this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2025
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I'm specifically talking about the wording of the survey questions. If you've ever worked on making survey's and collected good samples for it you quickly learn how much the questions you ask and the way you ask them impacts the results.
An obvious example being surveys asking Americans about "The affordable care act" vs. "Obama Care". You can swing the results by double digit percentages just by changing the name of the same policy.
But taking the results side by side in a vacuum from this so you can get clicks is all financial times cares about.
The article is written so you think "Americans want others to work in factories but not themselves" but if you think about even the numbers with these poorly worded questions for more than a second they actually make sense.
1 in 6 people you survey are gonna be over 65 and retired (assuming you had a representative sample). And even more are gonna be "old"
More are gonna be college educated and already working in a comfortable job.
Obviously many people are going to answer "well, no it's not for me obviously"
It's actually still a large percentage that want to work in a factory considering everything. Which is the opposite of what the article is trying to imply.
I mean, if you question the survey so fundamentally then you shouldn't take much of anything from it. Including the opposite conclusion.
For instance, you also have to consider the opposite group: the number of people who are unemployed and people who aren't even participants in the economy but would prefer to be due to financial hardship. Desperate people might accept even awful work as an improvement, even if they'd prefer a completely different job overall if it was available.
And obviously, a lot of the people who perceive factory work as an improvement to their working lives even when already employed are probably thinking about it by mentally associating with the benefits of steady unionized work.
Where I live, basically none of the factory jobs that exist are unionized and are nearly all contract based through 3rd parties.