From Jonathan Haidt in The Atlantic: Why The Past 10 Years of American Life have been Uniquely Stupid
The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.
It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.
It certainly wasn’t sudden. Not by a longshot.
Like a lot of things, the foundations are laid, and then things SEEM to change rapidly, but in reality it’s much slower and gradual.Report
Agreed. Much of this started after WW2 and only gained steam in the last 10 years. As I and many others said Donald Trump was merely a symptom, not the disease (as but one example).
That said I am not surprised Haidt was surprised. A LOT of the punditry turned ever more blind eyes and deaf ears to what was happening around them.Report
What I find interesting is the insight that there is no longer a shared moral language.
Multiculturalism In Practice.Report
Why do you believe there ever was one?Report
Because it seems like we’ve transitioned from “sustainable” to “it seems like there’s an end date” at some point.
It’s that tipping point.Report
Its only a tipping point if there was a universal moral language. I don’t believe we ever had one. The real tipping point isn’t its loss, its more and more groups demanding a rightly deserved seat at the table to expand its definition.Report
We used to be polylingual, I guess.Report
I wouldn’t say “language”, but that first full sentence (depending on how you measure it) of the Declaration of Independence seems to serve that function:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness_ That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed_ That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”Report
Pointing out that their self-evidence only extended to themselves is a fair criticism.
That said, as aspirations go, I’ve seen worse. We’re seeing worse in the world right now.Report
It was easier than building an epistemology from the ground up. But it acted as a bare minimum requirement. If you publicly accepted the statement, you could be part of the American nation; if not, then you weren’t. It didn’t demand any specific beliefs about the Creator other than that it created the stated order. In terms of efficiency, it created an epistemology, metaphysic, and ethic in one sentence, and you’ve got to love that.Report
As a practical matter, it did demand not seeing slaves or indigenous peoples as “men” and left women entirely out of consideration. Which was historically correct and forward leaning for the time in that it reject class.
I think the problems began to arise, however, when women and non-white men began to seek inclusion in the “all men are created equal” part.Report
We’re not idiots here; we all know that the word “men” doesn’t exclude women and wouldn’t have been viewed that way before 20 years ago. As for slaves and indigenous, those issues were debated, and there isn’t anything in the text that was a barrier to them. Beyond that, so what? How does your observation even if correct affect the topic?Report
If Haidt wanted a date for when things fell apart, he should have looked up the moment when The League of Ordinary Gentlemen became Ordinary Times.Report
At the time those words were written, women could rarely own property and were not allowed to vote. They were not equal. While freedmen existed, they were few in number. Indigenous persons were not granted citizenship and so were excluded. The text may indeed have not been exclusionary – and we are certainly closer to the meaning you allude to now then we were at that time. But those words in their day were understood to mean land owning European males. Those words were exclusionary, and thus they prevented a common moral language from being framed. That our present society is closer to that ideal now is in spite of all that, not because of it.Report
Do you believe it’s just a coincidence that this society grew from those ideas, and grew nowhere else?Report
I disagree.
“All people are equal.” That’s the ideal. That various groups weren’t considered “people” was a different problem.Report
I agree it was the ideal. And I agree that having that ideal written down has helped us get to where we are.
I view that as a different argument then “We had a common moral language that went back to our founding and now its lost.” Our prior “common moral language” EXCLUDED – actively – vast swaths of our populace despite the ideals expressed in that sentence. That “common moral language” has been challenged HARD in the last 75 years, been found wanting, and is being rewritten to achieve the more inclusive principals noted in the preamble. That rewriting is, in turn, threatening the economic and political power of the people those words actually described. Which is why there now appears to be a fracture.Report
And where does the “threat” come from?
Where we’re going to end up is the problems that come from defining “equality” as “equal outcomes”.Report
We don’t yet have equality of opportunity. Equality of outcomes is a long way off.Report
What makes you say that? Far as I can tell, the big hold ups are bad parenting and bad cultural choices.Report
The common moral language has been threatened by progressives who invent rights beyond the traditional understanding of them within natural law and Christian faith, who see government as the final arbiter, and who claim authority to move beyond the founding documents.Report
If there’s one thing the Founders hated, it was people who invented rights beyond the traditional understanding of them within natural law and the Christian faith!Report
I think you think you’re being ironic or something, but there was a lot more theory behind the founding documents than the recent assaults on them.Report
If you want to declare that something is or isn’t a right, you need to actually do the work and construct an argument for it.
“It isn’t the traditional understanding” is the weakest of all possible arguments, especially when directed at Americans, doubly so when using as a reference the guys who rose up and overthrew the government and invented a whole Bill of Rights which had never existed before.Report
“If you want to declare that something is or isn’t a right, you need to actually do the work and construct an argument for it.”
My point is that’s already been done. We have a national moral language founded on that argument. The people who are trying to revise the contract bear the burden of making the argument. (The system also bears the burden of explaining the moral language, which is something it hasn’t been doing lately.)Report
There never was any contract.
As I mentioned, as recently as the late 60s the leader of the American conservative movement was soberly declaring that Negroes were an inferior race and therefore not entitled to equal treatment under the law.
Negroes, it must be pointed out, did not cosign this contract.Report
You’ll notice he keeps dodging this argument because there’s apparently a universal definition of the term “men” that includes all gender expressions and biological sexes as well as all human created ethic groups so that the drastic distance between the writing and the action is somehow mysteriously rendered pointless.Report
We hold these truths to be self evident . . .
That all MEN are created equal (in a land where all men weren’t and still aren’t treated equally, to say nothing of the historic treatment of women, blacks, indigenous persons, transgendered personas and gay persons)
And that they are endowed by their that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness – in a land that routinely seeks to impede their life (since healthcare is still considered an economic commodity and not a right) and where liberty is only really conferred upon those following a strict set of rules that favor economically conservative, nominally Christian whites. What Progressives have done is peeled back the layers of the onion to point out that these words are STILL not being fulfilled for a vast plurality of Americans, if not the majority. Progressives have insisted that the rights attending to being human – which do in fact flow quite freely from natural law – continue to be routinely violated by our economic and political constructs.
And what we also keep pointing out that is that America is a secular nation, not a Christian one. Were we actually a Christian one – as in a nation that follows Christ’s teachings in the Gospels – we’d essentially be socialists.Report
I usually don’t stop reading comments, and I don’t think I’ve ever commented on one that I stopped reading, but we’ve already discussed the word “men”, and no literate person could buy into your argument.Report
No literate person would also do so much to avoid engaging the well described and documented history of how those words and their alleged definitions were so easily and so frequently ignored as a matter of history.Report
A thread on Haidt is a good place to note the difference between conservatives and liberals being the degree to which “tradition” is binding on “liberty”.
For conservatives, Pinkys admonition about violating the traditional view of rights probably makes sense, but for liberals it just sounds like “My daddy wore a bowler hat so I must also”.Report
Except Pinky’s “traditional” view on rights fails to acknowledge the history of how those rights never conferred to everyone. He’s keeping the blinders on purposefully.Report
The Founders themselves fought with each about nearly everything.
But if there could be said to be one thing they were unanimous on, it was that they never thought of themselves as the final word on what rights were or to whom they applied.
They would be astonished and horrified to see arguments of “this not what the Founders intended”.Report
That always gets me on the “Founder’s Intents”. Which Founder did you have in mind?
The Constitution was a massive compromise document, with the Bill of Rights being one of the final compromises to get enough votes.
They argued over every last thing.
Divining “founder’s intent” is mostly just cherry-picking one of a few prolific writers among the Founders and claiming they spoke for all of them.Report
Yeah, that’s why I’m not arguing for any particular founder’s opinion. The question is, what did they agree upon as a minimum?Report
If we are a bunch of free citizens, sovereign and empowered to govern ourselves as we see fit, what does it matter?Report
Re: “Tipping point”;
In my first comment I wanted to write about how we are at a tipping point between democracy and authoritarianism, but refrained.
Partly because “tipping point” creates an image of transiton from one thing to another, like a see saw tipping from this end to that.
But history is nothing but tipping points, things transitioning from this to that.
For example, much of the social upheaval in the last half of the 1960s had their roots in the first half; Obvious things like the Civil Rights movement, but less obvious things like the divorce rate.
Divorce rates started rising in the early 1960s, among WWII couples. It wasn’t accompanied by obvious social movements, but by the end of the decade when the Baby Boom generation were of age to get married, and decided to cohabitate, it appeared like there was a sudden break, a tumultuous overturning of the institution of marriage.
But the actual “tipping point” in marriage had happened years before, dating back to the postwar era of newly discovered freedom and material pleasure. Playboy, the writings of people like Mailer and Updike, the proto-feminists like Betty Friedan all contributed to a reassessment by the WWII generation of marriage.
And this extends to many other things. Things that seem cataclysmic actually have long roots which can only be seen in hindsight.Report
The decline of marriage goes back further than that. Henry Ford make the automobile affordable, and soon thereafter, our roadways were lined with motels, making discrete, non-marital sex easy and economical — no more having to “keep” your paramour. Big Pharma invented effective birth control, mitigating one of the big risks of non-marital sex.
Massive social changes were enabled not by radical thinkers, but by conservative businessmen trying to make a buck. As is so often the case.Report
Something like 80% of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen.
Something like half of them believe in the existence of a vast ring of pedophiles are running the country.
And quite a few believe in the various flavors of horse paste covid quackery.Report
Man, Haidt is gonna be very surprised when he reads about the fractured nature of this country in other periods of its history, such as the 1790s, the 1800s, the 1820s, the 1830s-1860, 1860-1865,1865-1877, the 1890s, 1900-1920, 1929-1942, the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, 2003-2008, 2009-today, just to take some examples. I mean, we’re talking about bloodshed between political factions, fights on the floor of Congress, rebellions, slavery, an actual war in the territories, a century of outright genocide, a damn Civil War, Reconstruction, the KKK and Jim Crow, the shooting of striking laborers, the shooting of army veterans by the military itself, the blacklisting of anyone who seemed a little too left, the Civil Rights movement, the burning of churches, the feminist movement, the anti-war movement, the anti-gay movement, the police bombing residences, Waco, Oklahoma City, killing abortion doctors, Bush v Gore, etc., etc., etc. Compared to much of our history, these times seem relatively tame.
Sure, the country seems divided, today, but lemme tell you about how it’s looked, with a few exceptions (WWII, parts of the Cold War, but only through actively suppressing dissent, for a bit after 9/11), always been so, and when it’s not, it’s usually united in a single purpose (war, mostly), or otherwise only superficially. This is what you get when you have a country that’s built on divisions (of geography, of race, of class, of culture, of language, of religion, etc.), especially one built on such divisions and a culture of extreme individualism.Report
The world of social media and 24 hour, heavily partisan news is the ultimate case of losing the forest for the trees, because what you have is a bunch of people with their faces pressed against fairly thin trees, but because all they can see is the trunk of that thin tree, they’re convinced that the tree is in fact the entire forest. So they behave as though it is, and they treat everyone whom they blame for the tree as if those people have ruined the entire forest, and they see every little bump and hole in the tree as a major problem to be fought over.Report
Yup. This.Report
No fair spoiling everyone’s fun with facts.Report
This is a good list and good point, but mostly it shouldn’t be comforting.
“We’ve been through this before” is true and correct, but so is “We’ve seen periods of bloodshed and violence”.
The founding proposition of America has been hotly debated since its inception, and has never been fully embraced by all its participants.Report
Not saying it’s a good thing, but I think perspective is important. The real divisions today are socioeconomic, racial, and gender divisions, and while the racial and gender divisions may (in some cases at least) be shrinking, the socioeconomic ones are growing. The cultural and political divisions that politicians and the media play up serve, at most, to obscure those real divisions by creating and enhancing artificial or, at least, not particularly meaningful ones, or by pitting people against each other who are, in fact, having no impact on each other’s lives (at least not for the reasons we’re told they are).
One thing this country has a tradition of his real radicalism, starting with radical views of what the Constitution was and what it should be, then radical populism, radical abolitionism, radical labor, radical civil rights movements, radical feminism, radical gay rights movements. We live in an age where the dominant movements are fights over various parts of the status quo. Radicalism isn’t dead, but is largely rejected and marginalized, for better, in the sense that we don’t live in a genuinely divided time with real, heated conflicts, or for worse, in the sense that the major problems with our society, from the disparities I mentioned above, to police violence and unaccountability, as well as endless war, unchecked climate change, etc., go on pretty much unchecked.
I actually got really excited, in 2017, when I saw a bunch of young people gravitating towards more radical politics, but the excitement was short lived, as their radical politics began to look like fairly mainstream progressive politics from the Bush administration (first and second). I was even more disheartened by the lack of any real progress on police violence despite not only large, very visible protests, but a near universal mainstream adoption of the rhetoric of those protests. The status quo might be stronger than ever before, and the manufactured conflict of Team Red and Team Blue does little more than maintain that strength.Report
Also, Haidt is just a bad critic or analyst of culture and society, and always has been.Report
I would argue that the socioeconomic differences are decreasing. When you look at history (as you did up further), the difference between the very poor and the very rich was way more serious. The bottom rung of society used to be a slave and/or very hungry.
Our poor have food, free education, even access to mankind’s sum of knowledge (wiki). The inequality we get spun up on today is things like someone born to the very bottom of society has less of a chance of reaching the very top than someone who was born into the very top. Or someone made Billions by creating Hundreds of Billions of wealth for the nation.
We are in this permanent tempest in a teapot because it’s useful to sell eye clicks, not because we have serious problems.Report
So you don’t think 16% of kids nationwide living in poverty is a problem?
You don’t think 13.5 million Americans lacking access to healthy food is a problem?
You don’t think a CEO making 351 times the average salary of his workers is a problem?
You don’t think that 600,000 Americans sleeping unhoused every night is a problem?
What do you think is a serious problem then?Report
While I agree with your sentiment Philip, I actually think it’s the wrong way to approach the debate, in that it accepts Dark’s premises for measuring these things. I’d say the better questions are things like, why is it we’re still operating a Medicaid system with core processes designed in the 60s? Or are policies that inevitably result in a basic necessity like housing becoming a financial investment really good for the average person, to say nothing of the most marginal among us? What I’d call basic cost disease kinds of questions.
The ratio of what the CEO makes to the average worker is a lot less important than whether the average worker has a decent standard of living and is generally on the up and up with respect to economic security.Report
That ratio is a handy shorthand for how the growing economic divide, which Dark and so many others dismiss as not a problem, impacts the things you mention.Report
The ratio is a common leftist shorthand that won’t persuade anyone.Report
We have 500 CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and even that overstates the issue because the eye popping numbers are at the top.
I don’t view this as any more meaningful than looking at the incomes of the 50 best paid entertainers who also get eye popping numbers. For example the author of Harry Potter got more than a Billion for her work.
Those are both a reflection of scale. Companies can be bigger and access much larger customer bases and have a larger impact.
It well illustrates the mindset of the Left. Some people are more successful than others, why exactly is this a problem? What exactly do you want to do about J. K. Rowling and why?
I don’t see why inequality is a problem because it’s inequality.Report
So you don’t think 16% of kids nationwide living in poverty is a problem?
That depends on the definition of “poverty”, and whether it’s fixed or floating.
You don’t think 13.5 million Americans lacking access to healthy food is a problem?
I assume you’re referring to “food deserts” but a good deal of that research neglects other ways of accessing healthy choices. The average convenience store or fast food place has options for a full, healthy diet.
You don’t think a CEO making 351 times the average salary of his workers is a problem?
Not even a little.
You don’t think that 600,000 Americans sleeping unhoused every night is a problem?
I think it’s 600,000 different problems. Most of those have something to do with drugs and mental illness rather than strictly socioeconomic issues.Report
these responses make sense to me.Report
The official definition of “poverty” is “X income or lower” without counting income transfers or gov benefits.
In other words, this is a measurement of the problem BEFORE we do anything about it, not afterwards.
“Healthy” food (as opposed to “food”) is an effort to move the goal posts to make it look like we have a serious problem. Further “lacking access” ignores that most people have access to a car.
Looking at the original problem would give people the impression that things are much better and problems have been solved. That would put professional problem solvers and professional busy bodies out of work.
On a side note one of my girls is trying to get me to buy healthy food on line. What happens if/when that catches on is the goal posts will be moved again.
I think this is multiple problems and lumping them all together obscures more than it showcases. For some of them we’re looking at very short term issues. For others we’re looking at mental illness and substance abuse.
However needing to focus on the bottom 0.1%-0.2% of the country (and only that by lumping various groups together) showcases just how far you need to move the goal posts. If that’s the country’s biggest problem, then we’re doing pretty well.Report
Official Definition of “lack of access to healthy food”.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/what-are-food-deserts#definition
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) define a food desert as an area that has either a poverty rate greater than or equal to 20% or a median family income not exceeding 80% of the median family income in urban areas, or 80% of the statewide median family income in nonurban areas.
In order to qualify as a food desert, an area must also meet certain other criteria. In urban areas, at least 500 people or 33% of the population must live more than 1 mile from the nearest large grocery store. In rural areas, at least 500 people or 33% of the population must live more than 10 miles from the nearest large grocery store.
OK, so I live 3 miles away from the nearest Publix (I just checked). My youngest has biked there to study at the coffee shop next door. I’m sure we have more than 500 people living here (I live in dense housing).
Ergo (ignoring income) I live in a food desert and “don’t have access to healthy food”. Meaning it’s not within walking distance.
Our problems with food for the poor have been so well addressed that we needed to move the goal posts to the point where even I qualify.Report
You don’t think 13.5 million Americans lacking access to healthy food is a problem?
We should have vouchers for people to buy healthy food with.
None of this “unhealthy” crap. We should have a list of foods that qualify and a list of foods that don’t.Report
Yes, but that’s after the gov has done something to fix things. Official data measures things before.
That’s the happy solution that lets professional problem solvers continue to be employed and politicians to continue to rail on how we’re not doing enough.Report
I was even more disheartened by the lack of any real progress on police violence despite not only large, very visible protests, but a near universal mainstream adoption of the rhetoric of those protests.
Yeah, whatever happened to “Defund the Police” anyway?Report
Here, at least, it was basically outlawed by the state legislature.Report
Last I heard of it, Jen Psaki was accusing Republicans of being the “Defund the Police” party.Report
The Democrats are, after all, the party of the status quo.Report
It was an vague, idiot slogan from a radical fringe that didn’t address the actual complaints the masses had about policing and because of those failings had very limited purchase across the left and ended up discarded and disregarded.Report
it’s not a phrase one comes across outside of twitter, really.
it is remarkably stupid, if only because if your slogan is x, but people need to say “well, it’s really not x, but kind of x, and also y, z, q, and r, and also block grants” that’s a terrible slogan and awful branding.
in contrast “don’t say gay” is excellent – it’s snappy, it rhymes, it’s close enough to the truth (because these laws are so vague, by design), and it’s anchored to the broadest coalition position with the most popular support.Report
But it had impact. Before we put it in the trashbin of history, we should remember that there were reforms made in its name and those were immediately followed by reductions in policing and a spike in crime in the same areas.Report
New York added a lot of cops, and what was the result, again?
Oh, yeah…
https://www.yahoo.com/gma/nyc-police-search-gunman-brooklyn-105500881.html?fr=sycsrp_catchallReport
I’m not an expert on this, but they did reduce the department’s budget under de Blasio,, as far as I can tell. He campaigned on restrictions on policing. The DA’s office has been practicing a policy of charging fewer crimes and I think early releases. Like I said, I’m out of my field of expertise here, but I think all of the above is accurate, as is the increase in major crime. If I’m wrong I welcome correction.
I don’t know if the total numbers, police policy, and prosecution / sentencing have gone back to old rates. If they did, I wouldn’t expect immediate impact. And you cited one incident. So is that your counter-argument?Report
So the causes of the increases in crime are many and complex and can’t be attributed to any single variable, is what you’re saying?Report
Conspiracy theorists on my timeline are saying that this is going to be used to bring back “Stop and Frisk”.Report
It’d be hard to separate the impact of all those liberal policies that led to more deaths, if that’s what you mean. They were all recommended by the same people under the same banner though.Report
The general downward trend of crime over the past 40 years is due to…what sort of policies?Report
That’s a subject that’s been debated a lot, worldwide.
ETA: I should note the decline in crack-related crimes, since you said 40 years.Report
Lead abatement, abortion, universal internet and ubiquitous, erm, entertainment options.Report
And people still fall for the “MO Money For Police!”stuff when they should be voting for “Free Abortion On Demand, And More Environmental Laws!”Report
You sure combed through that list of theories and found one that confirmed your priors.Report
Yep, that’s how the game is played.
The truth is no one really knows for sure why America is so much safer today than it used to be.
But for some reason the “Outtacontrol Crime!!1!” Zombies still get airtime and column inches.Report
But again, back to the point, the recent increase in crime in major urban areas corresponded to defunding of police and other liberal policies. It’s hard to see what causes what in the grand scheme of things, but a sudden crime shift immediately preceded by a sudden policy shift are as close to cause-and-effect as you can get, and your attempt to distract from that was ineffective.Report
Did it?
Did crime only increase in places where there was a reduction in police funding and remain the same where funding was not reduced?
Because from what I’ve seen it spiked pretty much everywhere.Report
We don’t have good data on this yet.
There are other maybes on the table, something to do with the pandemic or the gov’s response, something to do with the various riots/protests (like sucking up police bandwidth).
But without better data, which will take a while, we’re speculating.Report
So the causes of the increases in crime are many and complex and can’t be attributed to any single variable, is what you’re saying?Report
Did crime increase? Where? Under what circumstances? What age groups saw an increase? What races? What regions?
We can’t even start to have a discussion on this without the basic facts, and we’re lacking those.
If one variable had some massive effect without data it’s impossible to figure out which variable it was.
Alternatively it might be so complex that we’re into “handwave” territory and we’ll never figure it out.
Another possibility is there is one variable that has a ton of influence but we don’t capture that so it’s not on our radar. We capture race / education / whatever but that’s a standin for something way more important.Report
Same reason why we care about the cops killing 1k people, some fraction from that unjustly. It attracts attention when people kill people.Report
Well, I think that there’s also something in there about “people commit less crime if they know that crime results in arrest”.
Like, you can laugh and ask “What? So you’re saying that people will shoplift more if they know that they won’t be arrested for shoplifting?!?!?”
Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying.
And the thing that would turn that around is a pendulum swing in the other direction.
But, and here’s what’s crazy, THE COPS DON’T HAVE THE MORAL AUTHORITY THEY USED TO HAVE.
So the pendulum can’t swing that way. So we’re going to get, among other things, more crime.
I wouldn’t start to worry until vigilantism starts kicking in hard, though.Report
Are people actually shoplifting more, and only in jurisdictions where there are restrictions on police arresting them?
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-12-15/organized-retail-theft-crime-rate#:~:text=But%20in%202018%20its%20survey,of%20total%20shrink%20in%202018.
The data we haven’t doesn’t really support either one of those assertions.
And people committing more crime because of lower moral authority on the part of police?
I have no idea where to even begin with that one.Report
While I appreciate you giving me an article that quotes numbers from 2018 as evidence that shoplifting has not gone up, it links to an article that mentions both that we don’t have reliable numbers and, okay, sure the numbers that we have shows that it has gone up, but it’s still not as bad as in the 90’s.
And people committing more crime because of lower moral authority on the part of police?
You misunderstand. My argument is that one of the ways for the pendulum to swing back is to establish stuff like a police presence that demonstrates that shoplifters will be arrested and charged.
But the police don’t have the moral authority to provide a police presence for shoplifting.
They have done a magnificent job of cutting their own damn selves off at the knees.
And so, if crime is going to go down after rising again, it’s either going to need to become worse… so bad that people will see letting the cops do Stop & Frisk again as the less bad choice *OR* we’re going to have to come up with something outside of the box.
Maybe our nation can turn to California as a leading light and California can show the rest of the country how it’s done.Report
https://nypost.com/2022/01/22/why-shoplifting-is-soaring-in-the-us-and-will-get-worse/
This article gives stats that shoplifting has gone up, A LOT, and a big reason is after we reduced the penalties the profile changed.
It was nonviolent crime perpetrated mostly by teens or substance-abusing adults but now it’s an organized crime/serious criminal thing.Report
I saw that story but I didn’t want to have the “OH THE NEW YORK POST! WHY ARE YOU QUOTING THE NEW YORK POST?!?!?!?” conversation.
(Soon to be followed by a “Oh, you’re quoting the NYT? Everybody claims to hate the NYT but everybody quotes them” conversation.)Report
They were the top link, from this year, sourced their work, and supply lots of numbers.
Their core claim, that the numbers are now driven by serious crime at scale, pass some sort of smell test given various other headlines.
The NYP may not always be a serious mag but that seemed like a serious article.Report
The article does a good job of demonstrating why it is an unreliable source and flunks Journalism 101.
The article provide one and only one actual number on shoplifting, and doesn’t tell us where the number comes from so it can’t be independently checked. (“Store Losses” =/= “Shoplifting”)
The rest of the article is largely theorizing and editorializing without any sort of facts or data.
Even simple logic flaws such the the statement that theft happens in front of “helpless” store personnel.
Why are store security guards “helpless”? A wave of muscle atrophy? Why wasn’t this claim explored, since it is the stores themselves who control their behavior.
Overall, the article just mixes viral photos with empty barstool bloviating.Report
Sublink makes it clear those numbers are “losses due to organized crime” per Billion dollars of retail sales.
The financial impact of organized retail crime is considerable. ORC costs retailers an average of $719,548 per $1 billion dollars in sales.
https://nrf.com/research/2020-organized-retail-crime-survey
There’s also a decent amount of linkage between states that lowered their penalties and increases in organized shoplifting.Report
Stop and think this through for a moment.
As you yourself have pointed out, the raw data from some crimes is easy, we just count the dead bodies.
But what is the raw data from shoplifting?
It all begins with “shrink”, the difference between purchased inventory and counted inventory.
A store discovers after inventory that it is missing 10 units.
It has no idea what happened to those units- were they miscounted, or stolen by employees, or damaged and discarded without proper accounting?
Stores generally don’t have a very good way of determining how much of the shrink is attributable to what cause.
Further theorizing as to how much is attributable to “organized crime” is even shakier- how would someone go about documenting this?
Most of the articles on the topic come from self-interested sources like security companies or trade associations which have a vested interest in portraying store owners as helpless victims.
And then tying this all up to changes in the law is just taking poor data and unreliable methodology and adding a dash of editorializing.
Now I’m open to the idea that shoplifting is increasing by some amount- but we just don’t have good numbers for if it is, or by how much.
But what is the cause? Is it possible that changes in technology, like apps that make it easy to fence stolen goods, is behind an increase in organized rings?
Or maybe a rise in employee dissatisfaction and resignations is affecting their vigilance in stopping in-store thieves?
We just don’t really know- there are a million possible hypotheses for shoplifting, and very little data to go on.Report
One of those numbers has to be wrong. If there are $720k in losses per $1 billion in sales (which seems implausibly low to me), then $61 billion in losses implies over $80 trillion in sales.
The $50-60 billion in annual shrinkage is consistent with what I’ve seen elsewhere, so it must be $720k per $100 million, or 0.72%. That would imply retail sales in the single-digit trillions, which is more plausible.Report
My assumption is that eventually some burnt out shopkeeper in one of these places is going to go Bernard Goetz on someone and be mostly acquitted, probably by at least partial jury nullification.
Following that there will be a behind the scenes acknowledgement by the powers that be that we can’t have that sort of thing and a very quiet, unannounced correction will ensue.Report
The shopkeepers are mostly Fortune 500 companies. I would expect that they’re already talking to the powers that be and pointing out that this is a problem.
It’s interesting how the wheels come off a year or three after we change the system so we treat the low level criminal as a victim of circumstance.
Yes he is, but you’re opening the door for the professional criminals.Report
For the fortune 500s I assume they will simply remove their franchises from areas where this is a problem. And who can blame them?Report
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Walgreens-to-close-5-more-S-F-stores-citing-16528444.phpReport
Keep reading.
The Chronicle published a story that, citing data from the city’s Police Department, pointed out how one store set to close “had only seven reported shoplifting incidents this year and a total of 23 since 2018.” While it is important to note that not all incidents are reported to police, the five stores being shut down “had fewer than two recorded shoplifting incidents a month on average since 2018.”
Some have also pointed out the company’s prior plans to reduce its stores. In an August 2019 SEC filing, Walgreens stated that it planned to close approximately 200 following “a review of the real estate footprint in the United States.”
https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2021-10-18/walgreens-retail-theft-closures-essential-california
We should ask ourselves why shoplifting seems to target Walgreens and only Walgreens, and not CVS or Rite Aid, not the mom and pops, not the retail clothing stores, not the Walmarts and Costcos.
Weird, innnit?Report
1) The whole Organized Crime aspect of this seems to have taken off after 2018.
2) 1 “shoplifting incident” with OC can be dozens of people all lifting at once.
3) It’s very weird to me that this would even fall under the category of “shoplifting” and be reported as such.
Having said that, Walgreens was clearly looking to close some stores and they might as well connect something that’s painful to something they don’t like.
None of which is the same thing as this not being a rapidly increasing problem.Report
CVS has announced that they’ll be closing 900 stores in the next three years. Rite Aid is closing over 50 stores this year. Costco doesn’t seem to have a lot of shoplifting, but they make you present a card on the way in, they have 50 lb cans of tuna, and there’s no way to quickly run out of the stores. Walmarts in Florida have recently stopped putting out steaks because of shoplifting. As for mom-and-pops, it’s not easy to find good data.
As you were pointing out when it helped your crime argument, something may have a lot of causes and effects, and there are good reasons to think that small stores would be cutting back as delivery increases. And typically, one data point is enough for you to reach a conclusion, so I think that one Walgreens story would be enough for you in other circumstances.Report
I’m actually open to the idea that shoplifting is increasing by some amount.
But the argument that A) Shoplifting is rising dramatically and B) This is directly attributable to liberal policies has almost no support of real data and ignores many other possible explanations.Report
As you’ve noted, micro data is hard to come by. But if you’re dismissing macro data like store closings, I don’t know what data you’d be open to. That’s even before we get to possible explanations.Report
I’m not dismissing it just not seeing any good explanation for it.Report
That’s nonsense. You completely dismissed it. You listed a bunch of other operations that we didn’t have data on, but for some reason you assumed you could cite as proof for your dismissal.Report
So let’s talk about the macrodata instead of dismissing it.
What does the macrodata suggest and why? Why are these stores closing?Report
I’d rather not move past the part where you dismissed the data then claimed you hadn’t. Because you and I aren’t going to solve the problem of shoplifting here and now, but we can address this particular example of ideological distortion, and after all that’s more to the heart of Haidt’s article than any shoplifting stats.
As for the explanation of the closures, I already stated that “there are good reasons to think that small stores would be cutting back as delivery increases”, and I made that statement because I’m not trying to spin some news story to protect any side. That was something I went to because I’m interested in fair analysis, not falling back to a more easily-defensible position after I’ve been called out for dismissing data.Report
I am always open to more data and better data.
However drawing a line between effective decriminalization of an activity and increased amounts of that activity seems easy and obvious, even expected.
That’s the obvious trade off. So when we decriminalized abortion it’s numbers exploded. When we do the same for weed we need to expect it’s consumption to increase.
For shoplifting, the argument for decriminalization has been that it’s serious overkill on an already repressed group of people.Report
Misdemeanor=/= decriminalization.
And again, ignoring other theories like , oh, the store saying they are closing due to business reasons, or the Retail Apocalypse of brick and mortar seems like poor logic.Report
Lead abatement: All the high fives for government environmental regulation.Report
We need more presidents like Nixon.Report
R’s who could work with D’s and weren’t brittle ideologues instead of trolls or chasing Fox sound bites. True. Very true. You should talk to R’s about that.Report
Do we have any?Report
Romney probably but he couldn’t crack the sweet 16 in the primary and if ever elected he only wanted D votes in congress. I hear he had a decent idea for middle of the road HC reform which he should talk about.Report
It would probably be a giveaway to his finance buddies.Report
Possibly.
But the Jan 6 insurrection was actually radical and would be seen so even the people who winessed the Civil War parts 1 and2.
And we are still in it.
It’s pretty likely that, absent a decisive victory one way or the other, the 2024 election will be disputed and lead to open violence.Report
Even with a decisive victory there may be violence, if that victory is for Democrats. The Trumpian base will either try to stop it with violence, or turn on Trump and the GOP for yet again ignoring them and their concerns.Report
As I noted with my litany of bizarre yet widespread conspiracy beliefs among Republicans;
If you believe that the election is stolen a second time by a corrupt ring of pedophiles who want to force you to take a dangerous vaccine and allow hairy men in dresses to storm into your daughter’s dressing room and expose their penises well then why not use violence?Report
I dunno man, only two other times in our history has a candidate been accused of “stealing” the election: And in neither of those cases did a mob try to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.
Additionally, I have experienced this very thing here on this blog. People I enjoyed talking to, even though I often disagreed with them, became impossible to talk to, and often brought in an entirely foreign universe of beliefs. This is a thing that happened.
On top of that, we know for a fact that there are armies of bots and operatives out there, such as the Internet Research Agency, trying to do the exact thing Haidt is describing. It’s their mission statement.
I’m very resistant to any “business as usual” argument.Report
I mean, contested elections have been pretty common. I mean, the must recent one was 2000, and to be, the results of that, not only in who was declared the winner but in the precedent, was worse.
In another case, an election sparked a Civil War. Another went unresolved until a compromise that prematurely ended Reconstruction.
We’ve had assassinations, we’ve had riots, we’ve had violence and intimidation at the polls, and so much more. 2020 was bad, but in an almost ridiculous way, a way which, again, occludes the real problems with our democracy and its processes.Report
You know, your cases, to my mind, make my point. Gore didn’t like the result, pursued it in court, when the court decided, he walked away.
I mean, the Confederate States didn’t like Lincoln getting elected so much that they walked away and tried to secede, but they didn’t undermine the actual democratic foundation.
And the Reconstruction one, well, that’s one of the two I was thinking of.Report
Gore is a lot saner than Trump and even he chased victory long past any sane way of him actually winning.
By the time the Supremes ruled Gore had NO paths forward which could have resulted in him actually winning. There were a few paths that would have had him losing a bit later, but big picture he’d already lost the question was just how.Report
” the must recent one was 2000″
(2004, actually)Report
This is an incomplete thought, but I think that there are some meaningful differences between now and then (and yes, I realize that there is an obvious truth to that statement that renders it almost meaningless).
What I mean is that no matter how messy conflicts got in the past, there was always a release valve. And that valve got triggered in all but a few situations. In many ways, America feels more closed-off than it ever has. Physical space is obviously not the problem. America is vast and the virtual world makes it even more so.
My working theory is that the professional managerial class has gained a level of control that the old Establishment never had. The old Establishment was happy to keep its stranglehold on the commanding heights of political, economic and cultural power, but to leave the rest open. The PMC has managed to infiltrate its monopoly power and bureaucratic control into every aspect of contemporary life. Culture War may be the result of our inability to unseat or even fully recognize this situation. We know something is wrong, but we misidentify the problem in our respective political enemies.
I don’t know that any of this is intractable or irreversible, but it does feel different in a meaningful way.Report
“… the commanding heights of political, economic and cultural power, but to leave the rest open. ”
What is “the rest”?Report
Have you read Virtue Hoarders? You might like it.Report
Have not read it. Thought that I had heard of it, but realized that I was thinking of the similarly-titled Dream Hoarders.
Looks like Liu is coming at this from an explicitly leftist perspective, while Dream Hoarders is written by a Brookings scholar. Would be interesting to see how the two books compare.Report
Haidt is always worth reading. But he has that trait that seems universal among social scientists, a confidence that he’s got a good handle on subjects outside his expertise. They’re prone to using examples that only appear like they fit the pattern they’re trying to present. I guess other kinds of thinkers can fall into it to – the typical Nobel Scientists for Ukraine kind of thing – but those are usually easier to spot.
I think his timeline fits better for Obama’s second term than the Trump era, and I wish people would talk through the implications of that. His position on open primaries sounds to me like it’d cause more harm than good. But there’s a lot here that’s praiseworthy. I’d be interested to see an analysis of those who aren’t on the major social media sites. This may be my own bias, but it seems to me that there’s been a loss of identification with sports franchises, and I’d love to know if that’s related somehow.Report
I like this piece a lot. It also confirms my priors pretty strongly. I feel it is a much better critique than “cancel culture”.
I’m open to dissent. To focus the discussion here are the bullet points of my takeaway:
1. The internet, both in search engines and The Algorithm of social media serves to strongly amplify confirmation bias.
2. Social media, if not so much search engines, with the ‘like’ and ‘reshare’ allowed widespread punishment (in the psychological learning sense) of differing opinions and rewarding of shared opinions. This meant users were actively trained.
3 Both 1 and 2 above lead to fragmentation, with little in the way of belief that is shared.
4. There are innumerable actors who are actively working to erode trust in important institutions, such as government. Some of them within the US, others not.Report
The time has come for the Butlerian Jihad.Report
Personally I’d open up the Jihad to all the classes below stairs, but… yes.Report
I’ll work my way there. First on the list is my fridge. It’s constantly chirping for a filter change like it owns me.Report
Vaguely related in that whole gestalt thing that I have going on in my brain:
Report
Related:
The Washington Post is looking for a reporter based in Washington DC to document life in Black America and develop a new beat mapping the culture, public policies and politics in a region unknown to most Americans.
Nah, just kidding.
Instead let’s do Episode 3,594 of the NYT Pitchbot interview series of some white old duffers at a diner somewhere and listen to them wank on about these kids today.Report
I don’t know if Jeff Bezos has open DMs, but it might be worth attempting to slide into them and telling him to quit paying attention to Texas, a red state, and definitely not a purple one.Report
Maybe I’m being unfair.
Maybe they will interview a bunch of young black and Hispanic professionals in Houston or Dallas, Or a couple of gay and trans artists in Austin, or some Mexican or Muslim immigrants about living in a red state.
Maybe.Report
“Why, they’re just like Portland!”, we can say when we read those stories. “Why didn’t they vote for Beto O’Rourke’s gun control plan?”Report
Good question. Are they really like the editors of the Washington Post?
A pity we don’t hear their voices more often. I bet we could learn a lot.Report
For some reason the Washington Post feels the need to share their perspective.
Which is weird because if we want to hear it, we can just go back and read THEIR VIEWS IN 1938 IN THE ORIGINAL GERMAN!!!Report
Makes me think of the online Sanders supporters who were shocked — to the point of conspiracy theories — when Biden won South Carolina.
They blamed the media, but not for the right reason. The right reason would have been the media’s laser focus on short-term horserace coverage, and the general lack of nuance and context that provides.
It did remind me of how painfully young the average user of, say, Reddit was. I got to watch them become shocked and appalled at the idea of a candidate dropping out and endorsing.
Honestly, I’m really thinking the driver of a lot of this has been social media and general set of feedback algorithms most share– by feeding you more of what you engage in, it drives extremism — because few things are more engaging than rage watching.
I’ve watched a few people go down the Facebook or Twitter rabbit hole, and they come out angrier, more extreme, and claiming to be better informed — only to spout a collection of crazy buzzwords that, to name one example, might require a QAnon to Reality translator.
Both are really good at feeding you what you like and what you want — which isn’t a bad thing if, for instance, what you like is say videos of cosplayers or funny cats. It’s a lot more problematic when you’re diving, into other topics.
I do fondly recall the AI twitterbot that started spewing white supremacy within hours…..and I’ve personally gotten from “fresh Youtube account” to “white replacement” in less than an hour just by following the recommendations from a mildly conservative starting point.Report
This gets into a debate that exists on liberal online spaces, how much should liberal-left politicians bow down to popular patriotism to make their point. There is a big faction of online liberals that want to eschew patriotic mythology in favor of what they see as aggressive truth-telling about the sins of whatever. Others argue that giving up patriotic mythology is devesting the left of some very powerful images and figures and that even in the past socialists knew they had to portray themselves as the heirs to the American Revolution.
The side that favors aggressive truth telling believes that resorting to any sort of patriotic mythology just hides the sins of the past and encourages injustice. The other faction basically sees aggressive truth-telling as a magic underpants gnome situation with step 2 missing.Report
The left in America is at its best when making the case for working hard to improve the house. It’s at its worst when it is making the case that the house is so irredeemably f—ed that it should all be burned down.Report
We’ll set fire to the living room and it will just stay there and not spread. We don’t use the living room so it won’t be a problem.Report
Sure. Just make sure you’re investing in the whole property too while we’re on this rickety metaphor. No one is going to be convinced they should be comparing themselves to the burnt out shack across town when the case is made for yet another renovation of the suite on the top floor.Report
The flaw in this evaluation is it’s binary. burned out house or top floor. Add the vast space between the two and not only are there very nice houses, way better than burned down stuff, but almost everyone lives there.
Burning stuff down is risky and the only thing it “helps” is equality.Report
What I said isn’t binary at all. But people who think we always need a little more in the best corners and for everyone else to make do always seem to act like it is.Report
Maybe a better metaphor is that we are all on an airplane together. And some dangerous people are trying to gain control of the cockpit.
A brief review of the Flight 93 essay would be instructive here.Report
You, a passenger, have no right to tell the pilot what to do because of inequality much less insist that ending inequality be the goal of the flight. Someone has to get off first.Report
That’s what the Mile High Club is for.Report
Accelerationists of any kind — whether they seek the end of capitalisms or the return of a Messiah — are often the absolute worst, especially because if you poke them hard enough it’s clear they really mean “Burn everyone else’s house down” and don’t really envision any hardship falling on them.
At it’s core, most supporters of it seem to view it as “I’m going to hurt you until you agree with me” to society as a whole.Report
Haidt’s piece is excellent written, well-reasoned, well argued, will no doubt be praised and shared and pointed to for some time to come, and is wrong in both premise and conclusion.
But I want to percolate on it for a while longer…Report
Since I’m an immigration lawyer and basically at the front line of all this, I feel very tired. At this point I just want the dam to break and the screaming violence of the American fascists to come through. Everyday feels like I’m trying to starve off a flood by putting my finger in a dike and many contradictory forces pulling at you,. You try to starve off disaster but know you can’t do it forever and you have very little support and need to do everything yourself. Just let the dam break and all the screaming violence come through so I can rest through total defeat or have people wake up finally after their heads are cracked open finally and come and help me.Report
There’s no ghost so scary as the ghost you make up yourself.Report