Removing The Rose-Colored News Glasses – How America is ACTUALLY Doing
This is part two in a two-part series about progress in America. In part one, we talked about how journalism and news skew our perception of how violent and backward our country is. In today's episode, we'll explore some theoretical models of how we might measure American progress - ones that don't involve outrage news programming.
Joe: In the last episode, we asked the question, “why did crime go down in the 90s? Why was it so high and then start coming down again?
Todd: I think the real problem then had to do with crack cocaine.
Joe: Yeah, I remember watching the show Cops and every episode, they would pull up on somebody and find crack in their pockets.
Todd: That, and gangs were flourishing during the 90s because of the cocaine business.
Joe: There's also a question of why news stations had to become so Innovative with their evening news. It used to just be Walter Cronkite very quietly, blandly reporting on everything. They would have the same bland tone about reporting on us landing on the moon as they did for a local theft. So, we're going to talk about why programming changed and some of the reasons why we think crime might have gone down. A lot of this comes from sources about theories on why crime went down because we are almost back to 1960s levels of crime, which was half and half again than what was in the 90s.
To recap our numbers: In 1960, there were 1800 crimes per hundred thousand people. That doubled in the 1970s and then doubled again to the 90s. Today, we are back down to 2500 crimes per hundred thousand people. So, we're doing pretty good, but how did that change happen? Now, one of the theories of why crime dropped after the 90s was simply the number of police officers hired. In 1994, Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which means $30B in federal aid was spent over six years to improve state, local enforcement, prisons, and crime prevention programs. When people wanted to defund the police during black lives matter, the second half of that statement, which doesn't make it onto a catchy slogan, is “and put that into prevention programs," part of which was included in Clinton's bill.
The prison population rapidly increased from the 1970s. So as crime went up, imprisonment went up. In the 80s, that was when the crack cocaine market grew. Now, crack use and violent crimes kind of go hand in hand, but it also depends on what county and what city you're in. So, you can't draw a straight line from that. If you're in Detroit, it's not going to be the same as Malibu. Along with this, we have changing demographics, meaning we have an aging population. If you are in the health industry or the retirement community right now, you know America has fewer young people and more older people than we used to. And that lowers crime.
With that being said, let’s bring up Compstat. Basically, it's a system of tracking crime. The idea that we think of crime as all criminals doing all the crimes all the time is not true. Most criminals are barely ever committing any crime, and then one or two are just doing a ton of crime. The inventor of crime stats was doing it to catch pickpockets on subways and subway theft. And he just accidentally stumbled into an amazing computer system that a lot of police stations still use today, like almost unchanged but now on computers rather than bullet boards.
And of course, security and technology play a factor in lower crime too. Before the 90s, we didn't have all these neat car alarms and theft detection services. We didn't have nearly as much of an industry for home burglary and alarms. That huge increase in technology more than likely helped cause the drive downward in crime.
Joe: Todd, you had a note once asking why all the huge, creative successes come from America.
Todd: Yeah, you see these places that are just brilliant. There are many educated people, but most disruptive inventions come from the US.
Joe: One might think that over these last few episodes, we talk about progress in America through crime too much. But that's because the lens that we see progress is through news, and news very often only covers crimes and not all the neat technology that comes out. There was a sex toy that ended up winning the top hundred tech awards, and nobody in CNN is looking at that wanting to air it.
Todd: But they cover the murder of seven people in detail.
Joe: That is exactly my point.
So, now we want to get into real progress – technology and the economy. Our economy used to be built around innovation. Why does America seem to be the leader of innovation? To start, let's talk about the term ‘garage inventor.' For example, there was a story about how vulcanized tires were invented by a guy holding rubber in his fingers, and he dropped it into a hot pan. One of the fake sweeteners came from a scientist who came home, didn't wash his hands after a lab experiment, and touched bread. And that's how we got a non-sugar sweetener - just a clumsy lab tech.
In the 1980s, and this comes from Harvard Business Review, the most inventive activity was exactly what we're talking about. They were from people who were not connected to major companies, major research, or labs. However, we made a change from 1870 to the year 2000. We went from most patents filed for inventions by individuals to 80% of patents being done by firms. So, the garage inventor went away, and it turned into big business. Top firms get all this money, and they just create one invention after another. It can also drive wealth too by state. For example, if you're in a state like Massachusetts, 1900 to 2000 had four times as many patents as less innovative states like Wyoming. They would be 30% richer in GDP it like if Wyoming came out with as many patents. There is money in forward thinking and creativity. If you have a bunch of garage inventors living in your city or town, you can expect to be a richer city or town for it.
Joe: So, what are some of the key elements of American culture that make up the secret sauce of innovation?
Todd: Yeah, why would somebody want to not get a job and risk so much?
Joe: And why aren't other countries doing this? You would think that they could model it?
One of the reasons in America is the forgiveness of failure. We Americans have a huge tolerance for risk and a huge appetite for crazy ideas. When I hear about Google providing beanbag chairs and gourmet lunches to their people, I, as an American, want to hear if that works on bringing on innovation. But on the other side of the coin, people in other countries are afraid of being ridiculed. But in America, we consider failure to be a mark of somebody who is working. We look at a pile of failures and we see that person is hard at work and dedicated. I'm going to quote John Kao from this Smithsonian article, “…and a willingness to listen to ideas no matter how outlandish has been the seed corn for countless ventures that are now seen as mainstream.” So, when we talk about being willing to risk, and willing to overlook failure, that is the American version of progress.
There was a fortune.com article talking about how the best measure for progress is GDP compared with the prosperity of a middle-class family and how many proper prosperous middle-class families there are. So, we're going to pause there because that is a good question. And that seems to be what economists for the last 10 years have really been focused on. The middle class is something we kind of focus on a lot as a measure of progress. Here is a little bit of a problem with that; if your measurement for progress in America is how many people are in the proper prosperous middle class, then there's nowhere up from there.
That's when you start comparing GDP again. But if you're in a country that currently has a solid middle class, then you have to start looking at happiness. You have to start looking at things that reflect human welfare and social well-being, and that's where we get into our next article from GreenBiz. GreenBiz thinks that to measure progress, we should replace GDP and instead use things that look at comfort and happiness. It's just hard to measure, though, because many times happiness doesn’t come unless there is health, a secure job, and prospects for future education.
Joe: I found an obscure data website (towards data science) by a guy named Jordan Bean who had a neat idea. Have you seen sports analytics where they make a composite combining all the things that would qualify as a good team?
Todd: Oh, yeah. They got that down to a science.
Joe: What if we did that for America? I kind of love this idea just because I love data and analytics, but then again, I don't know if it would actually do anything. In short, Jordan says to combine all the things that might measure the quality of life. He includes GDP on this amongst other things like health, intelligence, median household income, etc.
Also, have you heard the theory in sports that we can't run any faster as humans? They are statistics showing that if runners who broke records 30 years ago had the same shoes as today back then, they would be as fast as we are now. So, it's not that we are getting better at sports; we are getting better equipment. Lastly, Jorden believes that we have peaked in several of those categories he listed already, like sports and how fast a speed skater can move on ice. Basically, he thinks we peaked in a couple of these little categories that measure the quality of life. Do you?
Todd: I think intelligence peaked because people have more access to education like going to YouTube, etc.
Joe: I think maybe consumer speed because between how warehouses work now and how distribution works, literally the only thing that can make us faster would probably be dropping boxes on people by flying drones. Overall, I don't know if America has actually peaked in progress for any specific measure. But I do know that us being fixated on misinformation and violence, those have not peaked. In fact, it's gone the other way where we are kicking ass in how peaceful things have gotten.
Final Thoughts
In the TV series The 100, after being asked by a group of people who would persist in a task that they know is fruitless, the character Gaia has a throwaway line: “sometimes belief is stronger than the truth.” Even when presented evidence, you will still choose to believe in events that probably won't happen. With all the biases we mentioned, like survivorship bias, availability bias, mere exposure biases, it's easy to think the human brain is built to believe in the unlikely. Because the unlikely is exciting, terrifying, or fantastic.
Winning the lottery stirs our imagination and we see winners on TV all the time. So, half of all Americans buy a lotto ticket each year despite the chances being about 1 in 250,000. In addition, we see people being hurt and violent crimes on the news every night. So, we estimate our chances of being robbed at about 15%, even though it's a lot closer to 1% throughout our entire lifetime. In other words, instead of asking neighbors how safe they feel, we base our chances on what the news says. And if you listen to the TV news, which is staffed by journalists who are openly political, trained, and rewarded to home in on violent stories, you will hear about how progress in America is stalled. Furthermore, they will tell you that violent death, despite being statistically unlikely, is lurking around every corner.
We should stop asking the hammers if our house is done yet. Instead, take a look yourself because the real measure of progress in America should be our health, income, and local sense of safety. When you watch the news and all you see are flaming gas stations and crime scenes, just take a walk through your neighborhood. And let me ask you this - can you see Brian Williams chopper going down?