Changes, part 2

My last post took changes in the effects of education and income on economic opinions (or at least one important economic opinion) back to 1978.  However, given the upheavals of the 1960s, it seemed possible that there had already been substantial changes even before that starting date, so I wanted to see if I could get anything from the 1950s or before.  Between 1945 and 1947, several survey firms asked "Which of these statements do you most agree with?...The most important job for the government is to make certain that there are good opportunities for each person to get ahead on his own, the most important job for the government is to guarantee every person a decent and steady job and standard of living."  Unfortunately, that question has never been repeated, but there has been a similar one,  "Should the federal government see to it that every person has a job and a good standard of living, or should the government stay out of it and let every person get ahead on their own?" which was asked a few times in the 1970s and 1980s and most recently in 1999.*  I took one of the 1946 surveys and the 1999 surveys and did logistic regressions with education (coded into four categories from not a high school graduate to college graduate) and log income (using the midpoints of the original categories) as independent variables.  The results:

                 1946       1999
Log inc     .155       .388
                (.061)     (.091)

Educ        .565         .102
                (.049)      (.065)

The positive sign means that higher values of the independent variables were associated with the "get ahead on their own" option.  The effect of education was substantially smaller in 1999 than it had been in 1946, and the effect of income was larger (although there's a good deal of uncertainty about changes in the effect of income--the standard error of the difference is .110). 

Putting this together with the question from my last post, I think that it's not just the relative importance of economic and social issues that has changed since the middle of the 20th century--another factor is that education used to have a substantial "conservatising" effect on economic opinions, but no longer does.   


*There was also one that asked people to place themselves on a 7 point scale running from "The government in Washington should see to it that every person has a job and a good standard of living." to "The government should just let each person get ahead on their own," which was included in the ANES in the 1980s and 1990s and revived in a PRRI survey in 2013. 

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]