Footnote 2

In a post about the claim of rising "despair" among less educated people, I noted that when asked "Some people say that people get ahead by their own hard work; others say that lucky breaks or help from other people are more important. Which do you think is most important?" people without a college degree had become more likely to say "hard work" while college graduates had become more likely to say "lucky breaks or help."  I interpreted the changes among less educated people as counting against the hypothesis of rising despair, on the grounds that "hard work" was the optimistic answer.  But Tom VanHeuvelen has suggested a different interpretation:  "If you attribute success and failure mostly to your own efforts, well, then what do you make of life when the massive structural factors out of your control . . . all hit you in a span of two decades? It certainly feels like a depressing and mortifying combination of factors."  The implication is that if a people think that success is due to hard work, when when things get worse they will blame themselves.  This sounds plausible, and in fact I think some noted sociologist or political scientist said that this was one of the reasons for the relative lack of "class consciousness" in the United States.  On the other hand, my interpretation also seems plausible, at least to me. 

To try to see which interpretation fits here, I looked at the correlation between views on the sources of success and happiness.  On the average, people who say that success is due to hard work are happier than those who say it's due to breaks or help.  It seems to me that VanHeuvelen's interpretation suggests that this relationship should differ by social position:  it will be reversed, or at least weaker, among people in lower social positions.  That is, if you think that getting ahead is the result of hard work, and you haven't gotten ahead, then you'll feel bad about yourself.  On the other side, people who have been successful and think that success is the result of hard work will enjoy not just the material benefits of success, but greater self-esteem. 

 Breaking it down by education

                                           Correlation
Not HS grad                           .11
HS grad                                  .09
College grad                           .09

By occupational prestige

Low (1-30)                            .09
Medium low (30-40)             .05
Medium (40-50)                    .05
Medium high (50-60)            .09
High (60+)                             .06

There is no apparent pattern in the group differences, and they are small enough to be ascribed to sampling variation.  That is, it seems like the relationship is pretty much the same at all social levels:  people who think that getting ahead is the result of hard work are happier, even if by conventional standards they have not gotten ahead themselves.  It could be that people who think that getting ahead is due to hard work believe that they will get ahead in the future.  Or people may be able to see themselves as having done pretty well by their own standards--compared to some other people they've known, or considering the problems they've faced. 

I restricted this analysis to whites, since the "despair" arguments focus on them.  But I thought a comparison of races might be interesting:

                    Corr
White             .09
Black              .03
Other              .07

The black-white difference is statistically significant.  I don't have an interpretation for it, but it seems worth thinking about.  As far as the relationship between race and views on getting ahead, blacks are a bit more likely to say lucky breaks or help.