Has anything changed?

The General Social Survey has a question beginning "Some people think that the government in Washington should do everything possible to improve the standard of living of all poor Americans; they are at point 1 on this card. Other people think it is not the government's responsibility, and that each person should take care of himself; they are at point 5," and asking them to place themselves.  The figure shows the estimated effects of  (log) income and education on opinions for each year that the question was asked. 

Positive numbers mean that the effects are in a conservative direction--"not the government's responsibility."  The effects of income are consistently in a conservative direction, and don't show any trend.  The effects of education are initially in a conservative direction, but go towards zero and negative in 2014, 2016, and 2018.  That is, more educated people are more liberal on this question than people with the same income but less education. 

I've had a number of other posts about changes in the effects of education on opinions about redistribution, most recently this and this.  They all suggest education used to go with opposition to egalitarian redistribution, but no longer does.  (Income still does, and the magnitude of the difference after controlling for education hasn't changed much). 

This point doesn't seem to be widely recognized--most observers seem to assume that "elites" of all kinds are opposed to redistribution.  An example is a paper that appeared in Science by Raymond Fisman, Pamela Jakiela, Shachar Kariv, and Daniel Markovits called "The Distributional Preferences of an Elite."  The elite was Yale Law students, and according to the abstract, they displayed "selfishness" and were "less fair-minded" than the average person.  The paper began by speaking of the "sense of entitlement" of "the American elite," with a footnote that spoke of "the phenomenon of growing elite entitlement."  The research itself was interesting, but the packaging was misleading.  It didn't deal with preferences involving the overall distribution of income and wealth, but with behavior in a low-stakes online exercise where you chose how to divide a sum between yourself and an anonymous "partner."  Basically, they found that the Yale Law students played the game differently than average people--they had more concern with their own gains and less with an even split between participants.  OK, but that's pretty far from issues like whether to raise taxes on people with high incomes.    A recent survey of technology entrepreneurs found that they were about as favorable to redistribution as Democrats in the general population (e. g. 76% favored raising taxes on people who earned over $250,000 per year), and from my experience of universities, I think that if Fisman et al. had asked similar questions of their participants, they would have found a lot of support for redistribution. 

If some elites, especially educational elites, have become more sympathetic to redistribution, why hasn't the change received more attention?  One reason is the natural appeal of the principle that opinions reflect straightforward self-interest.  Another possibility is what I have called an "anti-elitist mood," in which people are reluctant to say anything positive about "elites." This mood seems to be especially strong among people who are part of an elite themselves.