Theoretical and empirical study on economic consciousness (attitudes) and social evaluation of economy.

在我们1997年对具有代表性的东京样本进行的调查中，人们对经济和政治参与者的期望出人意料地低，甚至低于有利的自然条件，如良好的天气或受欢迎的运动队的好成绩。与小政府论证中的隐含假设相反，人们对竞争机制的信心构成了一个不同于因子分析中管理层所代表的态度维度。这种对制度机制的信心与对重要制度参与者的信心的分离是日本独有的，正如在政治制度方面指出的那样，还是在其他发达国家也存在，这是我们的研究提出的一个理论上的重要问题。此外，我们的受访者对日本经济的几个方面的前景表示非常悲观。我们的假设是，在舆论对日本社会长期走势悲观的基础上，人们对短期经济周期的看法急剧恶化，使得他们对日本经济的前景非常悲观，受访者的性别、教育程度、收入和职业声望显然与他们是否依赖电视或报纸作为经济信息的主要来源有关。将自由联想的方法应用于英语中与“经济”相对应的“经济”一词，我们得到了286个单词，其中206个单词出现在电视新闻和报纸上，证实了媒体的强大力量。在自由竞争与弱者利益管制的问题上，文职人员和蓝领工人分别表现出似乎与他们的职业兴趣相对应的观点。但个体户并没有表现出明显的就业倾向。在对公平的认知上，持悲观经济观的个体比持乐观态度的个体更倾向于认为教育对职业成功的影响更大，更多地认为教育与实际能力有关。

In our survey using a representative sample of Tokyo in 1997, people showed surprisingly low expectation of economic and political actors, even lower than of favorable natural conditions such as good weather or good results of popular sports teams. And contrary to implicit assumption in small government arguments, people's confidence in competitive mechanism constituted an attitudinal dimension different from the dimension represented by management in factor analysis. Whether this separation of confidence in system mechanism from confidence in salient system actors is unique to Japan, as pointed out concerning political system, or found in other developed countries too, is a theoretically important problem posed by our research. Also Our respondents showed very pessimistic view of future of several aspects of Japanese economy. Our hypothesis is that on the basis of pessimistic public opinion on long term trend of Japanese society, sharp worsening of people's outlook on short term economic cycle made extremely pessimistic their confidence in future of Japanese economy.Respondents' sex, education, income, and occupational prestige had clearly to do with wether they rely on television or newspaper as the main source of economic information. In applying the method of free association to the word "Keizai", which correspond to "economy" in English, we got 286 words of which 206 words were found in television news and newspapers, confirming strong power of the media.In the issue of free competition versus regulation for the interests of the weak, clerical workers and blue collar workers showed opinions seemingly corresponding to their occupational interests respectively. But self employed people did not show clear tendency.Concerning the perception of justice, those people who show pessimistic outlook of economy tend to look greater influence of education on occupational success and more assume education is connected with real ability than those who are more optimistic.