America’s Mood Swing: It’s More Than a Pocketbook Issue
Diagnosing the public’s current foul mood has the pundits working overtime these days. It’s puzzling: We win the Cold War, stamp out inflation and add 5 million new jobs to the economy. Nevertheless, people are unhappy, angry, fearful, disheartened or all of the above.
A recent ABC News poll found just 28% of Americans believe the country is going in the right direction. Almost seven in 10 feel it’s on the wrong track. And last November’s elections were hardly an endorsement of the status quo.
But what, exactly, is bothering so many Americans these days?
In times past, the country’s periodic mood swings seemed easier to explain. We were down and out in 1980 and 1992 because of inflation or recession, plain and simple. We felt bad in 1968 over the quagmire of Vietnam and unrest in our cities. But the reasons for the current malaise are far less clear.
One current, popular, explanation goes like this:
The 20-year stagnation in real income growth is the culprit, sapping people’s faith in that core precept of the American Dream--a better future for themselves and their children. Add to that an economy that’s shifting workers from secure full-time manufacturing jobs into part-time service work without benefits and you have your answer.
The theory has a lot of supporters, and one can find poll data to back it up. Last year, Gallup found 73% dissatisfied with “the opportunity for the next generation of Americans to live better than their parents.” And while ABC recently reported that 67% feel they’re better off financially than their parents, that’s down substantially from 81% nine years ago.
But other surveys refute the hypothesis. According to the Census Bureau, median family income declined between 1989 and 1993. Still, consumer confidence--as measured by the Conference Board and others--is now at its highest point since 1990.
As for workplace security, the National Opinion Research Center has tracked fear of job loss for almost 20 years. In 1993, the center found just 12% of workers concerned that they might be fired or laid off in the year ahead, a number virtually unchanged from 1977.
Such contradictions have the experts sparring with one another.
The pessimists include pollster Albert Sindlinger, who has tracked consumer sentiment for nearly 40 years. He considers job security key, and his ratings on that measure are the lowest in decades. This is the first period since the 1920s and ‘30s, he says, that people don’t feel secure “when they get up in the morning and go to bed at night.”
Sindlinger disputes government claims about robust job creation. The jobs, he says, “are not on Main Street. If the government figures are correct, the Democrats would still be in (control of) the House.” The Republicans, he says, have also missed the boat, offering tax cuts when people really want assurances about work.
The Conference Board’s Fabian Linden begs to differ, characterizing gloomy views as a product of the “woe-unto-us school.”
“I don’t know where this notion comes from that people are not keeping up,” Linden says. “We are in a reassuringly good era of economic growth,” he says, citing reports of low inflation and falling unemployment and his own consumer survey. So who’s right?
Tom W. Smith, who directs the University of Chicago’s general social survey, offers one explanation. Smith agrees that the polls are contradictory, but he at least sees a pattern. “When you ask people fairly objective questions about their own lives, the answers are pretty positive.” But when the public rates the overall economy, he says, feelings are far more dour. Smith speculates that Americans increasingly grade the economy less on home-grown experience and more on what they see in the news media. And that news, he says, is most often bad.
But there’s a further complication in this debate. Is it really the economy that’s got people down? Pocketbook issues usually dominate the public’s mind. Perhaps not now, though. Last year, NBC News and the Wall Street Journal asked Americans to tell them simply what was wrong with the country. Rampant crime and drug use was the top response, along with “too much involvement in foreign countries” and a lack of morals and religious beliefs. “Excessive unemployment” was well down the list.
And a July, 1994, Los Angeles Times Poll found 53% more people concerned about the moral climate in the United States than about financial matters. Ironically, good economic news may have given the public room to worry about other things.
Soothing the public’s economic woes--or winning a war--poses enough of a challenge for those in power. But the current anxieties seem more amorphous than jobs or income alone, extending to things like personal safety, doubts about our institutions and concerns about moral decline. If that’s the case, our leaders--regardless of party--face a far more daunting task than their predecessors in trying to make things better again.
