Kevin Drum

This is a Joshua tree lit by the setting sun at Joshua Tree National Park. I have to confess that Joshua trees don't do much for me, and I've never been entirely clear on why a thousand square miles of scrub and Joshua trees became a national park. But I'm sure it has a unique and fragile ecosystem etc. etc.

I noticed yesterday that the Atlantic's Yoni Appelbaum has a new book coming out next year called Stuck. It asks, "How did America cease to be the land of opportunity?"

Obviously I haven't read it yet, but it got me curious. Has America ceased being the land of opportunity? My own suspicion is that America was never quite the land of opportunity that legend has it, but gained that reputation because for a lot of immigrants it was a helluva lot better than what they had before.

But who cares what my suspicion is? I was curious about whether things have fallen apart in the past few decades for young people. Here are several metrics that make up what people think of as the American Dream. First, homeownership:

Are you surprised? Even with the growth of home prices, homeownership is the same among young people as it was in the '90s. Here is income:

There's a lot stagnation here thanks to the Great Recession, but that's in the past. Compared to 30 years ago, incomes of the youngest are up 30% and incomes of the next youngest are up 40%. That's not too bad. Here's a recent Fed report comparing income among generations:

Every generation has done better than the previous one, including both Millennials and Gen Z. Here is wealth, which was a big concern at one time but now looks perfectly normal:

Here is college:

College completion is far higher among young people than it was 30 years ago. It's nearly doubled during that time. Here is retirement:

Projections suggest that young people are likely to have a pretty prosperous retirement, although it may end up being a little less than Boomer retirement compared to average national income. Here is economic mobility:

This is from a 2015 paper, so it's a little dated, but it shows little change between children born in 1971 and Millennials born in 1992. Mobility hasn't improved, but neither has it declined. Finally, here is new business formation:

This series goes back only to 2005, and there's evidence that starting up your own business has declined over the long term. But more recently, after falling during the Great Recession, it's now at a higher rate than it was at the beginning of the century. These figures are not specifically for young people, but it's a good bet that most small business formation is done by the relatively young.

So . . . it looks like young people aren't really stuck. They've got legit problems with college loans and high housing prices, but overall they're doing as well or better than any generation in recent memory.

UPDATE: I've corrected the homeownership chart. I originally miscalculated the combined rate of the 18-24 and 25-34 age cohorts.

Here are the latest swing state results from Emerson College Polling:

It's close to a dead heat in the battleground states. Aside from Arizona, Kamala Harris is either ahead or within 1% in every state.

Fingers crossed.

The Army has finally released a statement about Donald Trump's vulgar and illegal behavior on Monday at Arlington National Cemetery:

The Trump campaign's official response is that the Army is lying and the altercation was prompted by an employee suffering a "mental health episode."

Whenever you think Trump can't get any more obnoxious, he does. He and his staff all knew Arlington isn't allowed to be used for political purposes, but they barged in and did so anyway. When a cemetery employee tried to stop them, she was shoved aside and they continued. Really reprehensible.

The previous post got me playing again with the Google Ngram viewer, which is a total time suck if you let yourself get dragged into it. But writing about stress got me curious about the use of the word crisis. Here it is:

Look at the left edge of the chart. We managed to get through World War II, the Marshall Plan, Russia getting the bomb, Communists taking over China, McCarthyism, and Sputnik without calling everything a crisis. Then, suddenly, in the mid '50s, everything became a crisis. We had the Cuban Missile Crisis; the Middle East crisis; the drug crisis; the oil crisis; the inflation crisis; the Iranian hostage crisis; the AIDS crisis; another drug crisis; the climate crisis; the 9/11 crisis; the obesity crisis; the banking crisis; the mass-shooting crisis; the COVID crisis; the replication crisis; yet another drug crisis; the homelessness crisis; the social media crisis; humanitarian crises everywhere; and finally, because a simple crisis wasn't enough anymore, the world fell into a polycrisis. And then there's the language of personal crisis: mid-life crisis; loneliness crisis; mental health crisis; crisis of conscience; identity crisis; and crisis of confidence.

The use of the word crisis tripled between 1955 and 1975 and then nearly doubled again to the present day. Its share of the language has gone up almost 5x in the past 70 years.

It's no wonder we all feel so overwhelmed. Everything is a crisis. Or so you'd think if you inhaled television and magazines and online media. But who knows. Maybe everything isn't a crisis. Maybe—just maybe—the world is safer than it was during World War II. If we took a more clearheaded view of things, perhaps we'd decide that the world isn't in a perpetual crisis after all.

Vivek Murthy, fresh off his advisory about the dangers of social media, has a new advisory telling us that parents in America are distraught:

Surgeon General: Parents Are at Their Wits’ End. We Can Do Better.

The stress and mental health challenges faced by parents — just like loneliness, workplace well-being and the impact of social media on youth mental health — aren’t always visible, but they can take a steep toll.

....Something has to change. It begins with fundamentally shifting how we value parenting, recognizing that the work of raising a child is crucial to the health and well-being of all society. This change must extend to policies, programs and individual actions designed to make this vital work easier.

Murthy is right about surveys showing that parents have higher levels of stress than other adults. But this is neither surprising nor new: surveys have always shown this. It's not something unique to our brave new world of smartphones and COVID.

The gap between parents and non-parents hasn't changed much over the past couple of decades, which means we can get a good idea of how stress has changed by simply looking at overall stress levels. Here's Gallup:

Gallup suggests that adults reporting stress has gone up from 50% to 60% over the past quarter century. Here's another poll from the American Psychological Association:

This one suggests that average stress levels have been steadily decreasing since 2007 (when they started doing their survey). Here's another one from the APA:

This is the number of people reporting "extreme" stress. It's also been steadily decreasing. Finally, here's a poll from the CDC for just the past few years:

This one shows a spike in 2020 during the COVID pandemic and a steady decline ever since.

What's the takeaway here? One poll shows generic stress increasing moderately and two polls show it declining moderately. Overall, I'd guess that stress hasn't changed an awful lot over the past couple of decades but we sure talk about it more than we used to:

Murthy's goals are admirable. At the same time, one thing we really do seem to suffer from these days is tremendous growth in the business of scaring us about practically everything. I'm all for helping parents with the stress of raising kids, but I'm not thrilled about turning it into a "crisis," as so many things have been. I really don't think it is.

This is a snow leopard waking up from a nap at the LA Zoo. It's a very impressive yawn.

This is just a single poll and doesn't show what the trend is, but it's interesting nonetheless:

Nearly all Americans believe that financial goals—money, retirement, homeownership—are essential to the American Dream. But only about 60% say the same about marriage and kids.

I don't know how that compares to the past, but I'll bet it's down significantly.

According to YouGov, Kamala Harris's lead over Donald Trump declined a bit this week:

Aside from random fluctuation, my best guess is that Harris got a slight convention bounce but Trump got a bigger bounce from the RFK Jr. endorsement. The YouGov poll no longer includes him on their list of responses, and his three points appear to have divided mostly between Trump and Other.

POSTSCRIPT: Interestingly, 95% of Harris voters say their mind is made up. Only 92% of Trump voters say the same.

That turned out to be pretty easy. The blog has been migrated to a new host and all the DNS pointers have successfully propagated. Performance should be much better now. If you notice any bugs, let me know.