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That small dip may reflect preoccupation with economic doldrums unleashed by covid-19

While that 50 percent could be higher, the issue has seen a 21-point shift, and the polling question asks if respondents want action on climate “even at the expense of economic growth.”

while 54 percent of young voters believed in 2010 that abortion should be legal in most or all cases, that’s up to 69 percent this year.

Demographer William Frey and his colleagues calculate that by the 2036 presidential race, Gen Z will represent 35 percent of eligible voters. “They’re growing up in a 21st century America that’s far more diverse, inclusive and globally connected than the 1950s and 1960s America of the GOP base,” Frey told me. “They’re going to shun the Republican Party as they get older.”

There are major caveats. President Biden’s approval among young people remains stubbornly low

There’s some evidence that the young voters who elected Barack Obama have become somewhat more conservative as they’ve aged, which could happen again

The Institute of Student Employers records that a declining half of firms now ask for a class of degree, and a quarter explicitly state “no minimum requirements”

The age-old debate over whether a university is really an investment, personal or national, as opposed to a middle-class finishing school has never been resolved. British graduates on average earn £10,000 more than their non-graduate contemporaries, but surely some students might have done equally well with the same number of years’ work under their belts, perhaps studying a favourite subject part- or full-time later in life.

with those often-invisible systems that we take for granted until they fail, such as the electrical grid or medical implants, pharmaceuticals and the blood supply.

It’s possible to see a future in which we are dependent on the perfect, continuous performance of air conditioning the way many people are dependent on lifesaving drugs, planes are dependent on air traffic control, and a colony on the moon or Mars would be dependent on perpetual sources of oxygen and water.

AC’s basic trajectory has been from a curiosity and luxury to an amenity to a necessity. It has changed how we live and where we live, and reconfigured our cities, houses, politics and identity. And now it is bound up with our hope for survival as a species.

Where would we be without it? Much of the South would be poorer than it is now, and isolated, with high mortality rates and lower educational achievement. There would be no skyscrapers in Atlanta, no high-rise apartment buildings in Dallas and Houston. In our hottest states, including the Sun Belt, public institutions, including universities, libraries and entertainment venues, would be fewer and more minimally developed.

Entertainment would still be seasonal. City theaters would close as temperatures rise, and music, drama and the movies would migrate outdoors. Many of the products we take for granted, including textiles and foodstuffs that rely on atmospheric controls or refrigeration, would be of far inferior quality and much more expensive.

Architecture would look very different, at least for those who could afford such niceties as higher ceilings, wider eaves and more sharply pitched roofs (all of which can passively cool a house). The picture window — a source not just of light but also of heat, and which can’t be opened for ventilation — would not be a key element of suburban design.

The ranch house, with thin walls and low ceilings, laid out in relentless grids across the Sun Belt since the 1950s and immortalized in the haunting photographs of Robert Adams, wouldn’t define the vernacular architecture of America.

The net migration from the South, which continued from the Civil War until around 1964 (when air conditioning was well established in the country’s hottest states), would be ongoing.

air conditioning increased political polarization, with an influx of Northern Republicans into the South, and a resorting of the Democrats into a northern, more progressive, urban party without a conservative Dixiecrat wing.

It may have also changed the way women conceive of feminism and liberation from patriarchy, from a model based on independence and working outside the home in the early 20th century to one structured around the supposed leisure offered by the modern, air-conditioned tract home in the middle of the century.

Less tangible are the poetic details of life before AC that are embedded in art and literature. Staying cool in hot weather was often a social experience, a collective lethargy that brought one closer to family and community

Throughout the history of mechanical ventilation and “comfort cooling,” there was resistance to innovation, with a vocal and determined “open air” movement that opposed mechanical ventilation in public schools.

On Tuesday China’s government also announced the GDP had grown 3% in 2022. That figure would mark one of the slowest periods of growth in decades, but was still higher than predicted, prompting some scepticism among analysts given the incredibly stringent zero-Covid restrictions in place during the fourth quarter.

Yi Fuxian, an obstetrics and gynaecology researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and expert on China’s population changes, said the decline in population was occurring almost a decade earlier than the country’s government and the United Nations had projected.

“Meaning that China’s real demographic crisis is beyond imagination and that all of China’s past economic, social, defence, and foreign policies were based on faulty demographic data,” Yi said on Twitter

“China’s demographic and economic outlook is much bleaker than expected. China will have to undergo a strategic contraction and adjust its social, economic, defence, and foreign policies. China will improve relations with the West.”

48,830 people died from gun-related injuries in 2021. (The U.S. population is about 20 times that of the Netherlands; U.S. gun homicides are more than 1,777 times the number in the Netherlands.)

“Since 2014, 23 prisons have been shut, turning into temporary asylum centres, housing and hotels. … The number of prison sentences imposed fell from 42,000 in 2008 to 31,000 in 2018 — along with a two-thirds drop in jail terms for young offenders

Registered crimes plummeted by 40% in the same period, to 785,000 in 2018.”

in the United States, “Drug offenses still account for the incarceration of over 350,000 people

possession arrests each year, many of which lead to prison sentences.”

the United States has 163 times the number of incarcerated people as the Netherlands, more than eight times as many per 100,000 people.

“The United States spends nearly $300 billion annually to police communities and incarcerate 2.2 million people.”

“The societal costs of incarceration — lost earnings, adverse health effects, and the damage to the families of the incarcerated — are estimated at up to three times the direct costs, bringing the total burden of our criminal justice system to $1.2 trillion.”

These two very different systems didn’t just happen. Each country made choices.

In real terms, the U.S. criminal justice system and ubiquitous guns require an industry — ambulances, emergency room personnel, police, courts, judges, prisons, lawyers, private security and more — that the Dutch system does not

As I walked down the streets of Amsterdam, I imagined what we could have bought with the money we spend on the criminal justice system: universal college education, universal medical care, a strong social safety net.

The human cost of crime in America — a family driven into poverty because a breadwinner is murdered, a child permanently disabled from a gunshot, children terrorized in schools — is astronomically higher than in the Netherlands.

there is the opportunity cost in the United States — the murdered child who doesn’t grow up to invent the next cancer cure, the school that is forced to use resources on lockdown drills and grief counselors rather than reading teachers

We are very good at feeding a criminal justice system; we’re not so adept at eliminating crime

Understand, then, that we have our current criminal justice system because we have fetishized guns, criminalized addiction, neglected mental and emotional health, and resisted addressing social factors driving crime.

We could do it differently. We simply don’t want to

Thanks to social-science research, we now know that children’s life chances are profoundly affected by their context—not only income and family circumstances but also their community—more so than by their genetic profile or the medical care they receive.

With this in mind, we created what we call the Index of Deep Disadvantage, which reflects two traditional measures of income (the poverty rate and the “deep poverty rate,” meaning those with incomes below half the poverty line), two markers of health (birth weight and life expectancy), and the rate of social mobility for children who grow up in low-income families. We used this index to rank the roughly 3,100 counties in the United States along with the 500 most populous cities.

Immediately, the rankings revealed a stark geographical pattern.

the most disadvantaged places on our index were primarily rural

Though some of these were majority white, most were majority Black or Hispanic.

these places resembled, well, colonies—internal colonies within the U.S.

Considerable poverty exists in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. But in our apples-to-apples comparison, none of those cities ranked among even the 600 most disadvantaged places in the nation

The only cities on that list were a relatively small number of industrial municipalities such as Cleveland, Detroit, and Rochester.

Those living in the 200 most disadvantaged places on our index were just as likely to have major difficulties paying for housing as those in America’s 500 largest cities.

The places that our index identified as the 200 most disadvantaged are concentrated in three regions—Appalachia, South Texas, and the southern Cotton Belt.

hese places share a history of intensive resource extraction and human exploitation not seen to the same degree elsewhere in the United States

In each place, this economic pattern emerged (or, in the case of the Cotton Belt, fully flourished) in the late 19th or early 20th century. In each place, one industry came to dominate the economy, a pattern that held, broadly, until the 1960s, when King Cotton, King Tobacco, King Coal, and South Texas agriculture, would bow to the twin forces of automation and global competition.

many places with large Native American populations ranked among the most disadvantaged in the nation

While visiting many of the nation’s most disadvantaged places, we set out to build on this work through historical research, ethnographic observations, and in-depth interviews.

For generations, the appearance of towns in South Texas followed a pattern of social hierarchy: sturdy wood-frame houses, paved streets, and enclosed sewers in the white neighborhoods; shacks, dirt roads, and privies in the Mexican parts of town. Forced to migrate to find work during the off-season, generations of Mexican American children lost their right to a decent education. Even today, adult-illiteracy rates in these places are among the highest in the nation.

in Leflore County, Mississippi, for example, Black residents told us that violence was the No. 1 problem they face. The rate of death due to interpersonal violence there was nearly four times the national average, and well above that of Cook County, Illinois, home to Chicago

Throughout these regions, we saw the same themes emerge again and again—unequal schooling, the collapse of social infrastructure, violence, entrenched public corruption, and structural racism embedded in government programs.

Overall, poverty rates in these places are very low, babies are born healthy, people live to a ripe old age, and a low-income child usually has a similar chance of making it into the middle class as any other kid.

er they were forcibly relocated onto land mostly inhospitable to human habit

hey have enjoyed the lowest rates of violent crime, income inequality, and public corruption in the nation. These counties are unusually rich in social capital: Residents are connected to one another through volunteerism, membership in civic organizations, and participation in other community activities.

Counties that rank among those of greatest advantage began as agricultural communities with modestly sized farms, many originally secured through the 1862 Homestead Act that made landownership widely available. Many of these places have built on this history of broad-based wealth by making significant investments in schools, which has contributed to high graduation and college enrollment rates over generations.

One cannot fully understand the benefits enjoyed in America’s most advantaged places without considering the historic (and ongoing) exploitation of migrant labor that has gone on in them, mostly drawn from the U.S. border regions.

these communities have been more successful than most in preventing poverty, promoting health, and ensuring a level playing field for their children.

The upper Midwest is also overwhelmingly white. When we examined the relationship between whiteness and rank on the index, we found that a higher percentage of white residents is a significant predictor of a place’s rank, which is not at all surprising when one considers that the good schools and the good jobs have long been bestowed liberally on whites while being denied to Hispanic and Black Americans.

What makes the communities that are most advantaged unique is their histories as places of broad-based wealth. How different would conditions be in other parts of the country had they followed a similar, equitable course?

The lesson is that people seem to thrive—not always in high salaries but in health and life chances—when inequality is low; when landownership is widespread; when social connection is high; and when corruption and violence are rare.

The social leveling that is characteristic of communities in the upper Midwest is more than just a quaint cultural feature. It is the foundation of a community’s well-being. Until these regions’ virtues are shared nationwide, poverty and disadvantage will continue to haunt America.

The economy that Hickel envisions would cease to pursue growth, green or otherwise. Materials and energy will still be consumed, and waste generated, but at much lower levels. All impacts on the natural world will be tethered to the question, “Growth for whom, and to what ends?” In place of an individualistic consumer economy, Hickel’s post-growth economy would direct itself toward the creation of public goods that allow the many to live well—mass transit, health care—rather than to keep a few in luxury.

A growing body of research reveals an inverse relationship between “happiness” and growth beyond a certain point.

In the rich countries, general contentment peaked in 1950, when GDP and real per capita incomes were fractions of their present size (and inequality near modern historic lows); degrowthers posit that similar happiness levels will be reclaimed on the way back down the economic mountain

Hickel describes a post-growth economy defined by stability and equality, and the freedom and leisure possible when the economy is no longer subservient to the god of growth

He estimates that the U.S. economy could be scaled down by as much as 65 percent while still improving the lives of its citizens. This includes the metric most often tied to celebrations of endless growth: life expectancy.

degrowth will entail a steep reduction across a much wider range of high-energy consumer goods. Keeping a global economy within safe ecological limits is a zero-sum game.

When limited resources are directed toward clean energy infrastructure, public health care, and regenerative agriculture, it will still be possible to build and power modern 24-hour hospitals in every city, but not to have Xbox consoles, two-car garages, and giant appliances in every home.

would have to redefine it, too.

The post-growth economy could not succeed solely by redistributing wealth; it would have to redefine it, too.

He argues that short-term growth would have to continue in those countries that have still not achieved the basic levels of sanitation, infrastructure, and education needed for a decent standard of living, to close the gap. Their larger goal, meanwhile, would be to break free from their historical role as a source of natural resources and cheap labor for the north.

For degrowth to be just, global, and effective, the sharpest reduction in consumption will have to come from the north, where the greatest damage to the planet is currently being done

Ecological economists generally agree that the safe outer limit is eight tons

One person in a low-income country has a materials footprint of roughly two tons per year, a measure of total raw materials consumed, including those embodied in imports. In lower-middle–income countries, that number is four tons; in upper-middle–income countries, 12 tons. In the high-income nations of North America, Europe, and Asia, the number leaps to 28

The wealthiest 20 percent of the human population is responsible for 90 percent of “overshoot” carbon in the atmosphere (that is, a level of carbon that exceeds the limit needed to keep global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius)

The planet’s richest one percent has a carbon footprint twice the size of the poorest half of the world’s population combined

For the global north, degrowth not only starts at home, it starts with the biggest houses.

Less Is More doesn’t end in a poetic appreciation for nature’s majesty, but by teasing out its implications for the political project of preserving a habitable planet. Hickel devotes much of the book to explaining that degrowth must be central to this project, promising not just survival, but real democracy, social abundance, and liberation.

Both involve broad social shifts away from private consumption and toward the production of shared public goods.

This beautiful coincidence overlaps with policy programs like the Green New Deal in important way

In July 1979, shortly after installing a set of solar panels over the West Wing, Jimmy Carter did something peculiar for a peacetime president. He asked Americans to sacrifice: to consume less, take public transit more, value community over material things, and buy bonds to fund domestic energy development, including solar

Next to Schumacher’s “Buddhist economics,” Debsian socialism was reformist tinkering. Schumacher didn’t see liberation as a matter of reshuffling the ownership and management structures of the smokestack-powered growth economy. He believed a deeper transformation was needed to maintain a livable planet. This would require new socioecological blueprints “designed for permanence.” As the left and the right battled for control over growth’s levers and spoils, Schumacher pointed out how both had become blind to the rise of growth as its own self-justifying, pan-ideological religion; its patterns of production and consumption, he observed, required “a degree of violence” that did not “fit into the laws of the universe.”

They determined that infinite growth was, in fact, impossible on a finite planet. Barring a major course correction, the team projected, growthism would result in an ecological systems breakdown sometime in the middle of the twenty-first century

This warning, detailed in the 1972 bestseller The Limits to Growth, has aged better than the scorn heaped on it

We are now witnessing what appears to be the beginnings of the collapse predicted nearly 50 years ago

In his new book, Less Is More, Jason Hickel, an anthropologist and journalist, attempts to bring a comprehensive critique of growth closer to the center of the conversation, arguing through a sweeping history of capitalism that it’s uncontrolled growth, not its controlled arrest and reversal, that is the preposterous concept.

This economic and political revolution was reinforced by a complementary scientific one that displaced the lingering animist cosmology of pre-capitalist Europe. The dualism of Francis Bacon and Descartes held reason to be distinct from and superior to matter.

The idea of limitless growth is a relatively recent one. In Less Is More, Hickel traces its origins to the enclosure of the European commons in the sixteenth century

Starving refugees were scattered and forced into a new economy defined by neo-feudal servitude and wage labor. Landowners, meanwhile, began amassing great stores of surplus wealth.

By the mid-1800s, a new “science” had arisen from these assumptions. Neoclassical economics fully abstracted the economy from the natural world. The economy was geared not toward the creation of a happy and prosperous society, but toward the perpetual growth of wealth as its own end, achieved in an inherently virtuous cycle of converting labor and resources into capital, to be accumulated and reinvested in faster and more productive conversions of labor and resources

This ideology subsumed and profaned notions about progress and morality held by the classical economists, until eventually the field even l

This process unfolded despite repeated warnings along the way. Classical economists like John Stuart Mill and, to a lesser extent, Adam Smith not only acknowledged the existence of natural limits to growth, but saw economic development as a phase; at some point, they believed, nations would create enough wealth to pursue other definitions of progres

the caveats issued by Simon Kuznets, father of the concept adopted in the twentieth century as growth’s universal and signature metric: gross domestic product. Kuznets, Hickel points out, “warned that we should never use GDP as a normal measure of economic progress,” because GDP does not distinguish between productive and destructive behavior

Most people encounter the growth debate, if they encounter it at all, through the idea of “green growth.

This is a vision for our collective future based on the belief that technological advance will drastically reduce the amount of raw materials needed to sustain growth—a process known as dematerialization—and “decouple” growing GDP from its ecological impacts.

boosters of the idea point to the transition by rich countries from manufacturing to service-based economies, as well as efficiency gains in energy and in the use of materials

The belief that green growth will save us, also known as “ecomodernism” or “ecopragmatism,” has become a trendy article of faith among elites who acknowledge climate change and the dangers of breaching ecological boundaries

n 2017, Barack Obama threw his support behind the idea in an article for Science magazine, maintaining that signs of decoupling in major economies “should put to rest the argument that combatting climate change requires accepting lower growth or a lower standard of living.”

The argument that capitalism can grow itself out of the present crisis may be soothing to those who like the world as it is. It also relies on the kind of accounting tricks and rejection of reality

By only counting the emissions created within a country that imports most of its cars, washing machines, and computers, you end up pushing the emissions related to their production off the books. When you factor them back in, the picture is much less green. A number of recent studies show no evidence of meaningful decoupling—in energy or materials—even as the world increases its use of renewable energy and finds ways to use some materials more efficiently.

Green growth, Hickel concludes, is an ecologically incoherent “fairy tale.”

consider what the ecomodernist position asks us to believe. The current system requires annual growth of roughly 3 percent to avoid the shock of recession. This means doubling the size of the economy every 23 years

he economy of 2000 must be 20 times larger in the year 2100, and 370 times larger in the year 2200.

Hickel is less interested in the macroeconomic details of this future than are growth critics based in economics departments, like Tim Jackson and Kate Raworth, and more focused on the leisure, security, and general human flourish

he makes an alluring case that degrowth does not require anything like the “command-and-control fiasco of the Soviet Union, or some back-to-the-caves, hair-shirted disaster of voluntary impoverishment.”

Attaining the benefits of the post-growth economy would, however, require what the present consumer society considers “sacrifices.

it’s not clear how many of them are ready to give up its superficial pleasures enabled by consumer debt

Among nations, there’s also the question of fairness: Wouldn’t it be unjust to impose degrowth across the world, when it’s disproportionately the countries of the global north that have spent centuries burning through the planet’s resources?

This output tracks to the one percent’s share of global wealth—a number equal to the GDP of the bottom 169 countries.

Even if you accept the argument that inequality would be best addressed by more centuries of trickle-down growth, you keep running up against the simple fact of its impossibility. Even just one more century of growth—which so far has shown no sign of taking a less destructive form—will require multiple earths

Hickel is serious about bringing the system critiques of E.F. Schumacher and others out of their traditional cloisters and into the streets, and has sought allies in this effort

emphasize what Hickel calls the “beautiful coincidence” of degrowth: that “what we need to do to survive is the same as what we need to do to have better lives.”

Both are internationalist in outlook, and see the world through a lens of climate justice as well as climate equilibrium.

that is, communicating the many benefits of moving beyond the insecurity and terrors of the current system, and building a new society that is sustainable, stable, democratic, and fundamentally better in every way.

Others point to driving’s high cost. Car insurance has skyrocketed in price in recent years, increasing nearly 14 percent between 2022 and 2023. (The average American now spends around 3 percent of their yearly income on car insurance.) Used and new car prices have also soared in the last few years, thanks to a combination of supply chain disruptions and high inflation.

E-scooters, e-bikes and ride-sharing also provide Gen Zers options that weren’t available to earlier generations. (Half of ride-sharing users are between the ages of 18 and 29, according to a poll from 2019.) And Gen Zers have the ability to do things online — hang out with friends, take classes, play games — which used to be available only in person.

Whether this shift will last depends on whether Gen Z is acting out of inherent preferences, or simply postponing key life milestones that often spur car purchases. Getting married, having children, or moving out of urban centers are all changes that encourage (or, depending on your view of the U.S. public transit system, force) people to drive more.

In 1997, 43 percent of 16-year-olds and 62 percent of 17-year-olds had driver’s licenses. In 2020, those numbers had fallen to 25 percent and 45 percent.

Millennials went through a similar phase. Around a decade ago, many newspaper articles and research papers noted that the millennial generation — often defined as those born between 1981 and 1996 — were shunning cars. The trend was so pronounced that some researchers dubbed millennials the “go-nowhere” generation.

The average number of vehicle miles driven by young people dropped 24 percent between 2001 and 2009, according to a report from the Frontier Group and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. And at the same time, vehicle miles traveled per person in the United States — which had been climbing for more than 50 years — began to plateau.

adult millennials continue to drive around 8 percent less every day than members of Generation X and baby boomers. As millennials have grown up, got married and had kids, the distance they travel in cars has increased — but they haven’t fully closed the gap with previous generations.

data has shown that U.S. car culture isn’t as strong as it once was. “Up through the baby boom generation, every generation drove more than the last,” Dutzik said. Forecasters expected that trend to continue, with driving continuing to skyrocket well into the 2030s. “But what we saw with millennials, I think very clearly, is that trend stopped,”

If Gen Zers continue to eschew driving, it could have significant effects on the country’s carbon emissions. Transportation is the largest source of CO2 emissions in the United States. There are roughly 66 million members of Gen Z living in the United States. If each one drove just 10 percent less than the national average — that is, driving 972 miles less every year — that would save 25.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from spewing into the atmosphere. That’s the equivalent to the annual emissions of more than six coal-fired power plants.

They also died of covid at higher rates than other health-care workers, and they experience high rates of burnout, “an occupational syndrome characterized by a high degree of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, and a low sense of personal accomplishment at work,” according to the World Health Organization

high stress and anxiety are the “antecedents” to burnout. But you know you’ve hit the nadir when you become emotionally detached from your work. “It’s almost like a loss of meaning,” she said.

In April 2020, Miller said the public was “exalting nurses as these superheroes and angels,” while nurses themselves were tweeting about “the horrible working conditions, enormous amount of death without any break … being mentally and completely worn down and exhausted.”

Miller said nurses are experiencing “collective trauma,” a conclusion she reached by studying their social media usage through the pandemic

Before the pandemic, between a third and half of nurses and physicians already reported symptoms of burnout. A covid impact study published in March 2022 by the American Nurses Foundation found this number had risen to 60 percent among acute-care nurses. “Reports of feeling betrayed, undervalued, and unsupported have risen,

Miller and Groves also found a fivefold increase in references to quitting between the 2020 study and the 2021 study. “Our profession will never be the same,” Miller told me. “If you talked to any nurse who worked bedside through the pandemic, that’s what they’ll tell you.” From this, she says, has grown a desire to be heard. “We feel emboldened. We’re not as willing to be silent anymore.”

then, in late February 2013, Duke was abruptly fired. She’d posted a photo on Instagram showing an ER where hospital staff had just saved the life of a man hit by a subway train. It looked like a hurricane had blown through. There were no people in the photo, but Duke titled the post, “Man vs. 6 train.” She told me she wanted to showcase “the amazing things doctors and nurses do to save lives … the f---ing real deal.”

Duke says her superiors called her an “amazing nurse and team member” before they told her that “it was time to move on.” Her director handed her a printout of the Instagram post. According to Duke, he acknowledged that she hadn’t violated HIPAA or any hospital policies but said she’d been insensitive and unprofessional. She was escorted out of the building by security. When the episode aired, it showed Duke crying on the sidewalk outside the hospital.

She’d reposted the photo, with permission, from a male doctor’s Instagram account. He faced no repercussions. She now admits her caption was rather “cold” — especially compared with the doctor’s, “After the trauma.” In hindsight, she said, she might have been more sensitive. Maybe not even posted the photo at all. And yet this frustrates her. Why shouldn’t the public see nursing culture for what it really is? Man vs. 6 Train. “That’s ER speak,” she told me. “We say ‘head injury in room five.’ We don’t say ‘Mr. Smith in room five. We talk and think by mechanism of injury.”

But this is at odds with the romanticized image of the nurturing nurse — which hospitals often want to project. In some cases, nurses are explicitly told not to be forthright with their patients. “I know nurses in oncology who are not allowed to say to a patient and their family, ‘This will be the fourth clinical trial, but we all know your family member is dying,”

“The most frequent question is, ‘Katie, I have to get out of the hospital, but I don’t know what else to do.’” Her advice: “You have to create your own definition of what being a nursing professional means to you.” She has a ready list of alternative jobs, including “med spa” owner, educational consultant and YouTuber.

However, there is widespread skepticism about the prospect for change. In eight of the 17 publics, roughly half or more of those polled say the political system needs major changes or a complete overhaul and say they have little or no confidence the system can be changed effectively.

We found that the strongest predictor of being dissatisfied was being unhappy with the current state of the national economy. Another significant predictor was how someone feels about economic opportunity.

dissatisfaction with the way democracy is working was much more common among people who expect that when children in their country today grow up, they will be worse off financially than their parents. The economic pessimists are also especially likely to think their country’s political system needs major changes or needs to be completely reformed. For example, in the United Kingdom, 61% of respondents who are pessimistic about the next generation’s financial prospects think their country needs significant political reform, compared with just 34% among those who are optimistic that the next generation will do better financially than their parents.

People who believe their country is doing a poor job of dealing with the pandemic are consistently more likely to say they are dissatisfied with the way their democracy is working and that they want significant changes to the political system. For instance, 73% of Germans who feel their country is handling the crisis poorly say they believe their political system needs major changes or should be completely overhauled, while just 32% of those who think the country is handling it well express this view.

Across 27 nations we polled in 2018, a median of 54% said that most politicians in their country are corrupt. This sentiment was especially high in Greece (89%) and Russia (82%). When we asked Americans a similar question in the fall of 2020, two-thirds said most politicians are corrupt.

A median of 78% across the 38 nations polled said that “a democratic system where representatives elected by citizens decide what becomes law” is a very or somewhat good way to govern their country. More than half expressed this view in every country polled. However, even at this broad level, enthusiasm for representative democracy was somewhat subdued – a median of only 33% said it is a very good approach to governing.

Across the 16 advanced economies surveyed, a median of just 17% consider American democracy a good model for other countries to follow. A median of 57% think it used to be a good example but has not been in recent years. And around a quarter say the U.S. has never been a good example. The belief that democracy in the U.S. has never been a good model for other nations is especially common among young adults.

For example, a median of 49% believed a system in which “experts, not elected officials, make decisions according to what they think is best for the country” would be very or somewhat good. 

A median of 26% considered “a system in which a strong leader can make decisions without interference from parliament or the courts” a very or somewhat good way to govern.

A median of 24% said “a system in which the military rules the country” would be a very or somewhat good system. In five countries – Vietnam, Indonesia, India, South Africa and Nigeria – roughly half or more expressed this opinion, as did at least 40% in another six nations. And higher-income nations weren’t completely immune: 17% in the United States, Italy and France believed military rule could be a good way to run the country.

For example, 27% of Americans who identified as conservative thought autocracy would be a good way to govern, compared with 14% who identified as liberal. And 20% of conservatives supported military rule, compared with 12% of liberals. People with lower levels of educational attainment were more likely to consider military rule a good way to govern in 23 countries.

A median of more than 67% across 34 countries rated a fair judicial system, gender equality and freedom of religion as very important. But there was less support for holding regular competitive elections, freedom of speech and press freedom. A median of roughly six-in-ten or fewer said it was very important to have free expression on the internet or to allow human rights groups and opposition parties to operate freely.

In Greece, for example, the share who say having people of many different racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds makes their country a better place to live more than doubled between 2017 and 2021. Over the same period, favorable views of diversity increased by about 10 percentage points or more in Japan, the Netherlands, the UK and Spain. Slightly smaller increases can be seen in Germany, South Korea, Australia and Sweden.

A median of 67% across the same 17 publics say racial or ethnic discrimination is a problem where they live. Roughly three-in-ten or more in Germany, Spain, the UK, Greece, France, the U.S. and Italy say it is a very serious problem in their country. Younger adults and those on the ideological left are often more convinced on this point. In the U.S., about two-thirds of Americans on the left say racial and ethnic discrimination is a very serious problem in their country, compared with only 19% of Americans on the political right.

median of 56% across 17 advanced economies surveyed in 2021 say their political system needs major changes or needs to be completely reformed. Roughly two-thirds or more express this opinion in Italy, Spain, the U.S., South Korea, Greece, France, Belgium and Japan.

Across the 17 advanced economies we surveyed in 2021, a median of 61% say their country is more divided than before the outbreak. Moreover, the share of the public that feels this way has risen substantially as the pandemic has worn on. In the spring of 2020, only months into the crisis, just 29% of Canadians believed they were more divided, but a year later 61% express this view.

a median of 64% disagreed with the statement “most elected officials care what people like me think.”

A median of 50% disagreed with the statement “the state is run for the benefit of all the people,” while 49% agreed.

For example, 88% of Italians in 2002 said their government was run for the benefit of all, but only 30% held this view in 2019.

Across 34 nations polled in 2019, a median of 67% agreed that voting gives ordinary people some say about how the government runs things.

The COVID vaccines are, without exaggeration, among the safest and most effective therapies in all of modern medicine. An unvaccinated adult is an astonishing 68 times more likely to die from COVID than a boosted one

Yet widespread vaccine hesitancy in the United States has caused more than 163,000 preventable deaths and counting

Even in absolute numbers, America’s unvaccinated and current-smoker populations seem to match up rather well: Right now, the CDC pegs them at 13 percent and 14 percent of all U.S. adults, respectively, and both groups are likely to be poorer and less educated.

Countries such as Denmark and Sweden have already declared themselves broken up with COVID. They are confidently doing so not because the virus is no longer circulating or because they’ve achieved mythical herd immunity from natural infection; they’ve simply inoculated enough people.

data suggest that most of the unvaccinated hold that status voluntarily at this point

The same arguments apply to tobacco: Smokers are 15 to 30 times more likely to develop lung cancer. Quitting the habit is akin to receiving a staggeringly powerful medicine, one that wipes out most of this excess risk.

If everyone who is eligible were triply vaccinated, our health-care system would be functioning normally again.

With a vaccination timeline that stretches over years, our patience for restrictions, especially on the already vaccinated, will be very limited. But there is middle ground. We haven’t banned tobacco outright—in fact, most states protect smokers from job discrimination—but we have embarked on a permanent, society-wide campaign of disincentivizing its use.

We should neither expect that every stubbornly unvaccinated person will get jabbed before next winter nor despair that none of them will ever change their mind. Let’s accept instead that we may make headway slowly, and with considerable effort

Long-term actions for COVID might include charging the unvaccinated a premium on their health insurance, just as we do for smokers, or distributing frightening health warnings about the perils of remaining uninoculated

And once the political furor dies down, COVID shots will probably be added to the lists of required vaccinations for many more schools and workplaces.

nother aspect of where we’re headed with COVID. Tobacco is lethal enough that we are willing to restrict smokers’ personal freedoms—but only to a degree. As deadly as COVID is, some people won’t get vaccinated, no matter what, and both the vaccinated and unvaccinated will spread disease to others.

anti-COVID actions, much like anti-smoking policies, will be limited not by their effectiveness but by the degree to which they are politically palatable.

Without greater vaccination, living with COVID could mean enduring a yearly death toll that is an order of magnitude higher than the one from flu.

this, too, might come to feel like its own sort of ending. Endemic tobacco use causes hundreds of thousands of casualties, year after year after year, while fierce public-health efforts to reduce its toll continue in the background. Yet tobacco doesn’t really feel like a catastrophe for the average person.

Losing a year or two from average life expectancy only bumps us back to where we were in … 2000.

We still care for smokers when they get sick, of course, and we reduce harm whenever possible. The health-care system makes $225 billion every year for doing so—paid out of all of our tax dollars and insurance premiums

Hospitals have a well-honed talent for transforming any terrible situation into a marketable “center of excellence.”

But we shouldn’t forget the most important reason that the coronavirus isn’t like the flu: We’ve never had vaccines this effective in the midst of prior influenza outbreaks, which means we didn’t have a simple, clear approach to saving quite so many lives. Compassionate conversations, community outreach, insurance surcharges, even mandates—I’ll take them all. Now is not the time to quit.

That’s no accident. In the three decades since the end of the Soviet Union, those men have faced industrial collapse, the disappearance of millions of jobs and declining life expectancy. The war promises to change that downward trajectory, transforming the losers of the past three decades into new heroes

For many Russian men and their families, the war may be a horror. But it’s also the last opportunity to fix their lives.

First, there’s the money. The federal base salary for a soldier is about $2,500 a month, with payment of $39,000 for wounding and up to $65,000 in the case of death. Compared with a median monthly salary of $545, this is a handsome reward — even more so for the approximately 15.3 million Russians living below the poverty line.

there’s much more on offer, too. For those coming back from the front, the state promises fast-tracked entry into civil service jobs, health insurance, free public transportation, as well as free university education and free food at school for their children. And for those who were imprisoned and joined the Wagner private military company, the state grants freedom.

Today’s soldiers live in the shadows of the generation that won the war against Nazism. In Russian public culture, no honor is higher than to be a veteran of the “Great Patriotic War,” something the regime has capitalized on by framing today’s war as a kind of historical re-enactment of World War II.

As one soldier wrote on Telegram in February, the war confers “a sense of belonging to the great male deed, the deed of defending our Motherland.”

By allowing men to escape the difficulties of everyday life — with its low pay and routine frustrations — the war offers a restoration of male self-worth. These men, at last, matter.

Feelings of inferiority, too, are swept aside in the fraternal atmosphere of the front. “It doesn’t matter who you are, how you look,” as one soldier put it. In the communal life of conflict, many of the distinctions of civilian life dissolve. War is an equalizer.

Mistrust of the rich, belief that sanctions actually strengthen the economy and disdain for émigrés all attest to a class-based experience of the conflict. By participating in the war, millions of Russians at the bottom of the social ladder can emerge as the country’s true heroes, ready for the ultimate sacrifice. The risk may be grave and the financial reward uncertain. But the chance to rise in esteem and respect makes the effort worthwhile.

The longer the war drags on, bringing more casualties, loss and broken promises, the harder it may become to sustain such levels of acceptance

it may not. Collective emotional turmoil could deepen the feeling that the war must be won, no matter what. In the absence of an alternative vision of the future, Vladimir Putin and his war will continue to hold sway.

the mid-2010s saw the beginnings of a turnaround that has continued ever since. By 2019, households headed by Millennials were making considerably more money than those headed by the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, and Generation X at the same age, after adjusting for inflation.

That year, according to the Current Population Survey, administered by the U.S. Census Bureau, income for the median Millennial household was about $9,000 higher than that of the median Gen X household at the same age, and about $10,000 more than the median Boomer household, in 2019 dollars.

Booms and recessions push incomes up and down, but although many media stories have tended to associate Millennials almost exclusively with the latter, they’ve now experienced both, and in a big way: Increases in income since 2014 have been steep.

ed since Millennials became adults. The Affordable Care Act extended health-care coverage, and federal-government support during the pandemic actually caused poverty to fall in 2020 and 2021

since 2014. By my analysis, Black and Latino Americans ages 25 to 44 in 2021 were making more money than Black and Latino Silents, Boomers, and Gen Xers at the same age. The U.S. is not without economic inequities, many of them racial. But Black and Latino Millennials are not falling behind previous generations when it comes to their income. Instead, most are getting ahead

Millennial men, on average, have not seen the income increases that Millennial women have (more on that later)—a divergence at least partly explained by the growing gap in educational attainment between men and women

the median income of Americans with a four-year college degree has steadily risen while the income of those with only a high-school degree has fallen. This trend is not new, though it is troubling.

The Great Recession was no doubt a more harrowing experience for young adults than the recession Gen X faced, but the income stagnation that followed it nonetheless lasted only a few years. Over the past half century, the longest period of falling or stagnant wages was from the ’70s to the mid-’90s, when Boomers were young workers.

poverty is not any more common among Millennials today than it was among previous generations.

Today, China’s economy is roughly five times the size of India’s. The average citizen of China has an economic output of almost $13,000 a year, while the average Indian’s is less than $2,500

In human-development indicators, the contrast is even sharper, with infant mortality rates much higher in India, life expectancy lower and access to sanitation less prevalent.

The divergence, analysts say, comes down largely to China’s central consolidation of policy power, an earlier start in opening up its economy to market forces starting in the late 1970s, and its single-minded focus on export-led growth.

China took the first-mover advantage and then compounded its dominance as it pursued its plans relentlessly.

India started opening its quasi-socialist economy nearly a decade later. Its approach remained piecemeal, constrained by tricky coalition politics and the competing interests of industrialists, unions, farmers and factions across its social spectrum.

“There is that element where China is a natural role model — not for its politics, but for the sheer efficiency,”

The world now has a radically different power structure than it did in 1990. China has already made itself the world’s factory, all but closing off any path India could take to competitive dominance in export-driven manufacturing.

A “Make in India” campaign, inaugurated by Mr. Modi in 2014, has been stuttering ever since. Wage costs are lower in India than in China, but much of the work force is poorly educated, and the country has struggled to attract private investment with its restrictive labor laws and other impediments to business, including lingering protectionism.

service-sector growth can go only so far in reaping India’s promise of a demographic dividend, or blunt the peril of an unemployment crisis. Hundreds of millions of people can’t find jobs or are underemployed in work that pays too little.

the employment entrance exams at government agencies. These jobs are still coveted as private sector work remains limited and less stable.

650,000 students will apply for just 600 or 700 jobs in the national civil service this year.

The civil service is a tiny part of the work force, but it is prestigious — in part because it comes with job security for life. Most applicants spend years, and a big chunk of their family’s savings, and still fail to make the cut.

“Here there is no enterprise, no companies,” Mr. Kumar said. For any young person, “the question comes, ‘What next? What can I do?’”

The lessons Mr. Modi is taking from China are most apparent in his push for infrastructure development, investing heavily in highways, railways and airports to improve supply chains and connectivity.

India has quintupled its annual spending on roads and railways during Mr. Modi’s nine years in power

As Mr. Modi has boxed in opponents, cowed the press and overwhelmed independent elements of civil society, his government has lashed out at expressions of concern from abroad as evidence of a colonial plot to undermine India or a lack of understanding of India’s “civilizational” approach — both elements that diplomats had long heard in China’s own defensiveness.

All the while, the increasing militancy of his Hindu nationalist supporters, as arms of the state hang back and give perpetrators a free pass, exacerbates India’s religious fault lines and clashes that threaten to disrupt India’s rise.

Even as India tries to align its growing technological and economic capacity to capitalize on the Western tensions with China, it is determined to stick to its neutrality and maintain a balancing act between the United States and Russia. There is also the question of whether the West’s shift from China, the linchpin of the global economy, is a temporary recalibration or a more fundamental one.

“China took advantage of a favorable geopolitical moment to really transform itself by having access to technology, to capital, to markets led by the United States. It took advantage of that to build itself up,” Mr. Saran said. “This could be that moment for India.”

there is no debate. There’s a trade-off. But once you make identity a core qualification, you’re opening up a whole world of racist anti-racism.

Most Americans believe in individual merit, and advancement regardless of identity. Harvard and our new elite believe that our society is so structured as an enduring “white supremacy” that merit can only be considered after you have accounted for the effects of “intersectional oppression.”

each moment of truth puts a crack in the stifling, authoritarian edifice of DEI. We can bring this corruption to light. We can hold them to account. I’m certainly more hopeful about the future of liberal society now than I was a month ago.

the only way to cover it all up, of course, is to abolish testing students entirely (which is what so many elite colleges and universities are now doing) or to give all students an A or an A-, making any distinctions of excellence irrelevant.

When push comes to shove, when there is a finite number of places available, you’re in a zero-sum predicament. You have to pick between a smarter student of the wrong race and a weaker student of the right race. In the end at Harvard, being in the right race — not merit — determines your chances.

The more people see this for the systemic racism it is, the sooner we can throw this neo-Marxist cuckoo out of the liberal nest, and return to the airing of all ideas, regardless of the subject matter or the identity of the students

That’s how you can claim, as Gay does, that “diversity” and “excellence” go hand in hand, when obviously, at some point they can and do conflict.

The response to all this from the CRT crowd has been to insist — ever more strongly — that Gay is simply and only a victim of racism, or, in woke terminology, a victim of misogynoir. The fact that a white female university president at those same hearings lost her job before Gay did — and without any plagiarism questions — doesn’t count.

In the Congressional hearings, moreover, she showed little gravitas, grace, or ability to think on her feet. She has largely hidden from public view since the plagiarism revelations — not a good instinct for a leader of a huge, public-facing institution like Harvard. She is, quite obviously, a run-of-the-mill woke academic, who was promoted at breakneck speed because of her race and sex, and found herself quickly out of her depth.

When you look instead at what she has done as an administrator, which is where she has been focused more recently, you see it has almost all been about hiring on the basis of sex and race, persecuting heretical members of racial minorities, and removing paintings of dead white dudes. She is, at least, consistent.

And let’s be honest: we can all see with our own eyes that subordinating merit to race and sex is how Gay got her position. Her work, beyond the sloppy dime-store plagiarism, would be underwhelming for an average member of any faculty in the country. But for a Harvard president, it’s astonishingly mid

what worries me even more is the change I see in ordinary Americans. I live in the heart of MAGA country, and Donald Trump is the single most culturally influential person here. It’s not close. He’s far more influential than any pastor, politician, coach or celebrity. He has changed people politically and also personally. It is common for those outside the Trump movement to describe their aunts or uncles or parents or grandparents as “lost.” They mean their relatives’ lives are utterly dominated by Trump, Trump’s media and Trump’s grievances.

never before have I seen extremism penetrate a vast American community so deeply, so completely and so comprehensively.

That percentage is far higher than the (still troubling) 22 percent of independents and 13 percent of Democrats who shared the same view.

In 2011, they were the American cohort least likely to agree that a politician could commit immoral acts in private yet “still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.”

They went from least likely to most likely to excuse the immoral behavior of politicians.

An increasing percentage are now tempted to embrace political violence. Last October, a startling 33 percent of Republicans (and an even larger 41 percent of pro-Trump Americans) agreed with the statement that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

Polling data again and again backs up the reality that the right is abandoning decency, and doing so in the most alarming of ways. It began happening almost immediately with white evangelicals

As the Iowa caucuses approached, Trump escalated his language, going so far as to call his political opponents “vermin” and declaring that immigrants entering America illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country.” The statement was so indefensible and repugnant that many expected it to hurt Trump. Yet a Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll found that a 42 percent plurality of likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers said the statement would make them more likely to support Trump — a substantially greater percentage than the 28 percent who said it would make them less likely to support him.

While political violence is hardly exclusive to the right, the hostility and vitriol embedded in MAGA America is resulting in an escalating wave of threats and acts of intimidation.

The result is a religious movement steeped in fanaticism but stripped of virtue. The fruit of the spirit described in Galatians in the New Testament — “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” — is absent from MAGA Christianity, replaced by the very “works of the flesh” the same passage warned against, including “hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions” and “factions.”

in the upside-down world of MAGA morality, vice is virtue and virtue is vice. My colleague Jane Coaston even coined a term, “vice signaling,” to describe how Trump’s core supporters convey their tribal allegiance. They’re often deliberately rude, transgressive or otherwise unpleasant, just to demonstrate how little they care about conventional moral norms.

For most of my life, conservative evangelicals (including me) have been fond of quoting John Adams’s 1798 letter to the Massachusetts Militia. It’s a critical founding document, one that forcefully argues that our Republic needs a virtuous citizenry to survive. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People,” he asserts. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

I’ve appreciated that quote because it recognizes the obligations of a free people in a constitutional republic to exercise their liberty toward virtuous purposes.

Absent public virtue, a republic can fall. And a Trump win in 2024 would absolutely convince countless Americans that virtue is for suckers, and vice is the key to victory.

if he wins again, the equation will change and history may record that he was not the culmination of a short-lived reactionary moment, but rather the harbinger of a greater darkness to come.

17 percent of G.D.P.

there is now one administrator or manager for every 4.7 employees, doing things like designing anti-harassment trainings, writing corporate mission statements, collecting data and managing “systems.”

This situation is especially grave in higher education. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology now has almost eight times as many nonfaculty employees as faculty employees

The general job of administrators, who are invariably good and well-meaning people, is to supervise and control, and they gain power and job security by hiring more people to work for them to create more supervision and control

Their power is similar to what Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic has called the “time tax.” If you’ve ever fought a health care, corporate or university bureaucracy, you quickly realize you don’t have the time for it, so you give up

As Philip K. Howard has been arguing for years, good organizations give people discretion to do what is right. But the trend in public and private sector organizations has been to write rules that rob people of the power of discretion

kids’ activities, from travel sports to recess, are supervised, and rules dominate. Parents are afraid their kids might be harmed, but as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have argued, by being overprotective, parents make their kids more fragile and more vulnerable to harm.

High school students design their lives to fit the metrics that college admissions officers require. And what traits are selective schools looking for? They’re looking for students who are willing to conform to the formulas the gatekeepers devise.

t Stanford is apparently now tamed. I invite you to read Ginevra Davis’s essay “Stanford’s War on Social Life” in Palladium, which won a vaunted Sidney Award in 2022 and details how university administrators cracked down on student initiatives to make everything boring, supervised and safe.

Mark Edmundson teaches literature at the University of Virginia. The annual self-evaluations he had to submit used to be one page. Now he has to fill out about 15 electronic pages of bureaucratese that include demonstrating how his work advances D.E.I., to make sure his every waking moment conforms to the reigning ideology.

the whole administrative apparatus comes with an implied view of human nature. People are weak, fragile, vulnerable and kind of stupid. They need administrators to run their lives

The result is the soft despotism that Tocqueville warned us about centuries ago, a power that “is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild.”

this kind of power is now centerless. Presidents and executives don’t run companies, universities or nations. Power is now held by everyone who issues work surveys and annual reports, the people who create H.R. trainings and collect data

Trumpian populism is about many things, but one of them is this: working-class people rebelling against administrators. It is about people who want to lead lives of freedom, creativity and vitality, who find themselves working at jobs, sending their kids to schools and visiting hospitals, where they confront “an immense and tutelary power” (Tocqueville’s words) that is out to diminish them.

Crew members like my Panamanian cabin attendant seem to work 24 hours a day. A waiter from New Delhi tells me that his contract is six months and three weeks long. After a cruise ends, he says, “in a few hours, we start again for the next cruise.” At the end of the half a year at sea, he is allowed a two-to-three-month stay at home with his family. As of 2019, the median income for crew members was somewhere in the vicinity of $20,000, according to a major business publication. Royal Caribbean would not share the current median salary for its crew members, but I am certain that it amounts to a fraction of the cost of a Royal Bling gold-plated, zirconia-studded chalice.

It is also unseemly to write about the kind of people who go on cruises. Our country does not provide the education and upbringing that allow its citizens an interior life. For the creative class to point fingers at the large, breasty gentlemen adrift in tortilla-chip-laden pools of water is to gather a sour harvest of low-hanging fruit.