Narratives of national decline have intensified in recent years. Most prominent, of course, is Donald Trump’s vow to “make America great again,” in response to what he has called “a nation that is dying.” But there is also doomsaying on the far left, which sees a “late-stage capitalist hellscape” (to quote the journalist Taylor Lorenz) and is often resigned to voting in protest for a long-shot candidate or sitting out the election altogether.
The doomers can always find ammunition in the news. News, by its very nature, consists of things that happen, and it’s easier for things to go wrong suddenly — a war, a terrorist attack, a hurricane — than to go right suddenly. When things do go right, it usually means either that nothing happens (a country remains at peace, for example) or that improvements creep up a few percentage points every year and compound over time, transforming the world by stealth.
As a result, one can get the impression that the state of the world keeps getting worse when in fact it keeps getting better.
An antidote is to look at trends. Actual data seldom tell a simple tale of disaster or triumph, but in this case, indicators of national well-being over recent decades suggest that the reports of our nation’s demise are greatly exaggerated, if not downright delusional.
To be sure, individual citizens don’t experience long-term trends in their daily lives. An unemployed voter, for example, could be forgiven for taking little comfort in rising employment numbers.
Yet overarching narratives have a big impact. Research shows that voters are typically more influenced by the state of the nation, as they understand it, than by the state of their own lives. This may seem counterintuitive but it makes sense: Their lone vote is astronomically unlikely to affect their lives, so they treat it as an act of self-expression rather than self-interest. (Political scientists call this sociotropic voting.) And when it comes to understanding the state of the nation, voters consistently judge it to be in worse shape than they do their own neighborhoods and themselves. (Political scientists call this the optimism gap.)
For all these reasons, an accurate long-term picture of where we are and which way we’re going matters a great deal. Let’s consider a sample of eight indicators of national well-being over the past half-century or so.
The Economy
People often identify the state of the nation with the state of the economy. Since inflation and unemployment are both bad things, but at any given time a government’s policies can trade one off against the other, it’s helpful to look at a measure called the Misery Index, which is simply the sum of these two measures of badness.
The line since 2020 shows a spike in unemployment from the Covid pandemic, which was brought down by government stimulus payments and loans, which then jacked up inflation, which is now getting back under control. The most recent Misery Index (from August) has not returned to pre-Covid levels but is lower than it has been in 88 percent of the quarters since 1970. And the post-Covid U.S. economy is the envy of our peer democracies.
Poverty
The left is often pessimistic about the efficacy of antipoverty policies, and the right can be downright cynical, as in Ronald Reagan’s quip that “the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won.”
In fact, poverty is losing. Between 1967 and 2021, the poverty rate fell from 26 percent to 7 percent, before a small bounce to 10.5 percent in 2023.
Economists credit the decline both to economic growth (a rising tide lifts all boats) and to government transfers, including the earned-income tax credit and the child tax credit. The welcome slide since 2013 began with swelling real wages and was extended by government Covid payments. It bottomed out when the payments expired and inflation shot up, and is now dipping again, perhaps as a result of inflation coming back to earth.
Violent Crime
Violent crime is a hot button in any election year, but especially this one, in which one candidate says the rate is going up and another says it is going down. How can we tell who’s right?
Police blotter data can be squirrelly, because they depend in part on how willing people are to report crimes. Homicide data are more reliable, because it’s hard to ignore a corpse and because rates of homicide tend to track those of other violent crimes.
The causes of these ups and downs are contested, but here is a reasonable story: The homicide rate shot up in the 1960s when the first wave of baby boomers entered their crime-prone years and law and order was challenged by, well, the 1960s. The rate remained high through the urban decay of the 1970s and the crack cocaine binge of the 1980s. There was a plunge in the 1990s and another downturn in the late 2000s as a result of greater incarceration and more and smarter policing.
The homicide rate bounced back up in 2014 and 2020, the story continues, in the wake of high-profile police shootings that led to cutbacks in policing and declines in trust of the police. (Covid is unlikely to have caused the 2020 spike, because no other comparable democracy had such a sharp increase.) But after 2021 the rate crashed again, perhaps as communities and police once again realized they needed each other’s support.
Life Expectancy
Life is the ultimate dimension of well-being, and starting in 2015, American life expectancy declined, a tragedy that is often attributed in part to “deaths of despair” from suicides and overdoses. This reversal came as a shock after 50 years in which life expectancy had steadily increased, with only brief and tiny setbacks.
But zooming out, we see that the 2015 dip was small and temporary, with longevity resuming its rise in 2018 before suffering a wallop from Covid.
When vaccines and immunity lifted us out of the pit, life expectancy resumed its rise, and the estimate from the past year (79.3 years), though below that of other affluent democracies, is the highest in the country’s history.
One cause of America’s lag in life expectancy compared with its peers is the country’s epidemic of drug overdoses stemming from the over-prescription of opioid-based painkillers. But in the past year the overdose death rate has dropped by 15 percent, which many experts say is a genuine reversal rather than a statistical blip. The likely reasons include the availability of overdose antidotes, increased access to treatment and simple burnout, as people are repulsed by the devastation they see in their communities.
Happiness
Covid made us not just sicker and poorer but also glummer. For most of the preceding half-century, American happiness — as measured by the General Social Survey — was pretty stable. For all the malaise, anger, toxicity and mental health crises we suffered, the proportion of Americans telling the survey that they were “pretty happy” or “very happy” changed little between 1972 and 2018. On average, 88 percent of Americans have been happy, with a barely perceptible downward drift since 1978.
But happiness plunged during the pandemic, bottoming out in 2021 at 76 percent. Encouragingly, we see a hopeful little climb in 2022, but that’s when the survey data end, so we don’t yet know whether the rebounds of the Misery Index and of life expectancy have made America happy again.
Pollution
A common belief of the anti-growth left and the anti-regulation right is that we can have either a cleaner environment or a rising standard of living, but we can’t have both. Data from the Environmental Protection Agency show otherwise.
From the birth of the agency in 1970 through last year, Americans annually drove almost three times as many miles, consumed 42 percent more energy and produced four times as much economic output and 63 percent more Americans. Yet during those decades we emitted 78 percent less of six principal air pollutants (carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, particulate matter, sulfur dioxide and lead). Though we spewed out more and more carbon dioxide until 2007, we’ve begun to reduce that as well, and in 2023 emitted only 16 percent more than we did in 1970.
The reductions came from regulations and incentives that led to innovations like scrubbers, catalytic converters, energy-efficient devices and, in the case of carbon dioxide, wind turbines and fracked gas. That said, these improvements shouldn’t make us complacent: Tens of thousands of Americans still die annually from inhaling particulate matter, and it’s easier to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by a fifth than to reduce them to near zero.
Women’s Rights
The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022, which revoked a constitutional right to abortion, is widely seen as emblematic of a regression in women’s rights. But while the loss of a right to abortion has profound consequences for women’s lives, for several reasons it is not representative of the overall trend in women’s rights.
A broader view comes from the Varieties of Democracy Project, which consults more than 4,000 experts across the world and a team of methodologists to estimate many indicators of democracy worldwide. The project’s Women’s Political Empowerment Index captures, on a scale from 0 to 1, the extent to which women in a country enjoy civil liberties, participate in politics and civil society and hold positions of political power. Women’s empowerment in the United States soared from 0.40 a century ago to .91 in 2009 — and in 2023 it remained at a hair beneath this peak.
Every other indicator of women’s empowerment — labor force participation, legislative seats, college attendance, management positions, pay equity, days of paid leave for new mothers — also shows American women at or just a sliver beneath their peaks (though lagging their counterparts in many other affluent democracies).
Democracy
American democracy took a hit on Jan. 6, 2021, when the peaceful transition of power was threatened by procedural shenanigans and a violent demonstration. How big a hit? The Varieties of Democracy Project calculates an Electoral Democracy Index, which captures on a scale from 0 to 1 the degree to which a country’s political leaders are chosen in free and fair elections and its government guarantees freedoms of association and expression.
After surging from a score of 0.53 a century ago to 0.91 in 2015, the country lost ground in 2017, but recovered much of it after 2020. As Benjamin Franklin might have said, America is still a republic — if we can keep it.
On the eve of this presidential election, the United States faces daunting problems. But that has been true on the eve of every election. As they say, “The best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory.” When we take an objective look at how the country is doing and which way it has been going, we see that American life is not a hellscape of carnage and decline. What stands out is a resilient democracy that tends to recover from setbacks and make halting progress.
None of this progress happened by itself. In the natural course of events, things get worse, not better, as benevolent conditions give way to disorder, disease and the worst of human nature. Progress is the dividend of human beings recognizing problems and mustering their ingenuity and will to solve them.
Among the most important of these people are political leaders. We should choose the ones who assess the nation’s problems realistically, distinguishing genuine afflictions from anecdotes and rumors, and who vow to learn from its successes and not repeat its mistakes.
The post Trump Says the Country Is ‘Dying.’ The Data Says Otherwise. appeared first on New York Times.
