I went to grade school when Eisenhower was President. My personal life observations see and agree with the data but some things are missing.
In the 1950s and 1960s, as kid, you've heard we had nuclear air raid sirens, drills, crawl under the desk, the Soviets were going to kill us all amd the world. The terror kids felt waking up at night figuring out the survival tactics of living in a nuclear winter with radioactive snow 3 inches deep, is unimaginable and was not much imagined by kids of the 80s 90s and on.
Assassinations. As crappy as Trump, his insurrection, his MAGA serviles, it is a far cry from the days President Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. Unique in all American history that decade. The social foundation of decency was deeply wounded.
The 1950s, 60s amd 70s,brought the greatest social change ever in America. Putting back into law Lincoln's goals. Millions of lives saved by US regulations on cars and industry.
Then Reagan. There are some Baselines in your charts that begin inflection in the 1980s. Looking back, we see the insidiously bad policies of conservatives. The vilification of women of choice. The demonization of the left. The Acolyte of Hate, Limbaugh spewing division and literally making enemies of others.
Hate and division were intended drives of the Moral Majority, Falwell, NRA - Lapierre, Beck, Gingrich et al.
I believe things pre exist and needs are latent waiting to be stimulated by products, services etc.
Twitter and social media played to latent needs, they didn't create these. They were the Amplifier of these.
I just have a hard time with the tweet that leads off. We had the fall of communism. A terrible war in Eastern Europe. Enron. 9/11 and the War in Terror. The financial crisis. The first Black President. A seismic shift in how people viewed gay rights. I feel like a lot changed in those decades, some for the better, some worse, but I just don’t feel like my world, at least, as a professional city dweller in a blue area, seismically shifted more in the 2010s than any other time.
> I just have a hard time with the tweet that leads off.
Me too. 1985 to 1995 didn't feel that different? For me, someone who grew up in the Eastern Bloc, this time period includes the biggest shift of them all - the fall of communism. Where people place those shifts depends a lot on when and where they were born.
For me, personally, the second largest perceived shift in history was 9/11. This feels like the trauma that changed America and subsequently the world. And some of the connections I draw might be pretty far-fetched, but I see a path from the 9/11 trauma to Bush breaking another of those post-WW2 taboos, preventive war, and to Obama and his weakness both towards Putin annexing Crimea, and in Syria.
BTW, this shows how open to interpretation this is - I could come up with a dozen narratives like this, and they could all seem believable to a certain group of people. Try telling people who dislike Obama that it was him who broke the world order by showing the world mobsters that the world cop is no longer willing to intervene, and they will happily believe it.
As someone born in 1980, I do feel the same thing the tweet was talking about (though I think the changes were already going before 2015). In 2005 I still had to stop and ask for directions if I was going some place unfamiliar (well, I stopped and pulled out my laptop and since people didn’t yet have security on their wifi I found a signal and was able to get Mapquest, but that was clearly an edge possibility that was radically novel). By 2015 I could just pull out my phone and call a random stranger to pick me up and take me to my destination. That difference affects me much more than 9/11 or the Berlin Wall.
I think there's a distance where, for us as americans, most of that stuff felt distant. We could watch 9/11 and the war on terror on tv, but it didnt really affect us directly if you werent in the army.
Smart phones and social media though? *everyone* has that now. It directly changed all of our lives.
9/11/2001 was the day the world broke. As Matt Yglesias pointed out in a great post yesterday, that was what set off the great catastrophe of the US disastrous middle eastern interventions which simultaneously left America trillions of dollars in the hole with diminished military capabilities to show for it presently
And the withdrawal from Iraq was mostly completed in December 2011, making it clear that the previous decade had been a colossal waste. 2011-2013 was also when ISIS became a serious threat, showing that the US invasion of Iraq was even worse than a waste -- it had actually made the region worse.
Hate to tell you, but the world broke long before 9/11. Our troubles pale in comparison to what the generations that precede the baby-boomers. I think the difference now is that with ever-evolving technology, we document everything a lot more. The problems of the past were initially forgotten amidst a desire to just move on. This left the task to history books, that were very high-level and word-of-mouth through families, which can be inaccurate. I think the sugar high of the end of the Cold War and the promise of globalization temporarily caused a more prosperous than usual period from 1989 until the early 2010's. Now, we are just heading back to normal with much more data.
It may be there is a residual effect from the massive US response to 9/11 — not just Putin and Xi thinking we’re hypocrites that can’t be trusted— but in other countries knowing what would happen to them if they attacked the US.
Same logic may be prevailing in Israel now.
I’ve always advocated for the US to have remained laser-focused on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, but this may not have convinced other aggressors of US military capability.
Growing up in Berkeley, Vietnam was always discussed as an obvious, colossal mistake. But now that I’m older, and I see the difference eternally North and South Korea, it’s easier to see what military strategists were fighting for.
For me, the moment I noticed a gigantic change for the worse in the US was hearing Rush Limbaugh on the radio. This man hated, despised, and disparaged a large sector of his fellow Americans. He presented politics as a fight to the death. You might say he was the Fort Sumter in Civil War II.
And he was the most popular personality on the radio! The listeners who came on to speak with Limbaugh, spoke with him with a deference that prefigured trump. As the years passed, it became clear this was a movement that was gathering strength and not going away.
To this day I haven't a clue if the Limbaugh/shock-jock-radio/FoxNews stuff created or discovered the size of that market. But I agree, for me too that was the start of the belligerence-is-the-point phase.
Rush was a lot like Elvis Presley. There was rock and roll before Elvis, but He was the breakthrough figure. He was smooth, well produced, vital, sexy, and white.
I don't know how much angry right-wing radio existed before Rush Limbaugh (I'm sure there was some), but there was no national known practitioner of the genre.
Rush was uninhibited, brash, transgressive, energetic, and supremely self-confident. His greatest achievement was to give his followers permission to abandon 1950s “niceness” as a social norm.
Obviously, the adjectives that fit Limbaugh fit Trump as well, but he has the visual to go with the audio. Paunchy Limbaugh tried TV but bombed.
The creator of a genre is seldom the person who breaks through to great popular acceptance.
Elvis changed the culture— he helped significantly in sexualizing public culture. Limbaugh pioneered the nasty tweet before Twitter existed.
By contrast, I was with my dad on his sailboat in Singapore at the Changi Sailing Club on Nov. 9, 1989 when the Berlin wall fell. We watched it fall on CNN International on a 12v TV with awful reception. The world felt very different at that moment. In a good way.
We were moving in the U.S., up until 2012 to a post-racial world, where race was no longer a determining factor in individual relations. If anything, the U.S. was realigning around economic class. Then all of sudden the NYT and WashPo and other corporate media outlets began highlighting racial divisions in their choice and selection of articles to promote. The narrative became around racial divisions in the U.S. well before Donald Trump appeared on the political radar. A hyper focus on race became the dominant narrative culminating in the 2020 riots. Multiple factors contributed to this effect including DEI and the woke mind-virus. But the real question is, qui bono? Who in the elite class benefits from this class, as a proxy for race, division in the U.S. electorate? Answer that and you have all you need to know.
Cui bono? I think a part of it is that the media figured out around 2010 that anger generates clicks. Obviously, more clicks -> more money. When Noah shared those charts of certain words suddenly appearing a lot more in the media, a question popped into my mind - was it a reflection of the existing division, or did it create it?
And maybe I am making it sound too psychopathic by interpreting it in terms of money. Maybe it was at least partly subconscious. People want attention. And when the attention economy emerges, and you notice you get attention by stirring anger at some imagined "other" tribe, suddenly you might find yourself seeing tribes everywhere.
Heading towards a post-racial world until 2012? That was a joke, right?
We are in the middle of White America's meltdown/backlash at the election of the first African-American president. The US was never aligned around class; has never headed towards aligning around class. The US culture has always been aligned around race.
It is not a 'narrative.' Race is the center of our history and politics and always has been.
"Those problems had existed during the 1980s, 90s, and 00s, but in some sense they had been “masked” by rising middle-class wealth from the long real estate boom, and by rising family incomes from the advent of two-earner families." Can we add the big expansion of credit card debt?
I think you have to ask yourself how the smartphone changed everything. What did it do or allow to happen? What do we notice today?
I think the shortest possible answer is that it allowed anyone anywhere to communicate and/or view media 24 hours a day seven days a week.
This manifested among the young in several ways - seeming anonymity allowing for unlimited trolling, physical isolation induced depression through loneliness, and the revulsion of the self after viewing endless media showcasing smarter, funnier, and wealthier people online.
Among adults it allowed for us to share and communicate everything highlighted above - suddenly we were all anxious/angry/nervous/triggered all. The. Time. No jobs - sharing that on Twitter with everyone. Low pay? Sharing that with everyone. European debt crisis? Shared and discussed. Iraq war, Afghanistan, border crises (endless), Russia into Crimea, nuclear meltdowns, tsunamis, etc.
Computers weren’t new but now you had one in your pocket on the train to work, on the way home, in the bathroom, at work, at school, in your bedroom, it connects to your car, you can wear headphones or iems, etc.
Absolutely nobody knew how to handle this and/or integrate it into their behaviors and habits. And so chaos ensued - and it substantively wasn’t that chaotic in a relative sense but it felt like it because again - nobody knew what the hell they were doing so everybody was learning as they went with everybody else in real time. So for a while crazy people didn’t seem so crazy because everything seemed kinda weird and crazy.
I think the change we see now is a result of the pandemic - if it was bad in the 2010s then the pandemic (as with many other things) amplified those effects 10000x. There was nothing but screens. Nothing but media. Trump. Trump everywhere. Doctors fighting on msnbc and cnn. Crypto gone wild.
And suddenly after making it through that we all learned that yes - touching grass is nice again. Going out to restaurants is great. Seeing and talking to people is great. And we need to regulate social media - we need to limit childrens time on it. We need to simply question the premise - should we be online 24/7?
Smartphones also led to big physical changes. The point of Lyft and Tinder is to do something in the physical world, but the phone and its gps are essential to enabling it.
For Peter Zeihan, the ultimate cause would be America's reduced need for foreign oil. With fracking, conservation, and alternative energy, we became more self-sufficient. Consequently, our interest in maintaining the world order declined. As we became indifferent to world events, things predictably spun out of control in regions where conflicts existed. Meanwhile, we turned inward and inflamed our internal conflicts. I'm not saying that I agree with this thesis, but it seems to complement your essay.
I think the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have done tremendous damage to the American psyche. Outside of Iraq being a collosal strategic mistake and Afghanistan a neglected one - it destroyed our collective willingness to engage. The GOP has eviscerated the neocons (several now Never Trumpers) and is now increasingly isolationist (see Ukraine). I see this as far and away having more of an impact than energy independence (but that does help).
As an economist, of course I m going to emphasize economic reasons, but I think the Great Recession was the key element. And the exonomic profession in not screaming bloody murder at the Fed for undershooting its inflation target (when recovery might well nave required over-target inflation as the COVID crisis did) was embarrassing. True we did advocate greater spending as was appropriate for relief and might even have been “stimulative” if the Fed was undershooting because if felt constrained about buying more non-Federal debt, but that coud not make up for the Fed’s failure. And vigorous monetary stimulus would have made it easier to have made examples of the owners and managers of financial institutions that triggered the financial crisis.
I think THIS set off or played into a lot of zero-sum economic thinking that in turn is compatible with zero-sum political attitudes. Same-sex marriage doesn’t undermine heterosexual marriage. Immigration can make almost everyone better off. Affirmative action really can help get the most meritorious students into universities. Better policing reduces both crime and the number of civilians of all races killed or injured by police officers.
And w/o denying some positive signs that Noah mentions, microeconomic policy seems to be getting worse, more protectionist, little attention to deficit reduction and merit-based immigration, Extremely high-cost policies to decrease vulnerability to Chinese disruption of supplies and to reduce net CO2 emissions. Greater awareness of the need to remove administrative obstacles to residential and commercial development in urban areas is one of the few unambiguous bright spots, but this has not effectively spread to promote investment generally.
Adding even more, social-technological changes with cell phones and social media, Snowden revelations that the secret state was everywhere and privacy was a pipe dream. All of the things we learned about the US constitution and economy, money supply in school were totally wrong… and for quite a long while.
Agree. Similarly, and even more so, 1967-1973 Civil Rights, Vietnam (Tet, My Lai, Kent State, etc.), Summer of Love, thousands of bombings in the Us by anti-war leftists, RFK and MLK assassinated, three major presidential candidates, Nixon opens China, Watergate, Pentagon Papers, 2 Arab-Israeli wars, USSR invades Czechoslovakia, oil-crisis, dozens of airplane hijackings, Munich Olympic massacre, Roe v. Wade, women’s rights (Title IX, women can have checking and credit accounts, etc.) modern computing was born and man walked on the moon.
Agree. You could add: cities across the US burning--Detroit, Newark, Los Angeles (Watts), Chicago West Side, Harlem and more; National Guard machine gun emplacements at the Capitol; police riot in Chicago at Democratic Convention.
My impression is that the period from about 1950-2010 was basically one of stasis, though there is a break around 1970 when various trendlines shifted. But the changes since 2010 seem bigger to me, closer to the kinds of decadal change that existed in the 1920s or 1930s, when we got gas cooking and electric lighting and automobiles.
One thing I like about you very much is your stress on rational optimism. But when it comes to AI imagery you are all about apocalypse and DRAMA!!!
In many posts you are trying to persuade us that the world is NOT falling apart (green energy), but at the head of this post you put a graphic cataclysm of the world literally splitting in two.
I agree this post is a good summary of the challenges facing us. But when it comes to challenges, I prefer a mood of determination.
What is your basic mood? Optimism, determination, or freak out?
Will the real Noah Smith please stand up?
My basic position is that humanity makes mistakes, even whoppers, and pays for them dearly. The climb back to rationality can be extremely painful (WW II). But that's the price we have to pay for our human nature, which is inherently quite wobbly. Human history is a roller coaster built by people who have not majored in engineering.
One small comment - there was a trend to "if it bleeds, it leads" before the advent of social media (and 24 hr cable news). BUT it tended to be mostly local news - the major national media only covered a small set of things. Once we had cable news, that changed - they had to fill their time up with something (and get advertising, which means get and keep "eyeballs").
The result that I have watched over the last 30 years (accelerated by social media) is people "living in fear" (and not just teenagers by any means). They think crime is up everywhere, cities are burning, some immigrant is going to attack them in the streets, take guns away, shoot them every day in school, attack a kid in a park, etc... All of which are things that the data says are clearly wrong. It isn't that most people have experienced any of this (sort of like their finances are fine, but the economy is terrible) - but it is what they have hammered at them constantly.
People are very bad at estimating the probability of a relatively rare event - and when they see lots of those events in media and social media, they are usually way way off on the chances of it happening to them.....
So, lots of fear. Well guess what, fear makes people a lot easier to manipulate (of any age - in this case perhaps worse with older folks who didn't grow up with all this).
Yes to all that Noah mentioned, but I think that coming of unreasonable fear is a big factor - we are the product anymore for media and others - and keeping our eyeballs and data to sell to companies is a what most it is about on a business level. And that means feed the fear, feed the divisiveness, and take home the money. And modern tech companies have gotten really good at how that is all done with a lot of data on how people react to posts and news.
By all means, there are real problems and real dangers (and always have been - whether nuclear war or climate catastrophe, or school shootings), BUT the relative risk is way way off from the perceptions - hence fear, hence the ability to be manipulated.
"President Obama and the European leaders were going to do basically nothing about this (Russia "annexing" Crimea), other than to levy some ineffectual sanctions."
Dude! Tsk-tsk to hell and back.
"When Putin invaded Crimea, Obama asked for funds to hit back, but the Republican Congress refused to act and then blamed Obama, to this day, for 'losing' Crimea."
Ummm. 2015? Try a little bit earlier. And the shift was the surprise election of first African American president and White America's backlash to that.
I went to grade school when Eisenhower was President. My personal life observations see and agree with the data but some things are missing.
In the 1950s and 1960s, as kid, you've heard we had nuclear air raid sirens, drills, crawl under the desk, the Soviets were going to kill us all amd the world. The terror kids felt waking up at night figuring out the survival tactics of living in a nuclear winter with radioactive snow 3 inches deep, is unimaginable and was not much imagined by kids of the 80s 90s and on.
Assassinations. As crappy as Trump, his insurrection, his MAGA serviles, it is a far cry from the days President Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. Unique in all American history that decade. The social foundation of decency was deeply wounded.
The 1950s, 60s amd 70s,brought the greatest social change ever in America. Putting back into law Lincoln's goals. Millions of lives saved by US regulations on cars and industry.
Then Reagan. There are some Baselines in your charts that begin inflection in the 1980s. Looking back, we see the insidiously bad policies of conservatives. The vilification of women of choice. The demonization of the left. The Acolyte of Hate, Limbaugh spewing division and literally making enemies of others.
Hate and division were intended drives of the Moral Majority, Falwell, NRA - Lapierre, Beck, Gingrich et al.
I believe things pre exist and needs are latent waiting to be stimulated by products, services etc.
Twitter and social media played to latent needs, they didn't create these. They were the Amplifier of these.
And what part of the ruling class brought about these changes?
What is your thinking?
I just have a hard time with the tweet that leads off. We had the fall of communism. A terrible war in Eastern Europe. Enron. 9/11 and the War in Terror. The financial crisis. The first Black President. A seismic shift in how people viewed gay rights. I feel like a lot changed in those decades, some for the better, some worse, but I just don’t feel like my world, at least, as a professional city dweller in a blue area, seismically shifted more in the 2010s than any other time.
> I just have a hard time with the tweet that leads off.
Me too. 1985 to 1995 didn't feel that different? For me, someone who grew up in the Eastern Bloc, this time period includes the biggest shift of them all - the fall of communism. Where people place those shifts depends a lot on when and where they were born.
For me, personally, the second largest perceived shift in history was 9/11. This feels like the trauma that changed America and subsequently the world. And some of the connections I draw might be pretty far-fetched, but I see a path from the 9/11 trauma to Bush breaking another of those post-WW2 taboos, preventive war, and to Obama and his weakness both towards Putin annexing Crimea, and in Syria.
BTW, this shows how open to interpretation this is - I could come up with a dozen narratives like this, and they could all seem believable to a certain group of people. Try telling people who dislike Obama that it was him who broke the world order by showing the world mobsters that the world cop is no longer willing to intervene, and they will happily believe it.
As someone born in 1980, I do feel the same thing the tweet was talking about (though I think the changes were already going before 2015). In 2005 I still had to stop and ask for directions if I was going some place unfamiliar (well, I stopped and pulled out my laptop and since people didn’t yet have security on their wifi I found a signal and was able to get Mapquest, but that was clearly an edge possibility that was radically novel). By 2015 I could just pull out my phone and call a random stranger to pick me up and take me to my destination. That difference affects me much more than 9/11 or the Berlin Wall.
I think there's a distance where, for us as americans, most of that stuff felt distant. We could watch 9/11 and the war on terror on tv, but it didnt really affect us directly if you werent in the army.
Smart phones and social media though? *everyone* has that now. It directly changed all of our lives.
9/11/2001 was the day the world broke. As Matt Yglesias pointed out in a great post yesterday, that was what set off the great catastrophe of the US disastrous middle eastern interventions which simultaneously left America trillions of dollars in the hole with diminished military capabilities to show for it presently
I 100% agree. I've been feeling like Bin Laden won for 20 years.
And the withdrawal from Iraq was mostly completed in December 2011, making it clear that the previous decade had been a colossal waste. 2011-2013 was also when ISIS became a serious threat, showing that the US invasion of Iraq was even worse than a waste -- it had actually made the region worse.
The response to 9/11 was a mistake that set the stage for the changes to come. But it didn’t itself create those changes.
Agreed https://disruptive-horizons.com/p/the-fight-against-terrorism-a-good
Hate to tell you, but the world broke long before 9/11. Our troubles pale in comparison to what the generations that precede the baby-boomers. I think the difference now is that with ever-evolving technology, we document everything a lot more. The problems of the past were initially forgotten amidst a desire to just move on. This left the task to history books, that were very high-level and word-of-mouth through families, which can be inaccurate. I think the sugar high of the end of the Cold War and the promise of globalization temporarily caused a more prosperous than usual period from 1989 until the early 2010's. Now, we are just heading back to normal with much more data.
It may be there is a residual effect from the massive US response to 9/11 — not just Putin and Xi thinking we’re hypocrites that can’t be trusted— but in other countries knowing what would happen to them if they attacked the US.
Same logic may be prevailing in Israel now.
I’ve always advocated for the US to have remained laser-focused on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, but this may not have convinced other aggressors of US military capability.
Growing up in Berkeley, Vietnam was always discussed as an obvious, colossal mistake. But now that I’m older, and I see the difference eternally North and South Korea, it’s easier to see what military strategists were fighting for.
I don’t know enough military history.
For me, the moment I noticed a gigantic change for the worse in the US was hearing Rush Limbaugh on the radio. This man hated, despised, and disparaged a large sector of his fellow Americans. He presented politics as a fight to the death. You might say he was the Fort Sumter in Civil War II.
And he was the most popular personality on the radio! The listeners who came on to speak with Limbaugh, spoke with him with a deference that prefigured trump. As the years passed, it became clear this was a movement that was gathering strength and not going away.
To this day I haven't a clue if the Limbaugh/shock-jock-radio/FoxNews stuff created or discovered the size of that market. But I agree, for me too that was the start of the belligerence-is-the-point phase.
Rush was a lot like Elvis Presley. There was rock and roll before Elvis, but He was the breakthrough figure. He was smooth, well produced, vital, sexy, and white.
I don't know how much angry right-wing radio existed before Rush Limbaugh (I'm sure there was some), but there was no national known practitioner of the genre.
Rush was uninhibited, brash, transgressive, energetic, and supremely self-confident. His greatest achievement was to give his followers permission to abandon 1950s “niceness” as a social norm.
Obviously, the adjectives that fit Limbaugh fit Trump as well, but he has the visual to go with the audio. Paunchy Limbaugh tried TV but bombed.
The creator of a genre is seldom the person who breaks through to great popular acceptance.
Elvis changed the culture— he helped significantly in sexualizing public culture. Limbaugh pioneered the nasty tweet before Twitter existed.
I'll post 2 different comments.
This conversation between two good thinkers is apropo to your great analysis Noah.
Yascha Mounk and Jonathan Haidt discuss the end of the play-based childhood and the rise of the phone-based childhood.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/haidt
By contrast, I was with my dad on his sailboat in Singapore at the Changi Sailing Club on Nov. 9, 1989 when the Berlin wall fell. We watched it fall on CNN International on a 12v TV with awful reception. The world felt very different at that moment. In a good way.
We were moving in the U.S., up until 2012 to a post-racial world, where race was no longer a determining factor in individual relations. If anything, the U.S. was realigning around economic class. Then all of sudden the NYT and WashPo and other corporate media outlets began highlighting racial divisions in their choice and selection of articles to promote. The narrative became around racial divisions in the U.S. well before Donald Trump appeared on the political radar. A hyper focus on race became the dominant narrative culminating in the 2020 riots. Multiple factors contributed to this effect including DEI and the woke mind-virus. But the real question is, qui bono? Who in the elite class benefits from this class, as a proxy for race, division in the U.S. electorate? Answer that and you have all you need to know.
Cui bono? I think a part of it is that the media figured out around 2010 that anger generates clicks. Obviously, more clicks -> more money. When Noah shared those charts of certain words suddenly appearing a lot more in the media, a question popped into my mind - was it a reflection of the existing division, or did it create it?
And maybe I am making it sound too psychopathic by interpreting it in terms of money. Maybe it was at least partly subconscious. People want attention. And when the attention economy emerges, and you notice you get attention by stirring anger at some imagined "other" tribe, suddenly you might find yourself seeing tribes everywhere.
Heading towards a post-racial world until 2012? That was a joke, right?
We are in the middle of White America's meltdown/backlash at the election of the first African-American president. The US was never aligned around class; has never headed towards aligning around class. The US culture has always been aligned around race.
It is not a 'narrative.' Race is the center of our history and politics and always has been.
"Those problems had existed during the 1980s, 90s, and 00s, but in some sense they had been “masked” by rising middle-class wealth from the long real estate boom, and by rising family incomes from the advent of two-earner families." Can we add the big expansion of credit card debt?
Credit card debt was basically invented in 1979 right?
Offhand, somewhere in the 1970s.
But it just grew and grew...
I think you have to ask yourself how the smartphone changed everything. What did it do or allow to happen? What do we notice today?
I think the shortest possible answer is that it allowed anyone anywhere to communicate and/or view media 24 hours a day seven days a week.
This manifested among the young in several ways - seeming anonymity allowing for unlimited trolling, physical isolation induced depression through loneliness, and the revulsion of the self after viewing endless media showcasing smarter, funnier, and wealthier people online.
Among adults it allowed for us to share and communicate everything highlighted above - suddenly we were all anxious/angry/nervous/triggered all. The. Time. No jobs - sharing that on Twitter with everyone. Low pay? Sharing that with everyone. European debt crisis? Shared and discussed. Iraq war, Afghanistan, border crises (endless), Russia into Crimea, nuclear meltdowns, tsunamis, etc.
Computers weren’t new but now you had one in your pocket on the train to work, on the way home, in the bathroom, at work, at school, in your bedroom, it connects to your car, you can wear headphones or iems, etc.
Absolutely nobody knew how to handle this and/or integrate it into their behaviors and habits. And so chaos ensued - and it substantively wasn’t that chaotic in a relative sense but it felt like it because again - nobody knew what the hell they were doing so everybody was learning as they went with everybody else in real time. So for a while crazy people didn’t seem so crazy because everything seemed kinda weird and crazy.
I think the change we see now is a result of the pandemic - if it was bad in the 2010s then the pandemic (as with many other things) amplified those effects 10000x. There was nothing but screens. Nothing but media. Trump. Trump everywhere. Doctors fighting on msnbc and cnn. Crypto gone wild.
And suddenly after making it through that we all learned that yes - touching grass is nice again. Going out to restaurants is great. Seeing and talking to people is great. And we need to regulate social media - we need to limit childrens time on it. We need to simply question the premise - should we be online 24/7?
"smarter, funnier, and wealthier people online"
Now that's a downer!
Left out "better looking", but yeah...
lol for the young and out of touch it can be.
Smartphones also led to big physical changes. The point of Lyft and Tinder is to do something in the physical world, but the phone and its gps are essential to enabling it.
For Peter Zeihan, the ultimate cause would be America's reduced need for foreign oil. With fracking, conservation, and alternative energy, we became more self-sufficient. Consequently, our interest in maintaining the world order declined. As we became indifferent to world events, things predictably spun out of control in regions where conflicts existed. Meanwhile, we turned inward and inflamed our internal conflicts. I'm not saying that I agree with this thesis, but it seems to complement your essay.
I think the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have done tremendous damage to the American psyche. Outside of Iraq being a collosal strategic mistake and Afghanistan a neglected one - it destroyed our collective willingness to engage. The GOP has eviscerated the neocons (several now Never Trumpers) and is now increasingly isolationist (see Ukraine). I see this as far and away having more of an impact than energy independence (but that does help).
How long will the current US shale boom last? Two decades? Three? In geopolitical terms this isn't a lot of time.
As an economist, of course I m going to emphasize economic reasons, but I think the Great Recession was the key element. And the exonomic profession in not screaming bloody murder at the Fed for undershooting its inflation target (when recovery might well nave required over-target inflation as the COVID crisis did) was embarrassing. True we did advocate greater spending as was appropriate for relief and might even have been “stimulative” if the Fed was undershooting because if felt constrained about buying more non-Federal debt, but that coud not make up for the Fed’s failure. And vigorous monetary stimulus would have made it easier to have made examples of the owners and managers of financial institutions that triggered the financial crisis.
I think THIS set off or played into a lot of zero-sum economic thinking that in turn is compatible with zero-sum political attitudes. Same-sex marriage doesn’t undermine heterosexual marriage. Immigration can make almost everyone better off. Affirmative action really can help get the most meritorious students into universities. Better policing reduces both crime and the number of civilians of all races killed or injured by police officers.
And w/o denying some positive signs that Noah mentions, microeconomic policy seems to be getting worse, more protectionist, little attention to deficit reduction and merit-based immigration, Extremely high-cost policies to decrease vulnerability to Chinese disruption of supplies and to reduce net CO2 emissions. Greater awareness of the need to remove administrative obstacles to residential and commercial development in urban areas is one of the few unambiguous bright spots, but this has not effectively spread to promote investment generally.
Adding even more, social-technological changes with cell phones and social media, Snowden revelations that the secret state was everywhere and privacy was a pipe dream. All of the things we learned about the US constitution and economy, money supply in school were totally wrong… and for quite a long while.
Agree. Similarly, and even more so, 1967-1973 Civil Rights, Vietnam (Tet, My Lai, Kent State, etc.), Summer of Love, thousands of bombings in the Us by anti-war leftists, RFK and MLK assassinated, three major presidential candidates, Nixon opens China, Watergate, Pentagon Papers, 2 Arab-Israeli wars, USSR invades Czechoslovakia, oil-crisis, dozens of airplane hijackings, Munich Olympic massacre, Roe v. Wade, women’s rights (Title IX, women can have checking and credit accounts, etc.) modern computing was born and man walked on the moon.
Really, nothing else even sniffs this era.
Agree. You could add: cities across the US burning--Detroit, Newark, Los Angeles (Watts), Chicago West Side, Harlem and more; National Guard machine gun emplacements at the Capitol; police riot in Chicago at Democratic Convention.
I spent most of 2020 telling my kids that, crazy as things were, 1968 was still Peak Crazy.
I admitted during Jan 6 2021 that counting that counting a riot/ insurrection as part of 2020 might tip the scales.
My impression is that the period from about 1950-2010 was basically one of stasis, though there is a break around 1970 when various trendlines shifted. But the changes since 2010 seem bigger to me, closer to the kinds of decadal change that existed in the 1920s or 1930s, when we got gas cooking and electric lighting and automobiles.
Dear Noah:
A word about your taste in AI image generation.
One thing I like about you very much is your stress on rational optimism. But when it comes to AI imagery you are all about apocalypse and DRAMA!!!
In many posts you are trying to persuade us that the world is NOT falling apart (green energy), but at the head of this post you put a graphic cataclysm of the world literally splitting in two.
I agree this post is a good summary of the challenges facing us. But when it comes to challenges, I prefer a mood of determination.
What is your basic mood? Optimism, determination, or freak out?
Will the real Noah Smith please stand up?
My basic position is that humanity makes mistakes, even whoppers, and pays for them dearly. The climb back to rationality can be extremely painful (WW II). But that's the price we have to pay for our human nature, which is inherently quite wobbly. Human history is a roller coaster built by people who have not majored in engineering.
One small comment - there was a trend to "if it bleeds, it leads" before the advent of social media (and 24 hr cable news). BUT it tended to be mostly local news - the major national media only covered a small set of things. Once we had cable news, that changed - they had to fill their time up with something (and get advertising, which means get and keep "eyeballs").
The result that I have watched over the last 30 years (accelerated by social media) is people "living in fear" (and not just teenagers by any means). They think crime is up everywhere, cities are burning, some immigrant is going to attack them in the streets, take guns away, shoot them every day in school, attack a kid in a park, etc... All of which are things that the data says are clearly wrong. It isn't that most people have experienced any of this (sort of like their finances are fine, but the economy is terrible) - but it is what they have hammered at them constantly.
People are very bad at estimating the probability of a relatively rare event - and when they see lots of those events in media and social media, they are usually way way off on the chances of it happening to them.....
So, lots of fear. Well guess what, fear makes people a lot easier to manipulate (of any age - in this case perhaps worse with older folks who didn't grow up with all this).
Yes to all that Noah mentioned, but I think that coming of unreasonable fear is a big factor - we are the product anymore for media and others - and keeping our eyeballs and data to sell to companies is a what most it is about on a business level. And that means feed the fear, feed the divisiveness, and take home the money. And modern tech companies have gotten really good at how that is all done with a lot of data on how people react to posts and news.
By all means, there are real problems and real dangers (and always have been - whether nuclear war or climate catastrophe, or school shootings), BUT the relative risk is way way off from the perceptions - hence fear, hence the ability to be manipulated.
"President Obama and the European leaders were going to do basically nothing about this (Russia "annexing" Crimea), other than to levy some ineffectual sanctions."
Dude! Tsk-tsk to hell and back.
"When Putin invaded Crimea, Obama asked for funds to hit back, but the Republican Congress refused to act and then blamed Obama, to this day, for 'losing' Crimea."
~ Rick Gage in NYTimes comment, 3/12/24
Ummm. 2015? Try a little bit earlier. And the shift was the surprise election of first African American president and White America's backlash to that.
That was only one part of it. Smartphones and gps were another part.