Now and then

 My last post looked at subjective income:  whether you think your income is above average, average, or below average.  The number of people who say that their incomes are average has declined, while the number who say their incomes are below average income has grown--but so has the number who say their incomes are above average.  So there's more dispersion, but no trend in the average rating (there are short-term changes reflecting economic conditions).  This doesn't fit one popular story about the rise and return of Trump:  that people felt like they were falling behind for a long period of time, so they lost faith in "elites" of both parties and turned to an outsider out of frustration.  But that's only one possible comparison:  you sometimes hear that people think that they are no better off, or even worse off, than their parents were.  

Last year (almost exactly one year ago), I wrote about a question that was asked a few times between 1951 and 2016:  "Comparing your present family circumstances with those when you were a child, would you say you are better off, or worse off, than your parents were then?"  In order to get a more complete picture of change, I identified questions that seemed similar--that asked people to compare themselves to their parents at the same age or their family when growing up.  The one that's been asked most frequently is in the GSS starting in 1996:  "Compared to your parents when they were the age you are now, Do you think your own standard of living now is much better, somewhat better, about the same, somewhat worse, or much worse than theirs was?"  Some of the questions had five response categories, some had three, and some just asked better or worse.  I dealt with this by considering the ratio of better to worse answers.  The results:

The ratio was always greater than one, meaning more "better off" than "worse off" answers.  The closest was in September 1980, when 44% said better off, 33% worse off, and 22% about the same.  It seems like opinions have been getting less favorable in the 21st century, but they are still more favorable than in the early 1980s or even the early 1990s (as I've noted before, people seemed to feel negative in the first half of the 1990s).  Specifically, the ratio in 2016 was almost exactly equal to the median of all surveys (there were two surveys:  Gallup found 72% better off and 20% worse off, GSS 59% and 17%, both giving a ratio of 3.6).  

So these data also don't suggest that the rise of Trump was a result of economic frustration.  There are some other interesting things in the figure, like the strongly favorable opinions in the 1980s--the economy was doing well, but no better than in the late 1990s, but the main thing is that people have not been particularly dissatisfied with their living standards in recent years.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]