Happy People Are Less Likely to Feel Sad

Sometimes it's just good to know that the GSS is not just random nonsense. 

Democrats More Likely Than Republicans to Blame "The Jews"

The Boston Review reports the data:

Interestingly, Democrats were especially prone to blaming Jews: while 32 percent of Democrats accorded at least moderate blame, only 18.4 percent of Republicans did so (a statistically significant difference). This difference is somewhat surprising given the presumed higher degree of racial tolerance among liberals and the fact that Jews are a central part of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition. Are Democrats simply more likely to “blame everything” thus casting doubt on whether the anti-Jewish attitudes are real? Not at all. We also asked how much “individuals who took out loans and mortgages they could not afford” were to blame on the same five-point scale. In this case, Democrats were less likely than Republicans to assign moderate or greater blame.

The story does not give us a link to the original study with the raw data (a search through Google Scholar using the authors' names yeilds nothing), does not tell us how jews responded, nor does it tell us how people assesed the blame of other ethnic or religious groups.  Nevertheless, it is striking that Democrats were more likely than Republicans to blame "the Jews" for the financial crisis -- by a wide margin. 

The General Social Survey asked respondents to asses their feelings toward jews using a thermometer from 0 to 100. We can sort those assesments by party identification.

The middle column reports the responses of Independents. The left wing of three columns reflect the opinions of people who lean Democratic. The right wing of three columns reflect the opinions people who lean Republican. We can see that "50" was the most popular response by a plurality among all of the catagories of political identification. Republicans, however, were more likely to report warmer feelings toward jews (greter than 50.) Democratic respondents were more likely to report colder feelings (less than 50.)

The two lines of evidence point in the same direction.

One might say this is just a reflection of black anti-semitism. Blacks identify with the Democratic Party at a rate of around 80%. But if you exclude blacks from the mix, the results are still largely the same. Republicans are still more likely to report warm feelings. Democrats are still more likely to report cold ones. 

Source: Boston Review 

Source: GSS

Headless or Heartless

We've heard the quote before--often attributed to Churchill--, "If a man is not a socialist at the age of 20, he proves he has no heart. If a man remains a socialist at the age of 30, he proves he has no head." Substitute "liberal" for "socialist" and the data confirm a trend: people grow more conservative as they grow older. According to a very large data set compiled by the NORC during more than three decades, people are more likely to call themselves "slightly conservative", "conservative", or "extremely conservative" than they are to call themselves "slightly liberal", "liberal", or "extremely liberal". It is only among the youngest age cohort, from 18-30, that the reverse is true. 

In 1990 the average American was 32.9 years old. As of 2007, the Census Bureau reported that the average American was 36.6 old -- well past the inflection point at which the balance of opinion flips from liberal to conservative. 

Source: GSS

Source: Census Bureau

The China Model

Look at Singapore.  Look at Hong Kong.  Look at Taiwan.  You will get a sense of where China will be 30+ years from now (assuming a constant -- and explosive --  8% growth rate, the mainland will be where Hong Kong is today in 36 years) .  The rise of China will be one of the biggest themes of the 21st Century.  To get a good sense of where China is going, it is important to get a clear picture of where China is today.  Glasshouse Forum recently hosted a debate on the nature of the China model of development.  The conclusion seems to be the sociological equivalent of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.  China is change.  To the extent we know the direction and speed of China, its precise model is hard to pin down.  To the extent we have a clear picture of the model, we loose sight of how things were done yesterday and how they will be done tomorrow.  If you look at China over the last 50 years, the Chinese Way will differ from the Way you see if you look at only the last 30.  The Way you see over the last 30 years (since Deng) will differ from the Way of the last 20 years -- or 10. 

The discussion raised some important points on how the government in China gains and sustains legitimacy. In the West, this takes the form of elections. In China, this takes the form of "performance legitimacy". Goals are set in Beijing or the provincial capitals and the rise or fall of administrators depends on achieving those goals. Opinion polls were mentioned in the discussion as a substitute for elections. Legitimacy is easy when the economy is booming. The true test comes during hard times. Times have been very good for very long.  But China, with the Party at its helm, was also able to weather the Asian Crisis of  '97.

Wang Shaoguang urged, borrowing from Seymour Martin Lipset, that a government is legitimate if there is no workably better alternative, pointing to Russia to illustrate his point. Democracy may be feasible, in this way of thinking, but it is not necessarily better. You can imagine governments better than the one in Beijing, but they are not necessarily feasible. But what about Taiwan? Taipei is now home to a democracy that has at least two passionately opposed political parties who have peacefully ceded power to each other at least once.  Democracy works there in a way that would be recognized in the West -- even under conditions of extreme stress (the subsequently peaceful transition of 2004 occurred even after mutual recriminations of assassination and conspiracy.) Prosperity in Taiwan is higher than on the mainland by a full order of magnitude times two and is therefore arguably "better" on a performance basis. 

There seems to be a reluctance to embrace Fukuyama's End of History -- that liberal democracy is inevitable. There seems to be a resistance to radical transformation.  Given the history of China in the 20th Century, this in understandable. China's road to capitalism was a marginal one, not shock therapy in the Eastern European mould.  Production in excess of the Plan was sold on the open market at a profit until private production dwarfed and consumed the public sector. The Party could use geography to their advantage. China is a big country. Allowing greater geographic mobility would be in keeping with a trend of marginal improvements that could shore up any slack in legitimacy. People unhappy with the performance of administrators in their city or province could pack up their bags and move to the greener pastures, voting with their feet rather than by ballot box. 

Source: Glasshouse Forum 

Wolfram Alpha - Google Trends

Wolfram Alpha is due to be unveiled on Friday, May 15 at 7:00pm Central Time. (Today!) Google Trends reports that "Worlfam Alpha" as a search phrase is picking up. There was an initial spike in interest in March. Interest fell, and is back again here on the eve of the unveiling. Strangely, Google trends also reports that the search phrase is most popular in Romania, Germany, and Ireland (in that order.) 

Busting the Moon Hoax Conspiracy Theory

According to a poll done by Gallup in early 2001, 6% of Americans (about 1 in every 16) believe that the Moon landing was a hoax.  I recalling being asked by a co-worker if I thought men had actually been to the Moon after Fox aired it’s TV special. It's the sort of question that can catch you off guard. My immediate response was, "I had an uncle who was involved with the space program. Either we went to the Moon, or he was a liar. I tend to believe the former, rather than the latter." I also suggested that doubters could use a telescope to see the remains of the Apollo mission. Mythbusters did an episode on the Moon Hoax conspiracy theory, in which they dissects and refuted some of the more common arguments that conspiracy theorists use to make their case: the photographs that would supposedly require more than one source of light; the shadows that don’t align; the flag that supposedly flaps in a breeze; the footage of space walks that could have been made by over cranking the film; that the crispness of the boot prints requires moisture. 

The result? Shadows that don’t align can be accounted for by the contour of the landscape alone. Photographs that supposedly could only be made with multiple sources of light can be made with only one. After being jostled, a flag in a vacuum will actually flap more than one in air. Video at normal speed of a man walking in a space suit on a Vomit Commet matches the footage from the Apollo mission better than anything that over cranking can produce. And the rough surface of Moon dirt creates crisp boot prints under a condition of a vacuum. The episode ends with Adam and Jamie going to a telescope and shining a laser at reflectors that were left on the surface of the Moon by the Apollo mission.

Source: Gallup Organization

Source: Mythbusters   

The UK Over Time

While looking for a time series graph of unmployment in Britian, I stumbled over this paper from House of Commons Library published in 1999. It's a collection of 100 year time series graphs for a wide variety of economic and social tends. Here are a few of the dozens of graphs from the paper. 

Source: House of Commons Library