Americans want you to show them the money.
A smaller percentage of people in the U.S. today say patriotism, religion and having children are very important to them than did in 1998, while the percentage of people who say they value money has gone up, according to a new poll.
The poll, which was conducted by the social research organization NORC at the University of Chicago with funding from the Wall Street Journal, found that fewer than half of Americans view conventional values such as religion, patriotism, having children and community involvement as very important.
Americans care less about patriotism, religion and more about money than they used to. This chart shows the percentages of respondents who said they see the values as very important, rather than overall net positive feelings about these values.
Source: WSJ/NORC poll
The percentages of Americans who value those factors highly have dropped off since 1998, when the Wall Street Journal first polled people on these questions. All of those the categories, with the exception of community involvement, saw a consistent drop between 1998 and 2019.
Respondents were asked to rate several values on a scale. In the poll, they were asked if each value was very important, somewhat important, not that important or not important at all.
The percentage of Americans who see money as very important rose between 1988 and 2019, and it has risen again since 2019, according to the polls. That was the only value polled that was seen as more important than it was a quarter-century ago.
“These differences are so dramatic, it paints a new and surprising portrait of a changing America,” Bill McInturff, a pollster who worked on the 2019 survey, told the Wall Street Journal on Monday. He went on to say that “perhaps the toll of our political division, COVID and the lowest economic confidence in decades is having a startling effect on our core values.”
The importance respondents placed on some of these values breaks along age groups.
According to the poll, about 23% of adults under the age of 30 say patriotism is very important, compared with 59% of adults over the age of 64.
Additionally, about 31% of adults under 30 say religion is very important to them, compared with 55% of adults over 64.
The poll was conducted with responses from 1,019 U.S. adults between March 1 and March 13 and has a margin of error of 4.1 percentage points.
The rise in the importance of money among Americans may reflect feelings about the current economic environment and ongoing high inflation. According to a Gallup poll conducted in December, 80% of Americans think the U.S. will experience great economic difficulty this year, and data released in January showed that 73% of Americans think inflation could affect their ability to pay their bills.
