For most, seeking fortune in the big city ain’t it

RECOMMENDED READING
The American Wake-Up Call
New Survey Upends Conventional Wisdom About the American Dream
What If Honesty Really Is The Best Policy In Politics?

Most public opinion polling is either of the horse-race variety (“who are you going to vote for?”) or else attempts to test perspectives on various policy issues and proposals. The first is fine, as far as it goes—campaigns need to know how they’re doing and the media loves the clicks. An entire industry is now dedicated to aggregating and averaging and modeling various polls into predictions obsessively tracked and discussed by pundits, all to no apparent effect. But hey, knock yourselves out.

The second would be useful in theory, but in practice tends to be of limited value. It’s fairly trivial to demonstrate that responses to questions about particular policies are dependent mainly on wording and framing. People typically respond with whatever they think is most consistent with their own partisan commitments—tell them that a proposal comes from their party or candidate and they will support it; tell them that it comes from the other team, and they’ll be opposed.

But what may seem fickle is really quite rational. The world’s top healthcare experts, after all, have diametrically opposed views of how to design good healthcare policy. Nobel prize winning economists can be found arguing opposite sides of almost any tax question. The foreign policy “blob” still disagrees on the wisdom of actions taken decades ago, whose outcomes are now part of the historical record, to say nothing of prospective actions for which it can only forecast consequences. Why should the typical voter believe that he or she can become independently expert on any, let alone all, of these issues? Far more sensible to identify the party or leaders whose values and priorities best align with your own and assume that the policies they pursue are the ones that best serve your own interests.

That’s why, at American Compass, we do extensive survey work focused not on horse races or popular policies, but instead on trying to understand what the values and priorities of the American people really are. Especially influential for me, in thinking about how researchers should approach this task, is a single question asked by Pew Research in the 2010s:

Which of the following is more important to you: (a) financial stability, or (b) moving up the income ladder?

It’s so simply worded, easy to understand, and something that every individual is fully qualified to answer. And the result is stunning: Americans prefer financial stability to moving up the income ladder by 12-to-1. I wrote about this particular result in more depth a couple of months ago (Why Our Political Elite Remind Me of Dumb and Dumber, September 9), but I return to it here because we’ve just completed our largest-ever survey of 6,000 Americans that tried in large part to expand on Pew’s finding and give it greater depth.

Continue reading at Understanding America
Oren Cass
Oren Cass is chief economist at American Compass.
@oren_cass
Recommended Reading
The American Wake-Up Call

Politicians are still selling a “Dream” that voters aren’t buying

New Survey Upends Conventional Wisdom About the American Dream

PRESS RELEASE — The American people reject the story of opportunity, mobility, and consumerism that politicians have been telling them for a generation

What If Honesty Really Is The Best Policy In Politics?

Data suggests Americans can handle the truth if politicians are willing to tell it