Above and below

 Many people have observed that in the last 5 or 10 years, a gap has emerged between public ratings of economic conditions and standard measures like unemployment and inflation:  people say that the economy is bad even when the statistics look pretty good.  One view is that the gap is due to politics or the nature of media coverage; the other is that it's because the standard statistics miss something about people's experience of the economy.  In the New York Times, David French writes that he used to favor the first view, but has now shifted to the second.   He says that what the standard statistics miss is the development of complex pricing systems; rather than offering a standard product at a standard price, companies now offer different levels at different prices.  For example, airlines used to distinguish between first class, business class, and economy--now they make a lot of additional distinctions, charging for a little bit of extra legroom, boarding in the first group, and so on.  His idea is that now people are constantly being reminded that other people are getting premium service--they are discontented because they're more aware of what they are missing.  

This change seems likely to have had the most impact on the middle and upper-middle classes:  people who could afford something beyond the necessities, but not at the premium level.  You have to be able to afford to fly before you're aware of all the extras you can't afford.   Since 1972, the General Social Survey has asked "Compared with American families in general, would you say your family income is far below average, below average, average, above average, or far above average?"  If people have reacted in the way that French suggests, the percent who see themselves as "average" or "above average" will have declined in the last decade or so.

The percent who say their income is average:

That's been declining pretty steadily over the whole period.  Now, (somewhat) above and below average.  

They both go up and down with short-term economic conditions--for example, below average rose and above average fell from 2008 to 2010.  But they both have upward trends, and the percent rating themselves as "above average" reached its highest level ever in 2024.  

Finally, far above and far below average:

They both have clear upward trends.  

The basic pattern is that there's more dispersion, but no change in the mean.  In a general way, this matches real changes in the distribution of income:  inequality has increased since the 1970s.  Although the increase has slowed down or stopped in the last 15 years or so, it may take time for people to become aware of that.  In any case, average ratings of your relative economic position haven't declined in recent years.

Although French identifies a real change, it doesn't seem to have affected people's perceptions of their economic position.  I think that's because it can work in both directions--people may look up at the people who get something better, but they may also look at those who get something worse and congratulate themselves at being able to afford an upgrade.  There are also people who could afford an upgrade but pass it up and congratulate themselves at getting a bargain.  

So we're still left with the paradox:  people think their own economic situation is pretty good, but that "the economy" is in bad shape.  Of course, this is just one possible comparison:  looking at other people today.   Another comparison that people talk about is with previous generations:  for example, where your parents were at the same age.  I'll look at that in my next post.

Whose idea was that?

A lot of the commentary after Paul Ehrlich's death said that his ideas were popular among liberals and/or "elites."  For example, Nicholas Eberstadt writes:  "In retrospect, what may look most amazing about Ehrlich’s career is the company he managed to keep. Despite his harsh and jarring rhetoric, his strident ideology, and his proclivity for veering off toward pseudo-science, Ehrlich was embraced into the bosom of the American academy. .... But perhaps this shouldn’t surprise at all. Though polemical and extreme in so many of his formulations, Ehrlich’s pronouncements on the human condition were largely in consonance with the moral panic about the 'population explosion' that swept through the American Establishment during the Cold War era."* But the New York Times obituary mentioned a detail that suggests a different possibility--Ehrlich was a frequent guest on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show.  So maybe his ideas were popular among the sort of people who watched the Tonight Show:  that is, a broad range of people.  

In 1974, a Gallup Poll asked "SOME PEOPLE FEEL THAT THE WORLD WILL REACH THE POINT SOMEDAY WHERE, BECAUSE OF POPULATION AND ECONOMIC GROWTH, THERE WON'T BE ENOUGH WATER, LAND, FOOD, AND OTHER NATURAL RESOURCES FOR EVERYBODY. OTHER PEOPLE BELIEVE THAT THE WORLD CAN CONTINUE TO GROW WITHOUT RUNNING INTO SERIOUS SHORTAGES BECAUSE SOMEBODY WILL ALWAYS BE ABLE TO SOLVE THESE PROBLEMS. DO YOU, YOURSELF, FEEL THAT SOONER OR LATER WORLD POPULATION AND ECONOMIC GROWTH WILL HAVE TO BE REGULATED TO AVOID SERIOUS SHORTAGES, OR NOT?"  62% said yes and 30% said no.  It was asked again in 1976:   65% said yes and 27% said no.  

Using the 1976 survey, here are "yes" answers by self-rated ideology 

Very liberal                                54%                
Moderately liberal                     76%
Middle of the road                     74%

Moderately conservative            66%
Very conservative                       58%
Don't know                                 70%

Support seems to have been somewhat higher in the middle (and those who didn't choose a label) and lower in the extremes.  Why wasn't there a straightforward relationship?  I think it's because there were two offsetting factors:  on the one hand, environmentalism was associated with concern about overpopulation; on the other hand, the Malthusian position suggested that trying to help poor people would be futile or harmful, giving it an affinity with conservatism, 

Not college graduate                      67%

College graduate                            79%

College graduates were more likely to think that regulation would be necessary.  But if we restrict it to whites:

Not college graduate                      73%

College graduate                            80%

The difference by education is smaller (and not statistically significant).  The reason that restricting it to whites makes a difference is that blacks were much less likely to think that regulation would be necessary (divided about 50/50) and less likely to be college graduates.  I considered a few other group differences:  men and younger people were a bit more likely to agree, and there were no clear differences by religion.  I'm not sure why race was so important--I just tried it because it's a standard control variable.  But the general point is that it wasn't just the "Establishment": most people were concerned about the "population explosion," to the point of supporting a policy that would now be regarded as pretty extreme. That's not hard to understand:  world population was growing rapidly, and people often think in terms of a fixed stock of resources.  

*As a sociologist, I have to note that this is an example of the dumbing down of the term "moral panic" to  be just a way of dismissing something as not a real problem.  In the original sense, the "moral" part was important.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Bad to worse?

In late 2022, I had a couple of posts about perceptions of moral conditions.  I concluded that assessments had become more negative in the 1960s, and after that there might have been some further decline.  It turns out that Adam Mastroianni and Daniel Gilbert were doing a similar study, which was published in Nature in 2023.  Their conclusions are completely different:

"A linear model indicated that the proportion of participants who reported moral decline was not significantly influenced by the year in which the survey was administered, b = 0.07, 95% confidence interval (CI) = [−0.11, 0.24], t(175) = 0.77, P = 0.45, adjusted R2 = −0.002, and the same model fit in a Bayesian framework indicated strong evidence of no effect (Bayes Factor of 0.04), which is to say that US Americans have been reporting moral decline at the same rate for as long as researchers have been asking them about it. (These and all tests we report are two-tailed)."

A problem with their model is that it omits a potentially important variable, or a lot of potentially important variables, depending on how you look at it--the specific question asked.*  Their sample of 177 cases includes over 70 distinct questions.  Some of these differences are small, but some are substantial.   For example, "Would you say that people are more willing, less willing, or about as willing to help their neighbors as they were twenty-five years ago?" and "In the last eight years, do you think crime has increased, decreased, or stayed about the same?" are clearly different questions, although they both involve the general topic of change in moral conditions.  So you should consider a model that includes dummy variables for the different questions in addition to the time trend.  The data set is not available to the public (the numbers are the property of the data archives), so I can't fit that model.  However, I can consider two questions that were asked frequently (data are available from the Roper Center).  One is "how satisfied are you with the direction that the country is going in at this time in terms of morals and ethics?...Very satisfied, somewhat satisfied, not very satisfied, not at all satisfied"; the other is "right now, do you think the state of moral values in this country as a whole is getting better or getting worse?"

  The figure shows positive minus negative responses to both questions over time.  For the first question, there is a clear downward trend (a t-ratio of about 10 if you regress the summary measure on time).  For the second, there's no clear trend, but the numbers are consistent with the hypothesis of a drop after 2004.  In addition to the trend, the responses for the first question show some short-term variation--e.g., opinions were more positive in October-December 2001 than in January-March 2001.  It's easy to think of an explanation for that.  

While I'm at it, here's the estimated assessment of moral conditions, adjusting for question, in the data set that I compiled.  It's not the same as the Mastroianni/Gilbert data, but there's some overlap--mine includes the "getting better or getting worse" question, but not "how satisfied are you with the direction."

*Another problem is the appeal to a "Bayesian framework" to claim that there is positive evidence of no change, but I've written about that at length here and here, so I'll leave that aside for now.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

No problem

 Adrian Vermeule, a professor at Harvard Law School, writes that "the Supreme Court faces a serious problem in the court of public opinion . . . . If the Court, having invalidated the President’s tariffs, also invalidates the birthright citizenship order . .   the Court will have invalidated the President’s two main or signature issues, on which he has campaigned since 2016 and twice won the Presidency."  

In the past year, a number of surveys have asked about birthright citizenship.  The wording varies, so I'll summarize by giving percent in favor of keeping birthright citizenship and percent in favor of eliminating it:

                     Keep     Eliminate
Jan 2025       61%          30%
Jan 2025       56%          43%
Feb 2025       55%          31%
Feb 2025       56%          39%
April 2025     67%          31%
May 2025      54%          28%
June 2025      74%          23%
June 2025      64%          31%
Nov 2025      72%          28%
Dec 2025       70%         24%

Average          63%        31%

All ten surveys showed a majority in favor of keeping birthright citizenship.  The narrowest margin (56%-43%) was for a question that mentioned Trump's executive order: "As you may know, Donald Trump signed an executive order arguing that children born in the United States are only US citizens by birth if they have at least one parent who is a US citizen or a legal permanent resident. Several states and outside groups have sued the Trump administration, arguing that there is a longstanding constitutional guarantee that children born in the US are automatically US citizens by birth. All in all, do you approve or disapprove of Trump's executive order limiting citizenship?"   The widest margin (72%-28%) was for "The Supreme Court is expected to hear arguments asking whether the 14th Amendment’s provision that those 'born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,' are U.S. citizens was intended to only apply to newly freed slaves after the Civil War and should not apply to a non-citizen‘s child who is born in the United States today. How do you think the Supreme Court should rule?"  There were some questions that just asked for opinions without giving arguments on either side:  for example, in May 2025 "Do you support or oppose . . . ending birthright citizenship, which makes anyone born in the United States a citizen" got 28% support and 54% opposed.  Although the small number of surveys and variation in wording means that there's a lot of uncertainty, support for birthright citizenship may have increased over the year.  But clearly the Supreme Court will have more trouble in the "court of public opinion" if it supports Trump than if it opposes him on this issue.  

I found only three questions on the subject before 2025--one from late 2024, one from 2023, and one from 2015.  This is relevent to Vermeule's claim that it is "one of his signature issues, on which he has campaigned since 2016."  The general idea of "getting tough" on illegal immigration was certainly a central part of Trump's appeal, but ending birthright citizenship was not a major issue.  The Trump Social Media Archive shows only one mention of birthright citizenship during the 2016 campaign (charging that Ted Cruz had changed positions, but not giving Trump's own position) and none in 2020.  There were a few in 2024 reposting articles supporting Trump's position, but nothing in his own words.  That is, he didn't campaign on the issue--he (or Stephen Miller) just decided to elevate it after his election.   This is part of a general pattern in which the second Trump administration has been more extreme than the first.  After January 6, 2021, mainstream Republicans temporarily distanced themselves from him, and the people who stuck with Trump during his exile have had a lot of influence in his second term.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]