Is Everyone Down on the Economy?

The common wisdom among progressives is that people think the economy is in the toilet and are ready to vote for Democrats on that basis. Not so fast! Polling results are actually quite mixed with people expressing confidence about own their economic situation but not about the economy as a whole. Thus, any simple economic appeal to change the economic rules significantly may not resonate as much as many think (a comprehensive list of polling results on economic issues over the last 10+ years is available here).

Example 1: In response to the question "Do you worry very much about being laid off in the next 12 months?", the answer of "worrying a lot" has been trending up with the latest value being 35 percent of workers worry a lot about losing their job. Gallup and the General Social Survey ask the question slightly differently: "Thinking about the next 12 months, how likely is it that you will be laid off or lose your job?" The answers to this question have been reasonably constant over the last 30 years; in the 2006 survey asking this question, just three percent answered "very likely" and seven percent answered "somewhat likely".

Example 2: The Pew Research Center asked workers in 2006 "Compared with 20 or 30 years ago, what has happened to the job security of the average American working person?" Not surprisingly given the number of mass media reports about plant closings, 70 percent of workers said that it had declined. Yet, in the same survey, 89 percent of workers said they were completely or mostly satisfied with their jobs. When probed further and asked about their satisfaction with their own job security, 75 percent said that they were completely or somewhat satisfied. An almost identical question has been asked by NBC/Wall Street Journal polls dating back to 1995. The results are basically the same over this period with no discernible trend.

Example 3: Pew, in a different survey, asked a question about how children of today will fare when they grow up relative to how adults are living today. The negative answer ('worse off") out-polled the positive answer ("better off") by 50 to 33 percent. Yet this answer conflicts with that of the answer to the question comparing your own children in the future to your own living standard today. This question has been asked consistently since 1994 by the General Social Science survey (and in 2005 by The New York Times). Here the answers in 2005 were more positive: 66 percent say that their children will live better, 18 percent the same, and 25 percent expect them to be worse off (5 percent did not answer). When the question is switched to "how do your current living standards compare with those of your parents at a similar age," in 2002, 67 percent said that they live better than their parents, 19 percent about the same, and just 13 percent said that they are living worse than their parents.

This dichotomy between a negative view of the state of the overall economy and the conditions of people in general, versus the positive view of one's personal evaluation of risk and living standards on the other, is repeated regularly across polls and within the same poll.

What should one make of these various answers?

After reviewing various polls with their optimistic and pessimistic answers, Kusnet, Michel, and Teixeira of the Economic Policy Institute in their 2006 book, Talking Past Each Other, articulate the typical left position: "With most people, the intensity, the insecurity, and the arduousness of their economic struggles are woven into the fabric of their lives--and are central to their identity." In essence, they throw out the positive evaluation of about one's own condition as people making up answers because they don't want to face reality.

This seems very wrong to me. Although the polling answers are contradictory, it would appear that people at all but the lowest income levels are mostly satisfied with their current life and the opportunities that their own children have. This is not to say that they don't want more or they don't face a difficult juggling act to determine what to buy and how much to save. But blanket appeals to their insecurities and economic plight have not worked in the past and aren't likely to work in future.