Broadsheet

Today I’m allowing myself to be a pedantic nit-picker. Really embracing that side of me.

And I’m wondering how to push back against mundane nits, even though I’m aware that it makes me sound like I’m over-sensitive and focusing on the wrong things.

Because the tiny things really do matter, and I’m reminded of that because I’ve spied at least one mechanism where a small change has a larger cultural impact.

The example is in social media…

"What is happening?!" – that’s the prompt that X/Twitter gives you in the post input field.

"What’s on your mind, Matt?" – that’s what Facebook says to me.

This is some kind of manifestation of brand, I had imagined. I hadn’t thought about it very much. I guess the wording has an effect what the social network is like, but I wouldn’t have given that much weight.

EXCEPT: the “nudge” acts strongly with neurodiverse people.

Here’s a paper about it (detailed ref below):

[Our Autistic young adult participants] interpreted feature descriptions such as “people you may know,” “what’s happening?,” “what’s on your mind?,” and “write a comment,” as a direct statement to themselves to act upon.

That UI microcopy that I parse as at-best lightly encouraging me to behave in a particular way is treated by at least some people as a strong instruction.

Again:

we observed that young Autistic adults took prompts to share information at face value and followed these suggestions as directives. For example, Participant3 explains the reason for sharing her contact information on her profile: “I had to do that because when I made my account it said phone number or email.”

This is so illuminating to me.

Ref.

Page, X., Capener, A., Cullen, S., Wang, T., Garfield, M., & J. Wisniewski, P. (2022). Perceiving Affordances Differently: The Unintended Consequences When Young Autistic Adults Engage with Social Media. Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3517596

Let me extrapolate.

Prevalence of Autistic adults in the US: 2 percent. (Apologies for the reference to “disorder” on that page; I wanted to link to the stat but I disagree with the frame.)
McKinsey. Minimum number of employees to involve for a successful business transformation project: 7 percent.

So hand-waving a bit here, 2% of a social app’s audience taking user interface copy literally is a good way toward having actual cultural change. You get a bunch more via mimesis, a bunch via algo nudges, and so on. But neurodiverse people get you a quarter of the way there!

I had PREVIOUSLY imagined that culture changes because EVERYONE shifts behaviour a LITTLE.

But NOW I see a mechanism whereby a VERY SMALL cohort changes their behaviour ABSOLUTELY and perhaps that drags along the rest.

Which seems plausible?

Anyway, I would love to understand more how/whether neurodiverse people have a critical role as a cultural vector, online and elsewhere, disproportionate to population.

Thinking like this has made me appreciate, even more, that apparently innocuously choices MATTER culturally, even when I can’t imagine the actual mechanism.

So I’ll go into two such apparently innocuous examples

Here are two incidences with signage that I spotted on my travels in the last few days.

London Bridge

At London Bridge station this morning, an automated announcement over the tannoy: "Due to weather conditions the surfaces around the station may be slippery."

I mean… yes? It’s raining a little? So… of course??

It is fascinating to contemplate the complex of considerations and sign-offs that brought this automated announcement into existence and maintain it.

I can’t imagine it stops people slipping over. And I can’t imagine it would function as a protective shield in court against negligence.

I can imagine, on the other hand, how it came into being! Somebody is trying to be nice or helpful, and nobody has an argument against adding the announcement to the roster. Or it’s a health & safety thing, an individual being extra keen, or maybe it’s aimed at staff (not travellers), but there was no lawyer in the room to say “nah that’s actually not a functional defence.”

But. To my mind, the automated tannoy announcement is corrosive:

Situationally: it reduces the signal to noise ratio of announcements and stops me listening to all announcements, even useful ones
Societally: it subtly reduces my individual level of responsibility by letting me disclaim any accident as “well, I wasn’t told.”

Society, in this case, becomes an diffuse helicopter parent.

Gatwick Airport

There are some gorgeous, huge, bright screens in Gatwick Airport now, used for way-finding and (of course) ads. You can barely tell they’re screens.

In fact these screens fulfil the function of regular static signs, and have displaced those old signs: there’s a big yellow block that says “Toilets.”

Some of the time.

A minute later, that part of the large screen changes its display mode and tells you what gates are in that direction instead.

The thing is… you can’t, on first glance, tell that these screens are screens. They do not have the visual affordance of changing over time. They are not dimmer than standard static surfaces; they have no flicker. The pixels are not visible.

So I unconsciously note that there is a sign that tells me where the toilets are, without memorising the arrow. My cognition is environmental; my extended mind extends to the sign. I look again, now wanting to know the direction… but the sign has changed.

I am confused. Was I wrong to look there for direction?

This all happens below my immediate consciousness. I am gaslit by the signage. By my own mind! By the sign’s appearance, it had informed me that it is not a changing screen. I must be mistaken.

My extental reality, I absorb just very slightly, just at 0.1% intensity, my external reality is not to be trusted.

I am aware that, in bringing up these two examples, I am an old man yelling at a cloud.

I am gesturing at what appear to be such diffuse effects, homoeopathically tiny nudges on culture:

That I do not bear individual responsibility for my own well-being, beginning with not being trusted to look after my own feet in the rain.
That I cannot trust my perceptions of my physical surroundings, beginning with an ostensibly helpful sign duping me and denying its nature.

It is challenging to belief this even matters?

HOWEVER.

My note from the microcopy-to-culture story is that it is worth caring about these things because even if I cannot identify the mechanism right now, large cultural effects from tiny acorns grow.

These examples are, indeed, how culture is enacted and propagated.

So I wonder what the counter-action could be, if I feel so strongly about the potential effects?

How can I persuade people to remove the meaningless announcements, to return meaning to signs? Short of enrolling a mob of enraged semioticians to take matters into their own hands.

To illuminate and persuade, we need new instruments to measure diffuse nudges on culture.

That sounds abstract. Yet, in the marketing world, something like Net promoter score (NPS) (Wikipedia) does exactly that.

If you’ve ever been asked whether you would recommend a product or service to a friend, know that your answer will pass through a standard and simple algorithm, and be pored over by product managers every 30 days.

The existence of NPS is so potent in bringing about a certain type of behaviour.

If there were a number to easily measure some abstract social metric - entrepreneurship, feeling of individual agency, contentment - and then show how it is eroded by the theatre of announcements that say “be careful walking, it’s for your own good”…

Well,

that would be an awfully technocratic “solution”.

And probably not work, really.

YET:

It doesn’t need to work, really. It doesn’t need to be true.

I just need some mechanism.

Some plausible mechanism to get into the heads of policy-makers and managers.

To make the asinine announcements in train stations stop.

Because they may or may not be a cause or a symptom of a certain kind of society, and all of that.

But mainly they drive me loopy.

And I want the robot to stop telling me that it’s raining and therefore I might slip over because for goodness sake.

COVID Metrics
	Now	Week Ago	Goal
Hospitalized²	5,899	6,686	≤3,000¹
Deaths per Week²	779	982	≤350¹
¹my goals to stop weekly posts, ²Weekly for Currently Hospitalized, and Deaths 🚩 Increasing number weekly for Hospitalized and Deaths ✅ Goal met.

Recently I’ve been writing some fairly gloomy stuff, mostly related to war and international affairs. But even though I’ve been focusing on scary happenings overseas, I’m still very optimistic about the domestic situation here in the United States. So I thought I’d make a little list of trends that we should be happy about.

First, the big picture. 2020 and 2021 were pretty dark years for the U.S. in many ways — not in all ways, but in many. Covid killed a million Americans, there was massive social unrest, violent crime skyrocketed across the nation, and in 2021 inflation soared and real income fell. There were some good things going on too — Covid relief spending allowed a lot of people to pay down their debts, and the economy rebounded strongly in 2021 — but overall, if you said that 2020-21 were bad years, reasonable people probably wouldn’t contradict you. I still expressed optimism during those years, but more of the “We can fix it” variety rather than the “Things are going great” variety.

Those years, and the years of unrest that preceded them in the late 2010s, cemented a negative mood in the minds of the American people that will take a while to heal. But the healing is underway, because there are a bunch of positive trends going on in the nation right now. Here are a few.

Crime is going down now

Violent crime is a huge problem in America today — in fact, it’s pretty much always a huge problem in America, since this is generally a very violent country. But in the 1990s, 2000s, and early 2010s things were getting steadily less bad.

(Just as a side note, I like to use murder rates as a proxy for overall violent crime — assault, robbery, and rape are subject to underreporting. If there’s a lot of assaults happening, people might just stop calling the cops when they get punched, but everyone calls the cops for a dead body. So I use murder to measure overall violent crime. Also, I often just say “crime” when I mean “violent crime”, because many other people use this shorthand.)

Violent crime hit a low point in 2014. But in 2015, it started drifting up again, and in 2020 it absolutely spiked. Many, including myself, feared that America was entering a long-term period of elevated urban violence, like we did in the 1970s.

But starting in 2022, something good started to happen — violence started to fall. It fell even more in 2023:

And the trend looks like it’s continuing, or even accelerating, in 2024. The Wall Street Journal has a great table where you can look at changes in murder rates in various cities over the last year. In most cities, murders are falling, and in some places they’re absolutely plunging:

America is becoming safer. Why? Unfortunately, as with the big crime decline that started in the early 1990s, we’ll probably never know. Changes in policing and incarceration, the good economy, and falling social unrest are all possibilities.

But the good news here is that the country seems to be getting safer. If the trend continues, we could get back to the relatively good years of the early 2010s.

We’re making progress against climate change

One thing that gets many Americans depressed — especially many young progressive Americans — is climate change. And that’s understandable! Climate change is a huge threat to our way of life, not to mention the natural world. The last year was especially brutal.

There’s an inherent difficulty in solving climate change, since it’s an externality — climate policy is made at the level of individual countries, so each country has an incentive to sit back and do nothing and insist that the other countries handle the global problem.

But there’s another powerful force working against climate change: technology. Solar power, batteries, and other green technologies have gotten cheaper at astounding rates, to the point where decarbonization is the smart economic option as well as the good environmental choice. At the same time, economic growth is generally shifting from manufacturing to services, especially online services, which are less carbon-intensive.

As a result, emissions have been falling in the developed world, and decelerating across much of the developing world:

And as a result, projections for how bad climate change will get have been falling for the last six or seven years:

Obviously much more needs to be done. 2.7 degrees of warming will be pretty catastrophic for a lot of people and places, and even 2.1 degrees will be difficult to live with. Electrification and decarbonization need to accelerate.

But still, this is big progress, on a huge, important, and potentially even existential issue.

The U.S. economy is growing pretty fast

A lot of people these days like to downplay the importance of GDP, but actually it’s a very important economic number. GDP is a measure of national income — the amount that people spend on goods and services is, theoretically speaking, the same as the amount that people earn (even if in practice there are small differences between these numbers when we measure them). We want people’s incomes to go up! That means GDP growth. Also, faster GDP growth means more people have jobs.

U.S. growth has actually been pretty average since the pandemic; it’s basically staying on the trend line of previous decades.

But when you look at international comparisons, America is actually doing really well. Most countries have struggled to grow at pre-pandemic rates in the post-pandemic era — this is especially true of European countries that suffered from the Russian gas cutoff, but it’s also true of places like Japan and Canada (and even China). The U.S. has powered ahead, even when you take higher immigration rates into account:

(Note: This is not a per capita measure, but since most population growth in rich countries is now due to immigration, it’s basically the same.)

And forecasters expect the U.S. to continue to outpace other rich countries this year as well.

Why is the U.S. growing so quickly? Two commonly cited reasons are 1) the U.S.’ expansionary fiscal policy, including more generous Covid relief payments, and 2) Biden’s industrial policy, which is causing a boom in factory construction.

But I would also like to point out allocative efficiency. The U.S. economy got very shaken up by Covid; a lot of businesses were destroyed, and there was a huge boom in new businesses. Americans also moved around the country a lot more than they had been doing in previous years. That churn results in a better allocation of productive resources — crappy old businesses die and better ones replace them, while workers move to jobs and places where their talents are put to better use.

In any case, American income is growing strongly. And there’s even better news: The higher income is flowing into the pockets of young Americans and the working class.

Younger generations are doing better than their parents

I’ve written several posts about this over the past year, but the positive data keeps coming in, and it’s good to go over it again.

In the 2010s, there was a big worry that the Millennial generation, and perhaps also Generation Z, would be uniquely hurt by the financial crisis and by other negative economic trends. But in the years since the pandemic, it’s become apparent that younger generations are — on average — doing very well economically. The Economist has a good story showing generational income gains by age:

Note that this chart is adjusted for changes in the cost of living over time.

And Jeremy Horpedahl has been tracking younger generations’ wealth gains over at his blog:

There are two basic reasons for the jump in the wealth of younger generations: 1) rising house prices, and 2) falling debt levels.

Now, these are averages, not medians. It’s reasonable to worry about inequality within the younger generation, especially regarding who gets to inherit an expensive house from their parents. But from 2019 to 2022, there were big increases in Millennials’ median wealth, not just average:

The changes were especially good for traditionally disadvantaged groups — Black and Hispanic Americans, Americans without a college degree, rural Americans, renters, etc. So that suggests that the surge in the wealth of the younger generation isn’t flowing disproportionately to richer young people (as it might be in the UK).

So young Americans are doing well — they’re making more than their parents did at similar ages, and their wealth is higher too, despite spending more years in school and getting a later start on their careers.

Wage inequality is falling

Inequality in America increased a lot in the 1980s, then again in the 2000s and early 2010s. By far the biggest piece of this was increased wage inequality — some people earned a lot more, others saw their wages fall. There were huge debates over what caused this — the decline of unions, competition with China, automation, changes in the tax code, or the rise of new technologies that benefitted educated workers more than others.

But in the mid 2010s, wage inequality plateaued:

And since the pandemic, this trend has accelerated. Autor, Dube, and McGrew have a recent paper titled “The Unexpected Compression: Competition at Work in the Low Wage Labor Market”, in which they document how low-wage and medium-wage workers have seen big gains since 2019, while high-wage workers have lost a bit of ground. They cite the reallocation of labor as the biggest factor — now that Americans are switching jobs a lot more, low-wage workers are able to drive a harder bargain against their employers.

In fact, Jeremy Horpedahl has my favorite chart showing the real wage gains (i.e., adjusted for the cost of living) across the distribution:

It would be nice if the top fifth had gained as well, but the strong gains for the people at the bottom are something to celebrate.

So those are five recent trends to be optimistic about in America today. We have a healthy economy, which is finally delivering on its promise to low-wage workers and young people, both in terms of greater income and greater wealth. Crime is falling, and the threat of global warming is a little less dire. If that doesn’t make you smile on a Thursday afternoon…well, I did my best.

Subscribe now