Disturbing evidence of instances of cultural revealed preferences

A few days ago I pointed out Brad Heath's tweet.

For 4 hours, more people were searching for info on our future leaders on Google than for porn. We did it, America. pic.twitter.com/z9m8AAjwQN

— Brad Heath (@bradheath) September 27, 2016

It occurred to me, as a matter of perspective, to question what the long term trend was. Well, I guess it is reassuring that human nature is constant versus intellectual faddishness and elections. Here is the relative interest of the population in porn versus the candidates for president.




For yet more perspective, what is the relative interest of Americans in the past year in the election, in the candidates Trump and Clinton, in porn and in social justice?

As you can see, no-one is interested in social justice and everyone is interested in porn.




To be fair, I tried porn with several other topics I thought might be stronger contenders such as freedom, mom, crime, economy and movies.

Mom is a distant contender. Movies are close run with porn, probably because people might be searching for porn movies. Crime and the economy are flatlined.




OK, let's take base urges out of the equation. What are people of the mind focused on? Is it freedom, the economy, crime, Black Lives Matter, social justice? What are the relative degrees of concern?




Freedom and Crime march hand-in-hand, which sort of makes sense as you could argue that they are almost opposite faces of the coin of justice. The Economy occupies at least a respectable amount of mindshare. BLM and Social Justice not so much, running at 1-5% of the other concerns.

A final question prompted by that crime/freedom dichotomy. The mainstream media, skewing left, has had the tendency to describe events in Ferguson, Charlotte and elsewhere as protests whereas most people describe them as riots. What does Google Trends say?




It looks like in the normal course of things, people describe civil disturbance as riots. When the MSM (and their preferred languaging) brings a spotlight on particular events such as the University of Missouri disturbances in November 2015, the disturbances when the five police officers were ambushed in Dallas (July 2016), and the Charlotte disturbances in September 2016, it is the MSM language of protests which dominates. Speculative and suggestive but not more than that.