Capitalism, Socialism, and Age

A while ago, I had a post about views of capitalism and socialism.  A Gallup News Service poll from November 2012 asked people if they had "a positive or negative image of" capitalism, socialism, and some other terms.  The results, ranked from highest to lowest percent positive (omitting people with no opinion):

                          % positive

Small Business               96

Free Enterprise              92

Entrepreneurs                90

Capitalism                   66

Big business                 60

Federal government           52

Socialism                    42

Both capitalism and socialism got higher positive ratings than in the survey I wrote about in my previous post.  That may be because this survey led off with "free enterprise," which may have put people in a positive mood.  In the earlier survey, the list started with "socialism" and then asked about "progressive" and "libertarian" before "capitalism." 

My previous post was about age differences:  compared to older people, younger people were considerably more positive about socialism and less positive about capitalism.  Does that pattern hold up here?

                           % Positive

Age            Capitalism  Socialism    Free Enterprise

18-29                57      51             89

30-49                71      40             92

50-64                73      34             95

65+                  73      26             95

It does.  Both surveys show big age differences in views of socialism and smaller differences in views of capitalism, with socialism and capitalism about equally popular among the youngest age group.  I also show the figures for free enterprise, since there is a statistically significant age difference.  (There's no significant difference in views of big business or entrepreneurs; younger people are more favorable to the federal government, but I suspect answers to that question are strongly influenced by views of the current administration.)

[data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?

Every once in a while I see a survey result that really surprises me.  I ran across this one recently, from a survey conducted by ICR in 1997.  "Do you think adultery should be punished as a crime, or not?" 20% said it should, and 6% weren't sure.

Another survey conducted about the same time by Gallup asked "what proportion of married men in this country do you think have ever committed adultery?  Most married men, more than half, about half, less than half, or very few married men?"  48% said most or more than half [I know that most means more than half, but those are the options they gave]; 31% said about half; and only 18% said less than half or very few.  People were asked the same question about women, and 26% said most or more than half, 34% said about half, and 37% said less than half or very few.

[data from iPOLL, Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Exceptionalism at the top

Almost everyone who's been paying attention agrees that over the last 30-40 years, the share of total income going to people near the top (say the top 1%) has been increasing.  It's also pretty widely agreed that this trend has been stronger in the  United States than in most other countries.  But it's not clear exactly how big the national differences are.  The World Top Incomes database gives data for a number of countries, but the range of dates varies, many countries have missing observations, and there's a good deal of short-term variation, so it's difficult to get a simple summary.  This is a first attempt.

There are nineteen nations in the World Top Incomes database that have data going back to the 1970s.  This figure shows the average share of the top one percent (adjusted for differences in the nations included in particular years).  It declined from 1970 to the early 1980s, and then increased.  The big jump in 2012 is probably not meaningful, since it's based on only one or two nations.

I then calculated a linear trend for each country adjusted for these differences.  Adjusting is important, because otherwise estimates of trends would be distorted by the particular years for which data were available:  e. g., an "average" country for which the data began in 1985 would seem to have faster growth than one for which the data began in 1970.   The rankings, taking the United States as the standard of comparison:

 0.00000 US
-0.10722 UK
-0.16061 Ireland
-0.16574 Norway
-0.16977 Portugal
-0.17165 Australia
-0.19644 Singapore
-0.21934 New Zealand
-0.23355 Italy
-0.24485 Japan
-0.25075 Sweden
-0.27085 Germany
-0.27659 Switzerland
-0.28545 France
-0.30242 Netherlands
-0.32016 Finland
-0.33291 Spain
-0.33960 Denmark
-0.38576 Mauritius

The United States is #1, but it's not a simple case of the United States versus everyone else--there are substantial differences among the other countries.

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How ignorant are we?

On Sunday, Nicholas Kristof had a column saying that Americans don't know much about religion.  The two specific items he mentioned were "only one-third know that Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and 10 percent think that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife."  I can't find any record of the second question in iPOLL.  There was one about the Sermon on the Mount, and indeed only 34% could answer correctly (it was free response, not a multiple choice question).  But that was in 1954, so I hope that wasn't what he was citing.  I did run across a question that has been asked a number of times since 1950:  whether you can name the first four books of the New Testament:  

            Correct          Partly        DK or Incorrect
1950        35%                12%              53%
1990        37%                13%              50%
2010        45%                  6%              49%

So there seems to have been a small gain in knowledge.  Given the rise in educational levels, you might expect more.  On the other hand, there has been an increase in the number of non-Christians and non-religious people.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

We're #1?

Larry Bartels has an article entitled "US is a world leader is class conflict over government spending."  The data behind his claim is that differences between the rich and the poor in opinions about government spending were larger in the US than in any of the 33 countries in the 2006 International Social Survey Pogramme (see the link on the right), except South Africa.  But his analysis was based on just one question--opinions about whether people were in favor of "cuts in government spending," so I looked at questions from the 2009 ISSP survey, which focused on social inequality, to see if the same pattern held.

I created an index based on questions about whether differences of income in the country are too large, whether it is the government's responsibility to reduce income differences, the government should provide a decent standard of living for the unemployed, the government should spend less on the poor, and whether people with high incomes should pay a larger share of their incomes in taxes than people with low incomes. This seems like a pretty good measure of support for egalitarian policies.  The size of "class" differences (coefficients from a regression of opinions on standardized income):

New Zealand      1.21
Sweden           1.03
Great Britain   1.02
Czech Republic   1.01
United States   0.90
Australia  0.89
Denmark     0.81
Germany          0.77
Latvia           0.70
Iceland          0.69
Slovak Republic  0.69
Japan            0.66
Finland          0.64
Belgium         0.61
Poland           0.55
Hungary          0.54
Switzerland      0.53
Slovenia         0.53
Italy            0.49
Austria          0.48
Ukraine          0.43
Estonia          0.42
Bulgaria         0.39
South Africa     0.38
Cyprus           0.37
Russia           0.35
France           0.33
Chile            0.29
Croatia          0.26
Portugal         0.25
Spain            0.25
South Korea      0.23
Taiwan           0.18
Argentina        0.15
China            0.11
Norway           0.08
Turkey           0.02
Philippines      0.02
Israel           0.01
Venezuela -0.31

The United States is not at the very top, but is close.  Britain, New Zealand, and Australia are also among the highest (Canada was not included in this survey).  So Bartels's general point is supported, although large class differences seem to have roots in Britain rather than being unique to the United States.  There also seems to be a tendency for class differences to be larger in more affluent nations.  The negative figure for Venezuela means that people with higher incomes were (slightly) more egalitarian, which seems very surprising, but given the political situation you have to wonder about the data quality for that country.

Opinion on Abortion, 1977-2014

Thomas Edsall had a strange piece in the New York Times recently.  It starts with a good question--why the difference in the trajectories of same-sex marriage as abortion as political issues?  Same-marriage came onto the scene in the mid-1990s as a result of court decisions.  For the first ten years or so, it was a winning issue for conservatives, but then things started to swing around.  Now support for same-sex marriage is becoming the mainstream position, and many conservatives seem to be giving up the fight.  Abortion, of course, has been a contentious issue for more than 40 years.

Edsall gave figures showing  substantial change in public opinion on premarital sex and women's careers and concluded that "with all of their demographic problems, the question is, how much can Republicans afford to fool around with this particular kind of political dynamite? [ie, restricting abortion]."  What makes his article strange is that he doesn't give any figures on public opinion about abortion except for some peripheral issues, even though there have been many questions over the years.

In order to give a summary of public opinion on abortion, I picked a question that has been asked by Gallup since the 1970s:  "Do you think abortions should be legal under any circumstances, legal only under certain circumstances, or illegal in all circumstances?"  The first time it was asked (1977), 22% chose "legal under any circumstances," 19% chose "illegal," and 55% chose "certain circumstances."  The last time (January 2014), the numbers were 27% legal, 20% illegal, and 51% under certain circumstances.  For what happened in between, see the figure, which gives the difference between percent choosing legal and percent choosing illegal.

Basically, nothing has happened.  There are ups and downs, some of which are too big to be explained by sampling variations, but they have very little pattern.  They might reflect short-term reactions to particular events, or the mysterious variation that sometimes occurs among different surveys.  So hard-line opposition to abortion is not "political dynamite," any more than it was in the 1970s.  It repels some voters, but appeals to an almost equally large number.  

[Data from iPoll, Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]