American optimism slipping away…
http://pewresearch.org/obdeck/?ObDeckID=94
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Ladder of Life
For a more stable barometer of trends in national optimism, it’s
worth examining the “ladder of life” series of questions that have
been asked by Pew and Gallup since 1964. These questions are not
posed on Election Day, nor are they asked of respondents who have
been cued to think about politics or partisanship. As a result, the
historic trend lines from this question are less volatile than those
drawn from the exit polls. But the basic story they tell is the same
– since the turn of the century, America’s optimists have grown
fewer in number and more Republican in makeup. In scale and scope,
both changes are unprecedented in the four-decade history of this
question.
Unlike the exit poll question, the ladder of life questions probe for
attitudes about one’s own prospects in life, not about the prospects
of the next generation of Americans. It asks about personal optimism,
not national optimism.
But part of the methodological elegance of this famous battery,
developed about a half-century ago by Princeton University
psychologist Hadley Cantril, is that respondents aren’t asked,
directly, to evaluate their own progress in life. Rather, they are
asked to imagine a ladder with ten steps, with 10 representing the
highest possible quality of life for them and zero the lowest. Then
they’re asked which step of the ladder they feel they’re on at the
present time; which step they were on five years ago; and finally,
which step they expect to be on five years from now. People aren’t
asked to make “better” or “worse” judgments. They’re simply asked to
assign numerical ratings to their life at three different points in
time.
The results are striking — for their long-term stability; for their
recent downturn; for their growing partisan coloration; and, finally,
for their enduring paradox.
On the stability front, consider this: In the 16 times that Gallup
and Pew have asked this question since 1964 — through good times and
bad times, through war and peace, through recessions and booms,
through Republican eras and Democratic eras — the present always
gets a higher mean rating than the past, and the future always gets a
higher mean rating than the present.
For example, in the 2006 Pew survey (taken this summer), Americans on
average gave a 6.1 score to their lives five years ago; a 6.8 score
to their present quality of life; and a 7.8 score to the lives they
expect to be leading five years from now. That adds up an aggregate
average of 1.7 rating points worth of forward progress between five
years ago and five years hence.
Pretty good, no?
Actually, it’s a bit below the historic average of 2.0 rating-points-
worth of forward progress, and it’s fully one-third below the 1999
high water mark of 2.5 points-worth of forward progress.
In the four decades that Pew and Gallup have asked the ladder of life
battery, that’s the steepest and most sustained decline in this
measure of personal progress. Americans are still upbeat about the
trajectory of their own lives, but they’re about a third less
optimistic now than they were in the late 1990s.
Moreover, the surveys show a sharp divergence since the turn of the
century in the way Democrats and Republicans evaluate their lives.
Among Republicans, mean ratings for both the present and future have
risen; among Democrats, both sets of ratings have fallen. (There is
virtually no partisan gap and there has been very little change in
ratings that people give to the past).
An Enduring Paradox
All of these trend lines are food for endless layers of analyses –
be they about changing patterns in life satisfaction and economic
mobility, or about the shifting political fortunes of the two major
parties.
But before making too much of any of them, one should perhaps pause a
moment to contemplate a paradox that has dogged the “ladder of life”
question throughout its long and distinguished career.
Looking at the trend lines in the responses over the past 40 years,
you cannot help but be struck by an unyielding, even poignant
pattern: the future, once it finally arrives, never lives up to
today’s expectations of it. It’s as if Americans are dogs at a race
track, forever chasing the mechanical rabbit that forever scampers
beyond reach.
To cite just one example: in 1997 the public, on average, expected to
enjoy an 8.2 quality of life in 2002. But by the time 2002 rolled
around, the public, on average, rated the present as a 6.9. This same
anomaly shows up every time this survey has been taken over the past
four decades, and it also applies, in reverse, to perceptions of the
past (the public always rates the past worse in retrospect than they
rated it at the time).
So the paradox boils down to this: if the public’s ratings at any
given point in time are to be taken at face value, the typical
American’s quality of life is constantly improving over time. The
present always surpasses the past, and the future always surpasses
the present. But the very same rating system that builds this
blissful portrait of perpetual human progress also eviscerates it.
For when you look at the public’s ratings of the present from one
year to the next, you see that it almost never changes.
What gives?
Some psychologists theorize that human beings can’t help themselves;
they’re hard-wired to imagine brighter tomorrows because the act of
doing so is pleasurable in and of itself.
Economist Richard Easterlin of the University of Southern California
adds an economic dimension to this psychological trap. Over the
course off their adult lives, he notes, most people acquire more
money and material goods. That’s a big part of the reason they expect
tomorrow to be better than today (and rate today better than
yesterday). However, once people get more, they also want more — and
so they never achieve the higher levels of satisfaction that they’d
previously assumed would come from having more.
This is a neither a new insight nor a new dilemma. Back in 1776, long
before survey researchers started asking their questions, writer
Samuel Johnson observed: “Life is a progress from want to want, not
from enjoyment to enjoyment.” More recently, Oscar Wilde quipped: “In
the world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one
wants. The other is getting it.”
If any political party can figure out a way to take the edge off
those tragedies, it probably has a bright future.
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