I used to be optimistic, not just about America, but about modern society in general. From Matt Ridley's book, The Rational Optimist, to Steven Pinker's book, Enlightenment Now, and others (Goklany, Lomborg, etc.), the logic was simple: as you've done in this post, let's just look at the historical evidence until today; most important things are getting spectacularly better and they are likely to continue to do so.
The COVID lockdowns shook me. I think it's even worse than whether or not America is failing. Nearly all the world's governments turned most of the world into a prison for a non-catastrophic virus. The lockdowns were temporary but the precedent has been set. The U.S. Constitution was discarded, so in that sense, America has failed, but it's worse than that. The global coordination of immoral laws based on poor science was the most worrying. We're on the precipice of a global, cyberpunk dystopia.
No longer can we indulge in a Voltairian or Caplanian Bubblism and enjoy increasing living standards while largely ignoring the government. The government cancer is, through institutional inertia, probing terminal metastasis. This does not necessarily mean that progress in well-being, science, technology, and culture will slow. Cyberpunk dystopic writers were prescient in how their imagined worlds were technologically advanced.
Most people are in denial about the magnitude of the global COVID lockdowns by governments that we just lived through, and what they portend.
On a technical point: I don't see the Constitutional violation. The lockdowns were state and local, not federal, as far as I know. So they couldn't violate the U.S Constitution (unless maybe you want to argue that they violated one of the rights incorporated under the 14th amendment).
Even if they had been federal, what Constitutional provision would they violate? The 9th and 10th amendments? Sure, but 99% of all US government activities violate those.
As far as violations of the Constitution and general liberty go, I think we've seen much worse. How about FDR sending people to concentration camps during WWII just for having Japanese blood? Or, indeed, how about slavery? How about forcing people to fight and die in Vietnam?
May 16, 2023·edited May 16, 2023Liked by Michael Huemer
> As far as violations of the Constitution and general liberty go, I think we've seen much worse.
As horrific as those examples were, they did not apply to even the majority, let alone the entirety, of the population. Slavery is significant at about 20%, but again, it's not even close to the entire population. There is something qualitatively different and profound about a population-wide, lengthy, mostly-at-home imprisonment. Imagine if the next threat, real or perceived, is worse than SARS-CoV-2. Worse, there is a risk of global coordination leaving no rich country to run to.
To your technical point about federal constitutionality, you're right. I got carried away and I retract that sentence. It could be transformed to state constitutions and the spirits in which they were drafted. I think the rest stands, though. The luxuries we accumulated could not stand up to the brute force of the state. Future accumulations of luxuries seem orthogonal to the danger of what we just lived through.
There are some concerning things unearthed in The Twitter Files about de facto free speech violations. They are probably not de jure violations, although I'm not sure how much that distinction matters anymore. It seems that modern governments have figured out how to co-opt corporations and avoid pesky legalities. Being discovered doesn't even matter much (e.g. Snowden).
May 16, 2023·edited May 16, 2023Liked by Michael Huemer
1) I agree that COVID lockdowns were fundamentally un-american and something I didn't think could actually happen in this country. It never crossed my mind that it was even possible. Since living through it I abandoned my "politics don't matter much" stance.
I actually don't mind "two weeks to flatten the curve". If there was an unknown but potentially deadly virus we didn't understand, I might be willing to take a two week vacation. But once it got beyond that, and once it was obvious that COVID wasn't a big deal, it got absurd.
Some people deny it was lockdowns were a big deal, but usually those people had laptop jobs and didn't have young children in public school. For those people it was a huge imposition that went on for two years.
2) Most terrible things that have happened in history have a genuinely good reason why they happened. We may disagree with it later, and we might be right, but the actions of the people make sense to us.
When there are Japanese subs on the west coast, when they sneak attacked us, when our fascist opponents are clearly evil and nuts...it's not hard to understand why we had Japanese internment. If those internment camps were like concentration camps perhaps it would be a different story, but they were fairly humane all things considered.
The further back you go the more brutal things get, but also the more brutal a world with limited options your talking about.
What made COVID lockdowns evil was its magnitude relative to the threat. Worse things have happened, but usually in response to real threats. COVID wasn't remotely close enough to a threat to justify the actions taken in its name.
Yeah, it sounded reasonable when it was a couple of weeks to flatten the curve. Then somehow we forgot that and it just went on and on. At first, we needed to flatten the curve because the hospitals wouldn't have enough respirators. Then it turned out that respirators actually don't help Covid-19 patients. But we ignored that and just kept on with the policy.
It was no problem for me, as it just meant I got to teach online and didn't have to waste time commuting. But it must have been terrible for people who owned or worked in restaurants, hotels, etc. Some businesses here went under and never came back.
1) Certain powers, even if they would make sense in certain contexts, can't be ceded because once ceded they will be used in other contexts.
2) Following on that, next time I will just take my chances that the pandemic is worse then COVID was rather then cede freedoms because the risk of needless caution is high and uncontrollable too.
3) People are crazier than I thought. It wasn't just the government. I watched too many "sane" friends go completely crazy for two years. I had to re-evaluate my understanding of the human condition.
Are there really any serious doubts that this was coordinated at the highest levels of global power, above all the national governments -- that it was the biggest power grab of our lifetimes? Globalism is not a "conspiracy theory" but a fact of human social reality.
> the Court held in Saenz v. Roe, “The word ‘travel’ is not found in the text of the Constitution. Yet the ‘constitutional right to travel from one State to another’ is firmly embedded in our jurisprudence.”
The virus was only non-catastrophic in retrospect. The amount of freedoms we enjoy are calibrated to the amount of security we have. With lots of security, we are able to enjoy lots of freedoms, but when our security is threatened, we are willing to give up some freedoms to obtain more security (think post 9/11 airport security measures).
COVID, especially in its infancy, was an extreme threat to security because the full extent of its downside potential was unknown. Data on death rates, the rate of mutation, etc. were fresh, varied, and unreliable. With so many unknown variables and risks, the most natural thing in the world was to err on the side of caution. Overreacting to risks with unknown downsides is a survival mechanism that has served us extremely well for millennia.
After several months, we got better data on the risks associated with COVID and different states eased lockdowns at different times based on risk tolerance. Reasonable people can disagree on whether lockdowns were eased quickly enough, but the disagreements typically span a range of just 6-12 months. This is a super short amount of time and is not a reason to no longer be optimistic about humanity. It's easy to say in hindsight that we overreacted to a non-catastrophic virus, but the reality is that our propensity to overreact to risks with unknown attributes is a major reason our species has survived and thrived for as long as it has.
> the most natural thing in the world was to err on the side of caution
That is one perspective. I disagree, as did some epidemiologists, even at the time (e.g. Ioannidis, taking into account the natural viral experiments that occurred on cruise ships with outbreaks). This same debate occurs with climate change, etc.
My concern, distilled, is that the burden of proof has shifted from those who share your perspective (caution) to those who share my perspective (freedom), without any obvious change in methodology (e.g. hypothesis testing). This suggests to me that there has been a fundamental and likely irrevocable shift in the majority philosophy of the "Western World".
Put another way, we seem to have shifted closer to China rather than our freedom roots. It is no longer inconceivable that the response to the next crisis, real or perceived, will more closely match the Chinese response (e.g. massive quarantine prison camps, barking robot dogs, welded apartment doors, QR codes squashing dissent and travel, etc.).
There are pros and cons to these different styles of society. It seems clear to me that the Chinese style is a cyberpunk dystopia, and the world is drifting towards it.
Societies do not approach every threat with the same balance between safety and freedom. When threats are perceived to be more serious, societies will tend to sacrifice freedom for safety. This trade off is deeply rooted in evolutionary biology.
If a society could react to a threat on a scale of 0% (pure safety) to 100% (pure freedom), the U.S.'s baseline approach to a "normal" threat might be 70% and China's might be 30% (I'm making up numbers). The U.S. approached the COVID threat, however, at a 40% and China approached at a 5%.
Your concern, if I understand correctly, is that our 40% reaction to COVID is a permanent change in how we think about risk. I'm saying that the 40% reaction was a one-off event justified by the unusual unknowns associated with COVID. Because of our cultural and institutional attachment to freedom, I expect future threat responses to snap back to our baseline 70%. Your concern is that our baseline itself has shifted.
You could still be right, and time will tell if our baseline has in fact shifted. All I'm saying is the fact that we approached a single threat with a 40% response is not proof of an unstoppable slide towards totalitarianism. I agree the Chinese style is a dystopia, but I don't think one isolated threat response is proof of the rest of the world drifting towards that style.
The question is, why is the "America is failing" narrative so incredibly popular? As you and plenty of others have laid out, the data clearly supports the fact that in many ways, life is better now around the world, and in the U.S. in particular, than it ever has been. Why does no one seem to care?
I'd be interested in other thoughts, but I think there's a case to be made that the success of the "America is failing" narrative can be chalked up solely to negativity bias and our collective addiction to negative talking points.
In a world of pure rationalists, the data and arguments that paint an optimistic picture of where we are would win out. Unfortunately, we don't live in that world. Humans are driven by negativity bias to a much larger extent than most realize. As long as we continue to give more psychological weight to negative talking points and data, articles like this will be drowned out by a sea of negativity.
The fight against overly-negative narratives, and the hyperpolarization these narratives cause, can't be won with more or better data. Until we recognize and push back against our addiction to negativity, negative narratives and talking points will continue to win in the marketplace of ideas.
I agree that America is not dead, and is doing well in many important ways which you highlighted. But I think your case was a bit one-sided. Let me try to make the case for the other side:
Christianity (which I claim is pro-social and a net positive), long the dominant religion in America, is rapidly dying out among the young, and is being replaced by something much worse (wokeness).
"Diversity" is now prioritized over merit in most important institutions, which will predictably lead to a reduction in general competence.
Then of course we have the government, which gives us an ever-increasing regulatory burden, an ever-increasing national debt, and increasingly irresponsible fiscal policy, among other problems..
So I think the picture is not quite so rosy for the USA.
I wonder how much the depression statistics reflect an increase in diagnosis, as opposed to an increase in the phenomenon.
Regarding IQ, the effect is so small that I wonder if it might just be due, e.g., to slight differences in who is finding online IQ tests. I.e., over the study period, maybe there was a slight increase in slightly dumber people finding the IQ tests online (which could be due to a general increase in internet exposure). In any case, note that this is after several decades of significant increases in IQ.
Regarding IQ, I'm not sure exactly what's going on. But if you look at fertility rates by education and/or income level, it is pretty clear that low-IQ people are reproducing significantly more than high-IQ people. So we should expect a reduction in IQ due to genetic factors. Also see the movie "Idiocracy."
"Christianity (which I claim is pro-social and a net positive), long the dominant religion in America, is rapidly dying out among the young, and is being replaced by something much worse (wokeness)."
I think this is a major factor in a lot of "decline" worries. Some claims of Christianity "dying out" are exaggerated, but the trendline of Americans professing Christian faith is indeed downward. If faith in Christ makes the difference between spending eternity in heaven or hell, then decline in such faith is a *very* negative thing to observe, regardless of one's material circumstances. I sincerely believe that presence or absence of such faith does make that difference, and a lot of people (underrepresented on this Substack relative to the whole populace, I would guess) agree. And of course many others see Christianity as a positive social influence, as you said, without necessarily believing in Biblical reward for Christ's followers and judgment for those who reject Him.
This is something that disappointed me in Richard Hanania's recent piece about how "conservatives win all the time" (and therefore shouldn't believe in Decline writ large). He briefly mentioned white nationalists as a group that's genuinely losing in terms of raw numbers, but didn't address the decline in Christianity much at all -- even though I think that the number of serious Christians worried about decline in faith is much greater than the number of people despairing over how America is becoming less white.
The 'Well-Being' category is probably what most complainers are largely concerned with, and it's the section in which you paint the least rosy picture. Surely America's poorest (or those just above the Medicaid cutoff) would rather have been born in a state with more generous welfare programs, other things being equal.
This is belated, and for that I apologize. I see contentions like this from credible authors; one of the other commenters mentioned Ridley and Pinker, and I know of a success coach (no, I don't dismiss such folks out of hand as they've put me on to some very worthwhile reading) whose view is that these are the best times in all of human history to be alive. Still:
It's around an hour and 37 minutes in length, but no one I've shared it who has actually watched it through has told me they still thought all is well in the present ship of state. I would not want to be looking for an apartment to rent right now. We all know, moreover, of claims that for decades now wages have stagnated relative to the cost of living which has skyrocketed; the only disagreements are over why this is.
I sense that most of the stats and abstract claims made above don't affect the average person very much, and his/her whose response to (e.g.) the percentage of Nobel Prize winners being Americans is going to be, "so what?" Yes, the U.S. may still be the largest economy in the world, but there is at least one reason that it may be living on borrowed time: the longstanding and ongoing debauching of the currency which has lost around 98 percent of its value since the Federal Reserve was created, the bulk of this loss occurring after Nixon killed the gold standard in 1971 and financialization replaced production as the major economic form of life. Everyone who has bought their own groceries for all their lives knows that their money has lost the bulk of its purchasing power. In the 1980s when I was a graduate student, $30 worth of food would fill my freezer and refrigerator for a week. Last summer, my wife and I were out and entertaining another couple. $30 wouldn't even buy a large pizza! Some will dismiss this as anecdotal. Okay, fine, but ask around. Gathering a sufficient number of anecdotes and you're doing research. Daily I read articles of the rich getting richer, the middle class gradually disappearing, and people who are struggling. AI, of course, threatens the next great wave of technological unemployment.
It's a fact, moreover, that other nations are moving away from the dollar as the world's reserve currency: BRICS nations? Russia and China are now doing more and more business using their own currencies. The death of the petrodollar / dollar supremacy may be the death of U.S. economic dominance. For decades now, foreign nations have held dollars. If the dollar hegemony ends, those dollars are going to return to America, devaluing them still more.
Seems worth thinking about.
Finally, are American's universities still the best in the world? I'm not in much position to judge in any decisive way as I've been out of university teaching for over 10 years now, but when professors are getting called onto the carpet and called "bigots" and "transphobic" for saying there are two and only two sexes (a biological fact, excluding perhaps for that .02% of the population that suffers from genuine gender dysphoria) things have gotten a bit loopy, to say the least.
I used to be optimistic, not just about America, but about modern society in general. From Matt Ridley's book, The Rational Optimist, to Steven Pinker's book, Enlightenment Now, and others (Goklany, Lomborg, etc.), the logic was simple: as you've done in this post, let's just look at the historical evidence until today; most important things are getting spectacularly better and they are likely to continue to do so.
The COVID lockdowns shook me. I think it's even worse than whether or not America is failing. Nearly all the world's governments turned most of the world into a prison for a non-catastrophic virus. The lockdowns were temporary but the precedent has been set. The U.S. Constitution was discarded, so in that sense, America has failed, but it's worse than that. The global coordination of immoral laws based on poor science was the most worrying. We're on the precipice of a global, cyberpunk dystopia.
No longer can we indulge in a Voltairian or Caplanian Bubblism and enjoy increasing living standards while largely ignoring the government. The government cancer is, through institutional inertia, probing terminal metastasis. This does not necessarily mean that progress in well-being, science, technology, and culture will slow. Cyberpunk dystopic writers were prescient in how their imagined worlds were technologically advanced.
Most people are in denial about the magnitude of the global COVID lockdowns by governments that we just lived through, and what they portend.
On a technical point: I don't see the Constitutional violation. The lockdowns were state and local, not federal, as far as I know. So they couldn't violate the U.S Constitution (unless maybe you want to argue that they violated one of the rights incorporated under the 14th amendment).
Even if they had been federal, what Constitutional provision would they violate? The 9th and 10th amendments? Sure, but 99% of all US government activities violate those.
As far as violations of the Constitution and general liberty go, I think we've seen much worse. How about FDR sending people to concentration camps during WWII just for having Japanese blood? Or, indeed, how about slavery? How about forcing people to fight and die in Vietnam?
> As far as violations of the Constitution and general liberty go, I think we've seen much worse.
As horrific as those examples were, they did not apply to even the majority, let alone the entirety, of the population. Slavery is significant at about 20%, but again, it's not even close to the entire population. There is something qualitatively different and profound about a population-wide, lengthy, mostly-at-home imprisonment. Imagine if the next threat, real or perceived, is worse than SARS-CoV-2. Worse, there is a risk of global coordination leaving no rich country to run to.
To your technical point about federal constitutionality, you're right. I got carried away and I retract that sentence. It could be transformed to state constitutions and the spirits in which they were drafted. I think the rest stands, though. The luxuries we accumulated could not stand up to the brute force of the state. Future accumulations of luxuries seem orthogonal to the danger of what we just lived through.
There are some concerning things unearthed in The Twitter Files about de facto free speech violations. They are probably not de jure violations, although I'm not sure how much that distinction matters anymore. It seems that modern governments have figured out how to co-opt corporations and avoid pesky legalities. Being discovered doesn't even matter much (e.g. Snowden).
1) I agree that COVID lockdowns were fundamentally un-american and something I didn't think could actually happen in this country. It never crossed my mind that it was even possible. Since living through it I abandoned my "politics don't matter much" stance.
I actually don't mind "two weeks to flatten the curve". If there was an unknown but potentially deadly virus we didn't understand, I might be willing to take a two week vacation. But once it got beyond that, and once it was obvious that COVID wasn't a big deal, it got absurd.
Some people deny it was lockdowns were a big deal, but usually those people had laptop jobs and didn't have young children in public school. For those people it was a huge imposition that went on for two years.
2) Most terrible things that have happened in history have a genuinely good reason why they happened. We may disagree with it later, and we might be right, but the actions of the people make sense to us.
When there are Japanese subs on the west coast, when they sneak attacked us, when our fascist opponents are clearly evil and nuts...it's not hard to understand why we had Japanese internment. If those internment camps were like concentration camps perhaps it would be a different story, but they were fairly humane all things considered.
The further back you go the more brutal things get, but also the more brutal a world with limited options your talking about.
What made COVID lockdowns evil was its magnitude relative to the threat. Worse things have happened, but usually in response to real threats. COVID wasn't remotely close enough to a threat to justify the actions taken in its name.
Yeah, it sounded reasonable when it was a couple of weeks to flatten the curve. Then somehow we forgot that and it just went on and on. At first, we needed to flatten the curve because the hospitals wouldn't have enough respirators. Then it turned out that respirators actually don't help Covid-19 patients. But we ignored that and just kept on with the policy.
It was no problem for me, as it just meant I got to teach online and didn't have to waste time commuting. But it must have been terrible for people who owned or worked in restaurants, hotels, etc. Some businesses here went under and never came back.
It basically convinced me that:
1) Certain powers, even if they would make sense in certain contexts, can't be ceded because once ceded they will be used in other contexts.
2) Following on that, next time I will just take my chances that the pandemic is worse then COVID was rather then cede freedoms because the risk of needless caution is high and uncontrollable too.
3) People are crazier than I thought. It wasn't just the government. I watched too many "sane" friends go completely crazy for two years. I had to re-evaluate my understanding of the human condition.
Are there really any serious doubts that this was coordinated at the highest levels of global power, above all the national governments -- that it was the biggest power grab of our lifetimes? Globalism is not a "conspiracy theory" but a fact of human social reality.
An interesting article in support:
How Government and Big Tech Colluded to Usurp Constitutional rights
https://brownstone.org/articles/government-big-tech-colluded-usurp-constitutional-rights/
In my continued post-hoc rationalizations (;-D) of my claim of federal constitutional violations, William Spruance is a gold mine. Here's another article on travel restrictions, getting to the heart of my point: https://brownstone.org/articles/the-covid-coup-attacked-the-right-to-travel/
> the Court held in Saenz v. Roe, “The word ‘travel’ is not found in the text of the Constitution. Yet the ‘constitutional right to travel from one State to another’ is firmly embedded in our jurisprudence.”
The virus was only non-catastrophic in retrospect. The amount of freedoms we enjoy are calibrated to the amount of security we have. With lots of security, we are able to enjoy lots of freedoms, but when our security is threatened, we are willing to give up some freedoms to obtain more security (think post 9/11 airport security measures).
COVID, especially in its infancy, was an extreme threat to security because the full extent of its downside potential was unknown. Data on death rates, the rate of mutation, etc. were fresh, varied, and unreliable. With so many unknown variables and risks, the most natural thing in the world was to err on the side of caution. Overreacting to risks with unknown downsides is a survival mechanism that has served us extremely well for millennia.
After several months, we got better data on the risks associated with COVID and different states eased lockdowns at different times based on risk tolerance. Reasonable people can disagree on whether lockdowns were eased quickly enough, but the disagreements typically span a range of just 6-12 months. This is a super short amount of time and is not a reason to no longer be optimistic about humanity. It's easy to say in hindsight that we overreacted to a non-catastrophic virus, but the reality is that our propensity to overreact to risks with unknown attributes is a major reason our species has survived and thrived for as long as it has.
> the most natural thing in the world was to err on the side of caution
That is one perspective. I disagree, as did some epidemiologists, even at the time (e.g. Ioannidis, taking into account the natural viral experiments that occurred on cruise ships with outbreaks). This same debate occurs with climate change, etc.
My concern, distilled, is that the burden of proof has shifted from those who share your perspective (caution) to those who share my perspective (freedom), without any obvious change in methodology (e.g. hypothesis testing). This suggests to me that there has been a fundamental and likely irrevocable shift in the majority philosophy of the "Western World".
Put another way, we seem to have shifted closer to China rather than our freedom roots. It is no longer inconceivable that the response to the next crisis, real or perceived, will more closely match the Chinese response (e.g. massive quarantine prison camps, barking robot dogs, welded apartment doors, QR codes squashing dissent and travel, etc.).
There are pros and cons to these different styles of society. It seems clear to me that the Chinese style is a cyberpunk dystopia, and the world is drifting towards it.
Societies do not approach every threat with the same balance between safety and freedom. When threats are perceived to be more serious, societies will tend to sacrifice freedom for safety. This trade off is deeply rooted in evolutionary biology.
If a society could react to a threat on a scale of 0% (pure safety) to 100% (pure freedom), the U.S.'s baseline approach to a "normal" threat might be 70% and China's might be 30% (I'm making up numbers). The U.S. approached the COVID threat, however, at a 40% and China approached at a 5%.
Your concern, if I understand correctly, is that our 40% reaction to COVID is a permanent change in how we think about risk. I'm saying that the 40% reaction was a one-off event justified by the unusual unknowns associated with COVID. Because of our cultural and institutional attachment to freedom, I expect future threat responses to snap back to our baseline 70%. Your concern is that our baseline itself has shifted.
You could still be right, and time will tell if our baseline has in fact shifted. All I'm saying is the fact that we approached a single threat with a 40% response is not proof of an unstoppable slide towards totalitarianism. I agree the Chinese style is a dystopia, but I don't think one isolated threat response is proof of the rest of the world drifting towards that style.
The question is, why is the "America is failing" narrative so incredibly popular? As you and plenty of others have laid out, the data clearly supports the fact that in many ways, life is better now around the world, and in the U.S. in particular, than it ever has been. Why does no one seem to care?
I'd be interested in other thoughts, but I think there's a case to be made that the success of the "America is failing" narrative can be chalked up solely to negativity bias and our collective addiction to negative talking points.
In a world of pure rationalists, the data and arguments that paint an optimistic picture of where we are would win out. Unfortunately, we don't live in that world. Humans are driven by negativity bias to a much larger extent than most realize. As long as we continue to give more psychological weight to negative talking points and data, articles like this will be drowned out by a sea of negativity.
The fight against overly-negative narratives, and the hyperpolarization these narratives cause, can't be won with more or better data. Until we recognize and push back against our addiction to negativity, negative narratives and talking points will continue to win in the marketplace of ideas.
I agree that America is not dead, and is doing well in many important ways which you highlighted. But I think your case was a bit one-sided. Let me try to make the case for the other side:
Mental health is deteriorating. Depression rates are at all-time highs, and 90% of US adults say the United States is experiencing a mental health crisis. (https://news.gallup.com/poll/505745/depression-rates-reach-new-highs.aspx, https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/05/health/cnn-kff-mental-health-poll-wellness/index.html).
Drug overdose deaths have increased five-fold in the past 25 years. (https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates)
Happiness was at a record low in early 2022. (https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/02/politics/unhappiness-americans-gallup-analysis/index.html)
Marriage rates and fertility rates have collapsed to all-time lows. (https://www.axios.com/2023/02/25/marriage-declining-single-dating-taxes-relationships)
IQ is declining. (https://nypost.com/2023/03/09/study-suggests-iq-scores-in-the-us-have-fallen/)
Americans increasingly hate each other due to political polarization and the culture war. (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/us-democrat-republican-partisan-polarization/629925/)
Christianity (which I claim is pro-social and a net positive), long the dominant religion in America, is rapidly dying out among the young, and is being replaced by something much worse (wokeness).
"Diversity" is now prioritized over merit in most important institutions, which will predictably lead to a reduction in general competence.
Then of course we have the government, which gives us an ever-increasing regulatory burden, an ever-increasing national debt, and increasingly irresponsible fiscal policy, among other problems..
So I think the picture is not quite so rosy for the USA.
Thanks. Those are all important issues.
I wonder how much the depression statistics reflect an increase in diagnosis, as opposed to an increase in the phenomenon.
Regarding IQ, the effect is so small that I wonder if it might just be due, e.g., to slight differences in who is finding online IQ tests. I.e., over the study period, maybe there was a slight increase in slightly dumber people finding the IQ tests online (which could be due to a general increase in internet exposure). In any case, note that this is after several decades of significant increases in IQ.
Not sure about depression.
Regarding IQ, I'm not sure exactly what's going on. But if you look at fertility rates by education and/or income level, it is pretty clear that low-IQ people are reproducing significantly more than high-IQ people. So we should expect a reduction in IQ due to genetic factors. Also see the movie "Idiocracy."
"Christianity (which I claim is pro-social and a net positive), long the dominant religion in America, is rapidly dying out among the young, and is being replaced by something much worse (wokeness)."
I think this is a major factor in a lot of "decline" worries. Some claims of Christianity "dying out" are exaggerated, but the trendline of Americans professing Christian faith is indeed downward. If faith in Christ makes the difference between spending eternity in heaven or hell, then decline in such faith is a *very* negative thing to observe, regardless of one's material circumstances. I sincerely believe that presence or absence of such faith does make that difference, and a lot of people (underrepresented on this Substack relative to the whole populace, I would guess) agree. And of course many others see Christianity as a positive social influence, as you said, without necessarily believing in Biblical reward for Christ's followers and judgment for those who reject Him.
This is something that disappointed me in Richard Hanania's recent piece about how "conservatives win all the time" (and therefore shouldn't believe in Decline writ large). He briefly mentioned white nationalists as a group that's genuinely losing in terms of raw numbers, but didn't address the decline in Christianity much at all -- even though I think that the number of serious Christians worried about decline in faith is much greater than the number of people despairing over how America is becoming less white.
The 'Well-Being' category is probably what most complainers are largely concerned with, and it's the section in which you paint the least rosy picture. Surely America's poorest (or those just above the Medicaid cutoff) would rather have been born in a state with more generous welfare programs, other things being equal.
This is belated, and for that I apologize. I see contentions like this from credible authors; one of the other commenters mentioned Ridley and Pinker, and I know of a success coach (no, I don't dismiss such folks out of hand as they've put me on to some very worthwhile reading) whose view is that these are the best times in all of human history to be alive. Still:
This: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhq0VLYTqEo&t=94s
It's around an hour and 37 minutes in length, but no one I've shared it who has actually watched it through has told me they still thought all is well in the present ship of state. I would not want to be looking for an apartment to rent right now. We all know, moreover, of claims that for decades now wages have stagnated relative to the cost of living which has skyrocketed; the only disagreements are over why this is.
I sense that most of the stats and abstract claims made above don't affect the average person very much, and his/her whose response to (e.g.) the percentage of Nobel Prize winners being Americans is going to be, "so what?" Yes, the U.S. may still be the largest economy in the world, but there is at least one reason that it may be living on borrowed time: the longstanding and ongoing debauching of the currency which has lost around 98 percent of its value since the Federal Reserve was created, the bulk of this loss occurring after Nixon killed the gold standard in 1971 and financialization replaced production as the major economic form of life. Everyone who has bought their own groceries for all their lives knows that their money has lost the bulk of its purchasing power. In the 1980s when I was a graduate student, $30 worth of food would fill my freezer and refrigerator for a week. Last summer, my wife and I were out and entertaining another couple. $30 wouldn't even buy a large pizza! Some will dismiss this as anecdotal. Okay, fine, but ask around. Gathering a sufficient number of anecdotes and you're doing research. Daily I read articles of the rich getting richer, the middle class gradually disappearing, and people who are struggling. AI, of course, threatens the next great wave of technological unemployment.
It's a fact, moreover, that other nations are moving away from the dollar as the world's reserve currency: BRICS nations? Russia and China are now doing more and more business using their own currencies. The death of the petrodollar / dollar supremacy may be the death of U.S. economic dominance. For decades now, foreign nations have held dollars. If the dollar hegemony ends, those dollars are going to return to America, devaluing them still more.
Seems worth thinking about.
Finally, are American's universities still the best in the world? I'm not in much position to judge in any decisive way as I've been out of university teaching for over 10 years now, but when professors are getting called onto the carpet and called "bigots" and "transphobic" for saying there are two and only two sexes (a biological fact, excluding perhaps for that .02% of the population that suffers from genuine gender dysphoria) things have gotten a bit loopy, to say the least.
What about "MuH HeAlThCaRe" and "MuH sHoOtInGs"
Have I said I'm being sarcastic?