I recall reading research (which I can’t seem to find now) that showed how prior to WW2 the political and social discourse in America was about how to build a stronger country and democracy, and how after the war that shifted to how to build a stronger economy - which dominates our conversations and goals to this day.
I wonder if this shift in the nature of our discussion is a factor. We’ve moved from social norms to market norms, which has brought with it less cooperation.
where there was a concerted PR effort after World War 2 to associate Democracy with Capitalism, (as a push back against some of the more social policies of Roosevelt.
It is extremely problematic to claim that cooperation declined in America after the 1960s without even mentioning civil rights. Americans are certainly cooperating more insofar that it’s no longer literally illegal for gay people to have a relationship, or that black families on vacation no longer need a book indicating which gas stations and hotels will actually serve them.
The fact that white people are meaner to each other - particularly liberal v. conservative - than they used to be is in fact directly (albeit not solely) related to this, as with the polarization in formal political parties. Seeing the decline after the 1960s is really not a mystery if you think about how American society drastically changed due to Democrat-led legislation passed in 1964 and 1965, right when the graphs started nosediving.
> Democrat-led legislation passed in 1964 and 1965
Fun fact: a greater percentage of Republican representatives (76.4%) and senators (81.8%) voted in favor of the Civil Rights act of 1964 than Democrat representatives (60.4%) and senators (68.66%).
The same is true of the 1965 Voting Rights Act: 80% of Republican representatives and 93.75% of Republican senators voted in favor, vs 75.4% of Democrat representatives and 69.1% of Democrat senators.
If by 'meaner to each other' consider that after said policies were introduced IN THE 1960's, the amount of crime and violence increased massively in all groups, but most poignantly among African Americans wherein the murder rate today is considerably higher than back in the 'nice days' (peaking in 1992).
Everyone talks about 'rights' in the 1960's while at the same time there was a massive upheaval in crime.
Imagine if you lived in a plain, boring world, and then protests started to happen, and all rates of measured crime went up by 300-800% in your neighbourhood. Having the basis of comparison to know 'what it felt like before' you might be inclined to think the world is in disarray.
Imagine if you remembered a time when many inner cities were not 'no go zones' full of extreme crime and poverty - and that those were just 'normal' neighbourhoods, imagine seeing that precipitous decline in real time. It'd be hard not to recognize that 'something' was wrong.
> cooperating more insofar that it’s no longer literally illegal for gay people to have a relationship, or that black families on vacation no longer need a book indicating which gas stations and hotels will actually serve them.
This is very much aligned with free market (capitalist) thinking. It's only modern politics which have combined fiscal liberalism (free market) with social conservatism (state or locally enforced prejudice)
This is basically "the decline of America, in charts" and it's pretty depressing to read. A lot of the information here confirms that things started broadly going south at the end of the 1970s and never really recovered. Also interesting is looking at the longer-range charts and seeing how much World War II really unified America on many different fronts.
I am pretty sure you could get a similar graft if you took a big bucket of yeast and dumped a bunch of sugar in. Right at the beginning you'd have massive expansion and productivity. Everyone is happy and getting along. Then as the sugar slowly disappears and everyone is fighting for resources, it seems like somehow no one is cooperating.
That's kind of the plot from 1945 to today as America has completely calcified itself, run down the unions and shut down its factories.
Based on historical trends, and according to the article, this isn't necessarily a decline but just a downward cycle.
"Social cooperation waxes and wanes in most complex societies, following a long cycle. This is a generic pattern in not only our own society but also in ancient and medieval empires"
Whether it is a decline or not depends on whether there are enough strong external enemies to destroy the US during the downturn.
The charts in question are income disparities (1% v other), membership rates in volunteer organizations, trust in US government, a “polarization index” two guys in Political Science came up with, filibustering since 1960, judicial confirmation rates and an Ngram on two terms. All basically Cold War era time series.
These charts have lead the commenter to declare “the decline of America”. This data basically defines for the commenter “the decline of America”. That seems to me an overly-expansive extrapolation from the data...
Is it too simplistic to ask if the difference in cooperation is the inevitable result of the Greatests being raised in squalor, contrasted against Boomers who were raised in the midst of plenty?
Serious question, wondering if that sort of extreme poverty in formative years followed by cannon fodder type war leads to the kind of people who are better able to team up?
I think of what happened to much of the anglosphere (including the US) after 1970s as a reversion to the historical mean.
The economic and social investment that went into the WWII war-effort and the postwar period created a bubble of prosperity that produced real improvements for pretty much everyone from 1945 to the 1970s. Unfortunately, this level of investment has not been sustained. Now the investment bubble is over, we're reverting to the kind of nasty, brutish, and uncertain life that has been the normal state of affairs for much of history.
The rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s (under Reagan in the US; Thatcher in the UK; Mulroney in Canada; etc) and the disinvestment that followed made the stagnation in living standards--and increasing socioeconomic insecurity--for the median person inevitable.
I don't see a way to turn things around, as the social disinvestment of the 1980s has eroded social ties to the point that no one is willing to pay for the kind of collective projects (infrastructure, education, a public commons) that would improve conditions for the median person. Far too many people find it comforting to blame the other for a declining society rather than understand that societal-level problems require societal-level solutions.
From the outside looking in, there's nothing strange about it at all.
In stark contrast to every other developed country, America has built into a very individualist society. In so many aspects of life it comes down to "me before us". Healthcare, education, work, welfare and so much more. With everyone scrambling hard to make ends meet, violence and anger are always just under the surface.
Either you get in and take yours for you, or you get left horribly behind.
Ben Harper said it best - "Everyone I know is in the fight of their lives."
In the more cooperative, pre-1960s era, there was basically no welfare, no Medicare, no federal student loan program, and by any metric, things were rougher and poverty was very rampant (around 30% Americans lived in poverty in 1950s). And yet, it was precisely at that time where civic society flourished, and it’s decline coincided precisely with the introduction of Great Society programs and Civil Rights.
Of course, reduction of poverty and civil rights were huge wins and unquestionable positives, but I believe it’s actually us making the society more prosperous and more just, that was what made us more individualistic and less civically engaged — because we don’t need each other as much anymore.
That's one way of framing it. The other way of framing it is that individual liberties are more valued than group securities in America. For example the individual liberty to own a firearm is (currently) more valued than the group security of not having firearm related deaths.
Group securities require giving up individual liberties.
Hard to say which way is "better" or "winning". America is divided on which way to move. One side optimizes for life over liberty, the other side optimizes for liberty over life.
You can see it happening right now with covid. One side cares more about preserving lives, the other side cares more about preserving liberties.
1) when I look at the direction of politics in most European nations, I see a similar trend; perhaps not as far advanced in some cases, but all pointing in a similar direction
2) What you describe seems to be more or less another name for the problem, rather than a description of the cause.
Jon Meachum boils this down to two statistics in The Soul of America... "Only 17 percent of Americans trust the government (down from 77 percent in 1955), and average household income is $58,000, some $70,000 less than what a family of four needs for a middle-class life."
The US was a wildly more homogeneous place before the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act [0]. For all of the benefits draining the rest of the world of their most ambitious brings, it also destroys social solidarity, trust, and cooperation [1]. The upshot is that the study suggests this is hopefully a short term problem.
Some companies are larger today than in the 50s, which means that in some ways, we are more collaborative now.
Are we more altruistic? that's different.
Today, there are many easy ways to never meet your neighbors or your community at large. You can go home and turn on your TV, browse the Internet, or whatever. You can also be a part of an online community that is geographically sparse and never meet any of its members in real life.
If you never meet people in real life, how can you assist them if they need something? How can you display an altruistic behavior? Perhaps you may answer some questions for free, or upload a free tutorial to YouTube, but will you be able to do other good deeds that require a physical presence? no.
What is your motivation for being altruistic? In the 50s, organized religion indoctrinated people from a young age to believe that a deity would reward them if they were altruistic. Those beliefs are now in decline. People now have a different utility function in their heads: they don't want to go to heaven, they want to enjoy their lives according to humanist values.
I think it's the economic inequality he mentioned.
If the middle class was easier to achieve and sustain - even in rough times like right now - people would have the time and maybe desire to interact with society around them.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that seems like a gold bug website, advocating for "hard" money (e.g. gold or bitcoin). I'm pretty sure the answer they want you to find is that in 1971 the US ended convertibility of the dollar to gold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system. It's actually a pretty clever persuasive trick (ask a question designed to lead someone down a specific research path and "self-discover" your true message (a trick thats's coincidentally also used by QAnon: https://www.axios.com/qanon-video-game-cbbacb1e-969c-4f07-93...).
However, the argument of those graphs is pretty much correlation = causation. I'm not economist or historian, but I do know that a lot was going on starting in the 70s (recession followed by the rise of neoliberal economics, among others), that may offer a better causal explanation than gold.
I don't agree with Turchin's thesis that the US is in trouble because it's producing too many elites who don't have places in upper society. If anything, America's elite problem is under-competition rather than over-competition.
American elites don't compete with each other in any meaningful way; they conspire with each other to exploit the public. Notice that nominally opposing businesses both funded California prop 22 to entrench the right of these elites to under-pay their workers. This kind of elite collusion is endemic across American society.
The reason American society is in danger is that decades of elite collusion, combined with the intentional use of cultural wedge issues as electoral levers, have left many Americans economically vulnerable and has misdirected their anger at minorities rather than at the people who have picked their pockets clean.
Vulnerable and angry people are prime targets for demagogues, and that's how the US wound up with Trump.
"Yes, Americans watch more TV, but is this really why they bowl together less? Yes, news media is reducing everything to five-second sound bites, but is this why we have the political gridlock?"
Media scholar, NYU professor Neil Postman examined the cultural impact of television in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death.
America was the most literate nation in the world in the 17th century. Between 1640 and 1700, the literacy rate for men in Massachusetts and Connecticut was somewhere between 89 percent and 95 percent, quite probably the highest concentration of literate males to be found anywhere in the world at that time [1]. The male literacy rate in England did not exceed 40 percent.
For 250 years, books, town hall meetings, leaflets, and then newspapers, were how Americans exchanged civic ideas and conducted public discourse. When Lincoln debated Douglas in 1858, they took turns speaking for one hour each, then were each allowed an hour and a half to reply. Newspapers reported every point in detail.
From the 1950's onwards, the American news business moved from the typographical domain of newspapers, to the ephemeral world of television, with profound consequences. Marshal McLuhan cut to the chase with his aphorism, "the medium is the message". What he meant is that the UI and information dynamics of each media type determine what sorts of conversations and discourse can be communicated, and what is excluded.
Typographical media encouraged history, background, and timeless reflection of countervailing arguments and analyses.
Television changed that by chopping news into 30 second pieces, with no background understanding required, infrequent depth, and a change of topic after every 3 stories for a message from our sponsor, after which you'd return to something completely different.
News has become entertainment. Entertainment has become trivia and indulgences.
Because TV news omits historical background, precludes detailed argument, and butchers context, it changes the nature of public discourse, which determines the public officials we elect, the policies they enact, and the corporate consequences of the flow of money from consumer advertising, which is what television (and now online "news") exists to serve.
- - -
[1] Hart, James D. The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste. New York: Oxford University Press, 1950.
2013 article, so before the hyper partisan media induced fear and frenzy which really started in 2016, and has made media moguls fabulously wealthy while severely damaging the fabric of American society and enabled divide and rule confusion IMO
Profit motivated fear mongering from news organizations is nothing new.
For example, in the late 19th century, American newspapers instigated a pointless war with Spain.
[+] [-] tchock23|5 years ago|reply
I wonder if this shift in the nature of our discussion is a factor. We’ve moved from social norms to market norms, which has brought with it less cooperation.
[+] [-] mesh|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self
where there was a concerted PR effort after World War 2 to associate Democracy with Capitalism, (as a push back against some of the more social policies of Roosevelt.
[+] [-] ojnabieoot|5 years ago|reply
The fact that white people are meaner to each other - particularly liberal v. conservative - than they used to be is in fact directly (albeit not solely) related to this, as with the polarization in formal political parties. Seeing the decline after the 1960s is really not a mystery if you think about how American society drastically changed due to Democrat-led legislation passed in 1964 and 1965, right when the graphs started nosediving.
[+] [-] jwond|5 years ago|reply
Fun fact: a greater percentage of Republican representatives (76.4%) and senators (81.8%) voted in favor of the Civil Rights act of 1964 than Democrat representatives (60.4%) and senators (68.66%).
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/88-1964/h182
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/88-1964/s409
The same is true of the 1965 Voting Rights Act: 80% of Republican representatives and 93.75% of Republican senators voted in favor, vs 75.4% of Democrat representatives and 69.1% of Democrat senators.
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/89-1965/h87
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/89-1965/s78
[+] [-] jariel|5 years ago|reply
Everyone talks about 'rights' in the 1960's while at the same time there was a massive upheaval in crime.
Imagine if you lived in a plain, boring world, and then protests started to happen, and all rates of measured crime went up by 300-800% in your neighbourhood. Having the basis of comparison to know 'what it felt like before' you might be inclined to think the world is in disarray.
Imagine if you remembered a time when many inner cities were not 'no go zones' full of extreme crime and poverty - and that those were just 'normal' neighbourhoods, imagine seeing that precipitous decline in real time. It'd be hard not to recognize that 'something' was wrong.
[+] [-] twelvechairs|5 years ago|reply
This is very much aligned with free market (capitalist) thinking. It's only modern politics which have combined fiscal liberalism (free market) with social conservatism (state or locally enforced prejudice)
[+] [-] Fellshard|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdorazio|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nathanvanfleet|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ativzzz|5 years ago|reply
"Social cooperation waxes and wanes in most complex societies, following a long cycle. This is a generic pattern in not only our own society but also in ancient and medieval empires"
Whether it is a decline or not depends on whether there are enough strong external enemies to destroy the US during the downturn.
[+] [-] onecommentman|5 years ago|reply
These charts have lead the commenter to declare “the decline of America”. This data basically defines for the commenter “the decline of America”. That seems to me an overly-expansive extrapolation from the data...
Thank you for sharing that.
[+] [-] bilbo0s|5 years ago|reply
Serious question, wondering if that sort of extreme poverty in formative years followed by cannon fodder type war leads to the kind of people who are better able to team up?
[+] [-] bleepblorp|5 years ago|reply
The economic and social investment that went into the WWII war-effort and the postwar period created a bubble of prosperity that produced real improvements for pretty much everyone from 1945 to the 1970s. Unfortunately, this level of investment has not been sustained. Now the investment bubble is over, we're reverting to the kind of nasty, brutish, and uncertain life that has been the normal state of affairs for much of history.
The rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s (under Reagan in the US; Thatcher in the UK; Mulroney in Canada; etc) and the disinvestment that followed made the stagnation in living standards--and increasing socioeconomic insecurity--for the median person inevitable.
I don't see a way to turn things around, as the social disinvestment of the 1980s has eroded social ties to the point that no one is willing to pay for the kind of collective projects (infrastructure, education, a public commons) that would improve conditions for the median person. Far too many people find it comforting to blame the other for a declining society rather than understand that societal-level problems require societal-level solutions.
[+] [-] rossdavidh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grecy|5 years ago|reply
In stark contrast to every other developed country, America has built into a very individualist society. In so many aspects of life it comes down to "me before us". Healthcare, education, work, welfare and so much more. With everyone scrambling hard to make ends meet, violence and anger are always just under the surface.
Either you get in and take yours for you, or you get left horribly behind.
Ben Harper said it best - "Everyone I know is in the fight of their lives."
[+] [-] xyzzyz|5 years ago|reply
Of course, reduction of poverty and civil rights were huge wins and unquestionable positives, but I believe it’s actually us making the society more prosperous and more just, that was what made us more individualistic and less civically engaged — because we don’t need each other as much anymore.
[+] [-] umvi|5 years ago|reply
Group securities require giving up individual liberties.
Hard to say which way is "better" or "winning". America is divided on which way to move. One side optimizes for life over liberty, the other side optimizes for liberty over life.
You can see it happening right now with covid. One side cares more about preserving lives, the other side cares more about preserving liberties.
[+] [-] rossdavidh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkobia|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seneca|5 years ago|reply
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_...
1: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9477....
[+] [-] bantunes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mwkaufma|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 29athrowaway|5 years ago|reply
Are we more altruistic? that's different.
Today, there are many easy ways to never meet your neighbors or your community at large. You can go home and turn on your TV, browse the Internet, or whatever. You can also be a part of an online community that is geographically sparse and never meet any of its members in real life.
If you never meet people in real life, how can you assist them if they need something? How can you display an altruistic behavior? Perhaps you may answer some questions for free, or upload a free tutorial to YouTube, but will you be able to do other good deeds that require a physical presence? no.
What is your motivation for being altruistic? In the 50s, organized religion indoctrinated people from a young age to believe that a deity would reward them if they were altruistic. Those beliefs are now in decline. People now have a different utility function in their heads: they don't want to go to heaven, they want to enjoy their lives according to humanist values.
[+] [-] m463|5 years ago|reply
If the middle class was easier to achieve and sustain - even in rough times like right now - people would have the time and maybe desire to interact with society around them.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] droffel|5 years ago|reply
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
[+] [-] ardy42|5 years ago|reply
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that seems like a gold bug website, advocating for "hard" money (e.g. gold or bitcoin). I'm pretty sure the answer they want you to find is that in 1971 the US ended convertibility of the dollar to gold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system. It's actually a pretty clever persuasive trick (ask a question designed to lead someone down a specific research path and "self-discover" your true message (a trick thats's coincidentally also used by QAnon: https://www.axios.com/qanon-video-game-cbbacb1e-969c-4f07-93...).
However, the argument of those graphs is pretty much correlation = causation. I'm not economist or historian, but I do know that a lot was going on starting in the 70s (recession followed by the rise of neoliberal economics, among others), that may offer a better causal explanation than gold.
[+] [-] averros|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] losteric|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] howlgarnish|5 years ago|reply
The Atlantic has a current story about where Turchin thinks we're headed, and it's from reading:
[+] [-] bleepblorp|5 years ago|reply
I don't agree with Turchin's thesis that the US is in trouble because it's producing too many elites who don't have places in upper society. If anything, America's elite problem is under-competition rather than over-competition.
American elites don't compete with each other in any meaningful way; they conspire with each other to exploit the public. Notice that nominally opposing businesses both funded California prop 22 to entrench the right of these elites to under-pay their workers. This kind of elite collusion is endemic across American society.
The reason American society is in danger is that decades of elite collusion, combined with the intentional use of cultural wedge issues as electoral levers, have left many Americans economically vulnerable and has misdirected their anger at minorities rather than at the people who have picked their pockets clean.
Vulnerable and angry people are prime targets for demagogues, and that's how the US wound up with Trump.
The evolution of American social divides into issues of morality (see eg: https://imgur.com/a2dTuWZ , or https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/reaching-out-to-trump-voters-... ) in recent years has likely damaged American society irrecoverably. People who have diametrically opposed moral worldviews can't work together.
[+] [-] zcw100|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wombatmobile|5 years ago|reply
"Yes, Americans watch more TV, but is this really why they bowl together less? Yes, news media is reducing everything to five-second sound bites, but is this why we have the political gridlock?"
Media scholar, NYU professor Neil Postman examined the cultural impact of television in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death.
America was the most literate nation in the world in the 17th century. Between 1640 and 1700, the literacy rate for men in Massachusetts and Connecticut was somewhere between 89 percent and 95 percent, quite probably the highest concentration of literate males to be found anywhere in the world at that time [1]. The male literacy rate in England did not exceed 40 percent.
For 250 years, books, town hall meetings, leaflets, and then newspapers, were how Americans exchanged civic ideas and conducted public discourse. When Lincoln debated Douglas in 1858, they took turns speaking for one hour each, then were each allowed an hour and a half to reply. Newspapers reported every point in detail.
From the 1950's onwards, the American news business moved from the typographical domain of newspapers, to the ephemeral world of television, with profound consequences. Marshal McLuhan cut to the chase with his aphorism, "the medium is the message". What he meant is that the UI and information dynamics of each media type determine what sorts of conversations and discourse can be communicated, and what is excluded.
Typographical media encouraged history, background, and timeless reflection of countervailing arguments and analyses.
Television changed that by chopping news into 30 second pieces, with no background understanding required, infrequent depth, and a change of topic after every 3 stories for a message from our sponsor, after which you'd return to something completely different.
News has become entertainment. Entertainment has become trivia and indulgences.
Because TV news omits historical background, precludes detailed argument, and butchers context, it changes the nature of public discourse, which determines the public officials we elect, the policies they enact, and the corporate consequences of the flow of money from consumer advertising, which is what television (and now online "news") exists to serve.
- - -
[1] Hart, James D. The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste. New York: Oxford University Press, 1950.
[+] [-] clarkmoody|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] olivermarks|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toyg|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigbubba|5 years ago|reply