Not to get too narrative driven, but the Strong Towns Podcast gave a hypothesis for one cause of the increase in driving deaths: Less traffic. As work from home has become possible and there are generally less people driving during rush hour, roads are emptier and therefore people drive faster, resulting in more deaths.
So one could conclude that the issue here deals with transportation policy. There are ways to design roads to "feel" less safe (narrower lanes, roadside trees) and ways to redesign stroads so 10 people aren't turning out onto a 40 mph 4 lane road in a 500 ft stretch, but those cost efficiency.
Of course the best solution would be to make more places walkable. And now we have reduced driving deaths into a housing issue, as all issues seem to stem from housing.
I see a lot of comments, including mine, are in the vein that "our" misbehavior either is not misbehavior at all or pales in comparison to "theirs." And I think that's true, why wouldn't I?
But we should still bear in mind that "they" have a finely developed system of ferreting out and communicating to the people most likely to be offended by our "misbehavior" and we need to try to be on our best behavior. This also means that the MSM is sometimes wrong in downplaying/ignoring our misbehavior. In some sense, it would be good if no one knew that some sliver of apparent BLM protesters in city X became violent, but some version IS going to come out and it's best if we have accurate reporting.
Hi Matt! In the intro, you write (but provide no links): "But defunding police departments can’t possibly be the cause of the national murder surge because very few departments actually cut police funding. And while it would be a stretch to say the increase has been uniform, it has certainly been broad-based — red states and blue states, jurisdictions with reform DAs and jurisdictions with traditional ones, and even the handful of cities with GOP governors were all impacted by the rising tide of mayhem." It would be great if you could write a longer post analyzing the data on this. It seems especially relevant given recent news out of NYC, where former NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton is claiming "If you look at every city in America that has violent crime increases and disorder increases…what is the one common denominator? District attorneys, almost all of whom are funded phenomenally by George Soros." (https://nypost.com/2022/01/09/bill-bratton-slams-da-alvin-bragg-blames-soros-for-election/) It would be great to see a careful analysis of these claims. Who is right?
Really glad Matt wrote about this because it's something I've been thinking about too. It's hard to prove but I think this is mostly about disrupted social signaling due to masks and Zoom. People consistently underestimate how important non-verbal signaling is to communication. The effects of covering 2/3 of everyone's face should be obvious, but I think Zoom is especially pernicious in how it creates the illusion participants can see each other's faces, when really its scrambling these signals and/or making them ambiguous.
On an individual level you might not notice it right away if everyone seems 2% less friendly. But if everyone else experiences the same thing, and it lasts for 2 years, these small differences compound over time. It's a small difference in the trajectory of our whole society that's going to produce more dramatic changes the longer it goes on.
As an autistic person I despair sometimes of trying to make allistic folks understand how complex and fragile social interaction is. You can't radically alter the form of this interaction and expect things to just sort themselves out. I mean, in the long run I think cultures can adapt, but it happens very slowly with lots of painful damaging trial and error.
Late to this party, but none of it surprising. The increase in disruption and chaos drives it. And it's not just covid - covid is just part of an upheaval that' affecting many people in very negative ways.
Just some other factors off the top of my head:
A huge loss of trust in institutions - pretty much all of them.
A sclerotic federal bureaucracy and a political class that has zero interest in reforming it or making it more effective.
A political and media elite that seems to live on another planet much of the time
Worsening political tribalism with some on both sides suggesting a civil war is inevitable. Activists on both sides now openly distrust the election system.
We've got all kinds of economic disruptions that have not affected individuals evenly. A whole lot of careers and lives have been wrecked while others have done very well.
So yeah, that's going to result in more bad behavior. No surprise there.
Getting off the Amtrak in DC. An elderly Black lady was struggling with her suitcase and a white guy behind her with a very southern accent hollered “Ah’ll git it!” He snatched it up and carried it down and by a tiny bit my faith in America was reinforced.
You can start a stopwatch to the rise in murders to George Floyd not the lockdowns. Is all of this just more we all have to collectively suffer because a longtime criminal was wrongfully murdered by police?
Possibly tangentially related, but something I've been noticing over this same time period is a seeming breakdown in property owners caring for their property, most especially in terms of cleaning up graffiti and running homeless people off. Graffiti in my neighborhood used to be a once a month or so thing and was it was typically small and quickly cleaned off. Now it's the rare day I don't notice some new patch of graffiti and there are entire building facades being covered in numerous large "tags" that are allowed to last for months without any effort to paint them over. There are also several businesses in my neighborhood that I no longer patronize because they've allowed semi-permanent homeless camps to spring up around them. (I'm very sure I will be accused of elitism for daring to complain about that latter point, but I'm not stepping over an open flow of human waste to get into a non-essential business, nor am I going into a business that allows someone to camp immediately adjacent to their doorway to aggressively panhandle me as I go in and out.)
Also speaking of behavior, there has been a dramatic rise in the number of people working from home. But average miles traveled is back above it's pre-pandemic level. If so many people are no longer commuting but mileage is at a record high - where the F is everyone going?
I was in Germany and upgraded myself to a pretty fast rental car. I was behind some kid in a modified GTI who was doing 140mph to 150mph on the unrestricted section of the Autobahn. But as soon as we got to a section that had a speed limit he slowed right down and drove the limit. The self driving in the rental also automatically adjusted for speed limits. I guess the theory is where there needs to be speed limits there are speed limits and they are camera enforced. But where there doesn't need to be speed limits there isn't any. It seems to help keep everyone on their best behavior.
Note Germany is 6.1 fatalities per billion km vs. 7.1 for the US.
This comment is ultimately not going to be a lot deeper than “Old woman shakes fist at The Cloud,” so consider yourself warned. Anyway I read a piece in Economist this morning about how men have dramatically fewer friendships than they did in decades past, toxic masculinity, yadda yadda. But it got me thinking about how social media/the internet scratches a pro-social dopamine itch that we humans have to the extent that we’re less motivated to invest in flesh and blood human relationships. Having real life friends is WORK (for men and women), going out and socializing takes effort, and ultimately it’s a hell of a lot easier to Netflix and chill with your cat. But it’s a lot emptier too and leaves you disconnected from humanity. So the murder rate is Facebooks fault and no need to point out it was much higher in the 90s K thx bye
For every person who “hearts” this comment, I will feel 1% less motivated to be nice to real life people.
Also I can only hope for a fraction of the group outpouring of grief that our friend Bob Saget received in the event of the untimely death of a real person named Marie Kennedy.
Great point about investing in actual human relationships! I (too?!) am old enough to have witnessed this transformation as an adult.
Another product of this disconnection might be spending way too much time in our own heads. I'm reading The Shipwrecked Mind by Mark Lilla (strong recommend in case anyone's interested), and in the intro he notes that "(t)he more charmed we have become with our individual psyches, the less adept we have become at understanding the psychology of nations, peoples, religions, and political movements. That the present has become so illegible to us is in no small measure due to this imbalance." The book was published in 2016.
Think the MY post is coming 4 weeks too early in the pandemic in order to set up his prediction bona fides and stake out contrarian ground a minute before it's normie, when actual public health policy eventually also arrives at this decision. The fact that MY was calling for endemic-oriented COVID policies first sounds good I guess, but it's literally peak COVID, and obviously poor timing for anyone with responsibilities beyond writing words on the internet. Continue to hunker down folks. Just 2 or 3 more weeks. It's cold outside anyways. You can Viva La Endemic in spring.
Anecdotally, I had a sense that there was a stark rise in anti-social behavior. Since the pandemic began, there was a shooting in the house immediately next door to mine, I can’t go to the grocery store without encountering an overtly rude person, and every time I drive anywhere (I live in the greater-Los Angeles area) I see at least one near-miss accident because someone is driving recklessly (and sometimes it doesn’t miss). So, on one level, it’s obviously disheartening to learn this is empirically true in the aggregate. But on another level, it’s weirdly positive for my personal sanity and comforting to know this shit isn’t just happening around me.
While some of this is undoubtedly the expected result of how a prolonged public health crisis impacts our collective mental well-being, we’d be remiss not to ascribe a fair share of blame to the climate of political hostility in America. And we’d be further remiss not to ascribe a lion’s share of blame for said climate of hostility to Republicans. “Billy, all institutions in this country are corrupt and evil Democrats rigged and stole a presidential election. Your teachers are a bunch of liberal zealots that indoctrinate you with the belief you’re a bad person because you’re white. Now, go to school and behave.” Yeah, no wonder Billy is acting out.
Your response is valid to an extent and I don’t deny some culpability on the part of democrats. The phrase "lion's share of blame" does, after all, imply that some blame belongs elsewhere. I decried the extent to which the Democratic party delegitimized the 2016 election because I knew that an exaggerated GOP response would be the result if Dems won in 2020. The events leading up to and including January 6th, 2021, constitute one hell of an exaggerated response. It wasn’t tit for tat, it was A-bomb for tat, just like every other response from the perpetually aggrieved Republican party.
Along those lines, by way of comparison, I think you have to be delusional not to view Republicans as more culpable. It's not like 2016 was the first time Democrats had a legitimate gripe in a presidential election. We know now that the Supreme Court stole an election for Bush before the Florida recount gave it to Gore. We have the ghost of Antonin Scalia to thank for the deranged voter fraud conspiracy theories believed by a majority of Republicans today (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22274429/republicans-anti-democracy-13-charts).
Moreover, we know that Russian meddling did have a profound impact on the results of the 2016 election (which is why Trump himself invited more meddling in 2020), even if we didn’t find evidence that Trump orchestrated it. We also know that allegations of widespread voter fraud in 2020 are laughably dubious. A Republican-sponsored recount in Arizona gave Democrats an even larger margin of victory.
So, there is at least a Partisan-slanted truth to what Democrats are telling Billy, whereas Republicans are peddling outright falsehoods. Again, I know which political party is more culpable for the elevated temperature of our society, and it’s the same party that shows no interest in fixing the problem. They’d rather burn the whole thing to the ground. For people that deranged, Billy smearing feces around a school bathroom is an act of Patriotism. Just like when they themselves smeared feces on the walls of our nation’s Capital. For shame.
In Milwaukee we have (anecdotally) noticed a huge increase in reckless driving, not like 5-10mph faster on the freeways, but like 90mph on residential streets and stroads. Usually beater cars in poorer neighborhoods. We see this more as an act of desperation and thrill-seeking by people with nothing to lose, than as continuous with 74 in a 65 or 30 in a 25. I don’t know how much this is really driving the traffic fatalities in Milwaukee or if it’s happening at all elsewhere, but it is certainly very striking every time you see it!
"Defund the police" and the laws allowing petty theft sent the message that the police are handicapped and the environment we are in is a lot more criminal friendly. This is like the fed: it's the message that matters the most.
Not to get too narrative driven, but the Strong Towns Podcast gave a hypothesis for one cause of the increase in driving deaths: Less traffic. As work from home has become possible and there are generally less people driving during rush hour, roads are emptier and therefore people drive faster, resulting in more deaths.
So one could conclude that the issue here deals with transportation policy. There are ways to design roads to "feel" less safe (narrower lanes, roadside trees) and ways to redesign stroads so 10 people aren't turning out onto a 40 mph 4 lane road in a 500 ft stretch, but those cost efficiency.
Of course the best solution would be to make more places walkable. And now we have reduced driving deaths into a housing issue, as all issues seem to stem from housing.
I see a lot of comments, including mine, are in the vein that "our" misbehavior either is not misbehavior at all or pales in comparison to "theirs." And I think that's true, why wouldn't I?
But we should still bear in mind that "they" have a finely developed system of ferreting out and communicating to the people most likely to be offended by our "misbehavior" and we need to try to be on our best behavior. This also means that the MSM is sometimes wrong in downplaying/ignoring our misbehavior. In some sense, it would be good if no one knew that some sliver of apparent BLM protesters in city X became violent, but some version IS going to come out and it's best if we have accurate reporting.
Hi Matt! In the intro, you write (but provide no links): "But defunding police departments can’t possibly be the cause of the national murder surge because very few departments actually cut police funding. And while it would be a stretch to say the increase has been uniform, it has certainly been broad-based — red states and blue states, jurisdictions with reform DAs and jurisdictions with traditional ones, and even the handful of cities with GOP governors were all impacted by the rising tide of mayhem." It would be great if you could write a longer post analyzing the data on this. It seems especially relevant given recent news out of NYC, where former NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton is claiming "If you look at every city in America that has violent crime increases and disorder increases…what is the one common denominator? District attorneys, almost all of whom are funded phenomenally by George Soros." (https://nypost.com/2022/01/09/bill-bratton-slams-da-alvin-bragg-blames-soros-for-election/) It would be great to see a careful analysis of these claims. Who is right?
Really glad Matt wrote about this because it's something I've been thinking about too. It's hard to prove but I think this is mostly about disrupted social signaling due to masks and Zoom. People consistently underestimate how important non-verbal signaling is to communication. The effects of covering 2/3 of everyone's face should be obvious, but I think Zoom is especially pernicious in how it creates the illusion participants can see each other's faces, when really its scrambling these signals and/or making them ambiguous.
On an individual level you might not notice it right away if everyone seems 2% less friendly. But if everyone else experiences the same thing, and it lasts for 2 years, these small differences compound over time. It's a small difference in the trajectory of our whole society that's going to produce more dramatic changes the longer it goes on.
As an autistic person I despair sometimes of trying to make allistic folks understand how complex and fragile social interaction is. You can't radically alter the form of this interaction and expect things to just sort themselves out. I mean, in the long run I think cultures can adapt, but it happens very slowly with lots of painful damaging trial and error.
Late to this party, but none of it surprising. The increase in disruption and chaos drives it. And it's not just covid - covid is just part of an upheaval that' affecting many people in very negative ways.
Just some other factors off the top of my head:
A huge loss of trust in institutions - pretty much all of them.
A sclerotic federal bureaucracy and a political class that has zero interest in reforming it or making it more effective.
A political and media elite that seems to live on another planet much of the time
Worsening political tribalism with some on both sides suggesting a civil war is inevitable. Activists on both sides now openly distrust the election system.
We've got all kinds of economic disruptions that have not affected individuals evenly. A whole lot of careers and lives have been wrecked while others have done very well.
So yeah, that's going to result in more bad behavior. No surprise there.
Getting off the Amtrak in DC. An elderly Black lady was struggling with her suitcase and a white guy behind her with a very southern accent hollered “Ah’ll git it!” He snatched it up and carried it down and by a tiny bit my faith in America was reinforced.
I have to ask...Pandemic or George Floyd?
You can start a stopwatch to the rise in murders to George Floyd not the lockdowns. Is all of this just more we all have to collectively suffer because a longtime criminal was wrongfully murdered by police?
Possibly tangentially related, but something I've been noticing over this same time period is a seeming breakdown in property owners caring for their property, most especially in terms of cleaning up graffiti and running homeless people off. Graffiti in my neighborhood used to be a once a month or so thing and was it was typically small and quickly cleaned off. Now it's the rare day I don't notice some new patch of graffiti and there are entire building facades being covered in numerous large "tags" that are allowed to last for months without any effort to paint them over. There are also several businesses in my neighborhood that I no longer patronize because they've allowed semi-permanent homeless camps to spring up around them. (I'm very sure I will be accused of elitism for daring to complain about that latter point, but I'm not stepping over an open flow of human waste to get into a non-essential business, nor am I going into a business that allows someone to camp immediately adjacent to their doorway to aggressively panhandle me as I go in and out.)
Also speaking of behavior, there has been a dramatic rise in the number of people working from home. But average miles traveled is back above it's pre-pandemic level. If so many people are no longer commuting but mileage is at a record high - where the F is everyone going?
I was in Germany and upgraded myself to a pretty fast rental car. I was behind some kid in a modified GTI who was doing 140mph to 150mph on the unrestricted section of the Autobahn. But as soon as we got to a section that had a speed limit he slowed right down and drove the limit. The self driving in the rental also automatically adjusted for speed limits. I guess the theory is where there needs to be speed limits there are speed limits and they are camera enforced. But where there doesn't need to be speed limits there isn't any. It seems to help keep everyone on their best behavior.
Note Germany is 6.1 fatalities per billion km vs. 7.1 for the US.
This comment is ultimately not going to be a lot deeper than “Old woman shakes fist at The Cloud,” so consider yourself warned. Anyway I read a piece in Economist this morning about how men have dramatically fewer friendships than they did in decades past, toxic masculinity, yadda yadda. But it got me thinking about how social media/the internet scratches a pro-social dopamine itch that we humans have to the extent that we’re less motivated to invest in flesh and blood human relationships. Having real life friends is WORK (for men and women), going out and socializing takes effort, and ultimately it’s a hell of a lot easier to Netflix and chill with your cat. But it’s a lot emptier too and leaves you disconnected from humanity. So the murder rate is Facebooks fault and no need to point out it was much higher in the 90s K thx bye
For every person who “hearts” this comment, I will feel 1% less motivated to be nice to real life people.
Also I can only hope for a fraction of the group outpouring of grief that our friend Bob Saget received in the event of the untimely death of a real person named Marie Kennedy.
Great point about investing in actual human relationships! I (too?!) am old enough to have witnessed this transformation as an adult.
Another product of this disconnection might be spending way too much time in our own heads. I'm reading The Shipwrecked Mind by Mark Lilla (strong recommend in case anyone's interested), and in the intro he notes that "(t)he more charmed we have become with our individual psyches, the less adept we have become at understanding the psychology of nations, peoples, religions, and political movements. That the present has become so illegible to us is in no small measure due to this imbalance." The book was published in 2016.
Think the MY post is coming 4 weeks too early in the pandemic in order to set up his prediction bona fides and stake out contrarian ground a minute before it's normie, when actual public health policy eventually also arrives at this decision. The fact that MY was calling for endemic-oriented COVID policies first sounds good I guess, but it's literally peak COVID, and obviously poor timing for anyone with responsibilities beyond writing words on the internet. Continue to hunker down folks. Just 2 or 3 more weeks. It's cold outside anyways. You can Viva La Endemic in spring.
The youth are distressed. Also the olds.
Anecdotally, I had a sense that there was a stark rise in anti-social behavior. Since the pandemic began, there was a shooting in the house immediately next door to mine, I can’t go to the grocery store without encountering an overtly rude person, and every time I drive anywhere (I live in the greater-Los Angeles area) I see at least one near-miss accident because someone is driving recklessly (and sometimes it doesn’t miss). So, on one level, it’s obviously disheartening to learn this is empirically true in the aggregate. But on another level, it’s weirdly positive for my personal sanity and comforting to know this shit isn’t just happening around me.
While some of this is undoubtedly the expected result of how a prolonged public health crisis impacts our collective mental well-being, we’d be remiss not to ascribe a fair share of blame to the climate of political hostility in America. And we’d be further remiss not to ascribe a lion’s share of blame for said climate of hostility to Republicans. “Billy, all institutions in this country are corrupt and evil Democrats rigged and stole a presidential election. Your teachers are a bunch of liberal zealots that indoctrinate you with the belief you’re a bad person because you’re white. Now, go to school and behave.” Yeah, no wonder Billy is acting out.
Your response is valid to an extent and I don’t deny some culpability on the part of democrats. The phrase "lion's share of blame" does, after all, imply that some blame belongs elsewhere. I decried the extent to which the Democratic party delegitimized the 2016 election because I knew that an exaggerated GOP response would be the result if Dems won in 2020. The events leading up to and including January 6th, 2021, constitute one hell of an exaggerated response. It wasn’t tit for tat, it was A-bomb for tat, just like every other response from the perpetually aggrieved Republican party.
Along those lines, by way of comparison, I think you have to be delusional not to view Republicans as more culpable. It's not like 2016 was the first time Democrats had a legitimate gripe in a presidential election. We know now that the Supreme Court stole an election for Bush before the Florida recount gave it to Gore. We have the ghost of Antonin Scalia to thank for the deranged voter fraud conspiracy theories believed by a majority of Republicans today (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22274429/republicans-anti-democracy-13-charts).
Moreover, we know that Russian meddling did have a profound impact on the results of the 2016 election (which is why Trump himself invited more meddling in 2020), even if we didn’t find evidence that Trump orchestrated it. We also know that allegations of widespread voter fraud in 2020 are laughably dubious. A Republican-sponsored recount in Arizona gave Democrats an even larger margin of victory.
So, there is at least a Partisan-slanted truth to what Democrats are telling Billy, whereas Republicans are peddling outright falsehoods. Again, I know which political party is more culpable for the elevated temperature of our society, and it’s the same party that shows no interest in fixing the problem. They’d rather burn the whole thing to the ground. For people that deranged, Billy smearing feces around a school bathroom is an act of Patriotism. Just like when they themselves smeared feces on the walls of our nation’s Capital. For shame.
In Milwaukee we have (anecdotally) noticed a huge increase in reckless driving, not like 5-10mph faster on the freeways, but like 90mph on residential streets and stroads. Usually beater cars in poorer neighborhoods. We see this more as an act of desperation and thrill-seeking by people with nothing to lose, than as continuous with 74 in a 65 or 30 in a 25. I don’t know how much this is really driving the traffic fatalities in Milwaukee or if it’s happening at all elsewhere, but it is certainly very striking every time you see it!
"Defund the police" and the laws allowing petty theft sent the message that the police are handicapped and the environment we are in is a lot more criminal friendly. This is like the fed: it's the message that matters the most.