The Pew Research Center published some intriguing polling results on energy issues just before Christmas. Americans have clearly noticed falling prices at the gas pump, but only half realize that U.S. oil and gas production has soared. So far, the changes haven’t affected policy views: a large majority favors expanding use of alternative energy, but … Continue reading »
public opinion
What do average Americans think about inequality?
Now that economic inequality has become a focus of attention – mentions of “income inequality” in the New York Times went up five-fold in the 2010s compared to the 2000s, 200-fold compared to the 1990s – we know a few things about it clearly. For example: American inequality is unusually great among western societies; it has been … Continue reading »
Which radical ideas come true?
It’s 1974. Richard Nixon resigns the presidency; Barbara Streisand is singing, “The Way We Were” all over the radio (that music-playing thing before the internet); and you could buy a hand calculator that could only add, subtract, multiply, and divide for, in today’s currency, $100. Someone asks you: Here are three pretty radical ideas – which do … Continue reading »
Political responses to the Crash
Back about a decade or two, as polarization widened among America’s politicians and political activists, most analysts concluded from the initial flurry of research that the general public seemed exempt. Officeholders and activists were taking more extreme positions on hot-button issues like immigration and welfare, but Americans in general seemed to be largely in the … Continue reading »
Why are whites so pessimistic about the future?
Americans’ collective mood has been souring. But it so happens that trends in outlook vary substantially by race and ethnicity and in seemingly paradoxical ways. According to a new report, AP-NORC_Public Mood White Malaise But Optimism Among Blacks and Hispanics, while whites are becoming more pessimistic, blacks and Hispanics have been relatively optimistic, and especially … Continue reading »
Sexual license, sexual limits
One clear social change of the last half-century is Americans’ increasing support of sexual freedom. It is all around us: magazines at the check-out counter blaring advice about orgasms, easy-access pornography on the web and soft-core pornography on cable, hooking-up culture on tv programs, and nonchalance about couples “living together” before (or after) marriage (see … Continue reading »
Attitudes on climate change, environmental science and clean energy
A new Associated Press poll reports a sharp increase in the number of people who believe that climate change is happening and will be a problem for the United States. The biggest change was among the significant group of people who say they don’t trust scientists. Here’s the summary from AP: 4 out of every … Continue reading »
The survey crisis
At this time in the presidential election cycle, we are inundated by surveys, almost moment-by-moment, battleground state by battleground state. But surveys are far more important than just serving to handicap elections. It is through scientific surveys – that is, asking standardized questions of representative samples of the population – that researchers and policymakers in … Continue reading »
Delta 101: Of levees, canals and whiskey
Nearly four out of five Californians do not know what the Delta is, according to a January 2012 poll. That’s 78 percent of the population. And 86 percent of southern Californians have never heard of it. Yet, 25 million people and 3 million acres of farmland rely on the Delta for at least a portion … Continue reading »
Good news and bad news for higher education
I am writing this blog post from London, where today, students and faculty mobilized in fierce protest against the British government’s proposed — and now officially passed — plan to raise fees for university, to about $14,000 a year, tripling what fees were up till now. Meanwhile, the education news from California, where annual undergraduate … Continue reading »