Was there a Big Drop in Happiness in 2020?

Sam Peltzman: 

I document a sudden, sharp and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness in the US population. It occurred during 2020, the year of the Covid pandemic, and mainly persists through 2024. This happiness crash spread across nearly all typical demographics and geographies. The happiest groups pre-Covid (e.g., whites, high income, well-educated and politically/ideologically right-leaning) tend to show the largest happiness reductions. The glaring exception is marital status, which has consistently been an important marker for happiness. The already wide happiness premium for marriage has, if anything, become slightly wider. With both married and unmarried reporting large declines in happiness the country has become segregated: slightly over half-the married adults-remain happy on balance; the unmarried, nearly half, are now distinctly unhappy. I also show that across a number of aspects of personal and social capital post-Covid deterioration is the norm, including a collapse of belief in the fairness of others and of trust in the US Supreme Court.

Full paper here.

Cesar Chavez and the Problem of Good and Evil

NY Times:

Ana Murguia remembers the day the man she had regarded as a hero called her house and summoned her to see him. She walked along a dirt trail, entered the rundown building, passed his secretary and stepped into his office.

He locked the door, as he always did when he called her, and told her how lonely he had been. He brought her onto the yoga mat that he often used in his office for meditation, kissed her and pulled her pants down. “Don’t tell anyone,” he told her afterward. “They’d get jealous.”

The man, Cesar Chavez, one of the most revered figures in the Latino civil rights movement, was 45. She was 13. . . .

The two women have not shared their stories publicly before, and an investigation by The New York Times has uncovered extensive evidence to support their accusations and those raised by several other women against Mr. Chavez, the United Farm Workers co-founder who died in 1993 at the age of 66.

Martin Luther King was a serial philanderer, heading a lost list of crusaders for good who did the same. Thomas Jefferson was a monstrous hypocrite, not just about slavery but also concerning personal morality and financial probity. Feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, a hero to many of my female friends, was a Stalinist who justified all the dictator's crimes.

I after pondering this problem across my whole life, I have decided that it is usually a mistake to say people are good or bad. They are good or bad in particular ways. Chavez was an excellent advocate for the farm workers he represented, but an abuser of girls. He joins the vast panoply of people were extraordinary in one area of life – politics, art, science – while being monsters in others.

Vanity vs. Love

The NY Times today is running a long article about the women who are irritated with the photographs their husbands and boyfriends take of them, because said photographs do not meet their aesthetic standards. I mentioned this to one of my sons who said, oh, yeah, people complain about this online all the time.

You people are sick.

Young and Single

Chrstine Emba in the NY Times:

Multiple studies show that young people aren’t dating, having sex or forming partnerships. A recent survey of young adults from the Institute for Family Studies and Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute found that only 30 percent of its respondents were actively dating, despite about half of them indicating that they were interested in finding a relationship. They cited a lack of confidence in what the researchers termed “dating efficacy”: Fewer than 40 percent believed themselves to be attractive to potential partners or felt comfortable discussing their feelings with them. Only around a quarter felt confident in approaching a potential partner or in their ability to stay positive after a dating setback — a rejection, a bad date or a breakup. If trends continue, one in three adults currently in their 20s will never marry, contributing to an epidemic of loneliness that is already generationally acute. 

I have observed despair about "dating efficacy" in some of the younger people I know. I hear, "why bother, it doesn't work, the other sex just isn't interested in relationships."

Strange days, when many people seem to view dating or sex as an impossible moral and logistical quandary, but endless porn is always seconds away.

Americans Think Everyone is Corrupt Because it Can't Be Their Own Fault

Matt Yglesias has a good piece today on why so many Americans think all politicians are "corrupt." For one thing, Americans have a very broad view of "corruption":

Searchlight did not make a chart out of these results, but they also asked respondents whether various actions constituted corruption. Voters of course view things like taking bribes or handing out jobs to unqualified friends as corrupt. But they also, by overwhelming margins, say that “government officials voting the way elites in their social group want instead of what most people in their district want” is a form of corruption.

So if a Democrat running in Iowa or Ohio has an unpopular view on affirmative action in college admissions or transgender athletes on school sports teams or late-term abortions, that’s not a consideration to weigh against outrage at Republicans’ covering for Trump’s corruption. It’s corruption on its own terms.

My views are obviously correct, so everyone who disagrees with me is corrupt!

You see this all over the discourse. E.g., people pushing for more housing construction instead of rent control must be taking money from billionaire developers. (People say this on Twitter/X a thousand times a day.) Or doctors pushing vaccines must be on the take for Big Pharma. To some people the idea that, no, other people actually disagree with you is beyond conception.

The basic shape of this is that just holding an unpopular view is corrupt. I suppose you could try to plead to the voters that your support of Policy X has nothing to do with donor influence or social elites. But if you support Policy X, then of course economic and social elites who agree with you about X will contribute money to your campaign and say nice things about you. There’s no way that you’re ever going to be able to prove that your support for a ban on single-use plastic straws reflects a sincere assessment of the public interest rather than the influence of climate donors and green-minded cultural elites.

To get to one of my own themes, people often blame politicians for not solving problems because they think our problems would not be hard to solve:

Most people believe that public policy problems are not actually difficult, and that if people of goodwill sat around the table and cooperated, they could be solved. Think about the scene in the movie “Dave” where, through a weird series of events, a non-politician ends up serving as president. He brings in his friend — a skilled and experienced accountant — to audit the books and finds that he can easily balance the budget without making any painful tradeoffs.

I once had an extended argument with an engineer who insisted that we know how to fix American education and the only reason we haven't is the power of teachers' unions. Even Elon Musk seemed to think for while that we could balance our budget by eliminating "fraud and corruption" from Social Security.

But I would take this even deeper. I think many people see the world as cleanly divided into US the THEM, and since WE are good, all our problems must be caused by THEM.

For a while we were supposed to tell kids about "stranger danger," as if wandering psychos were the biggest threat to their well-being. Actually most children who are sexually abused are abused by people very close to them – parents, step-parents, coaches, teachers – and most children who are murdered are killed by their parents.

Millions of Americans seem to believe that immigrants commit most of our crimes; two white Americans have flat out denied to me that a majority of American felons are white. Many Republicans believe that felons vote for Democrats, but so far as we can tell felons vote just like everyone else of their own sex and race, so a group that is majority white men of course votes for Republicans.

So if our budget is out of balance, it can't be because of good hard-working heritage Americans. It must be because of corrupt Somali refugees or Mexican cartels or so-called allies who won't pay their share or sinister billionaires just back from Epstein Island. The solution is to punish the villains and put good, honest people in charge.

In our time this might be the most dangerous fantasy in the world. 

Keeping Up with the TikTok Joneses

Noah Smith has a pretty good essay this week on a question he and I both wonder about: why do Americans feel that the economy is bad when all the numbers say it is great? Perhaps, he suggests, it has to do with social media, which constantly shows us people who appear to be wealthier, happier, and having more fun than we are. 

Well, maybe. In a sense this comparative approach has to be true, because we take our idea of what life should be like from those we see. Given the vast range of human lives, how else could we do it? People have been comparing their wealth to those of others for as long as we have had possessions; anthropologists find that this is a big issue in tribes who own next to nothing by our standards. 

There is tons of sociology showing that comparative  wealth looms large in our self-understanding; one of my favorite examples was a study that found moving to a bigger house did not make people happier unless their new house was larger than those of their neighbors. Smith cites a study that concluded

controlling for an individual's own income, higher earnings of neighbors are associated with lower levels of self-reported happines.

My problem with all thes arguments is that I don't see what about this is new. One of the broad changes that has taken place in western society is that wealthy people have in many ways withdrawn from center stage. Now many of the rich live in gated communities where you and I will never set foot, but they used to build their houses on the busyest street in town, where everybody had to see them. They used to go around in gilded carriages. Or think about Hollywood in the 1930s, offering Depression-era America a constant diet of fabulous millionaires in their fabulous mansions.

In 1850, tens of thousands of people lived as servants in the houses of the rich, sleeping in bunk beds in dingy little rooms just yards away from the silken beds of their employers. Many years ago I read a novel about a black American woman who worked as a maid for a rich white family, dividing her time between their lovely clean house, with three lovely clean daughters, and the rough house where she lived with her working class husband and three rough, dirty sons. It made a huge impression on me but I just searched for it and couldn't find it; if anybody recognizes it, let me know.

Being poorer than others is in no way new. So the argument that this explains our current misery depends on finding some way that the comparison now hurts more. Here is how Smith tries to derive this result from social media:

First, all of those classic reference points tended to be people who were roughly similar to us in income — maybe a little higher, maybe a little lower, but usually not hugely different, and certainly not Becca Bloom types. Housing markets, job markets, and all kinds of other forces tend to sort us into relatively homogeneous social classes. The rich and the poor were always fairly removed from the middle class, both geographically and socially. 

But perhaps even more importantly — and this was a point that David Marx especially emphasized — we were able to explain the differences we saw. In 1995, if you knew a rich guy who owned a car dealership, you knew how he made his money. If you envied his big house and his nice car, you could tell yourself that he had those things because of hard work, natural ability, willingness to accept risk, and maybe luck. The “luck” part would rankle, but it was only one factor among many. And you knew that if you, too, opened a successful car dealership, you could have all of those same things.

But now consider looking at an upper-class social media influencer like the ones I cited above. It’s not immediately obvious what they do for work, or how they could afford all those nice things. Some of them have jobs or run businesses, but you don’t know what those are. Some might have inherited their wealth. Some of them make money only by showing off their lifestyles on social media!

Not only can you not explain the wealth you’re seeing on social media, but you probably don’t even think about explaining it. It’s just floating there, delocalized, in front of you — something that other people have that you don’t. Perhaps you make it your reference point by default, unconsciously and automatically, as if you’re looking at your sister’s house or your neighbor’s car.

I find this unconvincing. First, as I said, I do not believe that any human in a society we would call civilized is not aware that others are richer. Second, I am also skeptical of the argument that  the wealth of people on social media is mysterious. We have the internet! We can look people up and find out! Some years ago I saw a bit of a reality series called Crisley Knows Best, and after just a few minutes of watching them I offered the opinion that they had to be fraudsters. Which turned out to be true. (Donald Trump pardoned them.) So I am not impressed by the notion that mysterious wealth is throwing off our social radar.

So I don't know. Maybe it is social media; maybe it is a decline in belief in other things, like religion or a better future. Maybe people with fewer children just have more time to worry about it.

But I continue to think that all the awfulness of our politics is downstream from a widespread sense that life is terrible, and I keep wondering why that might be.

What Do You Love?

David Brooks is very worried that young people aren't passionate enough. This leads him through an account of when he first fell in love to rapturous writing about the importance of loving things:

Love is a motivational state. It could be love for a person, a place, a craft, an idea or the divine, but something outside the self has touched something deep inside the self and set off a nuclear reaction. You want to learn everything you can about the thing you love. (They say love is blind, but love is the opposite of blind.) You want to care for and serve the thing you love. Your love is propelling you this way or that. You want communion with the thing you love.

“The deepest need of man, then,” the psychologist Erich Fromm once wrote, “is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness.” Picture a couple kissing, a carpenter rapt while working his craft, an astrophysicist at full attention gazing at the cosmos, a nun at prayer. Those are people transcending the boundaries of the self. . . .

To be loveless is to be on autopilot and disengaged from life. Love, on the other hand, fuels full engagement. “A person’s life can be meaningful,” the philosopher Susan Wolf once wrote, “only if she cares fairly deeply about some things, only if she is gripped, excited, interested, engaged, or as I earlier put it, if she loves something.”

I am all for love; give me passionate people who care. But I disagree that love cannot blind us; I think it often does. Like, people who love pit bulls and insist they are no more dangerous than other dogs. Anyway I wonder if it is true that people are less passionate than they used to be:

I’ve composed this little homage to love because Americans seem to be having less of it. Think of the things people most commonly love — their spouse, kids, friends, God, nation and community. Now look at the social trends. Marriage rates hover near record lows, and the share of 40-year-olds who have never been married is at record highs. (Cohabitation rates are up, but that doesn’t come close to making up for the decline in marriage.)

Americans are having fewer kids. Americans have fewer friends than before and spend less time with the friends they have. Church and synagogue attendance rates have been falling for decades. The share of Americans who said they feel patriotic about their country is down, especially among the young. From 1985 to 1994, active involvement in community organizations fell by about half, and there is no sign of a recovery.

In 2023 a Wall Street Journal/NORC survey asked people about what values were “very important” to them. Since 1998, the shares of Americans who said they highly valued patriotism, religion, having children and community involvement have all plummeted. The only value Americans came to care more about, the survey found, was making money.

Not so long ago I would have waved all of this away. But I find the awful mood in our country, the rampant insistence that things are worse even when they are clearly better, to be so mysterious that I am willing to at least consider almost any explanation. Are we less passionate? If so, why?

Here's a thought to consider: if we are less passionate than we used to be, could part of the reason be that we are too safe and happy? Really passionate love, it seems to me, sometimes takes the form of a desperate stand against something bad: parental control, social disapproval, horror, death. 

Many Americans think we live in some kind of dystopian hellscape; could that be because they have no notion of what a dystopian hellscape would really be like? Because their lives have fundamentally been very nice?

I think about an old post of mine focusing on two Christian writers who found that the hardest thing is  not surviving a crisis but muddling through ordinary life.

I don't know. But I wonder.

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Rage Against the Digital Machine

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is a Democratic congresswoman from rural Washington who has won twice in a very Trump-friendly district, garnering her significant national attention. Even I have written about her. She put herself back in the news recently by introducing a bill to limit bright headlights, which, she says, is the kind of thing real Americans really want their government to do.

James Pogue has an interesting profile in the NY Times that brings home how poorly Gluesenkamp Perez fits into either American political party as currently constituted:

Her worldview is widely held in rural America but almost completely unrepresented in national politics — neither reactionary nor exactly liberal; skeptical of big business and big government alike. She believes our society ought to be oriented toward working with your hands, living in nature and fostering deep and considered connection to a community. Her two biggest influences, her former senior adviser guessed, are the Bible and the ruralist Kentucky farmer-author Wendell Berry.

Personally I always regard too much interest in Wendell Berry as a sign of ill-thought-out alienation from the real world, and I will come back to that.

Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez’s signature cause is known as “right to repair.” In its simplest form, it is a call for manufacturers to make smartphones and farm equipment and headlights that can be fixed and tinkered with at home — so it’s possible to truly own them, unlike the disposable products or subscription services that surround us today.

To make this possible at any real scale, you’d have to change the whole value system shaping our increasingly financialized society, which incentivizes the rapid consumption of cheap imported goods and businesses built on the collection of what policy types describe as rents, rather than producing material things of lasting value. That’s what Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez has set out to do.

“We don’t want to be perpetual renters of disposable crap,” she told an interviewer for the website Front Porch Republic. “We want things that last.”

One of Gluesenkamp Perez's stock lines is to complain about the "high cost of cheap goods." 

To question the value of those goods, though, is to question the judgment of the leaders who sold them to us.

This resonates widely in America; I saw lots of praise on Twitter/X for Trump's line about no child needing 37 dolls, and "this is a nation, not an economy" is a widely repeated line.

What makes me crazy about this discourse is the positing of this imaginary THEM, "the leaders who sold them to us." Nobody in Washington told Americans to buy cheap foreign crap; those things sold because, and only because, Americans chose to buy them over more expensive domestic alternatives. I mentioned here recently that a shower head company offered its customers a more expensive, American-made version of one product, and not a single person bought it. Lots of Americans claim to want things that last, but when offered the choice they almost always chose the cheap version. Whose fault is that?

Across the whole of my lifetime the political establishment has been struggling to preserve manufacturing jobs in the US. Programs to teach poor kids skills like carpentry or plumbing go back to the nineteenth century. Lately we have had a weird fad of trying to make all high school students "college ready" rather than teaching them auto mechanics, but plenty of intellectuals (like me) have protested this, and American community colleges have stepped into this void. My big project down in Danville includes a major program to train manufacturing workers. Even the US Navy funds a major program to train industrial workers.

The world we live in is the world we have made. Nobody did this to us, not the government or the financial elite or the Jews or the Illuminati; we have done it to ourselves.

Many, many Americans are drawn to Wendell Berry's gospel of a simple life rooted in rural tradition. Berry wants people to live slowly and weigh any proposed innovation for years or decades before deciding to embrace it. His major practical complaint is against "cheap food", because intense competition among farmers forces them to adopt highly efficient, chemical-intensive factory methods. Maybe you nod along with this; but how did Americans react when we got a burst of food inflation in 2020 to 2023? It wasn't pretty.

Gluesenkamp Perez diagnoses Americans as suffering from deep fears about themselves and their world:

That angst, for many, is about a basic worry that neither party is seriously listening to today: a fear that we are losing what the philosopher Henri Bergson once described as an “open society” and replacing it with a society of the “anthill” — with most people living a drone-like existence, reduced to data points in a system run by technocrats and corporations. It’s a way of life that’s anathema to both America’s economic promise and its cultural traditions.

Are you living a drone-like existence? I'm not. The worry that modernity will enslave us is two centuries old, but in fact modern westerners have more freedom than anyone else in history. If you ask me, the most drone-like thing anyone in the modern world does is factory work. Revulsion against that particular kind of dronish existence is helping to drive low-end manufacturing out of America. Nobody really wants those jobs. (Except Haitian immigrants.)

Where did I learn about Wendell Berry? On the internet. MAGA, supposedly seething against the financializing elite and their plan to make us drones, is the most online political movement in history.

Gluesenkamp Perez rebels, as many other Americans do, against an economic philoosphy that says the only real goal is to produce goods for consumers. Instead we should worry more about empowerment, autonomy, community, closeness to nature, workers' rights, or something else.

Even if we agreed that those goals were important, how would we pursue them? Gluesenkamp Perez supports tariffs, but since Trump started will-nilly tariffing the world, American manufacturing has declined. Maybe better designed tariffs would help promote manufacturing here, but, again, I am not convinced that Americans really want manufacturing jobs. How would more factory work promote "autonomy"? One reason I support real national health insurance is that I would like to help people pursue autonomy rather than corporate jobs of any sort, but people like Berry and Gluesenkamp Perez are too suspicious of Big Hospital and Big Pharma and all of that to put much energy into Medicare for all.

This whole line of thinking is fundamentally confused. How can we have both stronger communities and more autonomy?

Nobody forced us to live like this; this is just what free society looks like, at our level of technology and social organization. Peasants worked with their hands, lived close to nature, and mostly lived in strong communities, but they were not happier than we are.

If you don't like your life, change it. In our world, you have the freedom to do that. Neither peasants nor 1950s factory workers did.

The "I Would be a Lousy Spouse" Problem

This is from Leah Libresco Sargeant in the Wall Street Journal, but I have seen similar statements from people who work directly with adolescents:

In 10 years of surveying high-school seniors, the Monitoring the Future project has found that fewer and fewer young men and women expect they will be “very good” as a spouse. It’s little wonder the share who expect to get married has plummeted in parallel.

Holding a stable job and being able to provide for one’s family is part of what it means to be a good spouse, but it flows out of bigger questions of character and how one handles responsibility. If we want to see marriages rebound, it isn’t enough to focus on expanding blue-collar work. High-school seniors need to have more faith they can handle the duties of marriage and child-rearing. Giving them more lectures on how important marriage is won’t do it—they think so highly of the institution that they judge themselves incapable of living up to it. Kids need more time away from adult supervision, pursuing projects of their own design, with the freedom to fail and to learn.

I have been wondering about this for decades. In the 1960s and 1970s we had a surge in divorce, which has since tapered off. But this seems to have left many Americans with a sense that marriage is difficult, that it is something you have to work very hard at if you want to succeed. You may have seen the sort of propaganda directed at girls and young women by Evangelical and Mormon churches, which says that you don't necesssarily need to find the right person, but you do have to be the right person.

Once upon a time marriage was just what most people did and nobody thought it required being a special sort of person. Now the message often is that marriage will require your supreme effort.

Are you the right person? Are you ready to make that supreme effort?

I have also wondered about Libresco's other argument, that young people shy away from marriage because they don't feel ready for any sort of adult responsibility. It does seem to me that adolescence keeps extending out farther and farther, and now many people seem to think that 30 is the minimum age to be a real adult.

I don't have anything profound to say about this, it just strikes me that the declining marriage rate for Americans in their 20s is related to changes in how we think about both marriage and life in your 20s.

Addendum:

The Heritage Foundations suggests "boot camps" for unmarried couples to teach them how to be married. I'm not picking on them; this is just another indication of how our whole society feels about marriage.

Wealth and the Generations

There is a lot of froth in America right now about how tough the young have it: crushed by student loans, unable to buy houses, trapped in low-end jobs, etc. The counter-argument from economists is that, actually, the current generation of young people is accummulating wealth just as fast if not faster than the Baby Boomers did, and if they are buying fewer houses that is mainly because they are not getting married. (See the chart above.)

A commenter on Scot Siskind's substack wrote this:

Looking at some ‘wealth by generation over time’ graphs, I have an intuition that there’s a stable and repeating pattern in the US of the elderly accumulating all the wealth and power while the young are struggling and disenfranchised. And that this creates a legitimate and perpetual intergenerational conflict where the old people really are hurting the young by keeping wealth away from them and passing policies that benefit themselves and their preferences.

I think there is much wisdom here. I remember, back when I was young and struggling, reading something like, "of course the young feel deprived, they suffered a major fall in their standard of living when they moved out of their parents' houses." At the time this puzzled me, because I had never thought of things in quite that way. I saw living in crappy little apartments as part of being young and never considered it to be deprivation. But if what many people in their 20s want is what they had at 17, and that was their own room in a nice house in nice neighborhood with no worries about food or utility bills, then they probably do feel deprived. I am much better off, materially, than I was at 25 or 30 or 35.

I suspect the curves in that graph at the top were different in the pre-WW II era. If what mattered most was how hard you could work, your wealth peaked when you could work hardest, not as your body started its grim decline. But people still went through a cycle of struggle, comparative wealth, and then decline.

One of my favorite historical books is A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. This chronicle of a Maine woman in the late 1700s traces out the arc of her economic life, which peaked when she had teenage daughters in the house. She was then the mistress of an impressive economic machine, with willing hands to weave, spin, and do other economically productive tasks. She saved money and bought land. Once her daughters married, and her own health declined, this all dropped away one bit at a time until she sold her loom and slid into unproductive and impoverished old age.

We have a different arc, but it is just as powerful. For someone like me, my salary will probably (God willing) peak right before I retire at about 67. If all goes according to plan, my mortgage will be paid off and I will be able to live comfortably on Social Security and my substantial IRA. My wealth will then gradually decline, but if I am lucky it will be enough to keep me fed and warm until I die. The enormous increase in the value of my house will provide a cushion should I need to move into a retirement home. Unless the US economy suffers a major crash, I would probably have to live well into my 90s to be as poor as I was at 25. So far as I can tell, that is a common arc for college-educated people of my generation, and the data seems to show that younger generations are tracking pretty much the same. That is our pattern.

One of the problems with our economic trajectories as currently constructed is that under this system we are poor during our prime child-bearing years. People like me bite the bullet, have kids and struggle, hoping to come out the other end ok. But if you already feel economically stressed and don't have nearly the material circumstances you want, I suppose that having children seems like a huge burden. My wife and I wanted children so much that none of that mattered, but I do see the problem.

But this is all about expectations. At 25 I lived in crappy apartments and ate lots of macaroni and cheese, but I never went hungry or shoeless. By global standards I was never poor. When my wife and I had three small children our lives were frantic – for a while we worked opposite shifts and one some days only saw each other on the way in and out the door – but it was the life I chose, so I never complained, and I now think it was very much worth it.

I am sure that our sytem could be better constructed and more fair. But if the complaint of young Americans now is that they are oppressed and deprived in a way their parents were not, they are wrong. They are just living through a different part of their lives.

Is Punk Leftist? What Would that Even Mean?

Via Matt Yglesias, I discovered that the DC Public Library sold these t-shirts as a fund raiser for their Punk Archive, which stores lots of ephemera from the local music scene in the 1970s to 1990s.

Like Yglesias, I think this is stupid; there is nothing less punk than a public library. 

A public library is a place where everyone has to walk slowly and speak quietly, where everything depends on stuff being filed in exactly the right place. Does that sound punk?

I suppose the people selling these shirts imagine that public libraries are punk in that they are anti-capitalist (because they are publicly owned, and allow people to read books while contributing only minimally to the wealth of publishers) and enable people to do research outside the bounds of what is taught in school or sold at your local mainstream bookstore.

But that's silly. The world is not simply divided into socialist vs. capitalist. It is also divided in a bunch of other ways, including order vs. disorder. And on that axis, the public library is at the farthest extreme of order, while punk stands for raucous disorder.

I have an acquaintance who was into the DC punk scene in the 1990s, and she is now an anti-vax Trump supporter.

My wife and I vote pretty much exclusively Democrat. We believe in gay rights, redistributive taxation, national health insurance, and building up the public sector. We are suspicious of foreign wars and support medical aid to Africa. We suspect the police could do their jobs with a lot less violence. 

But in many ways we are very conservative. We live a highly-ordered, family-focused suburban existence, with a mowed lawn, a flower garden, and a white picket fence (really). We have a cat and a Labrador retriever. We work professional jobs for big bureaucratic corporations and have done well in that life because we are both very reliable. We do not yell, scream, throw things, damage property, drive recklessly, wear outlandish clothes, or otherwise draw attention to ourselves.

We are the epitome of anti-punk.

To the extent that punk has any real political content, that would be anarchism. As my readers know, I read a fair amount about anarchism and am well aware of the price we pay in freedom for our wealthy, well-ordered existence. But anarchism has nothing to do with the kind of American left that supports public libraries.

As Yglesias notes, in the early 1900s the US had significant movements of both anarchists and socialists. But while the anarchists were trying to assassinate presidents, the socialists focused on stuff like creating publicly owned water systems, and agitating for the 40-hour work week. Not very punk.

Public libraries come from the "build public water systems" side of the left, not the do drugs, dance all night, and fight the man side.

The American Book Business in 2025

On the whole, the US book business is healthy: 707 million books sold in the year, including 184 million adult novels. It may be true that the average American reads fewer novels these days, or perhaps that the averaged college-educated American reads fewer novels. But in a country this big 10 percent of the people can drive an enormous industry.

Of course, most of that 184 million is genre fiction, especially thrillers, fantasy and romantasy. This New York Times piece mentions three fiction writers: thriller writer Freida McFadden (5.5 million books sold), young adult writer Suzanne Collins, whose Hunger Games prequel sold 2 million copies, and Rebecca Yarro, whose dragonrider Romantasy books sold more than a million copies.

Let me just insert a personal note here and say that I have hated everything I have ever read about people riding dragons. It's always utterly unmythical and unmagical, just, like, wouldn't it be cool to ride a big flying monster? Dragons should be more than that.

Physical bookstores are also doing ok, with sales holding steady.

Incidentally my own books accounted for 8 of those 184 million novels, so 0.0000000043% of the total vs. Freida McFadden's 3.0%.

Youth in America

Remarkabke article by Kelsey Piper at The Argument. She begins with some research done in 1913 by journalist Helen Todd, who interviewed young teenagers working in factories:

Todd asked these teenage laborers whether they would choose work in the factory or school if their families were rich enough that they didn’t need to work. Overwhelmingly, they chose the factory:

“The children don’t holler at ye and call ye a Christ-killer in a factory.”

“They don’t call ye a Dago.”

“They’re good to you at home when you earn money.” . . .

“Yer folks don’t hit ye so much.”

“You can buy shoes for the baby.”

“You can give your mother yer pay envelop.” . . .

“When my brother is fourteen, I’m going to get him a job here. Then, my mother says, we’ll take the baby out of the ‘Sylum for the Half Orphans.”

How things have changed in a century.

These days, according to Piper, the biggest threat to young people is not dangerous factory work or extreme poverty, but restrictive parenting:

This month, The Argument polled voters about modern parenting. I found it striking how far our society has pushed back the age at which children are trusted with even the barest autonomy — or, from another angle, how many years we expect parents to dedicate all their time to closely supervising them. 

We asked “At what age do you think it is appropriate for a child to stay home alone for an hour or two?” To my astonishment, 36% of respondents said that it was not appropriate until “between the ages of 14 and 17.”

Piper at first assumed that those must be people without children, but no; there wasn't much difference between people with and without children.

Or this:

Or take the responses to another question we asked: “When parents allow a 10-year-old child to play alone in a nearby park for three hours, should they be investigated by Child Protective Services for potential neglect?” Again, 36% of respondents said that they should.

She has lots more data of this sort.

I found that we had the opposite issue in my family. I kept encouraging my children to go out and play, but they preferred to stay inside and watch television or play video games. None of my children ever rode a bike, despite all the time I put into teaching and encouraging them.

But anyway it appears to be true that Americans under 18 spend a lot less time out on their own these days than they used to. We have good data on how many teenagers work, and that number is way down.

What impact is this having?

I confess that I have no idea. But maybe some of the despair that young people seem to feel about their own futures stems from their lack of experience at making their way in the world.

Girls, Screens, Parents, and Happiness

Interesting study looked at how the happiness of girls was related to multiple variables, including how much time they spend on their phones and how much they communicate with their parents. The investigators did not find that spending a lot of time on screens had much impact by itself. Instead they found a much bigger effect from whether girls said they could talk to their parents about their problems.

Parent-child communication dominates the model . . . .

Phones do matter, but their role is often misunderstood. Instead of operating as a primary source of distress, heavy phone use appears to function as a compensatory behavior. When young people lack reliable sources of support or connection, they turn to tools that provide stimulation or regulation. Heavy screen use fills gaps left by unmet material and psychological needs. 

My question would be, why don't some girls think they can talk to their parents? Is that based entirely on the strength of the relationship, or does it depend on what their problems are? If you are so involved in online life that most of your problems are online, and you know your parents frown on that, does that keep you from talking to them about it? I don't see these as independent variables.

The Persistent Fantasy of Rural Escape

I spent some time staring at this awful thing, wondering why it struck such a chord in me. It isn't because it's stupid. It's because it is *timelessly* stupid. It's just the contemporary white nationalist version of one of our most ancient dreams.

In the 1960s and 1970s we had the hippie version. I grew up with songs like this:

Baby I'll be there to take your hand
Baby I'll be there to share the land
that they'll be giving away
when we all live together.

(Who are "they"? And why are they giving away land?)

But it goes much farther back than that.

Marie Antoinette, queen of France, spent many hours playing at being a shepherdess, and she had a whole fake village built where she could act out her fantasies.

Thomas Cole, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, 1836

Pastoral poetry that evokes the simple pleasures of rural life is one of our oldest literary traditions; the earliest known examples are written in Sumerian.

Here is a famous example by Christopher Marlowe:

Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dale and field,
And all the craggy mountains yield.

It seems that the high-pressure life of an old royal court, full of politics and intrigue that might end with a knife in your back, encouraged the fantasy that shepherds had a better kind of life.

But it's all nonsense. Simple rural life is hard even for people who grew up with it, and it is almost impossible for those who did not. I have a friend who actually spent some time on a hippie commune, and she once said to me, "You know, there are reasons why we all left."

Lots of reasons. The work is hard and unrelenting, with many chores that must be done every single day. The amusements are limited. And the politics of the average commune, while perhaps not as bloody as those of a Renaissance court, can be quite awful. The communes that still endure in our time all have very strict policies about who can join, along with probationary periods and the like, and they still have high turnover.

These days only about 2% of Israelis live on a Kibbutz, and some of these are actually more like gated communities than farming communes.

But when people feel under great social or economic stress, or feel that their beliefs are at odds with those of the majority, or believe that their societies have grown wicked and decadent, these fantasies keep coming up over and over.

Searching for images to put in this post I found all sorts of dumb claims about communal life "going mainstream" in the 2020s. Like this: "Today, it’s not uncommon to see people switching to solar power, growing their own food, or building off-grid Earthships" Unless you consider 0.01 percent "not uncommon," this is utter nonsense. 

But what is indeed not uncommon is fantasizing about it.

Freddie deBoer against Identifying with your Disability

Cranky leftist Freddie deBoer has had enough of identitarian liberalism. From a piece titled The New York Times Attempts to Bully Elderly People Into the Disability-as-an-Identity Worldview:

I’m not joking! Paula Span has produced this particular bit of scolding for The Official Publication of Liberals Who Occasionally Look Up From Their Crosswords to Disapprove of Everyone and Everything. Span writes

Identifying as a person with a disability provides other benefits, advocates say. It can mean avoiding isolation and “being part of a community of people who are good problem-solvers, who figure things out and work in partnership to do things better”

Of course, you can enjoy those benefits without identifying as disabled, without allowing one unfortunate aspect of your life become an entire identity. But that doesn’t fly in the world of the brownstone liberals who fund and run the New York Times, who seem to believe that there is no such thing as a person, only beings that exist to function as sets of interlocking identities.

Here’s the maddening thing about this piece: it quietly smuggles in a worldview that has metastasized across the discourse, a worldview in which the biggest problem facing disabled people is that they aren’t eager enough to call themselves disabled. Not, you know, being blind or paralyzed or suffering from dementia or constantly wracked with chronic pain, no, all of that is subservient to the only question anybody seems to care about anymore, the all-devouring question of identity. The whole thing hums along with the cheery institutional conviction that the answer to every human frailty is more identitarian self-labeling. . . .

What’s infuriating is that the disability-as-identity movement now demands not only recognition but participation. It doesn’t merely want a world that accommodates impairments; it wants people to embrace their impairments as the core of who they are, to reorganize their sense of self around deficit, to declare disability a positive good rather than an unfortunate reality that any reasonable society would want to minimize. So we get this bizarre spectacle in which experts scold older adults for not calling themselves disabled, as though the great social failing is insufficient uptake of a label. When you tell people that disability is a proud identity, that it confers membership in a community, that it’s a site of resistance and empowerment, you create a perverse incentive structure: you reward pathology and make recovery, adaptation, or improvement look like betrayal. You create cultures where people compete for diagnostic prestige and moral authority through the performance of malady. You make suffering existentially sticky. The NYT wants you to believe the problem is that older Americans “don’t want to look disabled.” Is that really the problem for that 84-year-old in chronic pain who can barely walk? I think her problem is that she’s in chronic pain and can barely walk, and “identifying as disabled” won’t make the slightest fucking difference in her life. Meanwhile, our problem is that we’ve built an intellectual ecosystem in which more and more people want exactly that, a label, because being disabled has been reframed as a kind of sacred political laurel. . . .

Because behind all of the airy rhetoric about community and identity is a simple material reality: disability is bad. Disability is physically bad, emotionally bad, financially bad. It reduces freedom. It causes pain. It limits horizons. That doesn’t mean people who are disabled are lesser or that their lives lack dignity or value, obviously. It means that which afflicts them actually afflicts them. My controversial, offensive belief is that disability disables! But the new orthodoxy insists that saying so is taboo. The Times piece rattles through endless quotes about how older people need to feel empowered to call themselves disabled, yet never once confronts the obvious possibility that they don’t want to because they don’t want their lives defined by deficit. They want to soldier on, insist they’re that fine, preserve some continuity of self. Is that denial? Sometimes, sure. More often, I suspect, it’s a vestige of self-respect, a refusal to surrender one’s entire identity to the slow attrition of age and disease.

Recall that deBoer has suffered all his life from serious mental illness, but so far as I know has never once publicly used that as an excuse. He has certainly never tried to build his identity around it; on the contrary he has striven for a rational consistency in his positions. He spent years decrying the way wokeness was dividing the left and forcing people into extreme positions, thereby weakening the whole movement. Like everyone else who has ever thought about the problem, he understands that if people on the left want to move America in their direction, they must act together, as citizens.

The Generation of Men that Hit the Diversity Wall

On the whole, white men are doing great in America; our unemployment rate is about 3.5% and we have the highest salaries and the most wealth.

But when it comes to a certain set of elite jobs, the number of white men really has declined. If you look, for example, at the staff writers for top publications like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times, there are many fewer white men. Ok, that's fairness. But the changes didn't happen at the top; they happened at the bottom. According to Jacob Savage, that meant that one generation of young white men suddenly found themselves shut out of a bunch of jobs:

The truth is, after years of concerted effort, most news outlets had already reached and quietly surpassed gender parity. By 2019, the newsrooms of ProPublica, The Washington Post, and The New York Times were majority female, as were New Media upstarts Vice, Vox, Buzzfeed, and The Huffington Post.

And then 2020 happened, and the wheels came off.

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, newsrooms tripped over themselves to stage a “reckoning.” The New York Times solemnly promised “sweeping” reforms—on top of the sweeping reforms it had already promised. The Washington Post declared it would become “the most diverse and inclusive newsroom in the country.” CNN pledged a “sustained commitment” to race coverage, while Bon Appétit confessed that “our mastheads have been far too white for far too long” and that the magazine had “tokenize[d] many BIPOC staffers and contributors.” NPR went further still, declaring that diversity was nothing less than its “North Star.”

These weren’t empty slogans, either. In 2021, new hires at Condé Nast were just 25 percent male and 49 percent white; at the California Times, parent company of The Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune, they were just 39 percent male and 31 percent white. That year ProPublica hired 66 percent women and 58 percent people of color; at NPR, 78 percent of new hires were people of color.

“For a typical job we’d get a couple hundred applications, probably at least 80 from white guys,” the hiring editor recalled. “It was a given that we weren’t gonna hire the best person… It was jarring how we would talk about excluding white guys.” The pipeline hadn’t changed much—white men were still nearly half the applicants—but they were now filling closer to 10 percent of open positions. . . .

In 2024, The Atlantic announced that three-quarters of editorial hires in the past year had been women and 69 percent people of color.

And at the bottom of the ladder:

Since 2020, only 7.7 percent of Los Angeles Times interns have been white men. Between 2018 and 2024, of the roughly 30 summer interns each year at The Washington Post, just two or three were white men (in 2025, coincident with certain political shifts, the Post’s intern class had seven white guys—numbers not seen since way back in 2014). In 2018 The New York Times replaced its summer internship with a year-long fellowship. Just 10 percent of the nearly 220 fellows have been white men.

In Academia, where professors often teach into their 80s and turnover is thus very low, schools have  to work even harder to achieve diversity:

Since 2022, Brown has hired forty-five tenure track professors in the humanities and social sciences. Just three were white American men (6.7 percent).

According to Savage, it's even worse in Hollywood.

This is just math; if institutions want to shift the racial and gender makeup of their staffs, without firing a bunch of senior white guys, they must shift their hiring of junior staffers strongly toward minorities and women. Which means that young white guys get shut out.

And then they get angry and vote for Donald Trump.

There is no way to shift from a workplace dominated by white men to a diverse workplace without hurting somebody; this is especially true in a stagnant industry like magazine publication or higher education, where the overall number of jobs is static or shrinking. You may think, who cares, we need to achieve greater equality, and if a few thousand white men don't get professorships or plum jobs in journalism, that's a price we have to pay. But, again, since there was no mass firing of older white men, that means the price was actually paid only by a younger generation. And anyone who thinks that wouldn't turn those men against DEI and toward a hard-edged conservatism is living in la la land.

For most Americans, DEI has made no difference whatsoever. But in certain fields where jobs are scarce, it has radically reshaped the hiring landscape, and we are going to be dealing with the political ramifications of that for a long time.

Social Media, Big Tobacco, Freedom, and Happiness

The latest wave of attacks on social media have come in the form of comparing it to tobacco addiction and recommending the same remedy: making it much more expensive.

This is Utah governor Spencer Cox, speaking to Ezra Klein:

The social graphs that they use, which know us better than we know ourselves, that allow us, as you so eloquently stated and better than I could, to understand what makes us emotional and what keeps our eyeballs on there — so that when a kid is somehow, even if they don’t want to be, on TikTok at 3 a.m., just going from video to video, and they’ve given up their free will — that is unbelievably dangerous.

When tobacco companies addicted us, we figured out a way out of that. When opioid companies did that to us — we’re figuring our way out of that. And I’m just here to say that I believe these tech companies, with trillion-dollar market caps combined, are doing the same thing — the same thing that tobacco companies did, the same thing that the opioid companies did. And I think we have a moral responsibility to stand up, to hold them accountable and to take back our free will.

Klein himself has been saying that the next really popular presidential candidate may be somebody who takes on the social media companies:

And I think that, at some point, you are going to see a candidate come up who is going to weaponize this feeling. They are going to run not against Facebook or Meta as a big company that needs to be broken up. They’re going to run against all of it — that society and modernity and politics shouldn’t feel like this.

And some of that will be banning phones in schools. It’ll have a dimension that is policy. But some of it is going to be absolutely radiating a disgust for what it is doing to us and to ourselves. I mean, your book has a lot of this in it. I think that political space is weirdly open, but it seems very clear to me somebody is going to grab it.

Massachusetts Congressman Jake Auchincloss has been talking about introducing some kind of social media "sin tax."

I am of two minds about this.

I do agree that in some sense social media is a problem; at a minimum, it consumes a ton of our attention while not making us any happier or better off in any other way I can think of. But on the other hand, people now have many options for amusing or informing themselves, and social media is what millions of us choose. Isn't that what freedom means?

To me, this isn't just about social media. What if it is true that, given real freedom, many or even most people will make lousy choices? Where does that leave us?

Could it be that we are unhappy and frustrated, despite our great wealth and freedom, because we spend our time and money on things that make us worse off?

If so, what can we do about it?

Consider marriage. A good marriage always shows up in surveys as providing a huge boost for happiness, more than all the money in the world. But marriage rates are now falling, and the reason most sociologists give is that we just don't feel like we have to do it any more. Are we paying a tax in happiness for exercising that freedom? On the other hand, lots of people entered or stayed in bad marriages because they felt they had to, and that is miserable. Where is the balance point between the freedom that allows us to escape abusive relationships and the freedom that leaves us adrift and alone?

Sometimes, looking around America, I imagine a vast movement back toward restrictive social norms, backed up with strong social sanctions. But then I think about what Americans are like, and I feel certain that we would fight like hell against any really powerful neo-Victorianism. So I think we are basically stuck with our freedom, and the costs we pay for it.

Why Americans Feel Poor: Because $300,000 is Not Enough???

Some completely crazy claims flying around Twitter about how much money it takes to live decently in America.

First there was the $140,000/year is the real poverty line nonsense, launched by Mike Green based on some dubious arithmetic. Noah Smith has a bunch of similar claims at the link.

But it only gets worse from there. Goldman Sachs recently said that 40% of those making $300,000 a year are living paycheck to paycheck. Which inspired this insane tweet:

A lot of people don't understand this, but it's 100% true, depending on where you live.

From 300k to 1mm, the precarity is the same as being poor - paycheck to paycheck. It's just that the numbers are bigger.

- Most people in the aspirational class live in more expensive cities where the hobbies are costlier. Rich people in Texas enjoy backyard barbecues and drive F150s, but in Greenwich, you need a Range Rover, and in Hong Kong, you need bottle service every Friday just to fit in.

- It's expensive having rich friends. Nothing is worse than seeing a billionaire grab the wine list at dinner, because they never expect to pay the tab.

- If you're in the aspirational class, and trying to keep up, when someone invites you to their house in the Hamptons or on their plane, you have to reciprocate.

- You always think that next year's bonus will be bigger. So it'll be easier to save $10 in the future than it is to worry about $1 today.

The lesson is this: if your "aspirations" require you to spend every penny your earn, you will always feel financially stressed no matter how big your salary.

Aspirational spending isn't limited to the rich; it's why many poor people buy name brand products (detergent, soap, cereal) rather than the store brand, and why many Americans of all classes drive cars they can't afford.

If you don't want to feel stressed about money, live within your means.

You Could Afford a Tradwife

Matthew Yglesias takes up one of my favorite topics, the people who think the decline of housewives means we have gotten dramatically poorer:

One of the most persistent confusions about the economy, one that ricochets through the internet over and over again, is the notion that the decline of the two-parent, one-income household represents a decline in American living standards.

The claim pops up in various forms, and it’s central to Michael Green’s recent viral article contending that the “real” poverty line in the United States is in some sense $140,000. Green’s piece is full of errors, which its fans seem to have largely conceded, but they feel that he’s right on the level of vibes, and I think this bit about dual-earner families is the core of that.

He writes that between 1963 and 2024 “everything changed” and that today a family needs two incomes to maintain the standard of living that used to be provided by one.

This is just silly. You absolutely could maintain a 1960s standard of living on one income in America, which I know because I have a good friend who did it. She didn't want to work when her children were young, so she didn't. Instead she lived in an inexpensive area, sent her kids to public schools with iffy reputations, got deeply into frugality, and became an expert on free things to do with children. She was, by American standards, poor. Honestly, though, being poor in America is not so bad. Nobody in her family ever went hungry or didn't have (used) clothes to wear. Her house was small and run-down and had no air conditioning, but it kept out the rain and the cold. They found cheap ways to take vacations. They ate a lot of cheap vegetarian meals. The worst part was that she drove crappy old cars and worried a lot about them breaking down. (Cars are important in semi-rural areas.) Her children't don't seem to have suffered; one has an Ivy League Ph.D.

We work so hard because we consume so much: bigger houses, nicer cars, eating out a lot, computers, internet hookups, fancy televisions and multiple streaming services, etc. One of my favorite examples of how rich we are now concerns coffee. A few years ago, after an hour of walking around in the rain, I stopped at a questionable convenience store and got a coffee poured from a pot that had been sitting on a burner all day. I was shocked by how bad it tasted; it had probably been a decade since I had tasted really bad coffee. But in 1965, most coffee in America was like that, or worse. Now what you get at 7-11 is better than what most expensive restaurants served in 1965.

The main reason we have fewer housewives is, not that we are poorer, but that we are richer. Think about how much more it would cost now to hire a full-time, live-in servant than it did a century ago. The same logic applies to housewives; the more women can earn outside the home, the more they give up by not working, so the less attractive staying home becomes.

The persistent belief that we are poorer than we were 60 years ago makes me throw up my hands. People who believe this are either completely ignorant about life in the 1960s or just stuck in a nostalgia doom loop.

We are rich. Deal with it.