Wages stagnated since 1980. Rents doubling every decade. Dead-end service jobs. Unpayable student loans. Social Security payments going to IOUs instead of retirements. Lying politicians and chief corporate officers making bank on the backs of the working poor. 30% credit card interest. Delaying childbirth to make rent until it's too late. GMO and processed foods poisoning giving an obese population autoimmune disease. Republicans gerrymandering elections. Democrats supporting neoliberal colonialism. A burning natural world set to end between 2050 and 2100.
The list of threats to anyone younger than 50 is so infinite and growing so rapidly that social media is the new drugs in the endless war on youth culture. You know, the one that inconveniently lists the problems and solutions only to be told over and over again to sacrifice their dreams and get serious and study and get a job, that it's all in their heads.
The idea that any of these would normally worry an average young teen is hilarious to me. I grew up during cold war, USSR collapse, multiple wars in the region. At no point was I (or any of my peers to my knowledge) gravely concerned for our future. Because none of us yet had any idea what our normal future is supposed to look like.
The only way these mild horrors get into children heads is, again, through social media.
I grew up in approximately the same period and grim possibilities, along with local economic problems to a lesser extent, were certainly a concern for me and my peers. Other risks existed as well, kids in my neighborhood school died of drug overdoses, accidents, and medical problems. Others had to deal with poverty, abusive parents, or a family member behind bars. Back then middle aged people blamed television your any despondency among youth. I imagine previous generations blamed radio and newspapers.
The only way these mild horrors get into children heads is, again, through social media.
School shootings are such a regular feature of American life that every school holds safety drills for the risk. I don't think all children get to enjoy the same sort of carefree bubble that you did. Media certainly amplifies the awareness of problems but many kids are far better informed than many adults admit, or want to be themselves.
> School shootings are such a regular feature of American life […] Media certainly amplifies the awareness of problems
Case in point: in 2022 there were 51 school shootings [1]. Certainly more than I’d like there to be, but in a nation with about 129,000 schools [2], I certainly wouldn’t call them a “regular feature”. If students are in school for 18 years, let’s say, to include pre-K, Kindergarten, and an undergrad degree, and the number of school shootings stayed steady for that whole time, they’d be in school for 918 school shootings, or a 0.7% chance that they go to a school which experiences a school shooting. Not common.
Yet the media reports them heavily, and that causes fear, and that fear is what drives schools to hold safety drills regularly to prepare students for these situations.
People are getting confused by the number posted which is badly distorting the discussion. 51 is NOT the number of intentional massacres of students or staff. It is the number of shootings on school grounds of all types _including accidents_.
Here is a real example from the list: "A student was shot and injured when a sheriff’s deputy’s gun accidentally discharged in a classroom during a law enforcement vocational training."
Another: "A male student shot and injured an 18-year-old student. Police say the shooting appeared to have resulted from a dispute between the students."
Read down the list and most are accidents, or take place outside the school (e.g. in parking lots) between 2-3 people. These are accidents and individual beefs between students. They have nothing to do with mass murder. They don't involve anyone outside the students concerned. You could be a student at a school during one of these "school shootings" and not even be aware of it.
It's why the _total_ number of deaths is only 40 (!) from those 51 shootings. 8 of those were teachers so the total number of student deaths was only 32.
"School shootings" in the sense of intentional mass murders are nearly nonexistent. The overwhelming majority of damage related to these events is caused by the media and institutions irresponsibly generating fear that creates real psychological problems and distorts decision-making. The fact that so many here on all sides seem to think that intentional massacres could possibly be happening on a weekly basis in America is a testament to the distortionary power of the media. The reality is simply nothing like that.
The fact that so many here on all sides seem to think that intentional massacres could possibly be happening on a weekly basis in America is a testament to the distortionary power of the media
Nobody is making that argument or getting confused by these numbers. The Edweek figures were linked by someone complaining about media influence.
"School shootings" in the sense of intentional mass murders are nearly nonexistent.
There are only a few such incidents each year but that is far from 'nearly nonexistent'. Perhaps you'd care to quantify what you consider to be the acceptable number of deaths from shooting sprees?
Every year in America 900 kids age 0-19 die from drowning.
3,058 teenagers ages 13-19 die in motor vehicle crashes. [0]
In a country of 332,000,000 people, if 32 deaths stemming from parking lot arguments seems to require a society-wide blanket of fear and dramatic political anger, you are just badly miscalibrated. You're thinking like it's a village, which is natural, but if you want to discuss broad issues at scale, you need to put on your adult-style numerical/comparative thinking hat. "One is too many" sloganeering is simply a path to stupidity at scale. It distracts badly from things that actually matter and we end up way worse off in every respect.
Also worth noting that based on these data it is more or less completely true that a random student doesn't need to worry about school shootings for their own personal safety at all. If you don't choose to get involved in armed parking lot arguments over girls or respect or drugs, you'll be fine. (However, please wear your seatbelt and choose your driver carefully!)
But in other developed countries, kids still die from car crashes and swimming pools. It’s less of a “one is too many” argument for me and more a question of “if everyone else is able to get this right, how the hell are we getting it so wrong?” Looking around the world really drives the point home that these are avoidable fatalities.
That's a great argument for policymaking, but that's not what we're talking about -- we're talking about whether the children themselves should be worried sick, literally, about it. They clearly should not. Obesity and car wrecks will kill far more of them, and dealing with those issues is far more preventable. Smash the soda vending machines in their lunchrooms, and you'll save far more lives, plus avoid traumatizing the vast majority needlessly.
Once again, there is a significant qualitative difference between accidental or medically-related deaths, and someone actively attempting to end your life. Failing to acknowledge this is a significantly larger cognitive blind spot than the frequentist posters above are complaining about.
It's not like there is a complete lack of advocacy about auto safety or school diets. You might remember that during the Obama administration there was a campaign for more healthy school lunches, preferring vegetables and fruits over salty/sugary snacks, and extolling the value of exercise.
My original comment mentioned school shootings as an example of an issue that teens are understandably concerned about, because while the probability is low it's also a fundamentally horrific situation. I'm rather surprised by the rhetorical contortions so many people are putting themselves through to argue that having several massacres a year just in schools is nothing to worry about.
It's something that something should be done about, but not something that should be worried about. There is a fine distinction. Take whatever action is in your control to make the situation better, then, having done that, do not keep ruminating on it pointlessly when it's just not very likely to happen to you.
Stop lumping people who don't want to fret about it in with people who actually think the gun status quo is OK. Of course it's not OK, and should change. That doesn't mean we need to obsess over it. It just happens to be an issue that is very effective at driving media engagement.
By all means, vote and write to your lawmakers -- this actually drives change. But don't waste much time doomscrolling and ruminating -- this does not help, and only helps enhance media company shareholder bottom lines.
The point is that kids these days are exposed to constant encouragement to ruminate, ruminate, ruminate. This doesn't translate into actual action, it just translates into anxiety and depression, and increased dividends for media companies.
Ah, I see we’ve talked past each other. I was speaking to the policy-making angle. I don’t have any good ideas about how to get the policy issues fixed while avoiding scaring the kids. I doubt that’s even possible, tbh.
But yes, let’s smash the soda vending machines as well!
How many of those countries have a democratic republic style of governance like the US? Perhaps it is more dangerous to live in a freedom-loving democratic republic, but the number of people clamoring to get into the US vs the lack of people trying to leave tells us there's value in the risk.
That's not to say we shouldn't strive to get those numbers down, but personally I think we should be focusing on mental health, of which social media has a huge impact. Banning the weapon - as is the common suggestion - is treating the symptom, not the cause.
But we also place too much emphasis on school shootings when, as demonstrated, other things are far more dangerous to kids.
I understand the motivation behind this argument, but I haven’t seen compelling evidence that mental health issues are the “cause” and weapon availability is the “symptom.” There are mentally ill people all over the world, many of whom attempt to commit mass murder but are not as successful as they are in the US. Try killing four people in a row with a knife and you’ll have a much more difficult time. Contrast that to my city, where a fourth person was accidentally killed because they were in proximity of a gunfight a few years ago (in a decent part of town too. Scary.) As large as it is, the same will never happen in Tokyo.
Strictly speaking on numbers though, the evidence I’ve seen weighs heavily on the side of weapon availability being the root cause, with countries and states with fewer weapon restrictions having more weapons-related deaths per capita. All this talk of “weapons aren’t the problem, people are” therefore strikes me as disingenuous.
I thoroughly believe in keeping rifles around because hunting is vital to my community. I remain unconvinced that handguns and automatic weapons are at all important to protecting US democracy (though I’m certainly willing to be disproven).
Statistics from places like Canada or Switzerland (which have and historically had lots of guns per capita) demonstrate that weapon availability itself does not cause such violence.
You compared Japan's rate of violence to America's, and conclude that America's policies must be the cause. This is wrong because you're comparing completely different groups of people. What you should be doing is to compare Japan's rate of violence to the rates among Japanese immigrants in America.
If you want to figure out which variable matters you need to isolate that variable. And if you do, you'll discover that results come from the people much more than the policy.
The difference between America and these places is that America harbors specific subcultures which glorify violence, gangs, drug trade, criminality and generally antisocial behaviour. If you're not involved in these subcultures, or in close proximity to them, you really have nothing to worry about. Hyper-rare stray bullet incidents "in a decent part of town" don't change this. (I recognize that some people can't escape these subcultures and suffer from them, but again, this is a subcultural problem).
Statistic don’t affirm or deny impact. They are facts. The rest is left to you. Why are you trying to exaggerate its impact by suggesting we suppress statistics (facts)?
It’s a political issue not mired in reality but instead in a desire to affect policy. They do it because it works. This discussion is an example of it’d effectiveness. People who will look to the statistics for context in other situations are quick to dismiss them here. There is no rational reason to be anymore concerned about school shootings in America than any other cause of premature death in children and quite a bit of reason to be less concerned. If you want to protect your children focus on drugs, cars, and military recruiters.
You are crazy. No healthy society has school shootings and it has no place in it. To accept anything less then a healthy and violence & gunfree place our kids can grow up in is insane.
It reminds me of the song, "If you tolerate this, then your children will be next." That said, I think prescription drugs are probably more part of the problem than is widely acknowledged.
I'm sure you mean well, but do you understand that even one school shooting in a year should be unthinkable? Do you not understand that ever child in this country is acutely aware of the existence of school shootings and for many of them it absolutely is a cause of significant anxiety?
Yes, I understand. Do you not understand that every child in this country is acutely aware of the existence of school shootings, and for many of them it absolutely is a cause of significant anxiety, because the media has shown them school shootings, and has told them to be anxious about them? Look at death statistics for young people [1]. There are many causes of death which children are not scared of, despite them being far more likely to occur than school shootings.
You’re arguing 0.7% chance of being in a school shooting shouldn’t worry a teenager, for other commentators that’s just a mind-blowing percentage. I think that’s a cultural distinction, since if that was the case, most of people I know would do anything that’s possible to avoid their child to beat that statistic.
Mental health problems are a far greater threat though, and have dramatically increased in the last decade, perhaps partly because it's so easy to worry about big problems outside of their control. The probability of being affected by suicide is significantly more than being of being shot in a school shooting.
We can do two things at once. We can both, within our control, advocate for making school shootings less common, making climate change less problematic, etc, etc, while also try to actually worry about these things less, and not spread a culture of constant fear and disempowerment. Research who makes sense to vote for, what letters to write to lawmakers, and do that. Then, with the rest of your 364 days of the year, relax and focus on what you can control and having a good time.
Agreed in spirit, but fortunately school shootings isn’t a problem in the country I reside. Mental health though is definitely a huge issue though, but I’m not sure how we can fix that. Remembering myself as a teen, anything that was told to be “bad at that age” was a call for experimentation.
That's a cumulative 0.7% chance over 18 (or 22?) years, or 0.035%-ish per year. Not only is that not the right way to think about things even if shootings were random, the numbers aren't correct.
The Edweek numbers are doing what they were designed to do, which is mislead you and parent / grandparent. They are advocacy numbers, deliberately distorted to make things seem as bad as possible in order to drive clicks to further their political agenda. Which is exactly what's happening here!
You could read the edweek links, or the comment by jlawson, or you could do some math yourself. School shootings (in the meaningful sense, not the BS sense that edweek uses--shootings where a student is killed, which is what people really mean) are vanishingly rare in the U.S., a nation of 300,000,000 people. "Preparing" for them is the result of innumeracy, anxiety, fear-mongering, profitability of reporting on them, and lack of critical thinking skills in the U.S. population. The risk is so small that counteracting basically any other risk is a better use of resources. Teach kids about drugs. Teach them about driving safely. Teach them about how to be safe around pools, and how to swim. Teach them to eat healthy. Build them some exercise habits.
An hour invested in any of these activities is much better-spent than an hour of hand-wringing about an almost nonexistent risk of your kid being shot in school in the U.S. It's simple math.
I still think it’s a very cultural thing, since even 0.01% per year would be a huge number for your child to be in a school shooting. Maybe it’s an “outsider perspective”, but school shootings is not even a talking point in most of the places outside of US, thus anything that’s above 0.001% is a lot.
You can follow the edweek links to look at their data. It gives enough detail on any given incident for you to make your own call about whether it's included for political reasons or actually representative of the type of thing parents might fear.
Mother Jones maintains a database of mass shootings int the U.S. that would include school mass shootings, and they (to their great credit) use non-crazy criteria to determine what to include: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-...
This is an asinine argument, as a per-capita comparison with just about any other country shows. I'm not endorsing the Edweek numbers (which were brought into this discussion by someone asserting that school shootings are not a big deal).
I reject your argument that the media is to blame for hyping this. It is not normal to have people go into schools and start shooting children and teachers at random.
"It is not normal to have people go into schools and start shooting children and teachers at random."
We agree about that. If you mean "it's not okay" OR if you mean "it doesn't happen often".
Per capita comparisons aren't informative because you should care about the ABSOLUTE risk, rather than relative risk.
The ABSOLUTE risk (as I calculate in another comment, charitably about 0.000043% per year per student risk of being killed at school) is extremely small. The fact that it's 5x Greece's or something is irrelevant, because both are tiny. If you're trying to answer the question "How do I make sure my kid grows up happy and healthy?" worrying about school shootings is a waste of time. The kid has a 22x higher likelihood of being killed by drowning, focus on that. Or responsible drug use. Or physical fitness. Or driving safely (or not driving!).
Another basic thing you might want to keep in mind is: kids don't die much. Their overall risk of being killed from ANY cause is quite low. If you're worried about maximizing happiness or something, I wouldn't even worry too much about death. Sure, teach them to swim and when they're little make sure there's a lifeguard, but don't stress about them being killed unless you live in a war zone. (And I recognize that too many people live in war zones, and that's a real problem that real people have)
The average of 12 and 35 is 23.5, call it 24 kids on average murdered at school per year in the United States in recent years.
Note that this is not quite correct because it includes murders other than shootings, so it's a little inflated. But anyway.
Also note they say, "“At school” includes on the property of a functioning elementary or secondary school, on the way to or from regular sessions at school, and while attending or traveling to or from a school-sponsored event. In this indicator, the term “at school” is comparable in meaning to the term “school-associated." So again, it's going to be a little inflated because a bunch of these are going to be murders that people wouldn't intuitively understand to be a school shooting (e.g., kid murdered on the way to school in gang crossfire).
Okay, so 24 / 55,548,000 = 0.000043% chance per year of dying in a school shooting for a given U.S. child who attends school, all else being equal.
And of course, all else isn't equal. School shootings aren't random, and are much more common in the types of environments other shootings are common (poor cities, high % black populations, gangs, etc.).
For context, about 520 kids 5-19 die via drowning in the U.S. per year, making it about 22x the risk of being killed at school, all else being equal.
If 0.7% is accurate, then your kid's chances of dying in a car crash for any given year (1 in 93 = 1.07% [1]) is less than your chance of being in a school shooting during your entire childhood!
But the cultural framing (or lack thereof) makes the risk of driving in a car _feel_ like it's completely different
because the media has shown them school shootings, and has told them to be anxious about them
What argument are you making, that news outlets should not report this? I don't think much coaching is required for people to feel anxious about the idea getting shot by a homicidal maniac, even if the probability of a homicidal maniac showing up is relatively low. Applying your logic, we should avoid having reports or drills about it, and any additional loss of life from lack of preparedness should be offset against the aggregate increased happiness of prior obliviousness to the risk.
There are many causes of death which children are not scared of, despite them being far more likely to occur than school shootings.
Homicide infants and grade-school kids is disturbingly high up the list, although that includes domestic violence and other causes rather than only school shootings. But there is a high qualitative difference between dying because you did something stupid or because you are the unfortunate victim of disease or an inherited medical condition, vs someone actively trying to kill you.
Reporting about it in media causes more of them actually so yea. They should stop reporting on them.
Our states are as big as countries so they really should be considered separately. Just because Texas had one doesn't mean a child in California is suddenly in more danger. But actually reporting on it in news media does increase the likelihood because it puts the idea into a shooter's head.
To put it another way the school district I grew up in has never had a mass shooting. Is a child in that school district actually a 0.7% risk? Statistics can be skewed in any direction.
Far higher chance you’ll die on the way to school in a car accident.
School shootings are to the left what terrorist attacks are to the right —- fear-mongering over an ultimately rare and insignificant problem to drive desired policy change.
School shootings are genuinely frightful, not the subject of artificial fear-mongering.
This shallow and ideological analysis represents such a callous disregard for the trauma that any child would experience is they had to go through that.
My biggest fear is my kids dying in a car accident. I'd really prefer not to have to worry about school shootings on top of that, even if they are less likely.
Every single school has an "active shooter" drill. Some boneheaded admins even have a fake instigator come onto campus.
It's extremely disruptive to a child's psyche even if they are never unlucky enough to be at one of the weekly school shootings (which is a horrifically dystopic line that I'd never considered possible 20 years ago).
I bet you remember fire drills as a kid? Now they have those and Active Shooter Drills. It doesn't matter if actual shooting are rare if the fear of them is 'Drilled' into the kid's heads. I saw a paper that tried to measure the impact of first cell phone ownership on teen's mental health. What stood out the most was the whole cohort of teens were at fairly depressed emotional status, the ones impacted by early cell phone ownership even more so. We all here are relatively well educated and by extension fairly well off, we can't imagine what most of the generations following us are going through. I'm gen x so while the economic outlook was beginning to degrade there was still ample opportunity for simple hard work to succeed, that ladder has been pulled up to a large extent. We need a unified progressive taxation system, the current hodgepodge of regressive FICA tax and various credits, cliffs and the slew of tax breaks for investments have worsened class differences.
If you wonder why the rest of the world looks at USA funny, here's a counter point:
There are 9614 schools in Australia, and since 1992 there's been a total of six shootings resulting in a sum of 3 deaths. The deaths were at universities, so strictly speaking no children were lost. There have been no more school shootings since 2012, a year that took no lives.
By US standards we could have 3-4 shootings per year and that would be "not regular"?
Christ.
As a parent in Australia, youth violence with knives as well as distracted drivers concern me. Guns? Not even on my radar.
I would caution you still. Enjoy that you don’t have the blight we have in the US - but also be on guard against any forces towards such politics. It can happen anywhere with the wrong element propping up harmful policies entering the political sphere.
Why do you care so much about school shootings specifically? Shouldn’t be the goal to reduce overall child mortality? In which case it doesn’t make sense to focus on school shootings. They’re a rounding error in child mortality. Compare actual death rates between first-world countries to see what I mean; the US lags behind its Western peers, but the presence of school shootings, which is generally referred to as a decidedly American problem, is not nearly large enough to make an appreciable difference [1].
It's about empathy. Publicly stating that you are concerned about children being shot shows empathy and boosts one's image.
Publicly stating that you are concerned about child obesity is dangerous because it's implicitly stating that people are raising their children incorrectly and making poor decisions, which is more of an accusatory than empathetical statement.
The "think about the children" crowd don't actually want you to think about the children.
Maybe because I'm from one of the countries that doesn't have school shootings, so everytime I see that shit on the news I think I sure am relieved I can send my kid to school and not have that particular anxiety hanging over me. It's just so senseless. It's less about the raw numbers and more about how bloody horrific such an event is for everyone involved.
> I certainly wouldn’t call them a “regular feature”
More than one a week during the school year definitely makes them a regular feature. I can think of one in my entire lifetime in the UK.
Frankly it’s not clear what point you think you’re making, but I’m pretty sure it’s not the one you actually make. A close-to-1%-chance (I didn’t check your math) of experiencing a school shooting is now low, it is ABSURDLY high.
I'm generally in this camp of statistical importance when it comes to things like this, but the US is just about the only country where it happens this much. It shouldn't happen.
I would add that many of the "school shootings" counted in the edweek.org data are not what most people would understand to be school shootings. Things like Person A shoots Person B outside of a school, nobody dies, neither A or B are students, teachers, or otherwise affiliated with the school. Edweek is providing what are known as "advocacy numbers", in that they are stretching the truth as much as they possibly can.
Your kid's chances of being killed in a school shooting are about the same as being struck and killed by lightning (many more people are struck and survive).
> School shootings are such a regular feature of American life...
No they're not.
> ...that every school holds safety drills for the risk.
They also hold drills for tornado, fire, etc. These aren't regular parts of life either; they are emergencies for which people can prepare for the extremely rare chance it actually happens.
We could debate the utility or practical implementation of active shooter drills compared to fire drills, but just waving your hands saying they are injecting horrors into children's heads is overblown. Most kids just find them a waste of time. Just like fire drills.
If you took all school shootings of all first world nations, other than USA, in the last 100 years, that number would still be eclipsed by the average number of yearly USA school shootings. Comparatively the USA is an extreme outlier, even compared to 3rd world nations.
But rather than merely gainsay, I'll support that by observing:
a) here in Australia we regularly, consistently, have zero school shootings each year. Can recommend.
b) you are probably misunderstanding the meaning of regular, and conflating it with frequent.
Halley's Comet is regular - at once every ~76 years. But obviously not frequent.
(I'd argue, as per (a), that the USA has too high a frequency of school shootings as well. If your tolerance for slaughtered children is higher than mine you may disagree with that claim.)
Maybe if you had the same attitude about bus fatalities this would be grounded in reality. If we relax the rules to school bus related fatalities there are almost an order of magnitude more.
And many more people die of heart disease than school bus fatalities, which is arguably more preventable. The point is that a school shooting represents an event that is so extreme, and so completely antithetical to society, that the members of any well-functioning society should have enough shared values to give such an event the level of importance it deserves.
I would think if the US had routine bus fatality counts an order of magnitude larger than other countries, then yes, that would be cause to be alarmed about student bus fatalities in the US as well.
Okay, so you've redefined regular, and are now surprised the person you're responding to doesn't share your unique definition.
It sounds like instead of just mistakenly using it as a synonym for frequent, you're mistakenly using it to mean something like prevalent or widespread or pervasive.
Either way you're responding to a perfectly valid claim by re-purposing the words used by the parent post and then arguing against that.
> I imagine previous generations blamed radio and newspapers.
Speaking of which, when people bring these things up it's usually framed as "see? there's ALWAYS been some new media to complain about!"
But this isn't really true. The treadmill of new mass media really only began at all (in a very small primordial way) with the printing press, and in earnest with radio. Prior to radio, things really were very different, and did not change dramatically for hundreds of years. Radio brought about massive change and people did have a hard time adapting to it, although they did eventually, but ever since then, we've been on a treadmill where just as one generation manages to get a handle on how to deal with a new media technology, yet another one comes out, throwing everyone off balance again.
The idea that this is how things have always been for humans is ignorant. This is new to the last hundred years or so. Prior to this people had the privilege of learning how to deal with the world and pass on their wisdom to their kids without having most of their wisdom invalidated before they could finish raising their kids.
I did "lock down" drills all through my public education, but they never felt any more traumatic than a fire drill. I don't think school shootings are a defining feature of American life.
I think you are underestimating kids. Does the average child / teen have the same level of detailed understanding of the world as an informed adult? Likely not. But - I can tell you that on the elementary playground during the 2016 election, my kids and their peers were very aware of the threat to the kids whose parents had come (legally or otherwise) from Mexico as it pertained to the two candidates and parties. Heck, when I was that age back in the 80s, there was a group of kids very angry at my dad because he pushed through zoning / permitting regulations that their construction industry parents didn't like. Imagine as a 9 year old having to defend urban growth policy! And that was in a poor, shitty subburb.
In the past, it was a crisis of the present, with hope for the future.
Now, it's a tranquil present, with no hope for the future.
While the latter is materially better, psychologically it's far more damning.
Every single successful society survived on a story, or myth, of a better future. The current Western world is the only society that has fully abandoned that notion, and we are seeing the consequences. Every single political struggle, artificial conflict and strife is downstream of this fundamental disruption in this core societal promise.
Why would China have plans? China is well on their way to becoming the unrivaled military power of the world in the next couple of decades. All they have to do is wait and let the current trends play out. The only possible way to derail their ascent is a premature war--economic or otherwise--with the west.
I do not think this is necessarily the case. Their population is ageing rapidly, with due consequences for the company between citizens and the CCP. Internal tendons between the rich coastal regions, attracting all the labor, and the hollowed out interior could cause issues.
I don't think their ascendancy is necessity assured.
I mean, barring legitimacy on 2023 doom-and-gloom rhetoric, those who grew up during the Cold War do have this generation beat when it comes to warmongery worries. Problem is, there was not nearly as much domestic disarray back then - and there was still a sense of unity.
> there was not nearly as much domestic disarray back then - and there was still a sense of unity
The more one looks, the less this appears to be true. Malcom X and the Black Panthers didn't arise because things were just peachy. MLK's murder wasn't just a stray bullet. When the Philadelphia Police Department dropped a bomb on their own city, it wasn't just an accident. When the National Guard massacred a defenseless crowd of students in Ohio, it wasn't because twenty-eight trigger fingers slipped simultaneously. All while McCarthyism ran rampant, dividing Americans into Faithful Patriots and Godless Communists, pitting neighbor against neighbor in a nationalistic furor gleefully fed by the upper echelons of government, media, and industry.
I ain't trying to say things are going well these days, but let's not forget how shitty the past was.
Things can kill your fast or slow, right now or in the distant future. You end up dead regardless, so you need to avoid them all.
Also, you seem to conflate locally and personally with globally and universally relevant.
Threats are diverse and not restricted to being simplistic. Proper handling necessitates serious effort on all levels and certainly isn't done by relying on tradition.
I've seen a lot of assertions that the rhetoric and agenda online or on social media exist from those places in isolation, and "don't reflect the real world". The problem with this line of thinking is that the majority of humans with access to the internet in 2023 use the information they acquire online as a means to build their real-world beliefs and values. This idea that social media/online doesn't reflect the real world isn't true; it has made our present-day beliefs of the real-world, and has seeped out of the monitor and into our individual psyches and collective consciousness.
That doesn't really sound comparable unless you actually grew up in the USSR (your comment is kind of ambiguous as to whether you're from the area or just grew up in the US during that time period).
The soviet era had the risk of nuclear, but there was still a good chance that would never happen. By contrast, most of the things OP mentioned are already happening.
> I grew up during cold war, USSR collapse, multiple wars in the region. At no point was I (or any of my peers to my knowledge) gravely concerned for our future.
Kids in our day got it through regular media. The cold war had a big influence on music at the time and shows like The Day After (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After) were on TV. I was very aware that we could be nuked at any moment, and later, that we were destroying the environment. We had the rest of the world's evils pushed on us by Very Special Episodes and After School Specials. I had plenty of other mundane concerns to worry about too, but concern for our future was always there in the background.
Kids today get it much worse since the message is that it's already too late and we're basically doomed.
But the USSR collapse was (at least outside Russia) a great thing. Eastern Europe was no longer colonized by Russia and in the West, the fear of nuclear war was gone.
I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be.
We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is: 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.'
> A burning natural world set to end between 2050 and 2100
Eh, climate change is a really big problem but you can't go around saying "the world is set to end between 2050 and 2100", it's obviously untrue and demotivating.
I have expressly heard conservative friends use such exaggerations and metaphors as "proof" that global warming is a lie liberals are spreading because they hate freedom (or something like that).
Most recent IPCC report stated that we are very likely to hit 1.5° in the next five years. If all our current policies hold, and we don’t continue to increase our annual emissions we will likely be looking at 2.7° - 3.2° at the end of this century. At 3° the oceans die.
I think it is safe to say that the world as we know it is very likely coming to an end between 2050 and 2100. We will be living in a far more inhospitable planet in 2050.
I appreciate that it's hard to communicate fuzzy concepts with lots of unknowns succinctly, but this seems overly-alarmist and simplistic to me.
Or maybe I'm wrong; do you have some reputable sources?
Here's one of mine[1], indicating (paraphrased) "5° by 2100 would result in a mass extinction in the next 300 years." And I'd note that even mass extinction is not the same as "the oceans die."
Agreed about big changes to "the world as we know it", though.
* sharks and bat rays in the SF bay were dying of a brain fungus that resulted from decreased salinity from the excessive rain we got a couple months ago
* the size and severity of algal blooms are increasing across the world
* this year's crab season was delayed (initially predicted to be nonexistent) because the ocean currents and especially the depth of cold waters changed so drastically from last year
etc., etc. These examples are only from this year. We could also point to starfish dissolving, coral bleaching, etc. which have been going on longer.
Temperature is only an indicator, but there are many other nth-order effects which result from the changes to the climate that also severely disrupt life processes. We can be sure that the ocean won't "die", but if biodiversity continues to tank the way it has been, we will see an accelerating rate of decline in the health of the oceans and consequently the people whose lives and livelihoods depend on the ocean (somewhere around 1 billion people). Knock-on effects are hard to conceptualize but well worth fully exploring.
Just that the adaptation process might be too slow. I don't think the speed of evolution can keep up with us throwing new kinds of garbage into the ocean.
It's the same with mono-cultural farmlands. By reducing the habitation areas of animals, the population becomes so small that thinking "they just have to adapt" becomes a ridiculous statement.
Sure, but the change will be slow, and humans are fast. By the time that comes through, it won't be of use to us. Even if it were fast, there's no guarantee that it will be just as useful to us after the change, or of any use at all. Just because the oceans will still technically be alive in some sense does not mean that they will be as lively or at all the same as what we have now.
It is hardly even technically correct. Nobody disputes calling the late permian extinction event The Great Dying, even though technically not everything died. Life was disrupted in an unprecedented way, such that people agree this name is fitting. The same is true of a 3° horror scenario.
People aren’t generally affected by issues that are out of sight like those you list. A classmate saying something critical about an teenagers appearance will be 100x more impactful than the rainforests imminent disappearance.
People care about things relevant to subjects they have an emotional connection to already. This system of inference is different between individuals of course.
The relevant question should be, why do so many people care about ultimately meaningless stuff? That's what GP was on about in my opinion, people telling children authoritatively what is or isn't important while being obviously wrong about it.
Things like pollution, food price inflation, and craptastic government policies are far from out of sight because they impact families directly, even if teens don't fully appreciate all the ramifications.
I'm with you that these are major issues, and ones that impact my mental health as someone in my 30s, but I sort of doubt these problems are the main contributors to the mental health crises among young people. Social media and phones have had a huge negative impact on the amount of time young people spend together in person and have amplified the stakes of one's social life. Maybe I'm forgetting what it was like to be young but I'd guess these impacts are a lot more relevant to the mental health of children and teenagers.
> Social media and phones have had a huge negative impact on the amount of time young people spend together in person and have amplified the stakes of one's social life
Social media and phones are what youth had left, after adults systemically wiped out every inch of their development environment.
I'm an early genx; the last generation to grow up free of constant supervision. I went everywhere by myself and learned countless critical self-sufficiency and social skills - skill building that was utterly and thoroughly denied to my own kids.
That is, my kids risked their parents being charged if they were capably on their own. My kids had nowhere to go if they tried to be independent. Were my kids to risk having some ambition, they also risked adult-sized punishments for kid-sized transgressions.
We couldn't have designed a more stunting experience, short of tossing kids in forced-labor gulags.
> That is, my kids risked their parents being charged if they were capably on their own. My kids had nowhere to go if they tried to be independent. Were my kids to risk having some ambition, they also risked adult-sized punishments for kid-sized transgressions.
I'm not from the US, so my question is sincere. Is the situation the same across all states? You'd think the states self-describing as "freedom loving" wouldn't interfere with parenthood as much.
> I'm not from the US, so my question is sincere. Is the situation the same across all states?
It is fairly well the same everywhere in the US, red & blue states alike. There's no shortage of adults who are passionately stupid about kids w/o adults around. Maybe you educate one but there are millions more behind them.
At least one state passed a right-to-roam law. However, that didn't stop LEO from endlessly bullhorning false stranger risks or stop news orgs from thoughtlessly parroting it. The life-changing harm John Walsh has done to millions of kids is incalculable.
Generally conservative states are going to have the government more involved with how kids are raised as a method of social control. I'm in a liberal part of the country and I see kids walking/biking around all the time, while the conservative state I grew up in would almost certainly have the police at least stop them and probably take them home.
The 'parental freedom' stuff is really just the 'you're free to not ensure your children are educated'.
I'd maybe put the doubling of rent every decade up there at the top as the thing that causes the most mental health harm. I'm in my late 30s and remember moving to NYC in 2007, when seeing two bedroom apartments in Brooklyn for $1200/month seemed expensive but doable. Now I hear of young people paying that for a room in a shared apartment, or end up moving back in with their parents. Add to that other costs of existing plus their student loans and it's got to make young people feel on the edge all the time.
Not to say that social media isn't bad for mental health, it certainly is. But I've been out in NYC and seen swarms of young people at bars and clubs, it's not like they're not socializing with each other.
> I'd maybe put the doubling of rent every decade up there at the top as the thing that causes the most mental health harm.
I can't say you're wrong. In my formerly inexpensive state, we went from 1 typical income to survive (1993) to 4 typical incomes. Just in 2021, we had to absorb a 70% increase in rent - and we were lucky.
State 'fixes' to home/biz insurance are quadrupling policy costs while mandating more people pay for it. Renters are going to eat every cent of that.
That doesn't even start to touch on things like this year's sudden 40% increase to auto policies, the f.u. surcharge for living in this state.
Of note on the auto insurance: We carry fat comp/med but no liability. Any damage to our cars from weather is fully on us and not the ins company. This means in our case, the f.u. FL increase can not be reasonably said to be proportional to our risk of weather damage.
Where in Wisconsin? I'm a transplant, only been here 3 years or so, and luckily a homeowner now, but anything decent seemed in the 1500-2k range for 2 or 3 bedrooms.
Location matters a huge amount. If you are in Wisconsin and less than an hour from the edge of a big city (Milwaukee; Chicago; St Paul) you will pay a lot more than if you are out in the middle of nowhere.
Also small landlords with good tenants often don’t raise rents as fast as they should compared to the market.
It's simple - Brooklyn just became a trendy place in the meantime. And so, of course it's overpriced. Smart people don't overpay for things - the solution is just to live somewhere else. 99.9% of places are not trendy and thus not overpriced.
There are thousands of cities in the US, and maybe 10-20 of them are so popular that everyone wants to live there. Of course the prices in those places are going to be crazy - you have to outbid everybody else.
It depends on what you mean by 'overpriced'. Most people are talking about housing unaffordability which is not limited to trendy places. The house I rented in Kansas City Missouri in 2009 for $900 was bought by the owners in 2007 for $120k. Zillow estimates that same home would rent for $1800 a month and is valued at $269k. KCMO is not trendy or even a desirable place to live.
It’s not simple. If “smart people don’t overpay for things” I’ve got some news for you about inflation. And no, moving somewhere simply because it’s cheaper isn’t a solution that fixes everything for everyone in every situation.
Social media is just the medium for which doom/despair is transmitted. Removing social media might slow down the transmission speed, but folks will eventually arrive to the same conclusions mentioned in OPs comment.
Yep, this is how you get violent revolutions... people look at the average rent and an average paycheck/pension, realize they literally have nothing left to lose, and once they realize who's to blame, things (sometimes literally) explode.
Luckily (/s) we have social media to shift blame off of politicians to other groups of people, to fight eachother instead of the ones who profit from all this.
Also social media that cracks down violently on dissenting opinions and negativity of any sort. Try to find a non-mainstream political subreddit - they've all been banned.
Who does profit from all this? I know that all of the mainstream media corporations (NBC, Comcast, Disney, etc) are all owned by a small number of parent corps, with a small group of trusted leadership that hires each other.
What about other industries? Do leaders and founders of all these influential industries have anything in common? Tech, banking, media, the industries that influence our youth?
Unfortunately, most of our population in the US at least is not fit for sustained insurgence. I also doubt their willingness/capability to be trained. Most of the action will probably follow a power law. It may very well be that the most motivated folk will be those with something to lose.
There's a tiny percentage of those, compared to people either paying too much for housing, having adults "kids" at home, trying to get a bigger place, or get rid of roommates.
There are a few large investors in housing markets though, who have a lot more political power than a few karens in mcmansions.
If you look at literally any point in history, you're going to see what seems like "infinite problems". Even if you're 100% right that we face an unprecedented number of problems, this take still doesn't make any sense. You acknowledge that we have a lot of "real problems" that can occur simultaneously, but when it comes to social media, that is somehow a fake problem? The solutions proposed by controlling social media are very mild such as prohibiting phone use in class, and they aren't very popular. Yet somehow this is akin to the War on Drugs, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people in several countries?
Slightly off-topic, but coming from a country where credit card interest rates are around 15% _per month_, I was amused to find people complaining about 22% _per year_ interests in North America.
I imagine rates are determined largely by the general state of the economy (if you currently have a job, how likely are you to lose it?), the amount of data the creditor can gather on potential debtors (what are your wages and current debts?), and the credit card company's ability to efficiently collect on debts.
I wouldn't be surprised if the collections process is easier in the US than in other countries. The economy is not great right now, but credit card companies can also limit your credit to make sure that you don't borrow more than they expect to be able to collect later. And they can see what your existing debts and monthly payments look like, which allows them to de-risk their lending.
I would guess that consumer credit is much looser in USA than many other places. Like I had changed a job and couldn't get a credit card with 1000€ limit. Automated system simply blocked it.
This looseness is great boost for economy, but on other side it also means credit risk and thus the interest levels must be higher to in general to cover those losses.
> This looseness is great boost for economy, but on other side it also means credit risk and thus the interest levels must be higher to in general to cover those losses.
But it sounds like US interest rates are lower than some other places, based on GP's comment.
The worst part is that social media is dangled as if it is an obtainable successful career for most as creators.. But everyone often has to work years before even making a dime FOR FREE.
People invest heavily in rapidly depreciating startup equipment like ring lights, PCs, Cameras, Microphones, only to find out that every site is rigged like a casino, and few people truly win (most get predatory contract offers), and now they're actually charging all creators for visibility while shrinking natural post reach, and inventing and fostering scams of all kinds (Crypto/NFTs) while child exploitation is rampant.
Social media is pretty much essential to growing a business now, but the problem is that it's under siege by opportunists that give little care about the toxic wide-scale emotional, mental, and financial manipulation that they now perpetuate and promote for profit. I don't know how or if it's ever going to be reigned in.
The ocean no longer is able to provide calories for the billion+ who friend in it as their primary source.
Other food sources are impacted by drought, supply chain disruptions, flooding etc.
Large scale migration triggers political instability, revolutions.
Raw materials and inputs fundamental to our way of life become more expensive to obtain due to supply chain disruptions, driving living costs up and creating political tension.
While i don't think the world or civilization to end, i think a lot of people discount how much line can get worse and more uncomfortable for billions, especially in the wealthier parts of the world.
This is major first world problems but: good prices are higher due to droughts and then flooding. Housing prices have risen in part due to reduction in housing inventory and supply due to flooding, wildfires and increasing fire insurance costs.
My recreation options are limited due to so many parks being closed to due to landslides, storm damage, fire damage or fire risk.
Taxes are increasing in my area due to the increasing cost of maintaining infrastructure due to both flooding and fire damage, storm surges and other sources.
In California, one of the wealthiest places in the world, climate change is already gently and subtly eroding our quality of life.
Things can get much much worse in the next few decades, and likely will.
I’m totally on board with the idea that drastic action is needed, but the motte-and-bailey[0] argumentation on display here is counterproductive - it makes people distrustful of the action plan, or worse, feel hopeless and apathetic.
[0] The headline says the world is ending, the smallprint clarifies that no, actually, it’s not.
The report is more about school age children while your points, while relevant, are more about late teenagers / young adults.
Better reasons for why school age children are so addicted to social media are more car centric suburbian developments and the general attitude shift to not let children play outside without supervision. This isn't for cultural reasons only, it's also caused by the increased homeless population and the drug epidemic: in many places, streets are indeed more dangerous than they used to be 40 years ago.
And there is an explanation for all that, partner. It's called: carrying capacity.
Nobody wants to see it but it is there.
Things are hard because they need to be hard, otherwise we would multiply out of control and devour the planet in no time.
If you give every person a house, lifetime supply of food, free education, guaranteed job, a vehicle, you would see the population going to 30 billion in 20 years. Then we would all perish.
Nope, the latest rate is ~20%, and that only comes into play if you don't pay your credit card bill in full, and I'm not about to get into the topic of financial responsibility: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TERMCBCCALLNS
> Delaying childbirth to make rent until it's too late.
"In 1960, the group of women with the largest share of first births was 20 to 24 years old (43%).
In 2018, first births among women occurred most often between ages 25 to 29 (29%)."
25 to 29 is nowhere near "too late".
> A burning natural world set to end between 2050 and 2100.
I'm quite sympathetic to this view, since I think people tend to exaggerate how bad things are, to say the least. But on the other hand, a lot of these things are quite indicative that something's really wrong. Wages were already at a local min in 1980 and had been plummeting especially since 1971 [1].
But even in the "good" picture, you're looking at real wages increasing by about 10% over 44 years, while real rent prices increased more than 400% over the same time frame. To say nothing of dramatic cost increases in education, healthcare, and the introduction of countless new defacto necessary costs like internet and electronic devices. This is all obviously a complete catastrophe. In some ways it's kind of surprising that society has been getting along as "well" as it has, all things considered.
I suppose it's largely because we've managed to mythologize the past where somebody could do things like graduate college debt free on a part time job, and even have enough tucked away to get started on a down payment for their first house. That past simply no longer sounds even possible, let alone real. Yet it was.
On childbirth, don't forget the tails as the distribution shifts. 25-29 isn't too late, but as the average age increases you're raising the risk of various issues and you're going to have more people in "too late" side of the distribution. Add in egg-freezing and IVF turning out to not have such a success rate as predicted, you can wind up with a lot of disappointment.
OP is being rather... histrionic, but it doesn't do to overcorrect, either.
Wages definitely stagnated in 1980 (your chart shows $319 for both 1980 and 1998, for example, and it's visibly pretty flat for those two decades), and they've continued to be decoupled from productivity and corporate profits. "Trickle-down" turned out to be mostly pee.
The gap between productivity and wages has indeed grown, but that doesn't mean the same thing as Real Wages (adjusted for inflation) stagnating, as they have not done that.
Again, your chart shows two decades of stagnation, a small bump in the late 1990s, 15 more years of stagnation, and a bit of a recent runup (with obvious COVID outliers).
If you plot it with the Y-axis starting at 0 instead of 300, it'd looks even flatter. (See my link.)
Okok but I think kids just use social media to connect with each other, because it’s easier and more common than meeting up in-person, especially today.
Plenty of other things to distract yourself from existential dread (video games, movies, streams and shows, actual drugs) and learn about that stuff (the news).
There's a certain kind of privilege embodied in your post, not sure the name, that allows one to think that he/she has had it worse than all prior generations. Ignorance of history for sure, but it's combined with a closed-minded and selfish attitude as well.
i agree except for the GMO part. modern diet is pretty ill though. some of your points are slightly exaggerated but not by much. as someone now in their 40’s, affordable housing has been the biggest source of stress on me. worked my whole life but still had to live with housemates and couldn’t save much if any money. finally got a higher paying job at a pharma company in the bay area a few years ago, still can’t afford to buy a house or have kids. and even if i ever do get a decent place, it’s still not really enjoyable because so many other people in the “community” are on edge living in less than desirable conditions.
our elites are desperate to maintain the Monopoly they have had for many years on the ability to insert ideas into the minds of young people, which they have done for decades through the educational curriculum... now that social media is so ubiquitous and older people are getting onto it, there is now another stream of ideas being fed into Young minds.. and the elites have nothing to do with it, which tears them up.. the elites understand something that normal people do not, which is that young people are shaped and molded by the ideas put in their heads.. the the child is the father of the adult, as the saying goes, and Proverbs 22:6 tells us, if you show a child the way that he is to go, when he is old he will not depart from it..
so that is how the elites transformed society, and divided society among the different factions and thus maintained control... by changing society via educational propaganda fed into Young minds... the elites have long had a monopoly on shaping society by shaping Young minds.. the elites fear that ordinary people will soon wake up to the power and potential in social media for older people to feed their ideas into the minds of younger people and thereby put a stop to The divided society the elites have created
Wages stagnated since 1980. Rents doubling every decade. Dead-end service jobs. Unpayable student loans. Social Security payments going to IOUs instead of retirements. Lying politicians and chief corporate officers making bank on the backs of the working poor. 30% credit card interest. Delaying childbirth to make rent until it's too late. GMO and processed foods poisoning giving an obese population autoimmune disease. Republicans gerrymandering elections. Democrats supporting neoliberal colonialism. A burning natural world set to end between 2050 and 2100.
The list of threats to anyone younger than 50 is so infinite and growing so rapidly that social media is the new drugs in the endless war on youth culture. You know, the one that inconveniently lists the problems and solutions only to be told over and over again to sacrifice their dreams and get serious and study and get a job, that it's all in their heads.