Kevin Drum has an excellent article out on where the United States of America finds itself in the year 2021, in terms of both medium and long term trends along a variety of dimensions. Here are just the first three from “The Good” section:
- Income is up for everyone: men, women, Black, white, Hispanic, rich, poor, and middle class. Data from the CBO is here. UPDATE: Confused by this chart? Explanation here.
- Poverty is down by five percentage points since the ’70s.
- Federal income taxes are lower for practically everyone.
I found it instructive that he chose to go with 28 Things that he found to be Good, but only 5 that were Bad. That, in a meta-sense is worthy of being included as a 29th Good Thing!
Here are the five Bad Things:
- The worst trend of the past couple of decades has been a steady deterioration in average health outside of the upper middle class. Life expectancy has stopped increasing; obesity is up; opioid addiction is up; and deaths of despair are up.
- The labor force participation rate has been steadily dropping.
- The Black-white education gap has been stubbornly resistant to improvement.
- Climate change continues unabated.
- Political polarization has gotten worse, thanks mostly to Fox News and, more recently, the rise of Trumpism.
(I haven’t formatted both excerpts as quotes because the WordPress editor, best as I can tell, allows you to either format a piece of text as a numbered list, or as a quote, but not both at the same time. They call this the improved editor, and that makes me weep.)
What might India’s list look like? What do you choose to include and exclude in the good, the bad and the ugly, and what does that tell us about both the country we live in, and the biases that we reveal?
If any student reading this is looking to start a YouTube channel around a fun theme, I have, um, a suggestion for you 🙂
EconForEverybody 