“How on earth could young people, whose wages are flat, costs of living skyrocketing, experiencing increased social instability via bigotry, addiction, + violence, expected to live shorter lifespans than previous gens dare question the larger economic forces in their lives?!” - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
My mission has been to explore each of the above issues one-by-one to see if things are really as bad as AOC makes out. The last two posts (here and here) addressed wages and cost of living. This time I’ll tackle increased social instability and shorter lifespans, specifically in the US.
According to the above quote, bigotry, addiction, and violence are responsible for rising social instability. So how are bigotry, addiction, and violence trending? To simplify matters, I’ll use hate crimes and measures of bias as proxies for bigotry and indicators of opioid use as a proxy for addiction.
First, hate crimes. The The Bureau of Justice Statistics conducts a National Crime Victimization Survey, which is the best source of data on hate crimes in the US. According to a recent Politifact article, the 2017 survey “shows that there’s a significant decrease of hate crimes overall from 2014 to 2017, plunging 25% in 2015, and staying almost flat under 20,000 from 2015 to 2017”. In other words, despite a lot of heated rhetoric on this issue, hate crimes are not increasing in the US.
As for bias, a mega-study on this very subject was just published last month. To quote:
“Using 4.4 million tests of implicit and explicit attitudes measured continuously from an Internet population of U.S. respondents over 13 years, we conducted the first comparative analysis… on patterns of long-term change in six social-group attitudes: sexual orientation, race, skin tone, age, disability, and body weight…Even within just a decade, all explicit attitudes revealed change toward neutrality, implying that conscious and self-reported prejudice has decreased over time across attitudes. Crucially, long-term change was also observed across multiple implicit attitudes, with trends toward neutrality for sexuality, race, and skin-tone attitudes.” Charlesworth & Banaji (2019)
Check out The Economist for a nice summary of the research (“Everyone’s a little less racist “).
What about opioid use? According to various medical and government sources, the opioid epidemic seems to have peaked. Of course opioid use is still a problem, but the worst appears to be over. Here’s a chart to that effect:
As for violence, although there was a small uptick in violent crimes in 2017, the overall trend is rather reassuring, whether you’re counting crimes that are reported the police (FBI) or are unreported (BJS):
Ok, what about life expectancy in the US? Life expectancy at birth had been rising steadily for decades in the US until it decreased by 0.2 years between 2014 and 2015 and then another 0.1 years between 2015 and 2016. So, yes, US life expectancy has gone down a bit. But there’s no reason to expect US life expectancy to continue dropping, because it’s generally agreed that the opioid epidemic was responsible for the recent decline (via overdoses and suicides) and the opioid use is finally subsiding*. Bottom Line: There is no evidence that “larger economic forces” are shortening the lives of Americans.
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* Note that the AIDS epidemic was responsible the last time US life expectancy declined.
References:
Charlesworth, T. E. S., & Banaji, M. R. (2019). Patterns of Implicit and Explicit Attitudes: I. Long-Term Change and Stability From 2007 to 2016. Psychological Science, 30(2), 174–192. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618813087
“Everyone’s a little less racist: Race plays an ever-more important role in voting. Meanwhile, racial prejudice is declining” May 9 2019 https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/05/11/race-plays-an-ever-more-important-role-in-voting
“Hate Crime Statistics: Briefing prepared for the Virginia Advisory Committee, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights” Barbara Oudekerk, Bureau of Justice Statistics, March 29, 2019. https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hcs1317pp.pdf
“Life Expectancy Drops Again As Opioid Deaths Surge In U.S.” December 21, 2017 https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/12/21/572080314/life-expectancy-drops-again-as-opioid-deaths-surge-in-u-s
“Opioids Driving U.S. Life Expectancy Decline: CDC” by Dennis Thompson September 20, 2018 https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/news/20180920/opioids-driving-us-life-expectancy-decline-cdc#1
“Trends in life expectancy in EU and other OECD countries” by Veena S. Raleigh/OECD Health Working Papers No. 108 26 February 2019 https://doi.org/10.1787/18152015