Update: There was a major coding error. I've rerun the analysis. No qualitative change. As is often the case a 10 minute post using the General Social Survey is getting a lot of attention. Apparently circa 1997 web interfaces are so intimidating to people that extracting a little data goes a long way. Instead of talking and commenting I thought as an exercise I would go further, and also be precise about my methodology so that people could replicate it (hint: this is a chance for readers to follow up and figure something out on their own, instead of tossing out an opinion I don't care about). Just like below I limited the sample to non-Hispanic whites after the year 2000. Here's how I did it: YEAR(2000-*), RACE(1), HISPANIC(1) Next I want to compare income, with 1986 values as a base, with party identification. To increase sample sizes I combined all Democrats and Republicans into one class; the social science points to the reality that the vast majority of independents who "lean" in one direction are actually usually reliable voters for that party. So I feel no guilt about this. I suppose Americans simply like the conceit of being independent? I know I do. In any case, here are the queries: For row: REALINC(r:0-20000"LLM";20000-40000"M";40000-80000"UM";80000-*"BU") For column: PARTY(r:0-2"Dem";3"Ind";4-6"Rep") What I'm doing above is combining classes, and also labeling. The GSS has documentation to make sense of it if you care. Some of you were a little confused as to what $80,000 household income in 1986 means. I went and converted 1986 dollars to dollars today.
As you can see $80,000 in 1986 would be $166,000 today. So what percentile in household income is $166,000? Here it is (I rounded generously, so it is really 43 or 93 and such, instead of 40 or 95):
Value of income conversion
19862012
$20,000$42,000
