As David Greenberg, a historian at Rutgers, mentioned to me, Ronald Reagan’s famous question, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” echoes an earlier line from Franklin Roosevelt, from a 1934 radio address:

“But the simplest way for each of you to judge recovery lies in the plain facts of your own individual situation. Are you better off than you were last year?”

This reminds me of a point Aaron Edlin, Noah Kaplan, and I have made, which is that the evidence is (both from survey data and from theoretical considerations) that people vote based on what they think is good for the country, rather than what they think is their personal benefit. (This relates to the idea that it’s not rational to vote, with a probability of decisive vote being about 1 in 10 million, if your goal is to get a $300 tax cut or whatever, but it is rational to vote, with these same odds, if your goal is to make the country and world a much better place.)

Anyway, the Reagan quote is often taken as a symbol of selfishness, of people voting based on what makes themselves better off. But I’ve always taken Reagan’s statement as implicitly statistical or inferential: if your goal is to evaluate how the country is going, look to yourself and your neighbors and see how they are doing. “Are you better off than you were four years ago” is an estimate of “Is the country better off…”

This idea of personal-retrospection-as-inference is clearer in the original Roosevelt quote: “But the simplest way for each of you to judge recovery lies in the plain facts of your own individual situation…” As with Reagan, not an appeal to selfishness but rather an appeal to inference.