Actually Americans Don't Believe We Are the Best At Everything

HopeTracker| Listening to politicians talk, we are exhausted with the term ‘the American people believe’ or ‘the American people have spoken’. Americans do not speak with a single voice at all. The second phrase we’re exhausted with is ‘America has the best health care’ or ‘America is the best lifestyle in the world’ …

It’s not that we are unpatriotic. We are just factualists who believe that Americans need a dose of truth serum and not political platitudes.In two years I’ve not seen one research report that puts America on the top of any quality of life survey.

What is the truth about how we see ourselves? I just discovered this graph investigating another topic about scientists and political affiliation.

Even I am shocked to see how realistic Americans really are about our place in the world. Why do we never hear discussions that are grounded in the reality of how Americans see ourselves? This graph suggests that our self perception is in closer alignment with reality than I believed.

It’s our politicians and pundits who keep singing a different song about how we are the best in everything that counts in life. I wonder if any of them ever reads a research report.

I got to this graph, investigating the Economist’s tagging of a Slate article tagging this Pew Research 2009 survey about American’s view of science. I set out to investigate the fact that only six percent of scientists identify as being Republican. But I couldn’t ignore this table that suggests that Americans in total, are more realistic about our current place in the world than politicians of either party indicate.

As for scientists and their political identification, the tables do confirm a very disturbing reality, in our opinion. I don’t believe that the same question asked of scientists in the 1980s would have delivered the same answers.

Being a Republican and being a scientist wasn’t nearly so problematic in that decade, although the movement towards a more Conservative America was in motion.

These two graphs compare the American electorate in 2009 and then scientists by Partisanship and Ideology. I find this to be a staggeringly important consideration — that only 6% of America’s scientists consider themself to be Republican. Anne