Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to present to you the State of America over the past 20-40 years. This is focused strictly on long-term trends, not on specific good or bad things that have happened recently, and solely on trends that have a broad impact.
Please note that no trend is perfect. It's fine to note that poverty remains too high, for example, but it remains true that the trend has been steadily down. That said, first up in medium-term trends is:
The Good
Income is up for everyone: men, women, Black, white, Hispanic, rich, poor, and middle class. Data from the CBO is here. UPDATE: Confused by this chart? Explanation here.- Poverty is down by five percentage points since the '70s.
- Federal income taxes are lower for practically everyone.
- Contrary to popular opinion, the state of retirement hasn't changed much. Unbiased projections—which is to say, projections that aren't from the retirement industry—show that retiree income and wealth is in good shape and will continue to be in good shape over the next 40 years.
- Smartphones are cheap and ubiquitous.
- The divorce rate is down substantially.
- Nearly everyone has access to the internet, the greatest tool for entertainment and information gathering ever created.
- Vaccine development is entering a golden age.
- Among large countries, we have both the highest GDP per capita and the highest growth rate of GDP per capita.
- We have by far the greatest number of startup companies in the world, both in absolute terms and relative to population.
- Violent crime has dropped in half since 1990.
- Survey evidence suggests that overall happiness has been steady for decades.
- Ditto for life satisfaction.
- Assistance to the poor has increased more than 3x and currently amounts to about $1 trillion per year.
- In almost all ways, overt expressions of racism have dropped steadily for decades and are continuing to drop.
- Ditto for LGBT+ issues, especially same-sex marriage.
- The air is far cleaner than it was 50 years ago.
- Ditto for water.
- The disabled have far better access to public spaces.
- Police killings of unarmed civilians have decreased by more than half in the past five years. The declines have been especially noticeable among Black and Hispanic suspects, both down by 68%.
The spiraling cost of medical care has been brought under control. Over the past 20 years, medical inflation has been only slightly higher than overall inflation.- At the same time, the mortality rate from cancer has dropped by a third since 1990.
- Thanks to CHIP and Obamacare, more people have health insurance than ever before.
- Teen pregnancy rates are way down. Ditto for abortion rates.
- High school graduation rates are up and, contrary to popular perception, test scores for graduating seniors have remained steady.
- Lead levels in young children have plummeted.
- Entertainment options have blossomed, especially videogames and quality TV.
- A revolution in depression meds has made life better for millions.
The Bad
- The worst trend of the past couple of decades has been a steady deterioration in average health outside of the upper middle class. Life expectancy has stopped increasing; obesity is up; opioid addiction is up; and deaths of despair are up.
- The labor force participation rate has been steadily dropping.
- The Black-white education gap has been stubbornly resistant to improvement.
- Climate change continues unabated.
- Political polarization has gotten worse, thanks mostly to Fox News and, more recently, the rise of Trumpism.
The Ugly
- Social media. Some good, some bad, nobody knows for sure.
Kevin totally ignores the growth of inequality, which is a very bad trend. Inequality was actually decreasing until about 50 years ago. His economics are often essentially neoliberal - if the middle and lower classes get some crumbs from trickle down they are doing OK.
Also strangely, he blames polarization on Fox News and Trump. Of course Fox News is one of his obsessions. Polarization on racial and religious grounds is something that Republicans have been deliberately aiming for since the 60's. Fox News is now one of their main tools, but Fox didn't invent polarization. Trump has jumped on the bandwagon, capitalizing especially on racist xenophobia. Does Kevin really not realize how Republicans need to keep lower-income whites agitated and split on racism and religion to distract from their plutocratic economic policies?
The Republicans have mastered the art of getting people to vote against their economic self interest. Heck, they're getting people to literally die for them (covid).
Trust in institutions plummeted after fox news appeared. Thats his main argument anyways.
It's clear you didn't read Kevin's article on Fox. He doesn't attribute "polarization" to the network. He attributes the increase in partisan anger to the network.
The biggest win of your Republicans (and “moderate”-right wing Democrats) was when they fooled Americans into believing all tax is theft never to be of any use for ordinary citizens.
When I am giving information on my Sweden is the usual answer:
Americans would never pay xx% in tax ( usually a vastly exaggerated figure)… and by doing so are they confirming my statement above.
The interesting question isn’t the % , it’s what you get for the money.
A family of average income in Sweden is much better of than their peers in USA and a low income family isn’t comparable whatsoever.
Look who's back. In fact the tax thing was baked into the country from the start. It's not something the republicans convinced people about. The only reason we have anything in the ballpark of a modern tax system is to pay for war or prevent communist revolution.
“…deaths of despair are up.”
If most everything is peachy nowadays relative to the past, it sure is strange that deaths of despair are up too.
Maybe strange. Maybe not. But which of the "improvement" statistics Kevin cites are you saying are wrong?
Quality TV?
Yeah. We probably peaked around 2010. Not sure anything the US has produced recently can equal Mad Men/Wire/Sopranos/Deadwood.
(I do think "Better Call Saul" is more enjoyable, overall, than "Breaking Bad" but it's a bit unfair to the latter given that the prequel wouldn't exist without BB).
What We Do in the Shadows.
Oh, come now. Off the top of my head Schitt's Creek, The Good Place, Hacks, and on and on and on. I'd say that in one very important respect, this really is the Golden Age of TV: The writers, for a wonder, are accorded a modicum of respect instead of being treated like dogs the way they were in the not-too-distant past. I'd say the turning point was the Great Writer's Strike in the early aughts.
Not saying any are wrong. But it’s pretty obvious Kevin is presenting all of them as evidence that more things are getting better than getting worse. (The sheer number of Good items is more than the number of Bad items he has selected to show us.)
Yet, if Kevin’s thesis is true - more things generally are getting better than are getting worse - it’s surprising that Deaths of Despair would be one of the things still getting worse. There must be a lot of people out there - more than in the past - that must not see things the same way Kevin sees them, if they’re willing to succumb to a Death of Despair.
In essence, what I’m saying is that the things Kevin cited as improving may actually be improving… and yet also may not matter to other people as much as the things Kevin cited that are not improving… or the many other things Kevin didn’t cite at all that also may not be improving. And thus those other people are turning to Deaths of Despair to escape their misery, because the things they care about are not visibly improving (either nationally or in their immediate local surroundings), even as the Kevin Drums and Jaspers-in-Boston agree that the things they care about are improving.
Smart phones. Like many things they have both negative and positive effects. Everywhere I go, I see people with their faces buried in their phones. If I thought for a minute that most people were doing something constructive, I'd be more inclined to the positive side. But, in addition to being engaged with KD's one ugly list item -- social media -- they are ignoring the people they are with.
Better TV. If better television means more people are spending more time watching TV, I'd call that negative, not positive. The same goes for video games.
Health care.Yes, more people have health insurance, but many policies are poor, and medical debt is still the biggest cause of personal bankruptcies. This problem isn't disappearing.
Where is student debt on Kevin's list? Not a problem???
Federal income taxes. Yes, they are lower for everyone, which is clearly NOT a good thing for the society. It's great for the wealthy, but it means we unnecessarily put one thing after another on our credit card instead of paying for it or using added tax revenues to pay for things we need.
Another thing wrong with the lists or even presenting these things in list form is that each one gets the same weight, i.e., one number on a list. But some of the "good" things pale when compared to the bad things.
Social media are helping to undermine democracy, while better TV means what? More people are passively passing more time.
Climate change may overwhelm the lists, but there is still no sign we will do anything approaching adequate to counteract our destruction of the planet's life support systems. Kevin doesn't mention the species threatened with extinction, which is certainly a "bad" long term trend. And if Fox News and Trump disappeared, political polarization would continue and probably worsen.
I'll stop there. Kevin's lists are problematic, at best.
What a joke.
Kevin's extraordinarily anemic bad and ugly lists are preceded by this post:
"The US death rate from COVID-19 is still unbelievably high,"
but somehow the pandemic and the insanity that has accompanied it don't find a place on either list. I guess the almost endless list of ugly things is, in Kevin's brain, accounted for by saying political polarization is up. The insanity iS part of a long-term trend and not an isolated recent phenomenon.
No mention of the near extinction of labor unions.
Kevin distorts reality to make his "points" and is approaching right wing degrees of disingenuousness and obtuseness.
Sometime in Kevin's past he was a master "cherry-picker."
Sometimes, the cherry-picking gets slimy cherries: https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/82c08c86-7788-4acb-94e9-1785b8aab579
"but somehow the pandemic and the insanity that has accompanied it don't find a place on either list."
Certainly, that would be a fair criticism if K-Drum was looking at the past 2-4 years. But he's not--he's looking at the past 20-40 years, and examining trends. Covid-19 is obviously awful, but it's not a multi-decadal trendline event.
The response to the pandemic is a long term trend dating back at least to 1994 and Gingrich, as I pointed out in my comment!
For bad, how about the alienation of younger men? 60% of college students are now women, and only 40% are men. This is a very concerning trend. Also, labor force participation rate declines are significantly due to men dropping out of work.
I'm currently in a post-baccalaureate program, and I'm generally dismissive of stories that imply "cancel culture" is running wild through academia. In general, I've felt more or less free to discuss whatever issues come up.
But, one trend that really does match my own anecdotal experience is the generally unwelcoming attitude towards men. The comments about "old white men" and the "patriarchy" are not just common, they're more or less the whole paradigm (along with racial oppression, of course). This issue came up as recently as last week: a feminist essay was assigned on a lit theory topic. And I felt it was one of the worst academic essays I've ever read. From beginning to end it dismissed one author or critic after another as "old," white, and, worst of all, male. It accused them all of promoting nothing other than other white and male authors. Since I was familiar with some of the accused, I knew that accusation was wholly inaccurate. And I wrote a blistering response to this essay. I could not believe such writing could survive any sort of peer review, and I do not feel it was of any sufficient quality for the class. But everything it said appears to be so unquestioningly accepted that I was a lone voice speaking out against it.
I hasten to add that these are my own anecdotal experiences; but, it really is true that I have encountered a genuinely unfriendly climate towards men in modern-day academia. I have no idea if that experience relates in any way to a drop in attendance among male students, but I would not be surprised if that's the case.
I'm surprised you weren't tarred and feathered for being a misogynist and racist. How dare you criticize and feminist essay and refuse to denounce white males. And on a college campus, no less.
Folks, this is the guy who finally jumped the shark by quoting Charles Murray ... as an authority. FOAD, troll. You have nothing to offer but a turd in a briefcase. And everyone knows it.
8. Haha. Delta has been around since February and we still don't have a vaccine tailored to it or a system capable of evaluating it fast enough to make it worth while.
11. And the violentest crime murder has skyrocket the past few years. That's it's still below the hellish levels of 1990 soes not change that it's bad and getting worse. Deceptive.
12-13 so stagnant despite all your good stuff? That doesn't sound positive.
2 and 14 we've tripled assistance to the poor but made only a 5% dent in poverty? Hideous.
15-16 lol. See Trump. Way way up in the last 5 years thats a trend.
23 unfortunately the youth are becoming herbivorous. Sex is way down and population growth reflects that as well as less fulfilling sex being up. Positives and negatives.
27 unfortunately it seems far more people have mental health problems even accounting for better detection and lower stigma.
Okay, "youth are becoming herbivorous" is a good thing, don't know why anyone would think otherwise unless they work in the ranching industry. And you can't make a dumb assertion like "sex is way down" without any basis. Population growth going down is also a very good and important thing.
Herbivorous is the Japanese term for people who are essentially ace--but because it's too much work not necessarily natural inclination. It's not just the weird shut ins. Even otherwise well adjusted people don't bother Japans birthrate being what it is you see the issue.
"But the share of young adults having sex at least once a week has fallen from 59 percent in 1972 to 49 percent in 2018. This decline is far steeper among men: down from 58 percent of young men having sex at least weekly in 2010 to just 43 percent in 2018."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/happiness-recession-causing-sex-depression/586405/
The second paragraph is specifically about America. I'm not saying teens should get knocked up but when it extends into parenting years it becomes a problem. While Americans put out a lot of carbon without a strong economy financing the needed changes to deal with green house gasses gets harder.
I find it difficult to see the declining labor force participation rate as a bad thing. People are apparently managing to afford more leisure, earlier retirement, and other such desirable options.
Agree! Though it would be a good thing to have more flexibility to choose how to enjoy leisure: shorter work weeks? six weeks’ paid vacation, as in many countries in Western Europe? months of parental and/or family-care leave?
I don't think America's LFPR jives with what other high income countries are seeing. It's hard to believe the US provides "opportunities for leisure" more effectively than Finland or Canada. Also, a cursory look at the data suggest the decline in the US is concentrated on less educated males — hardly what one would expect if the trend really described comfortable seniors enjoying photography and gardening with all that extra time.
I'd check against disability. It's increasingly used as a kludge dole.
During the pandemic, many streets were taken back from vehicle traffic and used for outdoor dining, pedestrians and cyclists. I consider this a great thing.
But about that vaccine development:
You should be more explicit that mRNA has brought about this revolution. Moderna posted early lab mice results last week of a 3-in-1 vaccine shot incorporating Influenza, SARS-CoV-2, and RSV (https://twitter.com/moderna_tx/status/1435978825377136641). We've never had an RSV vaccine, before. Generally, Influenza vaccines are hit-and-miss on effectiveness, rarely reaching 70% and that's only for subgroups. Most of the time, effectiveness is at around 50%. If you can identify the key protein(s) to target, you can train the body to find a virus even if it has rapid genetic drift. This has implications far beyond just humans. We might effectively control FIV, for instance.
Yeah, it's on par with flight, or the advent of printing, or even antibiotics. It's probably going to be a paradigm changer.
Sometimes you've got to bake bread.
The spiraling cost of health care may be under control, but the allocation of the fees charged is out of whack. Not so much going to the health care providers, much going to administrative bureaucracies and insurance carriers.
id add economic inequality either by wealth or income since 70's
And the marriage rate?
All the good things are good, and most of them are going to evaporate as climate change really gets cooking, so to speak.
OK. Then why is everyone so mad at everyone else?
What is it about this country and enemies? It can’t even pretend to do without them. Of course, it just lost one enemy, the Taliban, in a humiliating fashion, even as President Biden bragged that no country had ever airlifted itself out of a losing war quite so brilliantly. (“No nation has ever done anything like it in all of history. Only the United States had the capacity and the will and ability to do it, and we did it today.”) In the process, he also announced that the forever wars of the last 20 years were finally ending. But don’t panic — not, at least, if you happen to be a failed commander from those wars or a CEO in one of the many companies that make up the industrial part of the military-industrial complex. There’s so much more to come. As Biden said, “The world is changing. We’re engaged in a serious competition with China. We’re dealing with the challenges on multiple fronts with Russia.”
Keep in mind that, in these last two decades, the U.S. has spent an estimated $8 trillion just on our forever wars (and the care of the veterans of those conflicts). Worse yet, possibly $21 trillion went into those conflicts and the militarization of American society that went with them. That scale of investment can’t continue without an enemy. Of course, from its earliest moments in office, the Biden foreign-policy team has been focused on “pivoting” from war-on-terror targets to provoking China. That’s included threatening naval gestures in the Strait of Taiwan and the South China Sea, a calling-together of allies to confront Beijing in an ever-more-militarized fashion, and greater support for Taiwan. It all adds up to an enemy-filled future in which Congress must continue to invest ever more staggering sums in the military-industrial complex rather than in this country’s true infrastructure or genuine needs.
In fact, the House Armed Services Committee promptly endorsed a plan to add an extra $24 billion (above and beyond the staggering $715 billion the Biden administration had requested for the 2022 Pentagon budget). The equivalent Senate committee had already given a thumbs up to a similar sum, indicating that the next Pentagon budget will be in the range of $740 billion dollars. California Representative Ro Khanna was among the few who gave the measure a thumbs down. (“We just ended the longest war in American history, now is the time to decrease defense spending, not increase it… We are already spending three times as much on our military as China did.”)
In that context, let historian Alfred McCoy, author of the soon-to-be-published groundbreaking imperial history, To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change, tell you what full-scale defeat in Afghanistan really means for this country. He considers how, as taxpayer dollars are put into yet more militarization (and the global failure that goes with it), China has proven so much cannier about its investments on a planet that itself needs some genuine human investment before it becomes a gigantic Kabul.
Social conservatives need conflict anywhere they can find it.
They're ideally suited for subsistence living, where the goal is hording and protecting your horde, so they try to maximize that kind of life and world of limitations and scarcity.
Good list, but you forgot one of the very best developments of the past 20 years - the universal ban on smoking in public venues.
OMG yes!!!!! I'm very, very allergic to tobacco, I'd be miserable in presence of tobacco smoke. I could go to work in the office without hacking a lung out and enjoy eating out.
Undone by vaping boom.
Not really - vaping is banned in most public venues also.
Maybe healthcare costs are only increasing a wee bit more than inflation but salaries are not and increasingly it's a game of cat and mouse to avoid surprise bills and gaps in coverage despite the incremental improvements with removal of life time caps for core care.
For the first time a majority of Americans believe in evolution,
https://news.umich.edu/study-evolution-now-accepted-by-majority-of-americans/
Alarming animated graph of selected causes of death vs covid over the last 18 months,
https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/selected-deaths-vs-covid-19-united-states
Covid is increasing, and, I may be wrong by just watching it, and the graph may be wrong, but it looks like coronary heart disease is increasing at a brisk pace over this period as well.
Air and water may seem cleaner, but that's only because we're much more discreet about what we dump into them these days. No more belching clouds of black soot that causes peppered moths to evolve black coloration. Nowadays, it's neonicotinoid insecticides that are leading to steep declines in insect populations. Our sewage doesn't smell as bad as it did, but it's nevertheless filled with MAOIs and SSRIs and endocrine disruptors.
It used to be that we knocked the food web out of whack by eliminating the apex predators. Now we're doing it from the other end.
I'd say the main "bad" things Kevin neglects to mention are:
1) The self-destruction of the Republican Party as a serious governing entry, and the accompanying threat of autocracy. We may not get there, and in in the past the fall of a party hasn't been a big problem (another one rises to take its place). But we see no signs of amelioration yet. Maybe the epic beatdown the GOP is going to receive next year because of its lunacy on covid? (Don't make me laugh).
2) Growing inequality. Absolute gains in income are nice, even when they're modest. But inequality itself is undesirable, and when it continues to expand year in year out, it's a deeply worrying trend.
3) An increasing swath of urban America—especially its richest, most pleasant and most productive metro areas—has steadily grown less affordable for the non-affluent. This negatively impacts the quality of life of millions of Americans (including, probably, the affluent, although they don't always realize it) and hurts the economy, and thus overall living standards (even in affordable areas).
4) Growing threat of nuclear war. This trend hardly affects the US alone, but I think we've squandered the window we briefly enjoyed in the 90s to do serious work on reducing the probability of nuclear war. That probability has risen precipitously in recent years, though few seem to be talking about it (I think it's just too much of a downer for people to grapple with).
But all in all Kevin's is a good list. I appreciate his insistence on data, even when the data don't (in this case) please his Gloomy Gus liberal readership.
3) and that also alienates the wealthy from the vast bulk of the human species leaving them incapable of seriously grasping or addressing any issue significant to most people and able to imagine only 'solutions that make sense for them'.
This is basically how the corporate Republicans lost control of the baboon colony, by increasingly upping the ante of nonsense that never is really delivered upon, in the interest of hording wealth.
The cost of education in the US has priced many right out of it.
Income inequality doesn't merit a mention? It's toxic. Economic power begets political power begets more economic power, and so on. And there is little counter-vailing power in the U.S. today - that is worth noting.
Suicide rate and gun ownership vs 2020 election,
https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/opgr9p/oc_us_states_suicide_rate_vs_gun_ownership_2020/
Road deaths, US vs Europe,
https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/p8phly/yearly_road_deaths_per_million_people_across_the/
90% of American problems are red state problems,
https://old.reddit.com/r/Fuckthealtright/comments/p887e0/the_dotheoppositeofwhatjesuswoulddo_belt/
Oklahoma is Syria with a professional basketball team.
And tornadoes, so it's just like being bombed all the time, so exactly like Syria.
In Syria, they say 'haboob'.
I prefer "Somalia with shittier weather and more guns."
Check the chart on page 22 of this NBER working paper: https://mobile.twitter.com/leedrutman/status/1437449704342704131
States that voted for R presidential candidate are more likely to have shorter life expectancies than those voting for D candidates. Ha ha, dumb Republicans, right? Not quite.
The trend came about from the move of White working class voters shifting towards the perceived protectionist GOP and the college-educated class moving to the Democratic Party. IOW, were the parties closer to 1976 than 2020, Democrats might be seen as a cult of death, not the GOP.
So, you're saying, not only is James Earl Carter, Jr., responsible for the 2007-08 housing crisis due the Community Reinvestment Act, but also COVID19.
Number of Federal disaster declarations by county 2011-2020,
https://i.redd.it/8ey54bff06f71.png
Counting up the counties a certain region stands out, yet these same areas of mayhem keep voting to destroy the government, whereafter they will be able to enjoy blind faith and trust in The Lord, presumably.
Oh, here's some good news!
Is your sperm lacking oomph? Does it just limp along? Like it needs a crutch?
https://old.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/o8uix9/a_micromotor_that_allows_sperm_with_movement/
Now you can attach little motors to it to give it that extra effort it can't produce on it's own.
It's a prosthesis for a cell!
Now no matter how old and decrepit you may be science is there to help you get the job done!
"Nearly everyone has access to the internet, the greatest tool for entertainment and information gathering ever created"
Also the greatest tool for time wasting, doom scrolling, bias confirmation, and uniting crazy people into a mob.
I count that a net wash.
Plus tomorrow it looks like California's gonna put a large stake in the coffin of Trumpism
Inshallah.
Mr Drum did forget the crucial ones
USA is continuing to slip in ratings on democracy (EIU and V-Democracy) and that goes also for freedom (Freedom House)
Your statistics on maternal and infant mortality is continuing to deteriorate starting from already disastrous numbers
What is positive is that USA is gaining one position if we are talking about freedom of press, up from pos 45 to pos 44..WOW (Reporters without borders)
… and I wonder what good your statistics on GDP is when people who are working full time cannot put food on the table or rent an apartment big enough to house a family and when middle class families are going bankrupt and ends up out in the street if a child is diagnosed with cancer
Some forgotten truths from a Swede
'thank you Kevin.
In summary: No matter how many things are getting better, it's still bad. All bad. No redeeming improvements whatsoever.