Saturday, April 29, 2017

Children, Overpopulation and Tommy Boy

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Frequently, in this space, as I’m discussing one topic, I’ll mention another, tangential topic, and declare that it “deserves a post of it’s own.” In order to help me remember, I keep a list of the topics I’ve promised to revisit, and I was looking through it recently when I realized that I haven’t done a very good job of making good on those promises, so for the next few posts I plan to, at least partially, rectify that. I’ve chosen to start with one of my more recent promises, the promise to talk about demography and population growth.


For most people the term “population growth” immediately brings to their mind the dangers and challenges of overpopulation. They may be thinking of the explosion of people which occurred during the last century, or they may be visualizing the graph of world population which looks like a giant, impossibly steep, peak rising up out the flat valley that was the world’s historical population. Or they may remember China’s recently abolished one-child policy and the tragedy of the accompanying gendercide. (Though I recently heard that China’s missing girls are not as missing as we thought and have started showing up in censuses when they get older.)


These people worry about overpopulation despite the fact that the crises predicted in the late 60’s by such books as the Population Bomb and Make Room! Make Room! (the basis for the movie Soylent Green) never came to pass. And also despite the fact that birth rates are falling everywhere and below replacement level in most of the developed nations.


In light of this, are the people who worry about overpopulation worrying unnecessarily? Do we no longer have to worry about overcrowding and famines and being forced to resort to cannibalism? (Soylent Green is people!) It’s hard to say, but this post will attempt to clarify things, with the caveat that, as always, I’m wary about any predictions of the future.


One of the first people to worry about overpopulation, or more specifically the idea that population growth would outstrip food supply, was Thomas Malthus, an English cleric and scholar. In 1798 he published his influential book, An Essay on the Principle of Population. The central idea was that food supply increased arithmetically while population increased geometrically. In the late 60’s, for someone considering a world where the population had all but doubled in the previous 50 years. It certainly must have have appeared that the Malthusian vision of mass starvation was finally about to come to pass.


But at the very same moment as the new Malthusians were predicting doom, the Green Revolution was taking root (no pun intended) all around the world and in developing countries like India and the Philippines, vastly increased food production was keeping the long predicted famines at bay.


When I was in high school I did two man policy debate and one of our topics concerned US agricultural policy. That year my debate partner and I constructed an affirmative plan around food aid to Africa. This was in the late 80’s and the Ethiopian Famine from earlier in the decade was still fresh in everyone’s mind. As we proceeded to debate this topic we encountered a lot of counter arguments involving the dangers of overpopulation. In particular some people actually argued that it’s better to let 10 people starve now than to let them reproduce resulting in 100 people starving in the future. As you can see things get twisted and dark pretty fast when you’re dealing with this issue.


By the end, after spending a year defending against these sorts of arguments I was convinced that Malthus was just wrong, food production could and would keep up with population. Additionally, even back then it was apparent that, on top of increasing food production, the world’s population growth was slowing.


As you can imagine, a high school student in suburban Utah wasn’t the first to put all this together, and while I don’t know if this belief is as widespread as the belief about overpopulation, people were starting to talk about population decline, or what some people call the demographic winter. And several decades on many countries, most notably Russia, Japan and even Germany have seen years where their total population fell. Obviously this is not unprecedented, but in the past when a country’s population declined year over year there was generally some external cause like war or disease. Historically it didn’t decline by choice.


Of course, as they say, one swallow doesn’t make a summer, and the fact that population has started to decline in a few countries doesn’t mean that world population is declining, but even if it’s not, the proponents of demographic winter point to a time, not far distant, when worldwide population will peak, and after that, start to decline. In other words, when you combine the Green Revolution with the trend towards declining fertility, it’s very reasonable to take the position that we don’t need to worry about overpopulation. And indeed that is the position I myself held until very recently, but over the last couple of years I’ve started to entertain the idea that maybe things aren’t as cut and dried as I had hoped.


To begin with, predictions that world population will peak rely on fertility rates continuing to decrease, especially in Africa as the continent becomes more developed. All of this results from projecting the declining birth rates experienced by most of the developed world into underdeveloped places that still have high fertility rates. And indeed fertility rates in developing countries had been following that trend. But that trend has slowed recently, as evidenced by this quote from The Economist:


Alarmingly, population growth in Africa is not slowing as quickly as demographers had expected. In 2004 the UN predicted that the continent’s population would grow from a little over 900m at the time, to about 2.3 billion in 2100. At the same time it put the world’s total population in 2100 at 9.1 billion, up from 7.3 billion today. But the UN’s latest estimates, published earlier this year, have global population in 2100 at 11.2 billion—and Africa is where almost all the newly added people will be. The UN now thinks that by 2100 the continent will be home to 4.4 billion people, an increase of more than 2 billion compared with its previous estimate.


So which is it? Is overpopulation still a concern? Or is the population in decline? If it is in decline might that also be a problem? (Particularly when you consider that the modern world was built around an expectation of an ever-expanding workforce.) Where do things really stand at this point?


Of course so far when speaking of overpopulation I’ve mostly focused on whether we can feed everyone, but there are obviously a lot of people for whom the problem of population is much greater than just whether or not people are going to starve. For example many environmentalists are desperately concerned about the ecological impact of the people we already have without even factoring in whether world population is going to continue to increase. (Fun fact, the most extreme example of this is the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.) Once you turn to looking at the environmental impact you quickly realize that there are a lot of contradictory dynamics in play.


It is widely agreed that the trend of falling fertility is powered by modernization, development, urbanization, etc. Thus, people have speculated that one of the reasons birthrates, in places like Africa, haven’t fallen as much as expected is that development has slowed. From this it seems logical that we should do what we can to speed up development, but development comes with a large environmental toll. For starters more developed countries emit significantly more CO2 on a per person basis than less developed countries. This creates something of a Catch-22. We can have a lot of people whose individual impact on the environment is low, or we can have fewer people whose environmental impact is a much greater.


To show you what I mean let’s take the country of Kenya as an example. If we look at the graphs provided by the United Nations, we see that, taking the low estimate, the Kenyan population starts leveling off around 2100 at slightly more than 100 million people. Up from approximately 50 million right now. If we assume that in order to keep Kenya's population at the lower end of the estimate that Kenya has to become at least as developed as, say, Brazil, then in the process of doubling its population it will also end up increasing its per capita emissions by eight times the current level.


In other words, following these assumptions, emissions for the entire country of Kenya will increase to 16x their current level, even though the population only doubles. If on the other hand it’s per capita emissions remain constant then it’s population can increase by 16 times without the actual level of Kenyan emissions being greater in this scenario than in the more developed, lower-population scenario. The actual high-end estimate is that Kenya ends up with 220 million people by 2100 which means the population would only be about four and a half times its current level, so well below the 16x increase required for this option to have the same emissions as the lower population/higher per capita emissions scenario.


Of course this is a crude estimation and doesn't take into account the fact that better technology should hopefully lower carbon emissions across the board. But even these back-of-the-envelope calculations show that if carbon emissions were your only standard then it’s better for Kenya to be fecund and poor than barren and rich. The colonial overtones of this section have probably already gotten me in trouble. But I wanted to illustrate some of the competing priorities that come into play when you talk about this issue. And this is part of what I was aiming for in my post on global warming. That there are a variety of complex situations facing us in the future and they’re all interconnected. But despite all of the complexities. Everyone agrees that population growth is bad. And that while implementing repressive programs to curb the population, like China’s one-child policy (which I mentioned earlier) are also bad. That, if people, naturally, and of their own choice, start having fewer children that’s great.


But does everyone truly believe this? Or are there some people who actually believe that population growth is good?


I think there is such a group. A group that speaks frequently about the importance of having children. A group that further might even use the word “multiply”, when speaking of child-bearing, as in the phrase multiply and replenish the earth. And while I am loath to speak on their behalf, I don’t think I’m stretching things to claim that they strongly support bringing more children into the world. (Though they get hung up on wanting to make sure these children have two parents who are married.) If you haven't already guessed I’m talking about the leadership of the LDS Church.


If you do a search on this topic on lds.org you’ll find that there are numerous talks which reemphasis, what is often called, the first commandment. The command to multiply and replenish the earth. A commandment given to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Elder Boyd K. Packer gave particular emphasis to this commandment in the last talk he gave before his death:


The commandment to multiply and replenish the earth has never been rescinded. It is essential to the plan of redemption and is the source of human happiness. Through the righteous exercise of this power, we may come close to our Father in Heaven and experience a fulness of joy, even godhood. The power of procreation is not an incidental part of the plan; it is the plan of happiness; it is the key to happiness.


A very similar phrase is found in The Family: A Proclamation to the World. So, as I said, I don’t feel like I’m stretching anything to call this the official position of the Church.


Interestingly as I was going through the talks I came across one given by Elder Joseph W. Sitati titled Be Fruitful, Multiply, and Subdue the Earth. Elder Sitati is from Kenya, which is the reason I used Kenya in my example above. Whatever colonial overtones may be present in my discussion of these issues, I hope you’ll agree that he suffers from no such handicap.


Now does all this mean that the leaders of the Church are advocating for unchecked population growth? What might essentially be called “the more the merrier philosophy”? I don’t think so, though I did find a quote from Elder Dallin H. Oaks where he said, back in 1993, that you should have as many children as you can care for. That aside I don’t think LDS Leaders are pushing to have as many people as possible. I think rather that they understand that not wanting to have children is a sign of an unhealthy society.


What do I mean by this? Well as usual the answer can be found in that greatest of all American movies, Tommy Boy. At one point in the movie the advisers are urging Tommy’s father (played by Brian Dennehy) to wait it out, and he tells them that he can’t because, “In auto parts, you’re either growing or you’re dying. There ain’t no third direction.” As it is in auto parts so it is with humanity. You’re either growing or you’re dying, there ain’t no third direction. Perhaps you think I’m being flippant, but let’s take a moment and break it down.


As we have seen it’s fairly easy to have a growing population. Such has been the case for all of human history up until a few years ago, and is still the case in much of the world. Apparently it’s also fairly straightforward to get to a level of progress and development where your population falls. In fact, it’s alarmingly straightforward. There doesn’t appear to be any special trick or policy, nor do you have to be especially advanced. Countries from Azerbaijan to Brazil have below replacement fertility. Even though one’s a post-soviet, 98% Muslim, central European country of 10 million people and the other is a religiously and ethnically diverse, Latin American country of 210 million people. Evidently we’ve mastered growing and dying, but what about the holding steady. Is there a number of people such that when we reach it we’ll just start having kids at exactly the replacement rate?


I don’t know that there is. Certainly countries who are experiencing a declining population and below replacement level fertility rates have tried various policies to encourage people to have more kids but these policies have largely been ineffective. The most extreme example of falling birth rates is Singapore which has a total fertility rate of 0.82. (Replacement rate is currently 2.1.) They have tried a number of policies aimed at increasing their birthrate including sponsoring a National Night party in which Singaporean couples were euphemistically encouraged to “let their patriotism explode” in order to give their country “the population spurt it so desperately needs.” (The party was sponsored by Mentos: the Freshmaker!)


Some of these tactics have been modestly successful, but none have come even close to raising fertility to the point where the population would be stable. And as you can imagine going from 0.82 to 2.1 is going to be very, very difficult, and involve huge societal changes in everything from marriage, to work, to the underlying culture. If Singapore is the future (and many people think that it is) then the challenge humanity faces is not that of bumping a 1.9 total fertility rate up a few points to 2.1, it’s a matter of taking a world that “naturally” wants to be at 0.82 (or even lower) and then somehow figuring out how to increase that by two and half times.


To return back to the LDS leadership, they encourage people to have children because they want society to be healthy, and a society that stops having children is unhealthy because it’s dying, and by definition that’s unhealthy. As I said above, I’m generally loathe to speak for the Church and it’s leadership, but I’m certain they think that poverty and starvation are bad. And insofar as those follow from overpopulation I imagine that they think that overpopulation is bad too, but there are lots of people who are worried about that. It’s well covered territory, even now, when fertility is falling. What isn’t being talked about is the myopia and selfishness present in a society that has stopped having kids. Perhaps that accusation seems unfair, but I don’t think that it is.


The accusation of myopia, interestingly enough, relates back to last week’s post. For those that need a reminder, I talked about human happiness deriving from being part of a community of sufferers. Beyond the obvious jokes about children causing suffering to their parents, traditionally this suffering has centered around raising and providing for a family. We suffered because we wanted a brighter future, and without children there was no future. These days the future seems pretty well taken care of, and suffering has largely been eliminated (at least in those countries with low birth rates.) Thus there’s no need to worry about the future, and certainly no need to undergo any suffering for it.


As far as selfishness, in countries with a below replacement level fertility, what have people traded their children for? I understand that childless adults get to travel more. I hear from my friends who are childless that they’re able to play more video games. Not having children obviously increases your disposable income and it also unquestionably increases your discretionary time. Both the additional money and the additional time can be used by individuals to pursue personal fulfillment. How is all of this not selfish? I understand that I am simplifying things enormously, but I also think that being selfish is more clear-cut than many people want to admit.


Returning to overpopulation, I am not blind to the potential problems, but neither am I convinced that a society which is still growing is less healthy that one that is atrophying. The more I dig in and discuss these issues the more convinced I am that there are some deep malignancies present in modern society. And that in our pursuit of material comfort that we have profoundly damaged our souls.


The harvest is past, the summer is ended and we are not saved...






I mentioned that kids are expensive, well I have four, so consider donating. And if you don’t have any kids, and this post upset you, you should also consider donating, I mean think of all the money you’ve saved.

Saturday, April 22, 2017

Tribe by Sebastian Junger and the Strange Diseases of Progress

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The subject of unsolved mysteries is one of those topics which can be reliably counted on to spark people’s interest, making it ideal for clickbait lists, questionable cable programs, and, in our own case, blog introductions. Though the unsolved mystery I want to start with does not involve pyramids, or Atlantis, or the identity of Jack the Ripper, you’re probably not even aware that it is a mystery. But not only is it one of the most profound mysteries of our age, but unlike the pyramids, Atlantis, and Jack the Ripper this mystery has serious implications for the future of society.


I first encountered this mystery when I read a review of Empire of the Summer Moon. The review was written by Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex (though it appeared in his previous blog.) The review mentions a curious fact:


All of the white people who joined Indian tribes loved it and refused to go back to white civilization. All the Indians who joined white civilization hated it and did everything they could to go back to their previous tribal lives.


This is the mystery. If modern society is so awesome why did it hold no appeal for the American Indians? At the time, I just filed this fact in the bin, unsure at the moment of what to do about it. Then, a couple of months ago I read the book Tribe, by Sebastian Junger. And he also mentioned this same mystery. Of course Alexander and Junger are not the first people to notice this, and both of them end up quoting from Benjamin Franklin who witnessed this phenomenon first hand:


When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language, and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return. But when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoner young by the Indians, and lived a while with them, tho' ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.


Junger also quotes from a french émigré named Hector de Crèvecoeur who was writing in 1782:


Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become European.


What made the American Indian tribes so appealing to the Europeans, and made the Europeans so unappealing to the Indians? And does this imbalance hold any lessons for us today? Junger’s book tries to answer that question, and it ends up being one of the few books where I wish it had been longer, but what he did write about was so great that I immediately knew it deserved a post.


Before I get into the book, however, I want create a framework for things first. I don’t think I’m being too controversial when I say that the vast majority of people feel like 2017 is a lot better than 1917 or 1817 and it’s certainly a lot better than 1017. I would probably count myself among those people. But how do we know that the past was worse? And what standard are we using to decide that it was worse? We can use things like deaths, or disease, or caloric intake, or maybe percentage of people in slavery to estimate what things were like, but when it really comes down to it we don’t know. Especially as we begin to consider more subtle topics like life satisfaction or the ideal way to build a community.


As an example of what I mean, let’s go back to a book I frequently reference, Better Angels of Our Nature, by Steven Pinker. One of the big themes of the book is that deaths from warfare have declined dramatically over the last few centuries. And that consequently the world is a better place. In support of this Pinker provides lots of graphs, one of which looks at various archaeological digs, and extrapolates the percentage of violent deaths in different eras. If you look at this graph you’ll see that by far the highest percentage of violent deaths was found at an archeological dig in South Dakota dating to the 1300s. This event has come to be known as the Crow Creek Massacre. And it might be an outlier, but even if it is, everyone pretty much agrees, Pinker especially, that American Indians experienced violent death at easily 10 times the rate  present in any modern society. But yet these are the same American Indians Benjamin Franklin and Crèvecoeur were talking about, whose society was so attractive that no one ever voluntarily left it. If violent death is a one to one proxy for unhappiness then this would have never been the case. We all assume that a lower chance of death leads to greater happiness, and yet this is evidence that that’s not the case. That we might not understand the past as well as we thought.


If American Indians provided the only example of this counterintuitive result, it would still be a mystery, and it would still be interesting, but I wouldn’t be writing about it. But as Junger shows in his book, this is not the only example of things being the opposite of what we might expect. And consequently the topic deserves a closer look because something similar is happening even today.


For a look at more recent examples of this Junger turns to his experiences during the Siege of Sarajevo in the early 90’s. As you can surely imagine the conditions were terrible. Junger described it thusly:


Over the course of the three-year siege almost 70,000 people were killed or wounded by Serb forces shooting into the city--roughly 20 percent of the population. The United Nations estimated that half of the children in the city had seen someone killed in front of them.


Violence on that scale is scarcely imaginable for most people in a developed country. And the natural assumption is that all of the people who lived through the siege must have been scarred for life, particularly the children, and yet when Junger returned there 20 years later he found that people missed the war, that “they longed for those days. More precisely they longed for who they’d been back then.”


Junger interviews one Bosnian journalist who was seventeen at the start of the siege. After being severely wounded by shrapnel, she was eventually evacuated to Italy. But she missed the wartime camaraderie so much that she went back to Sarajevo, crossing the lines to do so. Twenty years later when Junger talks to her he asks her if people had ultimately been happier during the war. Her response was, “We were the happiest, and we laughed more.”


Sarajevo is by no means the only example of this. At the beginning of World War II when the United Kingdom was preparing for inevitable aerial bombardment by Germany, or what came to be called the Blitz, the government assumed that it would cause mass hysteria among the population. But nothing of the sort happened. As Junger describes it:


On and on the horror went, people dying in their homes or neighborhoods while doing the most mundane things. Not only did these experiences fail to produce mass hysteria, they didn’t even trigger much individual psychosis. Before the war, projections for psychiatric breakdown in England ran as high as four million people [roughly 10% of the population], but as the Blitz progressed, psychiatric hospitals around the country saw admissions go down… Psychiatrists watched in puzzlement as long-standing patients saw their symptoms subside during the period of intense air raids.


That last bit is particularly interesting. It’s not just that normal people pulled together during the Blitz, but more interestingly, the number of people suffering from mental illness and the severity of those illnesses actually declined. And, lest you think this was a particularly English, stiff upper lip response, the same thing happened in Germany which suffered far worse aerial bombardment than England. The Allies expected that this massive bombing campaign would destroy German resolve, and in the end it did the opposite. Industrial production actually rose during the war, and the cities in Germany which hadn’t been bombed ended up being where morale was the lowest.


But of course, as I said in the beginning this sort of thing is the opposite of what we’re lead to expect. We expect war to be psychologically damaging in a way that nothing else is. This expectation certainly didn’t start with Vietnam, but it was arguably popularized by it. Everyone has seen movies depicting Vietnam vets as broken individuals, who were never quite the same after their experiences, and this trend has continued through to the present wars. But how do we reconcile this idea with the stories and examples I’ve already related?


You might not think that it needs to be squared, that everything I’ve said thus far can be dismissed as anecdotal evidence, but this is an issue that has been studied and the results are unequivocal: Large scale disasters improve mental health. The only question is why. For Junger the answer that it re-establishes the tribal societies of the past. This is the link between Sarajevo and the American Indian, between the English and the Germans, and this is where the title of the book comes from. But unlike Junger I’d like to focus more on the disease than on the cure.


If psychological damage due to war and disaster is part of the disease, then the most common symptom of that disease is PTSD, or Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.  And indeed the rates of PTSD among returning veterans has reached an historic high, and yet, combat deaths are as low as they’ve ever been. Junger compares the various wars:


This is not a new phenomenon: decade after decade and war after war, American combat deaths have generally dropped while disability claims have risen. Most disability claims are for medical issues and should decline with casualty rates and combat intensity, but they don’t. They are in an almost inverse relationship with one another. Soldiers in Vietnam suffered one-quarter the mortality rate of troops in World War II, for example, but filed for both physical and psychological disability compensation at a rate that was 50 percent higher… Today’s vets claim three times the number of disabilities that Vietnam vets did, despite...a casualty rate that, thank God is roughly one-third what it was in Vietnam.


If you parse this out, Vietnam vets had a disability per casualty rate that was six times higher than World War II vets and current vets have a disability per casualty rate 54 times as high as the World War II vets! You may or may not have noticed that I engaged in a subtle flip. We were talking about how warfare improves mental health and suddenly we’re talking about how modern wars appear to do the opposite. But of course these two things are just opposite sides of the same coin. All of things we talked about leading up to this involved intense bonding experiences, which affected an entire community all at once. Creating what one of the people who’s studied this issue called a “community of sufferers”. With that in mind the difference between World War II and Vietnam and the current wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan becomes obvious. At each step war become less of a community effort and more something that some people do in a far away place that has nothing to do with the rest of us.


In fact people who do more fighting end up with fewer psychological issues. As illustrated by the following statistics:


  • During the Yom Kippur War Israeli rear-base troops had psychological breakdowns at three times the rate of the frontline troops.
  • 80 percent of the psychiatric casualties in the US Army’s VII Corps came from support units which were never under fire.
  • During World War II, American airborne units, which saw the most intense fighting had some of the lowest psychiatric casualty rates.
  • Returning to the Yom Kippur War, Israeli commanders suffered four times the mortality rate but had only one-fifth the rate of psychological breakdown.


It appears that the more modern and safe the war experience is, the more likely someone is to develop some form of disability. As the final example, Junger reports that, roughly half of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have applied for permanent PTSD disability, but only 10 percent experienced any actual combat. Obviously one possibility for explaining this is that people may be imagining, exaggerating or even faking their symptoms. Junger mentions that possibility, of course, but even after accounting for that the increases in psychological disability remain. Additionally there is another statistic which is also going up and is unlikely to be faked, and that’s veteran suicides.


If PTSD is the most common symptom of the disease then the worst symptom is suicide, and here again the situation is counterintuitive. Of course, as I mentioned in a previous post much of what we know about suicide runs contrary to expectations regardless of whether it’s the suicides of veterans or the suicides of teens. Though this observation does nothing to make it less tragic.


Suicide is another area where the comparison between modern society and tribal societies is illuminating. Among the American Indians depression based suicide was essentially unknown. And when the Piraha, a tribe that lives deep in the Amazon, were told about suicide they laughed because the idea was so hard to comprehend. Sometimes I don’t think we’re any closer than the Piraha to comprehending suicide, but despite that, no one is laughing.


When examining veteran suicides we see the same things that we saw with PTSD. Specifically that there is no relationship between suicide and combat. Veterans who were never under fire are just as likely to commit suicide as veterans who were under fire, and in fact among recent veterans, “deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan actually lowers the risk of suicide.” As I said at the start this is one of the great unsolved mysteries.


Having spent most of our time looking at the disease through the lens of war and the military it’s time to ask if it’s present in society at large. And the answer to that would have to be yes. In fact the evidence is all around us. If suicide and depression are its symptoms then there is no shortage of examples.


The question we then have to ask is whether these symptoms are getting worse or better, and this is where we come back to one of the subjects I started with. The idea that we can’t, or in any case don’t, know what the past was like. This is particularly true when it comes to a condition like PTSD, which wasn’t even added to the psychological lexicon until 1980 (though there were precursors as early as 1952). Thus, we don’t know if Roman centurions had PTSD, we don’t know if survivors of the Black Death, or of the Lisbon Earthquake had PTSD. And when it comes down to it, we don’t even know much about PTSD outside of richer countries. But as I pointed out what we do know seems to indicate that it might in fact be a modern phenomenon


If Junger is right and the disease stems from not having to struggle, and feeling isolated, then it makes sense that lots of people should be grappling with this disease, since the modern world abounds in both those qualities, in fact you would expect it to be getting worse. But is there any evidence for that?


You may have recently heard that there has been a big increase in deaths among the white working class. This was first pointed out by Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton and his wife Anne Case when they published a paper showing that while every other group was experiencing a decrease in mortality, for white working class individuals the death rate was going up. It’s unclear why it took so long to notice this, but now that it’s been pointed out the trend is an obvious one and it meshes very well into the opiate epidemic which I wrote about previously. As more information has come out about the nature of these deaths and as the phenomenon get’s more attention it’s acquired a label: Deaths of Despair.


I’m going to go a little bit out on a limb here, and engage in some speculation, as well, by declaring that rising levels of PTSD and deaths of despair are just the tip of the iceberg. That we have a real and growing problem and that progress is making it worse. Most people are going to find that hard to believe, and it’s easy to talk about the benefits of progress and modernity if you’re not one of those that progress has left behind. And to be clear its beneficiaries get to do most of the talking, while it’s victims have been largely silent. Thus you end up in a situation where when the half of the country that hasn’t gotten quite as good deal elects someone which, at one point, was declared to have a better chance of playing in the NBA Finals than winning the presidency, it’s doubly shocking. First, that it happened at all, and second that no one saw it coming. But that’s the part of the iceberg that’s under water. We may notice the deaths (eventually) but they sit on top of a huge number of people who are experiencing all of the things that Junger was talking about: They don’t have anything left to struggle for, and they certainly don’t have a community to struggle with.


The drug overdoses, the alcoholism and the suicides all sit on top of a large group of people suffering from the disease, whose symptoms are largely invisible. These sufferers include males who don’t have a single close friend or spouse to say nothing of a community. It includes the millions of people who’ve given up looking for work. It includes some of the 1 in 3 millennials who live at home with their parents, 25% of whom are not working or going to school. And it probably includes the people who have decided that it’s easier to sit at home and play video games all day.


Normally it’s easy to dismiss stuff like this by saying that things are getting better, the world is getting richer, technology is getting cooler, everything is getting easier. But those arguments don’t work in this case, because all of those things are very probably making the situation worse. And if they are making it worse how much worse is it going to get?


Our world is full of assumptions. We assume that eliminating struggle is a worthwhile goal. We assume that an eventual life of leisure is what everyone needs. We assume the past was worse than the present. We assume we know what we’re doing. And we assume that peace is always good and war is always bad. And when we make an assumption with disastrous consequences, we correct it, but what about when we make assumptions that have subtle negative consequences, creating diseases of society that only turn up years or decades later?  If this is what’s happening, will we be wise enough to examine all of these assumptions and admit that maybe we’re wrong?





If you’re one of those who’ve benefited from progress than surely you can spare a buck a month and donate to this podcast. And if you’re one of those who’s been on the losing side, keep your money. You may need it.