
This Is How Fast America Changes Its Mind - dataminer
http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-pace-of-social-change/
======
twoodfin
_The case comes amid a wave of gay marriage legalization..._

This phrase, and the title, mask the fact that in the majority of states same-
sex marriage legalization came from court cases, not through legislation or
referenda[1].

"America", broadly construed, is quickly changing its mind, too, but this
"wave" is more a product of judicial thought than public opinion.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-
sex_marriage_in_the_United...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-
sex_marriage_in_the_United_States#States_that_fully_license_and_recognize_same-
sex_marriage)

~~~
saraid216
In America, there's no longer much legitimacy placed in legislation; we
generally look to the judiciary for any actual governing thought these days.

Legislation is mostly seen as a stepping stone; it's not until it's been
tested in court that a law is really valid.

~~~
talmand
I find that sort of statement deeply disturbing.

~~~
saraid216
Well, yes. So do I. That's why I felt I had to say it.

~~~
talmand
Sorry, I got that. I just didn't reflect it in my response.

------
smackfu
They probably should have left abortion out, since it's not clear that
American ever changed their mind on that. Over the last 20 years, it's still
roughly 50/50.

[http://www.gallup.com/poll/170249/split-abortion-pro-
choice-...](http://www.gallup.com/poll/170249/split-abortion-pro-choice-pro-
life.aspx)

~~~
wwweston
They should have indeed left it out. Abortion is a different (and tougher)
issue because there isn't just a preconception/prejudice at work -- there are
multiple important values in tension with one another.

------
joshuaheard
Abortion and gay marriage were changed in the courts, so I don't know if that
counts as America changing its mind. That being said, I would posit that any
increase in the rate of America changing its mind is due to the increase in
the rate of information exchange due to advances in communication technology.

~~~
wanderingstan
Gay marriage has been steadily gaining in public approval, as seen here:
[http://www.gallup.com/poll/169640/sex-marriage-support-
reach...](http://www.gallup.com/poll/169640/sex-marriage-support-reaches-new-
high.aspx)

This is indeed America changing its mind.

You're right that there is not a direct connection between America's laws and
America's minds, but the article was clear in what it was reporting.

It would have been interesting to also include information on public polling
of these issues, but this information doesn't exist beyond a few decades ago.

~~~
kelukelugames
There is a chart with "age" on the y axis and "year for the poll" on the x
axis. The delta is also shown for each group from 1996 to 2014.

[http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Prod...](http://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/tbpelkodp0spw8exj7rmuw.png)

I wish there thy y axis was birth year. That way we can see if older people
are actually changing their minds instead of just aging into the next bracket.

------
lambda
Hmm. This seems to focus on a few issues that neatly fall into a sense of
"progress" in social change, in which something changes in a number of states
culminating in a Supreme Court decision that causes that change to affect the
entire country.

However, it ignores some issues that don't fall into such a pattern. For
example, the issue of teaching evolution vs. creation in public schools; where
teaching about evolution has never been questioned (as far as I know) in some
states, while others have had laws on the books, and there is continuing
pressure and laws that offer limited "workarounds" of the supreme court
decision in order to promote "teaching the controversy", so it's not really a
clear cut case of progress.

Another that isn't covered is capital punishment; some states have never had
capital punishment, some have repealed it over the years, and the Supreme
Court briefly suspended it nationwide but it was reinstated later, and many
states still practice it.

Abortion, which is used as an example in this article, faces a similar
problems as teaching of evolution. While abortion was allowed nationwide by
Roe v. Wade, states are slowly introducing laws that restrict it so heavily
that it's not available to a large fraction of people who need it. The turning
point nationwide is being slowly turned back by laws that skirt the existing
precedent.

It seems like picking these couple of issues, to show how "it may happen
again", is a bit disingenuous without also covering major cases in which
change hasn't followed this pattern, or has backslid since the original
change.

~~~
titanomachy
I don't think capital punishment and creationism follow the same trend as
women's suffrage, interracial marriage, etc. The issues in the article started
with low state-level support and rapidly gained acceptance across the country;
at some threshold the Supreme Court stepped in and said "this is now accepted
as law nation-wide.

I don't have the numbers to back this up, but I don't think creation teaching
and capital punishment started at a low level of support and rapidly ramped up
across many states. State-level legislation on creation-teaching is limited to
a few conservative areas. Capital punishment has been around forever and
support for it has fluctuated with the times.

I agree that abortion doesn't really fit the pattern of the other issues in
the article, though. Supreme court approval seems to have come prematurely in
that case.

------
amelius
The gun laws are missing from these graphs.

How fast would America change its mind about them?

~~~
meritt
This graph is focused on expansion of rights, not retraction.

~~~
bmelton
With a few exceptions, gun rights have, for the most part, expanded over the
past couple of decades. More and more states are adopting some form of carry
laws, and to my knowledge, those that have expanded gun rights have never
reversed. The one notable exception that comes to mind is Colorado, with its
ammo capacity ban, but even that's sort of up in the air at the moment.

~~~
hga
There's a new line of attack you might not be aware of. Well protected by his
own armed security Bloomberg is now the most effective gun controller (he and
his people engineered the Colorado debacle, and gerrymandering is likely to
keep it all), and he's pursuing deceptive transfer laws through state
initiatives, with initial success in Washington state.

These laws ostensibly regulate private transfers, but in the fine print are
aimed directly at hindering the creation of new gun owners and otherwise
trapping us in flypaper, by criminalizing the lending and renting of guns even
under supervision. The Washington state officials say they won't enforce that
part of the law, but....

Next up are Nevada and Oregon, last time I heard about this.

~~~
bmelton
The Oregon situation was particularly questionable, and I was saddened that
I591 was narrowly defeated.

The chaos agent in me was hoping that 591 would pass alongside 594, to see how
the state would have to reconcile directly conflicting bills. Sadly, 591 was
massively outspent.

~~~
hga
When you're fighting the 13th wealthiest person _in the world_ , who can also
get other billionaires to join in at least for Washington state (note to
others, there were Washington state initiatives), you're going to get outspent
heavily. We haven't yet figured out how to counter him, and like e.g. the
BATFE, might not until there are enough atrocities to wake people up to the
threat. Which would require an anti-gun state's people passing one of these,
and the state then using it as more flypaper. Less likely with less viciously
anti-gun states like Washington.

~~~
bmelton
On the up-side, at least you haven't run into the "confiscation through
anonymous tip line" issue, yet.

I am hopeful that, eventually, for-cost registration schemes will eventually
go the way of the dodo, as I personally equate them to a poll tax, so either
the laws will be rescinded on those grounds, or FFL fees will be eliminated,
which should ameliorate at least some of the issue.

I'm a long way from Washington. Is the current interpretation of I594 being
applied to temporary transfers? I'm in Maryland, and we have a similar
transfer limitation, but were at least able to press the AG into issuing a
formal opinion on some aspects of the law, though the specifics of it
currently elude me.

~~~
hga
I'm in Missouri, so paradise compared to Maryland, and initiative wise better
than Washington. Heck, our recent constitutional amendment on the subject
([http://ballotpedia.org/Missouri_Right_to_Bear_Arms,_Amendmen...](http://ballotpedia.org/Missouri_Right_to_Bear_Arms,_Amendment_5_%28August_2014%29))
ought to make such an initiative impossible, but the one very bad thing about
the state is our courts. So I'm not following Washington state closely, but as
I recall there was an "on pain of lawsuit" AG opinion/pledge not to prosecute
on temporary transfers. Or see Colorado where the authorities promised not to
prosecute folks who left their guns with friends during the nasty flooding not
long after the Bloomberg laws passed.

But of course each state's enforcement will be different, and subject to
change. The really nasty states didn't start out enforcing their laws in truly
nasty ways until the _zeitgeist_ changed enough and laws aimed for blacks and
disfavored immigrants were applied to all but the anointed.

------
intopieces
The problem with the analysis re: Marijuana is that it appears to leave out
the anti-drug treaties we've signed with other UN members. As I understand it,
federal legalization is a nonstarter w/r/t that agreement.

~~~
sanderjd
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding has always been that the US has
been the one pushing for those treaties. If that is the case, it seems
possible that if anti-Marijuana policy loses support here, its support in the
UN won't be so strong.

~~~
unics
The US has been behind it and putting mountains of cash along with it to enact
the treaties.

------
andrewla
This is an interesting analysis, but it would be more interesting to look at
the generalization of the trends, rather than the cherry-picked examples of
"interesting" policies.

Specifically, take all US Supreme Court decisions that resulted in the
invalidation of state legislature, and track what the trend looked like in
terms of historical trends of states that conformed to the decision before the
decision was made.

Is anyone aware of any data sources that would have this information in some
form? The complexity seems to be that if a law was struck down by a state in
1956, and the Supreme Court made a decision relative to that law in 1960,
determining whether the law would have been struck down could be more subtle
than a binary yes/no. But even having this data in a basic form, measuring
state legislature activity leading up to a relevant federal court decision,
could at least give an indication of how long issues take to gain some
momentum.

This ignores the other axes; like state judicial decisions being overridden or
validated by the federal level, or other variants, but still would be very
interesting.

------
amyjess
I love the data, but the animations are just obnoxious.

~~~
metamet
You only see them once, so I didn't think it was that bad.

~~~
amyjess
You see them every time you scroll.

Want to go back and look at something again? You now have to wait for the
animation.

This is objectively bad design. I want static PNGs or SVGs, not JavaScript.

Also, that site got in my shitlist for taking control of my keyboard. I prefer
to use the arrow keys to scroll one line at a time, and the stupid JavaScript
on that site made that impossible.

Actually, I'd be happiest if that entire page was just a single static .svg
file.

~~~
classicsnoot
Every point you have made here is subjective.

~~~
rayiner
No, it's not. The animations add no information that isn't conveyed by the
graph already--it just creates a delay before you can see the information. And
changing the behavior of core functionality like the keyboard/pointer will
confuse people, and on this page there is nothing to be gained in return.

~~~
classicsnoot
I too hate when i don't get to use my computer as i see fit, but you have to
admit that every point you have mad, previous to the comment i am responding
to now, has been made from a personal, preferential point of view. I am not
saying i do not agree with; i am saying its just, like, your opinion man.

~~~
rayiner
You can make objective conclusions about subjective preferences. Most users do
not want to wait to see information being presented to them. Nor do most users
want to deal with websites that randomly change how their computer works. The
distribution of subjective preferences can make design decisions objectively
bad.

~~~
classicsnoot
fair point

------
acconrad
While the speed of change is good for these issues, could that speed be
detrimental in other scenarios? For example, what if this increases the speed
to reverse good policies, such as carbon emissions taxes? What if the speed of
change from political influence of much larger entities (corporations) also
increases the influence to reverse things even faster?

~~~
mikeash
The title is misleading. "America Changes Its Mind" sounds like it's talking
about people's opinions, but the data presented is about legal status at the
state level. This is misleading because there's a strong discontinuity there,
and the speed at which states legalize something doesn't have to be related to
the speed at which opinions change.

For an extreme case, consider some issue where opinions are evenly spread out
among all the states, and it _very_ slowly changes, at a rate of, say, 0.5%
per year. It would take two centuries to go from all-against to all-for at
that rate, yet once you pass 50% you'd expect all the states to switch over
more or less simultaneously.

The real world isn't so clean, but the same idea applies. Looking at the data,
the recent examples of marijuana and same-sex marriage are changing faster, at
more like 1-2%/year, but you can still see that the rate of change in state
legalization is way faster than the rate of change of public opinion, as one
would generally expect.

A couple of random pages with relevant poll data:

[http://www.gallup.com/poll/117328/marriage.aspx](http://www.gallup.com/poll/117328/marriage.aspx)

[http://www.gallup.com/poll/1657/illegal-
drugs.aspx](http://www.gallup.com/poll/1657/illegal-drugs.aspx)

~~~
fizbin
And looking at something already settled by the courts, it's also interesting
to compare the article's chart on the legal status of interracial marriage
with public opinion data:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage_in_the_Uni...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Public_opinion_of_interracial_marriage_in_the_United_States.png)

Note that the "Approve" line doesn't cross the "Disapprove" line until the
mid-1980s, long after the USSC had spoken. With same-sex marriage on the other
hand, the "Approve"/"Disapprove" cross-over happened a bit over three years
ago and the USSC has yet to speak as definitively as it did in _Loving v.
Virginia_.

(One could argue that in invalidating most of DOMA, the USSC has already
spoken strongly - if not definitively - in favor of same-sex marriage, and
therefore that we should use that decision when making analogies to _Loving_.
I'm not sure about that.)

~~~
dragonwriter
> One could argue that in invalidating most of DOMA, the USSC has already
> spoken strongly - if not definitively - in favor of same-sex marriage, and
> therefore that we should use that decision when making analogies to Loving

Not very convincingly, because it did not hold that States cannot deny equal
marriage, which would be the equivalent of the holding in Loving.

~~~
tomjen3
That was only because it wasn't the question put in front of the court (and
the people involved wouldn't have standing to sue if it was, because they had
been married of years).

~~~
dragonwriter
> That was only because it wasn't the question put in front of the court

The "only" here is pure speculation. The _fact_ is that the US Supreme Court
has not issued a _Loving_ like decision on same-sex marriage, and that same-
sex marriage remains illegal in many states because of that. Therefore, it
does not make sense to treat _United States v. Windsor_ (which struck down
Section 3 of DOMA) as an equivalent, in the domain of same-sex marriage, to
_Loving v. Virginia_ , in the domain of interracial marriage.

The federal government never did something like DOMA on interracial marriage
(there was, relevant to Section 3, no _federal_ policy against recognizing
state-sanctioned interracial marriages), so _Windsor_ naturally has no
parallel among the interracial marriage cases.

------
jfmercer
It is worth noting that the first two issues were settled via Constitutional
Amendments, whereas the second two were decided by the Supreme Court. If I
were a betting man, I would bet that the SSM issue will also be settled by the
Supreme Court, not by Constitutional Amendment.

It seems that, as a nation, we Americans can no longer settle divisive
national (and therefore Federal) issues via the democratic process envisioned
by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution: amendment of the Constitution
itself. Instead, we leave ultimate decision making power in the hands of the
Supreme Court.

Former Chief Justice Earl Warren expressed concern that if the Court's power
became too widespread, America would have, instead of democracy, kritarchy:
rule by judges.

~~~
jfmercer
Correction: It was Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed [1], not Chief Justice
Earl Warren [2], who "expressed concern that if the Court's power became too
widespread, America would have, instead of democracy, kritarchy". He did so in
late July 1953, specifically regarding the not-yet-decided Brown v. Board of
Eduction decision of May 1953, in a discussion with one of his law clerks,
John David Fassett. He confronted Fassett with the question, "Are you one of
those people who believes in krytocracy?" Apparently, he discussed this
question at length with his law clerks in the months leading up to the Brown
decision. I could find no evidence that he spoke with his Supreme Court
colleagues about it, but, then again, I've done no real research.

Also according to Fassett, in a February 1953 memo--three months before the
Brown ruling--fellow Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson [3] used the term "a
ruthless use of judicial power." Although Jackson did not use the term
"krytocracy," Fassett commented, "That was sort of Justice Reed's feeling too
--his krytocracy thought was the same thing."

I found all of the above in this article [4].

Finally, it is worth noting that, regardless of certain Justices' concerns
about the Constitutional limits of judicial authority, the Brown v. Board of
Education ruling overturned Plessy v. Ferguson by a unanimous vote, 9-0.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Forman_Reed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Forman_Reed)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Warren](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Warren)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Jackson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Jackson)

[4] [http://www.roberthjackson.org/files/theman/speeches-
articles...](http://www.roberthjackson.org/files/theman/speeches-
articles/files/articles/15fc4e650c204cfe9e7170bc4428d890.pdf)

------
silverlight
It's incredible to see how apparently progressive Kansas used to be. As
someone who lives here now, I always assume we're going to be one of the
slowest (I guess "most conservative" might be a nicer way of putting it)
states to adapt to social change. But I guess I really would have liked the
Kansas that existed before the middle of the last century...

------
glial
From the last graph, it seems like the rate of change (if that's what you'd
call it) is closely related to the time period in which the change is taking
place, or at least the time period in which the change started. I wonder if
this has to do with a general increase in malleability of (judicial) opinions,
or faster information transfer, or something else.

~~~
mokus
Perhaps it's a sampling bias - a slow change that started recently may not yet
have been detected to be included on the graph (or may not have enough
reliable data to support inclusion).

~~~
glial
True, that's an interesting point.

------
serve_yay
"In any event, the sloppy and fatuous nature of American good will can never
be relied upon to deal with hard problems. These have been dealt with, when
they have been dealt with at all, out of necessity — and in political terms,
anyway, necessity means concessions made in order to stay on top." \- Daniel
Baldwin

------
netcan
On a long enough timescale (which can still sometime be pretty short) stuff
seems to move together. The centre. The fringes. The legislation, the courts.
And of course, public opinion.

Democracy form a certain perspective is built in to us. Or at least people
(demo) have in built mechanisms for moving together.

------
qq66
The flip-flop is not as fast as the law makes it seem, because a law against X
only gets passed when X seems like a real possibility. Nobody was passing gay
marriage bans in 1850 -- only when it seemed imminent did people try to fight
it.

------
Terr_
They should scale each state by its population, or you overemphasize the
(ostensible) opinions of the people in very small states.

------
Kiro
OT but took a while before I realised the table was actually a representation
of a map and not according to some other taxonomy.

