Polling What Matters to Americans

The Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation have been polling Americans about what matters in their lives, and they turned up some interesting numbers. They asked "how important is this to you" about a range of matters, and got these responses:

	Very Important	Somewhat Important	Not very Important	Not at all Important
Being successful in a career	54	33	7	5
Having enough free time	57	37	4	2
Being married	51	24	15	10
Living a religious life	52	26	11	10
Having children	65	17	8	8
Being wealthy	12	41	35	11
Being respected by others	67	28	3	2
Being is a good romantic relationship	56	30	8	6
Being close with your family	88	9	1	1
Living a healthy lifestyle	77	22	1	1
Being physically attractive	16	48	26	10

You can see how seriously to take what people say is important to them by looking at that "living a healthy lifestyle" line; 99 percent of Americans say it's important, but how many are doing it?

What stood out for me is that number for "being respected by others," which comes in ahead of career, free time, religion, and marriage. This really is essential to human life, and one of our top goals ought to be to maximize the amount of respect and dignity in our society.

Read farther down into the survey and you find that 24% of white men worry about being discriminated against, which pretty much explains the support for Newt Gingrich's campaign.