Kevin Drum

David Brooks has a question:

Why have Americans become so mean? I was recently talking with a restaurant owner who said that he has to eject a customer from his restaurant for rude or cruel behavior once a week—something that never used to happen. A head nurse at a hospital told me that many on her staff are leaving the profession because patients have become so abusive.

At the far extreme of meanness, hate crimes rose in 2020 to their highest level in 12 years. Murder rates have been surging, at least until recently. Same with gun sales. Social trust is plummeting. In 2000, two-thirds of American households gave to charity; in 2018, fewer than half did. The words that define our age reek of menace: conspiracy, polarization, mass shootings, trauma, safe spaces.

The article is paywalled, so I can't read the rest of it. But you folks all know me pretty well, so you can probably guess what's next: Is it, in fact, true that we've become meaner over the last decade or so?

This is not an easy question to answer. We're interested in "mean" interpersonal interactions, not necessarily riots or murder rates. But who measures that? Who even decides what it is?

I thought about this for a short while and came up with some examples. Like Brooks, let's start at the extreme end:

Violent victimization has been dropping fairly steadily over the past 10+ years. In 2021 it was a third lower than in 2008.

Stepping down the scale a bit, here is red light running, which is the best proxy for aggressive driving I could find in the AAA's annual Traffic Safety Culture Index:

Like every other measure of aggressive driving in the AAA report, it's down substantially since 2008.

Here are incidents of unruly airline behavior reported to the FAA:

This has been going up—but not by a whole lot. The latest figures are only slightly higher than just before the pandemic, and are heading down.

And here, believe it or not, are a couple of results from the annual Customer Rage Survey, conducted by Customer Care Measurement & Consulting and Arizona State University:

The number of people reporting that they get "extremely" or "very" upset at things was 66% in 2003 and 66% in 2022. There's also this:

Compared to 2015, more people raised their voice when they were mad, but on every other metric bad behavior was down.

Here is school bullying:

None of this stuff is proof positive of anything. For one thing, almost all of it is self-reported, and maybe people are just kidding themselves. There's also no measure here of political polarization and anger, which has certainly increased over the past couple of decades. Still, almost all of these metrics point in the same direction: we're getting nicer, not meaner. The only exception is airline incidents, which have increased a little bit and are probably still suffering a hangover from the COVID era, when air passengers went completely bonkers.

If you can think of other examples, leave them in comments. Just remember, we're interested here in low-level rudeness and aggression, not wars or international terrorism.

This is a snail on Highway 70 in Louisiana just north of Morgan City. I suppose I must have been taking a picture of something else when this caught my eye, but I don't remember what.

Today's photo would have been a picture of a meteor, but I didn't get one this weekend. I put out my camera Saturday night, during the peak of the Pleiades meteor shower, and set it to take a picture every 20 seconds. I collected about 400 frames over the course of a couple of hours, but not a single one had a meteor streak.

National Review's jihad against electric cars continues today:

There’s nothing wrong with high-end cars or electric powerplants, per se. But the idea that the U.S. auto market is forced to accept a technology that is still underdeveloped and low-scale while the year quickly approaches that auto manufacturers will be required to produce EVs primarily is unacceptable.

Electric vehicles are for those with garage space for charging, multiple vehicles for different applications, and the ability to pay sticker prices. That list does not describe reality for most Americans.

The word primarily in the top paragraph is doing a lot of work here. The Biden administration is hardly banning gasoline cars, after all. Biden has a goal of increasing electric car sales by 2032 or so, but the actual rules he's enacted are all carrots: tax incentives, investment in charging infrastructure and battery manufacturing, and electrification of the federal fleet.

In addition, the EPA has proposed new tailpipe emission standards that would probably force about two-thirds of new cars to be electric by 2032. So far, though, it's just a proposal. It will be years before it's real.

So gasoline cars will continue to be available for a very long time. Even the aspirational 2032 goal is a decade away, and the whole point of this is to give auto manufacturers enough time to fully develop the technology. It may be underdeveloped and low-scale today, but the federal incentives will help ensure that it's robust and consumer-scale ten years from now. Is that really so scary?

Danielle Paquette has a piece today in the Washington Post about Tony Thurman, a home security dealer in Kansas City who says business is brisk:

But Thurman is troubled by what he senses is driving much of the demand: Americans’ growing preoccupation with the specter of deadly threats. They fear burglars, gangs and child predators. They believe crime is rising, even in places where it’s dropping, which tracks with what surveys have found nationwide. Over the last three years, the number of people who reported deteriorating safety in their area has spiked, especially among Republicans, though crime ebbed and flowed well below the bloodier levels of the 1990s. Gun purchases soared to record peaks. The home security industry boomed.

....[These] fears, he noticed, are often influenced by the news they watch, the social media they consume, the politicians they support.

Here is Kelli Cox, who is having a pool built in her backyard:

“I’d like to get the cameras up soon,” said Cox, handing Thurman the blueprint, “before the workers start.”

Not that she had a problem with the workers. They were simply people she didn’t know in a world where headlines like “Teenagers killed in double homicide” popped up on her news feed and someone had just posted on the neighborhood Facebook page about a “suspicious man” in a “white unmarked van.”

It's the Fox News effect, now expanded to the NextDoor effect and the MAGA effect. Fear of criminals, fear of the Deep State, fear of what schools are teaching, fear of trans people, fear of immigrants. Fear of everything, even though we have less to fear today than almost anytime in history. Thanks, Donald.

Thanks to TikTok and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez we are currently going through yet another micro-frenzy about why awesome European sunscreens aren't approved for sale in the US. This happens roughly every summer, and as usual there's nothing new to report. The active ingredients at issue could probably be approved easily in the US if their makers conducted clinical tests and submitted safety results to the FDA. But they haven't so they aren't.

The options for getting more sunscreen options on the market are limited:

• Manufacturers could submit the required safety data and get FDA approval. But for the past two decades they've been unwilling to bother doing this.
• The FDA could reduce its testing requirements. But this is probably not legal.
• Congress could decree that sunscreen is not a drug and therefore not subject to the FDA's pre-market approval. But Congress has shown no stomach for this.

But wait! Maybe there's a fourth option. The holdup is that sunscreens make medical claims—namely, that they can prevent sunburn, decrease the risk of skin cancer and mitigate early skin aging—and this is what brings them under the FDA's drug-testing umbrella. So why not just jettison those claims? In fact, label the awesome Euro-sunscreens as specifically not for those things. It would be a wink-and-nod sort of affair since everyone would understand that the things being ostentatiously disavowed are, in fact, precisely what they are avowing.

Would that work? Or is the FDA too smart to allow such a ploy?

There seem to be a lot of people who still don't understand how it is that researchers in 2020 concluded that a lab leak of the COVID virus was implausible just because they had discovered a particular bat virus. Surely the discovery of a bat virus similar to COVID makes a natural origin more plausible but says nothing one way or the other about a lab leak?

That's true. The catch is that the researchers already believed a lab leak was implausible. It went like this:

We believe the evidence is strongly for a natural origin and strongly against a lab leak....

EXCEPT

There's a furin cleavage site in the genome that nature can't explain. This gives us second thoughts about the lab leak.

When nature eventually confirmed that the furin site could indeed arise naturally, their doubts were alleviated and they returned to their initial belief: the lab leak hypothesis was implausible and there was no reason to think otherwise.¹

For most of the people who don't get this, it's because they don't want to get it. However, there are probably a few who don't get it in good faith. This post is for them.

¹This was based on the evidence available at the time. Since then, additional discoveries have made the lab leak hypothesis even less likely.

The Washington Post informs us that Millennials are screwed:

Homeownership — the main driver of wealth for most Americans — is out of reach for large swaths of the population. But the pinch is most pronounced for millennials, who are buying homes at a slower pace than those before them.

....Those born between 1981 to 1996 have been called the “unluckiest generation.” Since entering the workforce, they’ve experienced the slowest economic growth of any age group. They’ve also been weighed down by student debt and child-care costs, Lautz said.

I'll spare you the usual rant about this. Instead I'll just show you a few simple charts. For 30-somethings here is homeownership:

Here is the average cost of a house over the past 40 years:

Here is income:

And here is student debt:

Through 2021, Millennial homeownership is at its average for the past 30 years. The average mortgage payment is the same as it was for Boomers and Gen X. Income is higher than both Gen X and Baby Boomers at the same age. And average  student debt is lower than either Gen X or Baby Boomers (although only 10% of Boomers have student debt compared to 20% of Millennials).

The average mortgage has increased and the homeownership rate has undoubtedly decreased since 2021 thanks to our recent housing boom and interest rate spike. And while it's true that this affects young families the worst, it's also (a) temporary and (b) something that every generation has gone through (Boomers got the 1981 Volcker recession and Gen X got the 2001 dotcom crash as well as the 2008 Great Recession). It's nothing unique to Millennials.

Millennials are doing fine. There's a small and vocal subset who are unhappy that they can't afford to live by themselves in a spacious apartment in Manhattan, but the vast majority are faring as well as previous generations and better than Millennials in any other country in the world. Someday a reporter from the Washington Post will read this and pass the news along to the rest of the country.

In newspaper articles about court cases it's now routine to name the president(s) who appointed the judge(s) involved.¹ The reason is simple: it tells you everything you need to know. Hell, if they put this information in the lead you could skip the whole rest of the story. Democratic appointees reliably deliver liberal results and Republican appointees deliver conservative ones.

As near as I can tell, this is even more true in lower courts than in the Supreme Court. At this point, the Supreme Court might actually be the least partisan court in the country.

Is this new? The Supreme Court has always been political, but what about district courts? How long have they been so neatly polarized? I'd put it at 20 years or so, ever since the two parties got serious about naming reliably partisan lower court judges because they were the eventual feeders to Supreme Court appointments. After all, if you're dead set on nominating Supreme Court justices in their 40s and 50s then you need a big pool of judges to choose from who were partisans in their 30s. That means district courts. On the flip side, district court judges are all essentially auditioning for the Supreme Court. They can't afford to even occasionally break ranks if they have ambitions for promotion.

Bottom line: we really do have a two-tier justice system. Half is red and half is blue. Which one you happen to get is a matter of geography and chance.²

¹This usually isn't done on TV, which means TV news consistently leaves out one of the most important aspects of court stories.

²Except for the occasional bit of forum shopping, of course, where nothing is left to chance.

A common meme is one where you suggest that kids these days are unfamiliar with some item or activity from the past. The usual suspects are things like dial telephones, stick shifts, cursive handwriting, and so forth.

But this is ridiculous. There's so much period TV available that kids are familiar with practically all this old stuff. What you need is something that (a) went away a while ago and (b) never shows up on TV. It's actually hard to come up with examples, but tonight I finally did: opening a can of Spam with the little key taped to the bottom:

This occurred to me because I had Spam for dinner tonight. Yum!

This is Hilbert relaxing in our front yard. He's taking a little me time. Just a cat alone with his thoughts.