In the case of marijuana legalization (apart from the issue of value judgements), what I see confuses me: ISTM that most people above a certain age are against it and most people below a certain age (except politically right-wing ones) are in favour of it, but that would mean that either 1) support for marijuana legalization advances one funeral at a time, and hence ought to be larger now than 15 years ago than 30 years ago than 45 years ago, or 2) most people change their minds at a certain point in their lives, neither of which I’ve observed. I suspect that there’s some kind of selection bias in the young people I know and the old people I know. (Also, signalling probably plays a helluva part in this, so maybe the old people who claim they never supported marijuana legalization are just lying.)
Yeah, I had forgotten about population aging, though I’m not sure how big an effect it is. I’d guess the median age (in Italy) has increased between 5 and 30 years in the past 45 years.
From the abstract:
the direction of [intracohort] change is most often toward increased tolerance rather than increased conservatism
That’s what happens in diachronic linguistics too: when adults change the way they speak, that’s usually towards the way younger cohorts speak rather than away from it (just google for Queen vowels). In absence of any population aging, that would only accelerate linguistic changes among the population as a whole.
You may find http://www.gwern.net/docs/2007-danigelis.pdf interesting although unfortunately the survey data does not include questions about marijuana or drugs in general.
(I haven’t finished reading it yet.)
Yeah, I had forgotten about population aging, though I’m not sure how big an effect it is. I’d guess the median age (in Italy) has increased between 5 and 30 years in the past 45 years.
From the abstract:
That’s what happens in diachronic linguistics too: when adults change the way they speak, that’s usually towards the way younger cohorts speak rather than away from it (just google for
Queen vowels). In absence of any population aging, that would only accelerate linguistic changes among the population as a whole.