It's not bad governance that is to blame. Americans just had it too good for too long.

Oh, this is fascinating.  From Is the World Really Falling Apart, or Does It Just Feel That Way? The subheading is By most measures — with one glaring exception — people around the world are better off than ever. So why doesn’t it feel that way, especially to Americans? by Max Fisher.  

I glance at his twitter feed to get a sense of his orientation.  From the feed it seems like he is a pretty harsh critic of the US.  About everything.  We'll see.

I am interested in the article because this is exactly an issue about which I have been fascinated for more than a decade.  On virtually every socio-econometric measure, everyone is better off within the US and internationally.  We live longer, we live healthier, we are better educated, we have more choices, everything is cheaper, etc. than twenty, thirty, forty and fifty years ago.  Why do people think it is worse?

Part of it is just the well known human proclivity for recency bias.  We measure in short term increments and weight the recent past more than we do the distant past ten years ago.  So if the cost of living index is 100 this year but only 90 last year, we feel much worse off even though the cost of living index might have been 150 ten years ago.  

Part of it is, in the US, our gravitation in the past decade or two towards catastrophizing everything.  If we don't do something about AGW within ten years we are doomed!!!! Ten years pass and the shriek is the same.  Only ten more years till irreversible doom!!!!!   On topic after topic, policy after policy, the framing is never that this might improve things a bit here and reduce risks there.  It is always all or nothing emotional fear.  

In that kind of environment one grows jaded but one also loses a sense of proportion.  Hey, things aren't a disaster and nothing is in imminent collapse.  

Let's see how Fisher does.

Has the world entered a time of unusual turbulence, or does it just feel that way?

Scanning the headlines, it’s easy to conclude that something has broken. The pandemic.  Accelerating crises from climate change. Global grain shortage. Russia's war on Ukraine. Political and economic meltdown in Sri Lanka. A former prime minister’s assassination in Japan. And, in the United States: inflation, mass shootings, a reckoning over Jan. 6 and collapsing abortion rights.

That sense of chaos can be difficult to square with longer-term data showing that, on many metrics, the world is generally becoming better off.

Yep, this is the paradox.  But Fisher has an interesting framing.  What are the things he thinks are warranted being concerned about?  There is a pattern.  This is a crisis for the left in terms of thinking about what is broken.

The Pandemic - As we are discovering, the crisis is not about the pandemic, it is about the ineffective and authoritarian way many governments, including in the US, responded to the pandemic.  Substantially avoidable had we but followed the Great Barrington Declaration.  

AGW Crisis - No crisis which is increasingly being acknowledged.  Pollution? Yes.  AGW?  No.  No manifest crisis.

Global grain shortage - An anticipated but not yet materialized crisis.

Russia's war on Ukraine - A real crisis.

Sri Lanka - A self-created crisis arising from pursuing ESG goals at the expense of citizens and the economy.  An entirely avoidable crisis.

  

Assassination in Japan - A tragedy but not a crisis.

American Inflation - Self-created, deliberately and against widespread and loud spoken opposition.  An entirely avoidable crisis.

American mass shootings - Individual tragedies certainly, but the crisis is the dramatic rise in violent crime with some 5,000 excess deaths for 2020 over 2019.  Mass shootings are a tiny fraction of that 5,000.  Substantially a product of a dramatic decrease in policing owing to national and local policy choices.  A substantially avoidable crisis.

American January 6th - A made up crisis.  A riot occurred.  The FBI and other intelligence agencies have already investigated and found no insurgency and no conspiracy.

American collapsing abortion rights - A made up crisis.  Abortion rights are based on state laws which almost everywhere are more relaxed than those in Europe.  The adjustment from faulty federal law to new state law will be messy but in no reasonable way to be viewed as a disappearance of rights.

Fisher's list is revealing.  It is almost entirely non-crises, or crises which could have been avoided through good governance.  And they about things which Democrats hold dear.  It seems like these are crises because they threaten Democrat policies rather than because they are real and demonstrable crises.

Fisher spends time on showing how the empirical reality is that the world and the US are getting better and better.  He offers the not unreasonable hypotheses that people don't notice because the improvements have been incremental.  He gives a head nod to always connected news and social media sites as a source of anxiety.

He notes the well-established fact that optimism is prevalent in the developing world and in shorter supply among developed nations.  If you are on top, it is hard to maintain the distance between yourself and improvers, even if their increased prosperity takes nothing from yours.

He tries to make a stalled economic fortunes argument.

Polls in the United States have found that people who see little hope of personal financial advancement also feel the country as a whole is getting worse, and disapprove of political leaders. The erosion of secure working-class jobs, as manufacturing work flees overseas and labor unions wither, is thought to have precipitated much of the West’s populist backlash.

But this is very recent.  Up through 2019, there was a lot of economic optimism, especially among minorities who were seeing the biggest increases in employment and household incomes ever.  The loss of personal financial hope is again very much a product of policies from 2020 onwards.  Fisher is lamenting the public's response to Democrat policies.

So far though, compared to his innumerate NYT brethren, Fisher is making serious empirical arguments, hedging a little with the framing sometimes, and omissions here and there, but largely solid.

The next part is what I find most interesting because it is both debatable as well as because the framing is so critical.  His argument is, I think, narrowly true, but directionally wrong.

For seven decades, the number of countries considered democratic grew. The average quality of these democracies — the fairness of elections, the rule of law and the like — also improved steadily.

That rise began to slow about 20 years ago, though. And beginning five or six years ago, researchers have since found, the number of democracies in the world has shrunk for the first time since World War II.

Democracy indices are notoriously slippery but Our World In Data does a decent job.  From 1970, fifty years ago, there has been a massive democratization of the world.  South America moved away from its model of strongman dictatorships and military juntas.  With the fall of the Soviet Union many subject countries and client states slowly converged towards democracy.  Even Africa and much of Asia democratized, especially between 1985 and 2005.  

But after those big waves arising from development and from post-communism, there has definitely been some ebbing and flowing.  Many countries are democracies but have shown an inclination towards authoritarian parties.  The high tide was probably 2005-2010.  We now have far more countries and far more people living under democracy than we did in 1970 but the average health of those democracies after 2010 has been a little dicier.  

I think we are probably reasonably aligned on this point though I think he over-eggs it somewhat.

Here is, to me the interesting part.  He derives a substantially different conclusion than do I.

These may be especially severe cases, but they are vanguards to a global trend. So is the United States, which democracy monitors broadly describe as experiencing a sustained erosion.

Because wealthier countries are likelier to be democratic, they are likelier to be afflicted by this trend. This may speak to rising pessimism in those countries.

As I said democracy indices are notoriously slippery and particularly in short time increments.  There is a tendency towards incumbency bias, democracy is in danger when incumbents are turfed out.

Which is what is happening across the developed world.  France's Yellow vests, in the Netherlands, in Germany, in Spain, in Italy, in Britain, in the US, etc.  Everywhere people are evincing dissatisfaction with the status quo and with the direction of their country.  Sometimes it is targeted at the incumbents, sometimes it is targeted at the establishment parties at large.  

Fisher is convinced, without evidence, that there was an insurrection on January 6th, 2020.  He is also convinced that the electoral challenges Democrats face in the run-up to midterms in 2022 are also a grave threat to American democracy.

Fisher's conclusion is a bit psycho-babble and in a large part excuse-making for the very current sense of national unsettlement.  That unsettlement is clearly due to Federal policy choices in the past two years, exacerbated by bad urban policy choices as well.  Since the Federal government (Executive branch and both houses of Congress), as well as almost uniformly all major cities are Democrat, it is not unreasonable that all that citizen disgruntlement should be directed towards those in political power.

Somehow, that is not the conclusion Fisher reaches.

For Americans who got to spend most of their lives in a safe and stable society, the shift to seemingly unending political crisis is destabilizing. It can make the world feel darker and more alarming, which might make far-off events feel scarier or more upsetting, too.

People naturally look for patterns in the world. Experience something once, especially if that experience is traumatic, and you will start to see it everywhere.

For Americans suddenly attuned to, say, domestic threats of election theft or civil unrest, similar events playing out overseas will suddenly feel much more visceral.

That can add up. A handful of far-off crises that Americans might’ve dismissed as unrelated to one another 30 years ago can, today, seem connected. It might even feel like proof of a global breakdown.

It's not bad governance that is to blame.  Americans just had it too good for too long.  

Not a good conclusion but Fisher gives it a solid college try.  I respect that he has marshalled a lot of empirical evidence to support his argument.  He has been artful in his framing to get to the conclusion he wanted to reach, even if it is an ill-supported conclusion.  He did a lot better job than I have seen any other NYT journalist do in a long time.  

But he's still wrong.