Andrew Van Dam, head of the Washington Post's Department of Data, routinely does interesting data-driven pieces, and he's out with another one today. This time it's a survey asking people about the best decade of the last century. Here are the results:
Obviously much of this is a matter of opinion, but most of it is surprisingly defensible. Good economies in the '50s and '90s; good music in the '70s; close-knit families in the '50s, etc. The two most interesting, I think, are about political division and reliable news reporting: both of which are relatively flat, suggesting that people don't think there's been a lot of change.
But now comes the truly fascinating part of this. You see, it turn out this survey is all about the framing. The charts above are from asking people about the best decades. But what about if you ask them about the worst?
Overwhelmingly, the worst decade is . . . right now. We even beat out the Great Depression for worst economy! The only things people seem to have gotten right is that life expectancy was shorter in the '30s and both racial and gender equality were worse. They also managed to figure out that the '40s had a lot of war, but obliviously put the current decade in second place—entirely ignoring Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq.
In fact, if you remove the '30s, which are sort of a stand-in for "a long time ago," our current decade is the absolute worst on every single metric except for war. We're just barely better than the decade of World War II.
The takeaway from this is that the vast majority of people think current times are just about the worst on nearly every metric. That's crazy beyond belief, but it fits with the endless claims from left and right about "losing our country," democracy in free-fall, racism worse than ever, trans people making a mockery of traditional morality; the economy being in recession; genocide in Gaza; Fox News/mainstream media ruining journalism; rap music turning teens into hoodlums; social media turning us lonely and atomized; etc.
In other words, people always think they have it the worst. This is sort of "meh" except for two things:
- Is it always true, or just on an uptick at the moment?
- Why is that people were moderately historically literate when asked about the best decades, but completely out to lunch when asked about the worst?
This, by the way, is what I'm fighting against when I continually tell you that things are better than most people think. That's not because there are no bad things; it's because too many of you think the world today is mired in unprecedented polycrisis and decline. It's crazy. Neither data nor common sense supports this. And yet it's an awfully common belief.
Humans have well known negativity and recency biases in their opinions.
I'm sure next decade will be the worst decade ever, too.
Yes, most of the upticks on the right in the second bunch of charts would just keep moving with time. And like with Bill Maher, a certain segment keeps getting to the Hey You Kids Get Off My Lawn stage.
Standard nostalgia, especially when it comes to the entertainment categories. People have forgotten all the forgettable music from the 70s and only remember the good stuff, but they're constantly hearing the latest forgettable singles. And so on.
Plus there's a particular generation out there (starts with a B, I think) with a huge ego problem that tends not to be willing to listen to music that wasn't around when they were in their teens and twenties.
#notallboomers
You are using the word "majority" wrong here since it appears that a majority only thinks we have more political division this decade, while pluralities support the rest. (And with political division it is probably either this decade or the 60s, so that isn't so unreasonable.
What this really reflects is that there is a 43 percent of the population that will tell pollsters whatever they think most supports Trump, or possibly whatever most opposes the Democrats. That is the percent that thinks Biden should be in jail for... well something. Except for political division it appears that the biggest vote getters were around that 43 percent mark. So it may be impressive that not even all Trump supporters think that racial equality is at a minimum.
And yes with the lower ranked items it is likely an artifact of the fact that there is only one now and there 9 previous decades which run together. I have no idea which decade has the worst radio programming. It seems plausible that today has the worse, although it may at the same time have the best since there is a lot of radio programming.
"Radio programming" is one with particularly changing meaning over the years. Radio dramas moved to TV. FM came in with classical music and then late 60's-70s alt rock and college stations. NPR became a full fledged network nothing like commercial stations. With smartphones people can walk around listening to podcasts or some big city NPR station on the internet (or online at home).
And "Least reliable news reporting? Half the people are thinking Fox, the other half are thinking everything else is fake news.
This is in the US, right?
As Lon Becker wrote earlier, this is probably just a reflection of the politics of the US.
I will say that the world today is a different place, at least in terms of how communication happens. In how people consume news and get their facts. In fact, facts have any awfully fungible quality these days. So, can we even have a conversation without shared facts?
"The takeaway from this is that the vast majority of people think ..."
Oh, good grief! The vast majority of people don't remember WWII, Korea, Viet Nam, the Great Depression, the politics of the post-war (WWII) era, the racial integration of professional sports, the racial integration of public schools (and subsequently, of all public places), the racial political revolution of the sixties, Dixieland Jazz, "Modern Jazz," Modern Art, the Golden Age of the movie studios, the great years of radio, the advent of TV, the Dodgers finally reaching "next year" ... the list is endless.
And the reason is simple--the vast majority of people aren't old enough to remember those things. The vast majority of people focus on the present because that's what they know. Asking the vast majority of people to comment intelligently on history is a fool's errand.
????????????????????
You don't have to go back that far...
People don't remember 9/11, The Great Recession, The Iraq War, The other Iraq War, the Iran hostage crisis, even Covid has been forgotten for the most part....
Polls imply that a lot of people have forgotten the Trump years.
And yet they were able to provide a remarkably varied set of responses to "Best Decade" questions.
The ONLY story here is that the responses to questions about the Best and Worst decades are so at odds with each other. Sadly, it is just another version of everyone liking their kids' school but thinking that education in the country is in crisis. It makes you wonder how one can even defend the concept of democracy when the populace can be so easily manipulated by politicians and advertisers into holding so many contradictory thoughts in their heads at one time.
Exactly. I don't know who they got to participate in this survey, but it's based on a fundamentally flawed design. Few people remember much about last century, and hardly anyone around today was even alive in the 1930s.
It's the very worst kind of "data-driven piece", because the data is meaningless garbage.
New reporting/reliability went downhill when Walter Cronkite retired.
Cuisine is so much better now it isn’t even questionable.
The best years of sports are always the years from your youth.
I think life is pretty good right now but things can change pretty drastically if Trump becomes President again. I find the prospect of the U.S. becoming a dictatorship frightening, and the promised million deportations catastrophic.
You and me both. I wouldn't even care that much if not for danger of a possible descent into dictatorship (or even just the permanent damage to democracy). Russia still holds elections after all, it's just that they don't mean anything and everyone knows it.
And shall the old fart weigh in? American pedagogy is broken. Not just academically, but civically, practically, culturally (by that I mean beyond popular) historically... What happened to civics? What happened to shop classes? Home EC? I am stunned by the number of post-graduates I've met who can't hold a knife or fork properly, unclog a drain or roast a chicken.
A lot of that still exists but has been renamed or combined with something else. Civics is part of social studies curricula. Shop and home ec vanished for years but have recently been returning under the moniker of sustainability.
Also let’s not overrate how good people were at those things in the past. You’ll note that food is the one thing everybody agrees has gotten better. Missing out on home ec doesn’t seem to have harmed millennials’ ability to roast a chicken one iota.
You didn't read far enough, Kevin:
There's a graphic further down the page that breaks the 'best of' categories down by age.
Re: The good old days when America was “great” aren’t the 1950s. They’re whatever decade you were 11
I was 11 in 1978-- which was decidedly not a good year. Neither personally nor in the larger sense. If I got to choose an age to return to it would be 25.
As a side bar: According to this article, I should think the best decade for music should be in the 60's/70's. Now, I don't know what I think the best decade for music is but I no that one thing it's not is the 60's/70's.
Certain polls -- like YouGov -- are so long, you have to make sure you have a drink in hand to survive without dying from thirst. Point here is that the quality of a poll is inversely correlated to the length of time required to answer said poll.
At the 25th question, the whole fucking world is shit and in no way is that a proxy for goddamn why the fuck do I have to stay on the phone for 15 minutes answering questions when I'm not getting paid for this, are you paying me to answer these questions?
Maybe the 26th question should be “on a scale of 1 to 10, how much has this poll irritated you?” and then reweight the responses accordingly.
That's a fundamental, insoluble problem for the public opinion industry. Pollsters have gone to the well so often, asking about so many different matters, that only a tiny sliver of the population remains contactable and willing to participate. It's a self-selected sample that self-evidently is not representative of the general population, and no amount of tweaking and weighting can remedy that basic deficiency.
Re: good music in the '70s
WTF? Sure there' some 70s stuff I like, but overall I think of 70s music as pretty mediocre. The gym I go to plays 70s music in the morning (when the average age of the clientele present makes me feel like a youngster) and I'm very over it. Give me the 80s (golden age of MTV) or the 90s (Seattle sound era)!
I'm also puzzled why the 70s would rate as the best fashion. Mostly, it was butt ugly, at least when it came to everyday clothing.
Since Covid, the only ironclad rule I have about human beings is that the vast majority of them are idiots.
Inequality in the US has reached a level as bad as it has ever been. Perhaps that is one reason why many people have such a negative view of the present.
I am one of the few who remember from 1939 or 1938 to the present. My best years started when my dad paid for college. That era started in 1954. Musically my tastes were from listening to a Black DJ at a station in Oakland playing what was called in those days, Race Records. I was surprised to learn that the DJ was white.
The worst years were during the Vietnam war when I was seriously considering moving the family to Canada to keep my oldest son from the draft.
"Worst Sporting Events"? I guess in the 30s it was all cockfighting and sandlot baseball, but now we have MMA or something?
History is history, and because it happened a long time ago and we know how it turned out, it doesn't feel that bad even when it was jaw-droppingly awful. The present, on the other hand, feels immediate. It's happening now, and causing emotions in us right now. We don't know how it's going to end. That makes it scary in a way that history never is.
Pingback: Nukleartechnologie wird neue deutsche Staatsräson, weil der Matheunterricht die deutschen Gerichte in Sylt beschäftigt - Vermischtes 30.05.2024 - Deliberation Daily
"The takeaway from this is that the vast majority of people think current times are just about the worst on nearly every metric."
It's not often I see Kevin overstating how bad the situation is. It isn't "the vast majority of people." Of the "worst ever" results listed above, the only one to crack 50% was "most political division," and that one at least has some basis in reality -- even in the worst tumult of the 1960s, we never had a mob sack Congress on the instigation of the sitting President. (The survey cuts off at 1930, so the Civil War is out of scope.)
Rather, it looks as if about 30-40% of the population is deeply invested in the idea that everything today is awful, and the other 60-70% have a more reasonable view.