The biggest losers

The Census Bureau recently reported that Detroit has lost about a quarter of its population in the last decade.  I started wondering about which cities had lost population over a long period of time.  Of the 100 largest cities in 1900, 15 are smaller today (the population of the United States is about four times as large as it was in 1900).  Another five have grown by less than 5%.  

1.  St. Louis, MO      -38%

2.  Hoboken, NJ        -31%

3.  Scranton, PA       -29%

4.  St. Joseph, MO     -26%

5.  Wheeling, WV       -26%

6.  Buffalo, NY        -23%

7.  Troy, NY           -22%

8.  Wilkes-Barre, PA   -21%

9.  Fall River, MA     -13%

10. Holyoke, MA        -12%

11. Harrisburg, PA      -5%

12. Wilmington, DE      -4%

13. Pittsburgh, PA      -3%

14. Albany, NY          -0%

15. Providence, RI      -0%

16. Covington, KY       +0%

17. Cincinnati, OH      +2%

18. Reading, PA         +3%

19. Utica, NY           +3%

20. Camden, NJ          +4%

Pittsburgh would be in second place, with about a 35% loss, if you include the population of Allegheny, a city which it absorbed a few years later.  Allegheny was the 27th biggest city in its own right in 1900.

The big surprise to me was St. Joseph, which was the 34th largest city in the country in 1900.  That didn't last long--it lost about a quarter of its population, and has stayed about the same ever since.  Another surprise was that Providence was the 20th biggest city in the country in 1900.  Its estimated population in 2009 was within 100 of its population in 1900. 

Height and happiness

A recent article in the New York Times looked at the relationship between height and happiness.  It said that taller people were happier, but the relationship was stronger for men.  The results didn't actually involve happiness in the usual sense, but scores on the Gallup Index of Well-Being, which combines a numbers of things, ranging from how you felt yesterday to how often you'd visited the dentist in the last year.  I don't like indexes like this--feeling happy and visiting the dentist are both good things, but they're not the same thing.  So I looked at the relationship using answers to the question "In general, how satisfied are you with your life?" from the 2008 Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance System.  Here's a graph showing the estimated relationship (using a cubic polynomial regression) for men and women:

The red line represents women and black represents men.  The figure shows that taller people report being more satisfied with life, up until they are about six inches taller than average for their sex.  Beyond that point, satisfaction declines (I wouldn't take the exact shape of the predictions too seriously for very tall people, since there aren't that many in the sample, but there's clearly some decline).  As the Times article said, the relationship seems to be stronger for men. 

Free Speech

Americans are very positive about the Constitution in general, but not about some of the things that are actually in it.  For example, here's a question from a Gallup Poll taken in January 1941:  "Do you think newspapers should be allowed to take sides in their editorials during election campaigns?"  59% said yes, 33% said no, and 7% were undecided. 

But more educated people are more likely to favor civil liberties, or at least say that do, and that's the case here--about 80% of college graduates said it should be allowed.  So given the increase in educational levels, we might reasonably expect support to be much higher today.  There are no recent results, but the question was asked in 1985.  At that time, only 45% said that newspapers should be allowed to take sides, 48% said they shouldn't, and 7% didn't know. 

Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance

The idea that Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States has shown a lot of staying power, but few surveys have asked about it. One of those is a July 2010 poll sponsored by 60 Minutes and Vanity Fair magazine. In this survey, 25% said that they thought Obama was born in another country and 14% said they didn't know. The challenge in interpreting these results is to separate “pure ignorance” from “politicized ignorance.” 

By “pure ignorance,” I mean people who don't know that the constitution limits the presidency to “natural-born citizens.” Such people might be neutral or even favorable about Obama being born outside the United States—they might even think it shows that America is a land of opportunity. The survey doesn't ask who you voted for in the last election, but we can look at groups that are heavily favorable to Obama: blacks, liberals, and people who approved of the administration's handling of the BP oil spill (only about 35% did at the time):

                            Not born in US    Don't Know

Liberals                       11%               6%

Blacks                         12%              11%

Approve handling oil spill     11%               8%

The combined total of people who think Obama was born outside the United States and those who don't know is about 20% in all of these groups. So it seems that about half of the original total represents what I call “pure ignorance.” On the other hand, that suggests that about 20% of Americans are “birthers” to some degree.

"You can't have one group who are the haves and one group . . . who are the have-nots”

Those egalitarian sentiments are from Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin. By “the haves,” he doesn't mean people who actually have a lot of money, but public-sector workers. Many news accounts suggest that the public sees things this way too—that there's a lot of resentment of public employees, and especially public-employee unions. For example, there's the New York Times magazine article from which the quote is taken, or this one from the Guardian.

Is this true? There have been some very recent surveys about the proposed Wisconsin law, but here are some older ones.

This isn't about pay and benefits, but the changes are interesting:

“Most teachers in the nation now belong to unions or associations that bargain over salaries, working conditions and the like. Has unionization, in your opinion, helped, hurt, or made no difference in the quality of public school education in the United States? “ (Gallup)

1976: 22% helped; 38% hurt; 27% no difference; 13% don't know

1984: 49% helped; 29% hurt; 26% no difference; 7% don't know

1998: 27% helped; 26% hurt; 37% no difference; 10% don't know

On pay and benefits:

Just your own opinion, do you believe that federal government employees are paid more, or paid less than the same persons would earn in non-governmental jobs? (Gallup, 1977)

64% more; 12% less; 13% about the same (volunteered); 11% don't know

Finally, do you think--relative to workers in private industry--that government employees are overpaid, underpaid, or fairly paid? (American Enterprise Institute, 1981)

44% overpaid; 11% underpaid; 38% fairly paid; 7% don't know

In general, do you think the salaries and benefits of most government employees are too high for the work that they do, too low for the work that they do, or are their salaries and benefits about right for the work that they do? (CBS News, January 2011)

54% too high; 4% too low; 32% about right; 5% depends (volunteered); 5% don't know

On the other hand:

In general, do you think teachers are paid too much or too little for the job they are expected to do? (National Opinion Research Corporation, 1943)

2% too much; 58% too little; 30% about right; 9% don't know

Do you think public school teachers get paid too little for the work they do, too much for the work they do, or about the right amount? (Stanford University/Associated Press, 2010)

7% too much; 57% too little; 31% about right; 5% don't know

There were quite a few survey questions about teachers' pay in between 1943 and 2010, but it gets a kind of monotonous, because the results are always about the same. But there is one that's worth special notice because it mentions taxes:

Bearing in mind that they are paid out of taxes, do you think public school teachers are paid enough, too little, or too much? (Business Week/Harris 1992)

35% enough; 55% too little; 6% too much; 4% not sure.

More choices

I looked to see if there were any later questions on living in the "horse-and-buggy days" versus the present.  There didn't seem to be, but there were a couple that offered a choice between the past, present, and future.  A 1964 question from a survey on Hopes and Fears of the American People (which I believe was part of an international survey): 

"Here's a somewhat philosophical question. In general, are you completely satisfied to be living now in the present--or would you prefer to have lived sometime in the past, or to live sometime in the future? "

80% said they were satisfied with the present, 10% preferred the past, and 8% preferred the future.   

In 1978, a Roper poll asked:

"If you could choose any time in history or any time in the future in which to live, what do you think your choice would be--to have lived at some time in the past, or to live at some time in the future, or to live in present day times? "

Now it was 60% for the present, 25% for the past, and 12% for the future.  The questions aren't exactly the same, but I don't think that the difference is just the result of question wording.  Having experienced the 1970s, I can see why many people would have been inclined to think that other times looked good by comparison. 

Those were the days

In March 1939, a Gallup Poll asked "Do you think you would rather lived [sic] during the horse-and-buggy days instead of now?"  25% said yes and 70% said no, with 5% undecided.  Then it asked "Do you think Americans were happier and more contented at that time than they are now?"  63% said yes, 27% said no, and 10% were undecided.  Why didn't people want to live when they could have been happier and more contented?

The poll also included a measure of economic status--there's not much detail on how it was constructed, but I think it was based on a combination of occupation, interviewer's judgment, and answers to questions about whether you owned a car and a telephone.  Here is a comparison of answers by economic status.  (I think "OAA" stands for "Old Age Assistance," but I'm not sure.)


             Rather    People happier      N
           lived then     then

Wealthy        11%        67%             36        
Average +      15%        56%            182
Average        18%        59%            510
Poor +         27%        65%            238
Poor           25%        64%            297
Relief--WPA    37%        68%            163
Relief         53%        80%             59
OAA            61%        81%             38

The percent thinking that people were happier back in the day is pretty similar in all groups, although maybe somewhat higher among the poorer ones (also OAA, although that could be the effect of age).  The differences in the percent saying they would rather have lived then are considerably larger.  So either people with high incomes were more likely to be illogical, or people were implicitly thinking of "happier and more contented" as referring to the non-material side of life.