Donovan Crew writes:
I was wondering if you saw this, and what your take would be on it.
My reply: Yes, everybody’s been emailing me this! I have a post prepared on it but am waiting until current backlog dissipates.
Donovan Crew writes:
I was wondering if you saw this, and what your take would be on it.
My reply: Yes, everybody’s been emailing me this! I have a post prepared on it but am waiting until current backlog dissipates.
The article is completely wrong, of course, because the author is confusing age effects for cohort effects. Look at that chart labeled "how economic and social beliefs change with age" and remember that all their data appears to come from the last 4 or 5 years. That big hump in the economic permissiveness line corresponds to people who came of age during the Reagan/Bush I era. Go back to surveys of 18-29 year olds in 1990 and you would get a picture that looks nothing like their current graph, but very close to what this graph pictures for today's 38-49 year olds.
What you say sounds like it could be true, William, but do you know it to be the case or is it just supposition?
Ockham is right: these are cohort effects.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/weekinreview/15…
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/10/14/week…
I know that the cohort effect is more important than the age effect (in voting particularly and political beliefs generally) by closely examining a variety of data (exit polling and survey data from various sources, but especially from Pew). I suspect our host will argue that there is evidence of a strong period effect as well since that is implied by his belief in the economic theory of voting. I'm less convinced that period effects are important now, but separating age, period, and cohort effects is an extremely well-known problem in the social sciences.