I’ve been coming to think that the following hypothesis may be true about America:
Increasingly, people in the U.S. are concluding that society is really F’d up. But the reasons are subtle, hidden, and complex, so each group picks their favorite simple enemy to blame. Problems go unfixed.
Points in favor of the claim that people are increasingly coming to this realization:
1. This helps explain Trump’s election in 2016. Many rural Republicans and disaffected independents believed society was going down the tubes. They didn’t think that electing the same people (who would use the same old solutions) would fix it.
2. COVID-19 exposed malfunctions of various authorities (the FDA, Surgeon General, CDC, etc.) that are pretty hard to ignore. Liberals blame Trump for these failures, which may be fair, but another possibility is that these American institutions have been rotting for a lot longer. I don’t know enough to say with confidence.
3. Costs for health care, education, housing, infrastructure projects, and energy ($ per kWh) have (as far as I can tell?) been rising for a long time, with debates raging over the (surely complex) causes. People feel the sting of these rising costs. Meanwhile, many argue that wages have stagnated (which has been vigorously debated). What’s more, inequality seems to have risen, though this, too, is debated.
4. An appalling number of people in the U.S. end up in jails and prisons. Shockingly, we have one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. This is obvious to the communities that are most impacted. Though still awful, the numbers have fortunately been improving somewhat in recent years [H/T Alyssa Vance].
5. Student debt growth is out of control, and it’s hard for most students to ignore this.
6. People don’t have adequate savings, the saving rate seems to be relatively low, and a disturbing number say they don’t have enough cash to deal with emergencies. “About four out of 10 Americans said they had enough in savings to cover a surprise $500 expense. Another 21 percent said they would rely on a credit card, while 20 percent said they’d cut back on other expenses. Another 11 percent said they’d turn to family or friends for the money” (source). That being said, the wording of the survey that generated those results was rather confusing, so the results should be interpreted with caution. Note that “a 2016 study [found] that 76% of households had $400 in liquid assets, after…monthly expenses” (source).
7. There is a huge racial wealth gap (even more so than an income gap, I believe), contributing significantly to poorer quality of life for Black Americans.
8. Eric Weinstein’s “the Portal” podcast, which seeks to give explanations about what the hell has gone wrong in America, rose extremely rapidly to popularity. Its theories are quite interesting, in my opinion. It is nuanced (and hard to summarize), but it blames a significant portion of the problem on broken institutions that were predicated on rapid economic/productivity growth that we didn’t end up having, the collective behaviors of the Baby Boomer generation, misleading justifications given to us about immigration, a broken scientific establishment, and a propped up system of harmful deceptions.
So what’s really to blame for the U.S.’s problems?
Trump blames immigration, China, and the left.
The left blames Trump, Wall Street, the right, and (sometimes) capitalism/wealthy people/big tech.
Yang points to automation and globalization.
The BLM movement points to racism and police violence.
The right blames the left, declining moral values, and political correctness.
Libertarians (and the right, too) blame regulation and bloated government.
What seems to me to be the case: many of the explanations by different groups have some truth in them. But they are each only pointing at a part of a much greater problem without really getting to the core of it.
I think that many of the biggest issues in society are simply not being addressed, and their root causes go largely undiscussed. We are spoon-fed simple, misleading explanations for very complex things.
To solve complex problems, we have to know what’s true. To know what’s true, we need to resist political bias, wishful thinking, scapegoating, and overly simplistic (yet appealing) explanations.
To fix society, we must unearth the (hard to spot) root causes and cooperate in order to implement reasonable solutions.
What’s at stake here is way bigger than left, right, democrat, republican, or libertarian. What’s at stake here is the flourishing or decay of our society.
Is society actually getting worse, though? I think the perception is that it is. Is it actually worse than 50 years ago? I really doubt that. Is it worse than 15 years ago? It’s hard to say, and depends on what you care about, but it seems to be worse on at least some metrics, like: the cost of healthcare, the cost of education, student debt, inequality, political polarization, and so on. It’s also improved on some metrics, like GDP per capita. Any way you slice it, society has serious problems. Whether they’ve been getting worse on net is harder to say.
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This piece was first written on September 1, 2020, and first appeared on this site on March 19, 2023.
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