Who's afraid of inflation

It depends on the party in power:  in 2007, 55 percent of conservatives and 78 percent of liberals expected inflation to go up; in 2009, conservatives were more likely to expect inflation than liberals (67 to 58 percent).   If we take the average of those two surveys:

                 Conservative     Moderate    Liberal

Up a lot             27             18           25

Up a little          34             40           43

Same                 26             26           21

Down a little         7             12            8

Down a lot            4              1            1

So moderates were somewhat less worried than either liberals or conservatives.  That's surprising:  among economists and politicians, conservatives are more likely to warn about inflation.  And as with confidence in institutions, moderates aren't in the middle. 

Fear of inflation

Currently the annual inflation rate (using the Consumer Price Index) is 2.2%.  Over the last 25 years, it's averaged 2.9%.  Given that history, I'd think we could pat ourselves on the back and say we've got that problem under control before turning attention to other matters (like unemployment).  However, a lot of political figures and commentators seem to be worried about the danger of renewed inflation.  I'm not sure about the balance of opinion among professional economists, but at least some of them seem to be concerned too.  What about the general public?  Between 2001 and 2009, the Gallup poll frequently asked people what they thought would happen with inflation in the next six months:  would it go up a lot, go up a little, remain the same, go down a little, or go down a lot?  If you count those as 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 points, you can can calculate a summary score.  If the score is 3 the average persons thinks it will stay the same; the higher the score, the more people expect it to go up.  Here is a graph of the scores:

 Expected inflation increased pretty steadily until 2005, then dropped in 2007 and dropped again in 2009.  The drop at the end coincided with the recession, but over the whole period expected inflation had no connection to the unemployment rate, or to the current inflation rate.  Unfortunately Gallup doesn't seem to have asked the question after 2009, but at least we can say that the public didn't react to the stimulus package of early 2009 by getting more worried about inflation.

The Public, LBJ, and Civil Rights

A Harris Poll in June 1965 asked a number of questions about civil rights.  This survey occurred a few months after the Selma-Montgomery march, and while the Voting Rights act was moving through Congress.  That is, the movement was still basically about ending legal segregation and opening up voting rights, especially in the South.  President Johnson was popular, with approval ratings of 65-70 percent.  In the Harris survey, 19 percent said he was doing an excellent job, 45% said "pretty good," 21 percent "only fair" and only 9 percent "poor."  On "handling civil rights and the race problem," people were positive but less enthusiastic:  15% excellent, 38% pretty good, 24% only fair, and 16% poor. 

There was a question about the pace of "things that have been going on lately with Negro rights":  40% said "too fast," 27% "about right," 16% "too slow," with 16% not sure.    Another question asked who respondents sided with in "recent show-downs in Selma, Alabama, about Negro voting rights."  48% chose "civil rights groups," 20% the "State of Alabama," 18% volunteered that they didn't side with either, and 12% weren't sure.  Another asked about charges of "widespread Communist infiltration into the civil rights movement":  23% said there were "a lot" of Communists in "the Negro groups demonstrating for civil rights," 31% said "some, not a lot," 13% "only a few," and 13% "almost none," with 18% having no opinion.  When asked to choose among six statements describing Governor George Wallace, 37% chose a favorable one, 37% an unfavorable one, and the rest said that they didn't know. 

If I had to summarize these results, I'd say public opinion was no more than weakly positive.  And these figures count black respondents, although they made up only 5.5% of the sample (Harris surveyed only registered voters). 

Mysterious moderates

Gordon Gauchat, a former graduate student of mine, has received significant media attention for a recent paper which found that conservatives' trust in science has declined since the 1970s.  One point that puzzles me is that in the 1970s, moderates had less trust in science than either liberals or conservatives.  Even today, moderates and conservatives are about the same.  Does this tell us something about moderates in general?

The data Gordon used, the General Social Survey, has questions about confidence in a number of different institutions.  I picked ten that were asked frequently enough to discern clear patterns.  On most of them, there is a left-right difference:  for example, people who call themselves "extremely liberal" have the most confidence in labor, followed by those who call themselves "liberal," and so on down to "extremely conservative."  Controlling for this, the two "extremes" tend to have less confidence in nearly all institutions (organized labor was the one exception).  What about moderates?

More Favorable:
Military
Organized Labor
the Press
Education

Less Favorable:
Major Companies
Science
the Supreme Court

 No significant difference:
Banks and Financial Institutions
Medicine
Churches and Religious Organizations

"More favorable" and "less favorable" doesn't necessarily mean that moderates are the most or least favorable group, just that they are more or less favorable than would be expected from their position in the middle.  On labor, for example, moderates are about the same as people who call themselves "slightly liberal," and considerably more favorable than those who call themselves "slightly conservative."  To summarize:  moderates have definite likes and dislikes, but it's hard to see a logic behind the pattern. 

Are women becoming less happy?

In the 1970s, women were slightly happier than men, as measured by questions like "would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?"  Now they are less happy than men, and less happy that they were forty years ago, according to the same questions.  This makes for an interesting paradox, since women have gained in terms of things like income and education, and various explanations have been offered.

Here's another question which was asked several times between 1946 and 1995.  “If you could live your life again, would you rather be born as a man or a woman?”    I broke the results down by gender for 1958 and 1995.

Men
85% man; 4% woman (1958)
88% man; 4% woman (1995)

Women
17% man; 73% woman (1958)
7% man; 90% woman (1995)

The substantial drop in the number of women saying they would rather be born as a man seems hard to square with the idea that women were getting less happy during that time.  My explanation of the trends for the standard question is that to some extent people are using a standard of "what I could reasonably expect," and women's standards were rising. 

Diversity without preferences

Most people oppose racial preferences in hiring.  For example, a 2001 poll sponsored by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University asked people for their reaction to the statement "Because of past discrimination, qualified African Americans should receive preference over equally qualified whites in such matters as getting jobs":  9% strongly agreed, 12% agreed, while 21% disagreed and 58% strongly disagreed.  However, the same survey asked for reactions to the statement,
"Employers should be required by law to maintain a certain level of diversity in the workplace," and got a very different response:  32% strongly agreed, 24%, 16% disagreed, and 28% strongly disagreed.   Logically, it seems like a requirement to maintain diversity means not just preferences, but quotas, which are even less popular.  But apparently people didn't see a contradiction:  the diversity question was asked just before the preference question (with only one intervening item), so people didn't have time to forget their answers. 

The Constitution

A Roper survey of 1971 asked people to choose from three statements: 
a.  "Our form of government, based on the constitution, has stood the test of time and no fundamental changes need to be made in it."
b.  "The Constitution has served its purpose well, but it has not kept up with the times and should be thoroughly revised to make it fit present day needs."
c.  "Changing times have outmoded our system of government and we might as well accept the fact that sooner or later we will have to have a new form of government."

A similar question was asked in 1939 and twice in 1946.  The second statement was exactly the same; the first said "as near perfect as it can be and no fundamental changes should be made in it."  The third said "the systems of private capitalism and democracy are breaking down and we might as well accept the fact..."  The responses:

                A         B          C
1939      64%    19%      5%
1946      43%     33%   19%
1946      51%     27%      9%

1971      38%     39%     15%


Despite the difference in the questions, it seems pretty safe to say that support for revising the Constitution was higher in 1971 than in the earlier years.  In fact, since both options A and C were put in less extreme terms in 1971, the numbers probably understate the shift towards B.  Unfortunately, the question hasn't been asked since then, but we can look at patterns in 1971. 

                                               A         B           C
Not HS Grad                        30%    32%      21%
High School                         36%    41%      16%
College                                 49%    42%        6%

18-25                                    29%     46%     16%
26-34                                    34%     45%     14%
35-49                                    41%     37%     14%
50-64                                    43%     33%     15%
65+                                       41%     33%     14%

White                                    40%      41%     13%
Black                                    22%      25%      27%

Very Conservative              50%      22%     20%
Moderate Conservative      49%      36%     10%
Middle of the Road             34%      43%     15%
Moderate Liberal                27%       52%     17%
Very  Liberal                       21%       35%     29%


The biggest surprise to me is that more educated people were less likely to support revising or completely changing the constitution.  Usually more educated people are less traditionalist, and that seems to have been particularly true in the 1960s.