Exercising their rights

One of the more unpopular aspects of "Obamacare" has been its requirement that people buy health care insurance.  I always assumed that, even among people who fervently support the right to go without health coverage, few want to exercise that right.   But I've never seen any estimates of the number of voluntary uninsured, so I used the 2009 Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance System data to explore the issue.  I defined a group who (a) rated their health as excellent or very good, (b) earned at least $35,000 per year and (c) said "no" when asked if there was "a time in the past 12 months when you needed to see a doctor but could not because of cost."  These are people who presumably don't have substantial regular health care costs and have the resources to pay for the care that they need.

In the BRFSS sample, about 10% are uninsured and 10% of the uninsured have this combination of characteristics.  So the "potentially voluntary" uninsured make up about 1% of the total population.  Who are they?  Compared to the rest of the population, they are more likely to be self-employed, younger, male, and single.  These patterns aren't surprising.  But they are also more likely to be unemployed (10.7% were unemployed compared to 5.6% among everyone else).  They were also quite a bit more likely to have children under 18 (43% vs. 28%). Putting these together, it seems that at least half of this 1% would like to have health insurance but can't afford it.  

Good times, bad times

A few days ago, the New York Times had a piece by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, who has a PhD in economics and is now an intern at Google.  He looked at searches involving "depression" that Google's algorithms classified as "health related," and found some clear patterns.  They were more common in winter months and in colder places.  They also varied within the week, being most common on Monday and least common on the weekends.

The Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance System, a very large telephone survey, asks "in general, how satisfied are you with your life."  The great majority of people say that they are either "very satisfied" or "satisfied" but it seems reasonable to interpret "dissatisfied" or "very dissatisfied" as representing something similar to what the average Google user would mean by "depression."  I used the 2009 data, because I happened to be working with it for another purpose.

The differences by month in the percent saying they are dissatisfied or very dissatisfied are not statistically significant at conventional levels (P=.082) even though the BRFSS sample about 400,000 cases.  But for what it's worth, it's highest in August (6.26%) and lowest in December (5.66%).  There are significant differences by day:  dissatisfaction is lowest on Monday (5.7%) and highest on Friday (6.4%), which is pretty much the opposite of the Google pattern.

In short, the patterns in the BRFSS are totally different from those found in the Google searches.  I haven't taught research methods in several years, but textbooks always used to warn students that a very big sample was not necessarily a representative sample.  The favorite example was the 1936 Literary Digest survey, with millions of respondents, which predicted that Alfred Landon would win a solid victory over FDR.  The Google searches are essentially Literary Digest type data:  they represent a lot of "volunteers," not anything designed to produce a representative sample.  I wouldn't dismiss the Google results--if searches for  "depression" are more common in winter or on Mondays, that means something.  But the straightforward interpretation that Stephens-Davidowitz offers--people feel worse in winter and on Mondays--isn't borne out by the data from a random sample.

Millionaires

In 1979 and 1992, Roper surveys asked people if they thought various statements about millionaires were "generally true or generally untrue."  The statements ranked from most to least agreement (in 1992):

>They use their wealth mostly to protect their own positions in society
>They favor the Republicans over the Democrats
>They don't pay their fair share of taxes
>They are politically conservative
>Their investments create jobs and help provide prosperity
>Their spending gives employment to a lot of people
*They make illegal contributions to political campaigns
*They contribute generously to charitable causes
*They worked hard to earn the wealth they have
*They got where they are by exploiting other people
They play too much and work too little
They feel a responsibility to society because of the wealth they have
They are responsible for many of society's ills
They keep the common man from having his proper share of the wealth
They really live no differently from most people, except that they have more money

For the ones marked with a >, more than 50% said that they were generally true; for the ones marked with a *, more people said they were generally true than generally untrue (there were quite a few "don't knows" for most questions).

People are pretty positive about the economic contributions of millionaires (most people say that they provide prosperity and give employment, and most disagree that they keep the common man from getting his share).  Opinions on their personal qualities and social contributions are more mixed:  for example, the numbers agreeing that they worked hard to earn their wealth and that they got where they are by exploiting others are almost equal.

In a future post, I'll consider changes in these opinions between 1979 and 1992.

Nations and Inflation

During the 1970s and early 1980s, many sociologists argued that inflation couldn't be fully explained by factors such as the money supply or the Phillips Curve:  that "sociological" factors like power and norms were involved (see this book for a once well-known example, this post for another example).  This view didn't make much headway with economists and after a while the sociologists lost interest and drifted away.  But recently Paul Krugman said "inflation ... is always associated with severe political and social disruption. To stand Milton Friedman on his head, high inflation is never and nowhere a merely monetary phenomenon."

Using the data discussed in my last post, you can rank different nations on their average rate of inflation, adjusting for the years for which data are available (as far back 1956 for some countries, at least to 1998 for all).

Turkey
Slovenia
Poland
Mexico
Hungary
Slovak Republic
Chile
Israel
Iceland
Estonia
Czech Republic
Korea
Spain
Portugal
Greece
Italy
New Zealand
United Kingdom
Ireland
Australia
Finland
Norway
Denmark
France
Sweden
USA
Canada
Austria
Belgium
Netherlands
Luxembourg
Germany
Switzerland
Japan 

A couple of clear patterns emerge:  (1) nations with higher average rates of inflation are poorer than those with low rates.  Some of this may be a matter of high inflation holding down growth, but I'm confident that there would be a strong correlation with per-capita GDP at the beginning of the period (2) most of the nations with high average inflation experienced a transition (or at least a partial transition) from dictatorship to democracy.  You could probably think of a "pure" economic explanation for the first pattern, but the second one suggests that Krugman is right and that sociologists gave up too easily.  

It's not the 1970s any more

The following figure gives the average rate of change in consumer prices in the 34 nations that are members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.  (The simple average would be strongly affected by a few very high rates, so I transformed them to normal scores before taking the average).

There are some ups and downs, but the general picture is of a rise from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, roughly ten years of high inflation, and a pretty steady decline since then.  Paul Krugman recently considered a larger sample of countries since 1980 and found that high (double or triple-digit) inflation has become less common.  In affluent countries, even moderate inflation has become rare--in 2012, the rate of inflation was over 6% in only one of the OECD countries (Turkey).  In 1980 it was under 6% in only two (Germany and Switzerland).  

New York, New York

In 1939, the Roper Organization asked people to choose from five statements giving their feeling about New York City.  In 1992, they repeated the same question.  The distribution of responses:

                                                   1939      1992
one of the best places in the world
    in which to work and live                       10%       4%
a good place to visit for a short time
   but I wouldn't want to work or live there        47%      45%
a good place to work & make money
  but no place to live                              11%      10%
a good place in which to live but no
  place to be in business                            1%       1%
one of the worst places in the world
  in which to work or live                           8%      21%
Don't know                                          22%      18%

The three mixed responses were about equally common on both occasions, but there was a big decline in "one of the best" and big increase in "one of the worst."  In 1992, New York  had just finished a couple of bad decades--it would be interesting to repeat the question today and see if its reputation has bounced back.

More on the "Perot coalition"

Sean Trende said that Ross Perot appealed to "downscale" voters because "his campaign was focused on his fiercely populist stance on economics."  As I noted a previous post, Perot's strongest support actually came from the middle class.  Also, as I remember it, his campaign wasn't focused on economics, but on "fixing the mess in Washington."  Perot's pitch was that he was an outsider, a businessman with no history of political involvement, who would straighten things out by applying common sense.  In his more visionary moments, he talked about "electronic town hall meetings" in which the people could weigh in directly.

Of course, that's just my memory, and it's hard to get clear evidence on what a campaign was about.  But there was a lot of dissatisfaction with government in the early 1990s.  This is an index based on questions in the American National Election Studies.*

Confidence in government fell pretty steadily through the 1960s and 1970s to a low in 1980.  It then rebounded, but started to fall again after 1984.  In 1990, it was back down to the 1980 level, and it was only slightly higher in 1992.  It fell to a new low in 1994, and then started to recover.  The peak in 2002 was probably partly an aftereffect of 9/11, but in 2000 confidence was at its highest level since 1984.

It's not clear why people were so discontented in the early 1990s.  The two biggest events around that time were the breakup of the Soviet Union and the first Gulf War, which could both be claimed as major successes for the American government.  There was a recession in 1990-1, but it was pretty mild.  But whatever the reason, people were unhappy with the government.  All this suggests that Trende is right in the most general sense:  that there are parallels between 1992 and today.  But they don't involve "downscale" voters and economic populism (especially a "populism" based on being a "deficit hawk").

*Specifically, "How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right," "Would you say that the government is pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves or that it is run for the benefit of all the people," "Do you think that people in the government waste a lot of money we pay in taxes," "Do you think that quite a few of the people running the government are crooked," "People like me don't have any say about what the government does," "Public officials don't care much what people like me think," and "Over the years, how much attention do you feel the government pays to what the people think when it decides what to do."  Not all of the questions were asked in all years, but I adjusted for that by treating the observed data as indicators of a latent variable.