Month: March 2024

Here is the growth in the teen suicide rate since 2000:

I'd like you to notice two things. First, the rise in teen suicides begins in 2007 and ends in 2017. Second, the overall growth in teen suicide through 2022 is the same as it is for adults. Neither of these things seems consistent with the smartphone theory of teen depression and anxiety:

• Teen suicides start to go up well before the introduction of smartphones and social media, and the rise stops in 2017 even though smartphone and social media penetration continued to grow.
• Adults didn't grow up with smartphones or become nearly as addicted to social media as teens did. Yet their suicide rate grew just as much.

This is why I remain skeptical of the Jonathan Haidt/Jean Twenge theory that smartphones have wrecked American teens. The suicide stats don't fit. The research results are thin. And the state of American adults seems to be about the same as it is for teens:¹

It's obvious that something happened around 2012 or so, but it's happened equally to both teens and adults. This doesn't mean the smartphone theory is wrong. Maybe adults are affected as much as teens. But nobody seems to believe that, and it should make us cautious about accepting a theory just because two starting points² sort of match up—sometimes.

The smartphone theory really does seem to have some commonsense power to it, and I'm in favor of limiting social media use among young teens—though I'm not entirely sure how to do this. Still, I think something else is going on too. We just don't know what yet.

¹This is a complicated chart stitched together from several sources. It's meant to be suggestive, not definitive. The rate of teen major depression comes from Jean Twenge here. The teen depressive symptoms are an average of three questions on an annual survey, also from Jean Twenge as reported here. Adult mental health care comes from "Trends of mental health care utilization among US adults" here. The trend is extrapolated through 2022 using adult data from "Antidepressant Dispensing to US Adolescents and Young Adults" here.

²Smartphone use and teen depression both started rising at about the same time.

It's too early etc. etc., but I thought everyone could use a little dose of good news this morning. Joe Biden has been picking up support lately:

This is from the Economist, which updates its poll average weekly.

The big caveat, of course, is that this doesn't say anything about the polls in swing states, which are hard to track but still seem to be generally in Trump's favor. So any celebration is limited to one cookie, OK?

CBP released border numbers on Friday and they were about the same as last month:

Total encounters in February came to 190,000, of which 42,000 were migrants who made appointments for asylum through CBP's mobile app. The number apprehended crossing illegally was 141,000.

About 29,000 immigrants gained temporary residence via the CHNV parole program in February. Total numbers under the program are now nearly 400,000:

Through the end of February 2024, over 386,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans arrived lawfully and were granted parole under the parole processes. Specifically...79,000 Cubans, 151,000 Haitians, 64,000 Nicaraguans, and 91,000 Venezuelans arrived lawfully and were granted parole.

Here are my top ten traffic pet peeves. Some are fairly ordinary, some are probably sort of unique to me. Feel free to add your own in comments!

1. If you're going to make a turn, put on your blinker. Don't worry about whether anyone is around. Just do it.
2. Also: if you're turning right, move over to the right so other cars can pass. You don't have to make a tractor turn from the middle of the street.
3. If you want to drive at the speed limit on highways, that's fine. Just don't do it in the fast lane(s).
4. In parking lots, drive on the right.
5. Make a full stop at stop signs. But once you've done that you don't need to wait five seconds or three seconds or even one second. If the intersection is clear, just go.
6. In school zones, go 25 mph if children are present. But if children aren't present then drive at the ordinary speed limit.
7. At a stop light, don't leave ten feet between you and the car ahead of you. A couple of feet is plenty, and tighter spacing makes it less likely you'll block the left turn lane when traffic is heavy.
8. If you're in the right lane on a freeway, don't react to merging traffic unless you're forced to. This one sounds a little weird, but if I'm merging it's up to me to do it safely. This is a lot easier if you just keep doing whatever you're doing instead of slowing down or speeding up.
9. If you have the right of way, take it.
10. When turning into traffic, wait until traffic is clear. Being annoyed because you've already waited a long time is not a sufficient reason.

NOTE: Items #5 and #6 might vary depending on the laws in your state.

Remember a few years ago when Joe Biden was vice president and visited Israel? In a deliberate move to embarrass him, a right-wing minister chose that exact moment to announce 1,600 new housing units for Jews in Palestinian East Jerusalem.

Well, even in their darkest moment, when US support is more important than ever, they're still at it:

Considering everything else Israel's leaders have done over the past year—and the past 20 years—I suppose this is small potatoes. You can just add it to the bonfire of insults and provocations that explain why, after 40 years of defending Israel at all costs, Biden has truly and finally had enough:

This is nuts:

I was curious about some detail of the crime rate today so I pulled up data from the National Crime Victimization Survey. And I noticed something I never have before:

NCVS reports that about 10% of all households are victims of property crime. We normally think of this as home burglary, but it turns out that nearly all of it is "other theft," very little of which is serious enough to be reported to the police. This category includes shoplifting, pickpocketing, bicycle theft, and stealing stuff from cars. It's basically any theft that doesn't involve breaking into a building (burglary) or personal confrontation (robbery).

Ordinary home burglary is a tiny fraction of property victimization. What's more, it's dropped like a stone since its peak and has continued dropping over the past decade. Today, the average neighborhood has about one burglary every two years. Burglaries serious enough to notify the police happen about once every five years.¹

¹The median suburban subdivision has about 50 homes.

Consistent data on teen use of social media is hard to get because nobody bothered surveying it until recently. However, here's how things seem to have gone over the past five years:

• Winners: YouTube, TikTok
• About even: Instagram, Snapchat
• Losers: Facebook, Twitter

Here's what struck me about this: the more interactive a platform is, the worse it's done. Facebook and Twitter, which are fundamentally based on conversation, have done the worst. YouTube and TikTok, which simply present content, have done the best. Instagram and Snapchat, which are interactive but mostly video and photo sharing, are somewhere in the middle.

I'm not entirely sure I'm right about this, and I'm not sure what to make of it in any case. But it seems like it might be an important trend. In the past, social media replaced narrow in-person interaction with broad digital interaction. Maybe that was a plus, maybe a negative. But now the majority of time that teens spend on social media is simply about ingesting endless content.

If this is true, what does it mean? Thoughts?

Generation Alpha (ca. 2010-2024) isn't even finished being born yet, but the LA Times informs me today that we already hate them anyway:

“Everyone on the internet is really scared of Gen Alpha,” said Gen Z influencer Rivata Dutta, aka Riv, whose content is popular with alphas on TikTok. “They’re like, oh my God, Gen Alpha is so weird.”

....In recent months, the alphas have emerged as TikTok’s newest supervillain, a designation that has followed them into mainstream media. If zoomers are delicate snowflakes, alphas are the opposite — a horde of marauders chasing Drunk Elephant beauty products.

....“I need to ask millennials — why are your kids so awful, and more importantly, why do you think it’s so funny?” TikToker Alanna Dinh said in a viral video in November.

I don't really have anything to say about this. It just amuses me that most of the Alpha hostility comes from Gen Z. It appears to be based on little aside from the fact (?) that Alphas are even more digitally dependent than Zoomers, with their heads always buried in an iPad. In another decade, I suppose that Betas will spend 24/7 in VR headsets and the Alphas will be the ones complaining.

A few days ago I was out for a walk and came across a woman taking a picture of a very photogenic cat. It was Charlie, who had jumped the fence and was roaming around several houses away.

This alarmed Marian, who decided he needed a collar. So in today's picture you can see his stylish new—

Wait. No you can't. It's pretty much completely hidden by his fur. But you can see his favorite bird bath, which is sadly empty. The water has all evaporated since our last rain, so there's no yummy outdoors slush to drink. And no rain is forecast for the next couple of weeks. Perhaps the garden hose will make a surprise appearance in the meantime.