With all the truly bad news in the world as well as the misleading, mistaken, and down-right fake news, it is important to remember that the long march of progress actually does continue—albeit not at all along a smooth line.
I’ll start with Noah Smith where in one of his recent “At least five interesting things . . .” presented the perhaps surprising news that crime is falling rapidly across America.
In fact, I think my thesis is holding up well. Violent crime, which surged in 2020, has been plunging all across America:
[C]rime appears to be falling all over America. Jeff Asher, an analyst who compiles a real-time crime index from agency-level records, reckons that this year is on track to be the least murderous nationwide since the 1960s.
Here’s a chart of how much murder has fallen in select cities since 2020:
What about the mass shootings that seemed to happen on a regular basis in the late 2010s? Those are down too:
As ofMay 10, there have been four shootings in the United States in which four or more victims died this year, compared with 11 at the same juncture last year. It’s the lowest incident count over thefirst four months of a year since at least 2006, when researchers started the Mass Killing Database, which is maintained by the Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University…The drop builds on year over year data, which shows that mass shootings declined from 39 in 2023 to 30 in 2024…
Last year, three mass killings involving firearms occurred in public settings — at a market in Fordyce, Arkansas, a commuter train outside Chicago, and a high school in Winder, Georgia. That was down from a record of 10 the previous year. So far this year, thankfully, there have been none.
Fewer Americans are protesting, too. In 2016 and 2017, Trump’s election was met with massive nationwide protests, which were the biggest in U.S. history up til that time — until they were eclipsed by the even bigger George Floyd protests of 2020. But Trump’s victory in 2024 has prompted few protests, and in general the streets of America are pretty quiescent. Even the Palestine protests, which were already much smaller than Black Lives Matter or the Women’s March, have dwindled. Meanwhile, right-wing brawlers have all but disappeared from America’s streets.
Yes, there have been a few spectacular and grisly acts of political violence in America recently, such as Elias Rodriguez, the Palestine activist who gunned down two people at a Jewish event in Washington, D.C. But this parallels the experience of the 1970s and 1980s; as general unrest fell and most people walked away from the activist movements of the late 60s, the few activists who remained tended to be more extreme, both because of a selection effect and because the extremists had fewer moderates around to restrain them.1
So while America’s leaders are causing institutional chaos and making radical policies, the country itself continues to feel steadily less unsettled than a few years ago. Ages of unrest don’t last forever.
Read the rest to hear about YIMBY continuing to win and techno-optimism in areas like medicine (changing an infant’s DNA to save his life) and education (AI doing one-on-one direct instruction, the proven best form of education).
Next I have three links to recent posts from Jeremy Horpedahl. In the first one he shows how much spending on necessities has declined.
Has it gotten easier or harder for Americans to afford the basic necessities of life? Part of the answer to this question depends on how you define “basic necessities,” but using the common triad of food, clothing, and housing seems like a reasonable definition since these composed over 80% of household spending in 1901 in the United States.
If we use that definition of necessities, here is what the progress has looked like in the US since 1901:
A chart like this shows great progress over time, but it will inevitably raise many questions. Let me try to answer a few of them in advance.
One thing that could be going on is that consumers are increasingly spending more money on other things, but the real cost of these goods hasn’t declined. Maybe consumers are being squeezed by, say, the cost of education and healthcare (things they spent almost nothing on in 1901). Certainly it is true that families are spending their income on something else! While savings rates have increased (they were basically zero in 1901), families aren’t saving half of their income today.
But the intuition that the real cost of these goods has been rising is dead wrong. Certainly it is wrong for food, which we can see by using “time prices”: it takes a lot fewer hours of work to buy almost any food imaginable compared with 100 years ago, and for most foods even compared with 1980. Clothing is also much more affordable, as I showed in a comparison to 1898 prices. Housing is a tricky one, given that houses are much bigger and have more amenities today than in the past. I tried to do a reasonable calculation for size and quality of housing compared with 1971, and I found that while housing is more expensive relative to income, it’s not dramatically so: perhaps between 17% and 31% more expensive, depending on how much you value air conditioning.
As he eludes to, these comparisons make no adjustment for quality. Even for those very well versed in the conditions of the past including those who believe they remember it from lived experience, it is nearly impossible to fully appreciate how much better virtually everything is today. And when it is not, it is almost always a tradeoff made by choice rather than some quality lost to history.
In the second link he is giving an update on generational wealth including showing how relatively well Millennials and Gen Z are doing. They are largely ahead of schedule compared to prior generations as seen in his chart:
Third is a follow-up to the chart above explaining how this wealth growth is not primarily driven by higher home prices.
If we look at the past 5 years (2019Q4 to 2024Q4), the total wealth US households under the age of 40 increased by $5 trillion, in nominal terms. That’s not adjusted for inflation, but we don’t need to do so because we can look at how much each asset class increased in nominal terms as well. The total value of assets for households under age 40 increased by $5.86 trillion.
Here’s how the various classes of assets have increased since 2019Q4:
Real Estate: $2.1 trillion
Financial Assets: $2.0 trillion
Consumer Durables: $0.49 trillion
Private Businesses: $0.47 trillion
Other Assets: $0.78 trillion
While we can see that the increase in real estate values is the largest category of asset increase, it is roughly equal to the increase in financial assets (retirement accounts and other investments). And the increase in real estate assets was barely over 1/3 of the total increase in assets.
As I say in my subtitle, I need to do more posts like this presenting the good news that is so often overlooked.
Magnitude Matters is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
