Excerpted from WSJ “Where’s the Outrage? Really.” Arthur Brooks, July 31, 2008
According to an emerging journalistic narrative … ordinary Americans are outraged. The anger is simply assumed to exist. Ironically, this assumption is questionable, and is not supported by the data.
In May 2008, the Gallup Organization asked 1,200 American adults how many days in the past week they had felt “outraged.” The average number of angry days was 1.17, and 54% of those surveyed said none. … Despite the litany of horrors presented to us daily by campaigning politicians, most of us appear to be doing really quite well managing our anger.
Indeed, we are less angry today than a decade ago… (in) the glory days of the 1990s, when — according to the media narrative — we enjoyed uninterrupted peace and prosperity. In 1996, the General Social Survey asked exactly the same “outrage” question of 1,500 adults. Then, only 38% had not been outraged at all in the past week. The average number of angry days was 1.5 per week, 29% higher than at present.
Virtually every group in the population is less angry in 2008 than in 1996 … only one major group in the population has gotten angrier: people who call themselves “very liberal.” … Today, very liberal people spend more than twice as much time feeling angry as do political moderates. One in seven is outraged seven days a week .
Most Americans recognize that, while gas is expensive and our grocery money doesn’t go as far as it did last year, we are still an enormously prosperous and fortunate nation.
Most … are reasonable people, and can see the difference between correctable problems within a strong system of democratic capitalism and the kind of catastrophic failure that justifies real outrage.
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Mr. Brooks is a professor at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Public Affairs.
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For the full article (worth reading):
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121746010408198765.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries
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