women, and the share who report five or more declined by 40% among men and 38% among women.  And the share of women reporting no close friends rose from 2% to 10%:  the same ratio of 5 as among men.  That is, the table doesn't support the general claim that any decline has been much worse among men.*  

That raises the question of why this misinterpretation is so prevalent (Santos followed this report, which is the source of the table).  The obvious factor is that people just like to talk about differences between men and women.  A second possibility is the influence of political ideology:  the idea of an especially large decline among men appeals to both liberals and conservatives, for different reasons.  Liberals are inclined to think that the traditional model of masculinity is unsuited to modern society, and we're seeing a symptom of that; conservatives are inclined to think that we've paid so much attention to the problems of women that we're neglecting the problems of men.  And moderates think that if both liberals and conservatives agree that there's a problem, we have a welcome opportunity for cooperation across ideological lines.  

*Even if you think that the comparison between six or more vs. five or fewer is especially important, you need to consider sampling error.  The 2021 survey had about 2000 people, and the 1990 survey had about 1200, so the figures for men and women are based on samples of 1000 and 600.  Then you have ratios, and differences between ratios, increasing the margin of error.  I estimate that the standard error of the difference between the ratios is about 5.5% assuming simple random sampling, but even without doing calculations it's clearly substantial.  

Highly Respected?

 It's often said that a large part of Donald Trump's support represents a reaction to the disdain that ordinary people receive from the educated middle classes.   For example, in a recent opinion piece in the New York Times, Dylan Gottlieb writes "yuppies and their arrogance bred new resentments. In the 2010s, a brand of populist conservatism opposed nearly every tenet of the yuppie dream, from racial and gender diversity to educational meritocracy to frictionless finance and globalization to gourmet culture and the very idea of urban living itself."  I don't think this works as a historical account:  rather than growing arrogance in the educated middle classes, there's been a growth of social egalitarianism.  But there's still a question about the individual-level relationship between resentment and politics:  are people who feel like they are looked down upon more likely to support "populist conservatism"?  There aren't many survey questions on the subject, but since 2018 the General Social Survey has had one on how often you are "you are treated with less courtesy and respect than other people" (six categories, from "almost every day" to "never").  A few years ago I looked at it and found "no clear connection to choices in the 2016 election or to opinions on a variety of political issues," but more data has accumulated since then, so I thought it was time for a new look.

The average (never=1.....almost every day=6) is 2.98 among people who say they voted for Trump in 2016 and 2.92 among people who say they voted for Clinton, for a difference of .06, but the standard error of the difference is about .08:  that is, no evidence that it's anything more than sampling error.  But feelings that you are treated with less respect differ by race and gender (higher among black people, especially black men), education (higher among less educated people), and age (higher among young people), and these factors also make a difference to voting choices.  In a logistic regression of Trump vs. Clinton voting with controls for age in years, college degree, black race, sex, and an interaction of race and sex, the estimate for feeling you are treated with less respect is .092 with a standard error of .023.  That is, people who think they are treated with less respect are more likely to vote for Trump.  It's not a huge difference, but it's large enough to be of interest (e. g., an increase of 4 points on the scale is about equivalent to the gender gap among whites).

In my previous post, I suggested that feelings of resentment might be particularly strong among more educated conservatives.  That is, conservatives are a minority at most colleges and and in many professional jobs, so they probably will encounter occasions when they are treated with less respect than their colleagues.  If you add an interaction between college degree and feelings of being treated with less respect:

                                           B       SE          T        P

disrspct	.057	.027		2.094	.037
black	-2.407	.202	.	-11.926	.000
female	-.402	.064		-6.301	.000
age	.009	.002		4.599	.000
black*female	-.761	.330		-2.306	.021
college	-.413	.206	.	-2.010	.045
college * disrspct	.106	.047		2.250	.025

That is, the estimated effect of perceived disrespect among people who didn't graduate from college is .057; among those who did, it's .163.  This is just the 2016 election:  the 2020 estimates are in the same direction and of similar size, but not statistically significant.  

Overall, it appears that feeling that you aren't treated with respect is associated with support for Trump, but that the association is stronger among more educated people:  that is, it's more relevant to middle-class support than to working-class support.  This raises the question of whether the association involves support for conservatism in general, or a specific kind of populist conservatism.  In a future post, I'll try to shed light on that by looking at the association with various political views.  

Why not?

 In January, I had a post about why Trump was renominated in 2024.  I argued that it wasn't because he of strong support among ordinary Republicans, but because of support from Republican elites.  Andrew Gelman recently discussed my post in his blog, which led me to some further thoughts.  My post concluded by saying "'the base' didn't impose Trump on Republican elites; Republican elites asked for him."  In retrospect, saying that they "asked for him" was going too far--it would be more accurate to say that they didn't put up much opposition even though Trump had shown that he was a drag on the party.  He underperformed in both 2016 and 2020, and he hurt Republican chances in Congress by promoting weak candidates like Herschel Walker and Dr. Oz.  So even if they liked some of Trump's policies, they had a good reason to turn to a new candidate in 2024.  

Why didn't Trump encounter significant resistance from Republican elites?  One possibility is that they they realized had so much support from ordinary Republican voters that resistance would be futile (and would expose them to retaliation).  In my earlier post, I looked at questions about whether people would like Trump to run for the 2024 nomination and compared them to earlier questions on whether they wanted Gore, Kerry, and Romney to run for re-nomination after their defeats.  Those questions are usually asked in the first couple of years after the election; once it gets closer to the next election, you get questions about who people would choose out of the declared or potential candidates.  The figure shows the percentages of Republicans favoring Trump and DeSantis in surveys between July 2022 and August 2023.

Trump was ahead in the first few surveys, but his support declined and DeSantis's rose until sometime in early 2023.  After that, Trump steadily gained, but he didn't consistently break 50% until late May 2023.  In the last few surveys, the average was 54% for Trump, 17% for DeSantis, and 29% for all others.

So there was a period when Trump seemed vulnerable and other candidates were starting their campaigns (Trump declared in November 2022, Haley in February 2023, and others in March-June 2023).   During this time, endorsements might have been helpful in getting opposition campaigns off the ground.  But only a few prominent Republicans offered them:  among Republican Senators and Governors, by the middle of May ten had endorsed Trump and no one had endorsed any of his opponents.  There were six for various opponents by the end of June, then one for Trump in July and one more in August.  After that Trump pulled ahead steadily.  That is, very few prominent Republicans endorsed other candidates when their endorsements might have made a difference.  To consider a few examples, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski both endorsed Nikki Haley, but not until early March 2024, when it was too late to matter.  A few days ago, the New York Times had a story on a new memoir by Lamar Alexander (who left the Senate in January 2021) in which he "says President Trump committed an impeachable offense on Jan. 6."   But Ballotpedia doesn't record an endorsement from Alexander in the 2024 campaign.  Mitch Daniels didn't offer one either.  

 Why did prominent Republicans who didn't support Trump and had no particular reason to fear him stay on the sidelines?  As I've mentioned before, the rise of partisanship means that the perception of party unity has a larger impact on the fortunes of the party--when a party is seen as divided, it does worse.   If a large number of prominent Republicans had come out against Trump, that might have stopped him from getting the nomination, but it would also have hurt Republican chances in 2024 (especially since Trump would not have been a gracious loser).  As an alternative, they hoped that he would fade away on his own, and by the time it became clear that wouldn't happen, it was too late,

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Time for a change?

 I wanted to write a post on opinion about redistricting, but there are only a few survey questions on the subject.  Two points are clear:  most people think it should be done by some body other than state legislatures and most people pay little attention to the issue (many don't know how it's actually done in their state).  In the course of looking for questions, I ran across one that I'd written about in the pioneering days of this blog, where people were asked to choose among three statements:

a.  "Our form of government, based on the constitution, has stood the test of time and no fundamental changes need to be made in it."

b.  "The Constitution has served its purpose well, but it has not kept up with the times and should be thoroughly revised to make it fit present day needs."

c.  "Changing times have outmoded our system of government and we might as well accept the fact that sooner or later we will have to have a new form of government."

At that time, I just found that it was asked in 1971, but now I discovered that it was also asked in 1973, 1976 and 1979.  The percent choosing each response:

The earlier numbers are from a question that had the same statement for option b, but somewhat different statements for a and c (see the linked post for complete wording). Over the long term, opinions shifted away from "no change" and towards the middle option, but between 1971-3 and 1976-9 there was a move towards "no change."  I can think of two possible reasons:  first, the celebration of the bicentennial in 1976 brought a lot of mostly favorable attention to the founders and second, after the Watergate scandal concluded with Nixon's resignation there was a widespread feeling that "the system worked."  

As far as group differences in opinions, liberals were more likely to favor revising the Constitution, but it was only a small difference.  The Democratic/Republican difference was even smaller.  Two larger differences were that younger people and blacks were more likely to favor revision or replacement.  Education also mattered:

Not HS grad:    36%     35%    28%

HS:                   44%     43%    13%

College:            63%     33%      4%

College graduates were substantially more likely to favor "no fundamental changes," and much less likely to favor "sooner or later we will have to change."  In my earlier post, I found the same general pattern in the 1971 data, and remarked that it could be regarded as surprising because more educated people are usually less attached to tradition.   I think this example shows something important about the effect of education on political views.  There's a tradition, going from Joseph Schumpeter through Rob Henderson's "luxury beliefs," that educated people are attracted to oppositional or edgy views.  But in some cases, like this one, educated people are more strongly attached to what you could regard as the core beliefs of a society.  

Hopefully someone will repeat the question in connection with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.  I think that the connection with ideology and party would be considerably stronger today, since the idea of constitutional originalism has become a central part of conservative thought. 

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research] 

The root of all evil?, part 2

People are more optimistic about the future when their party is in power.  This isn't surprising--in fact, it would be surprising if this wasn't the case--but you'd expect the effect to fade as they look farther into the future.  There's a question that I've written about several times, "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?"   The average (higher numbers mean more optimistic) for Democrats and Republicans:

Both Democrats and Republicans are more optimistic when a President of their own party is in office, but the gap is much bigger for Republicans:  70-46 vs. 62-59.  Although it's hard to be sure because of the small number of cases, this gap doesn't seem to have existed in the 20th century:  it emerged in the GW Bush or Obama administrations.  

This question focuses on economic prospects.  There's also a broader question:  "Looking ahead to the next 10 years in the United States, would you describe yourself as optimistic or pessimistic about the future of the country?"  followed by wheter that is very or only somewhat optimistic/pessimistic.  Unfortunately it hasn't been asked since 2014, and I could only get party breakdowns for a few cases, but here are the means for those:

The percent "very pessimistic":

In the first two surveys (under Clinton and GW Bush) there were only a small number of "very pessimistic" responses among both Democrats and Republicans; then there was a surge among Republicans in 2011 and 2014.  

Why has the effect of partisanship grown?   I think it is because of a change among Republican opinion leaders:  rather than just saying that liberals/progressives have bad ideas, they increasingly say that they are evil people (or the tools of evil people) who are trying to destroy America.  Of course, there's always been some of this, but it was mostly confined to the fringes:  the mainstream leaders would make some effort to show respect and give their opponents credit for good intentions.    

Finally, to return to the subject of my previous post, progressives in general support the proposition that people are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights, but what about Wilson?  Thomas is not the only one to claim that Wilson rejected it.  Glenn Beck, and on a more respectable level, Christopher Cox (a long-time member of Congress and later a chair of the SEC) also make that claim and offer quotes from his work to support it.  However, they are very selective quotes:  Beck says that "To Wilson, the 'question is not whether men are born free and equal or not,' because we all 'know they are not.'"  He omits a crucial part "Suppose they were born so.  You know they are not .  They may have been born free and equal, but they are neither free nor equal if things of this sort can go on...."   So Wilson was appealing to the principles of freedom and equality, and saying it was not realized in contemporary society.  Of course, Wilson didn't always live up to those principles, especially when it came to race.  But his racism wasn't an expression of the progressive philosophy--it was in conflict with it.*

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

*W. E. B. Du Bois supported Wilson for president in 1912.    He was disappointed, but said that was because Wilson was "overwhelmed by a sudden and vicious onslaught on the part of his Southern supporters. Hungry for office they poured into Washington and regarded the election of a Democrat as a signal for a host of anti-Negro measures."