Good morning Hank. It's Tuesday.
I want to ask you a question.
Do you think the violent crime rate in the United States
has gone up or down
or stayed about the same
since 1990?
The answer is, that it has gone down, dramatically!
In fact, there are about half as many violent crimes
per one thousand Americans
as there were 25 years ago.
Overall, crime rates are also down dramatically
but every year since 2006
at least 60 percent of Americans polled
have said that they feel that
"crime is going up".
And I am among them. In fact, I wanted
to make a video about why crime is going up
in the Untied States only to find out...
you know...that...that it's not.
Okay, so if you are an American
this is how likely you are to die of various causes.
You see violence down there at the bottom right corner.
That's all interpersonal violence
war, terrorism, murder, etc.
Now, because its victims are disproportionately young,
violence becomes a bigger problem
if you change this visualization to
measure disability adjusted life years.
Which is like a measure of how many years
of healthy life are lost due to various causes.
But it's still a relatively small public health problem
in the United States. Smaller than
suicide, or drug overdoses, or asthma,
or complications from preterm birth,
or traffic accidents.
And also violence is shrinking faster
as a cause of death and disability
in the United States than any
other major cause except for HIV.
So Hank, several studies have shown that on the Internet
we like to share what makes us outraged.
And that incentivizes media companies, even
very small ones that make videos in their basements,
to find outrageous stories because
we know that you will share them.
I've done this. Like in 2010, I made a video about how
outrageous it is that we continue to mint pennies
even though they cost two cents a piece to make
and are never used to buy goods or services.
The problem is the penny, while it's an obvious outrage,
it's an exceedingly small outrage.
I mean the US government could save far
more money by just by passing a long term
highway funding bill which Congress has been
unable to do for the last six years.
But that isn't as narratively simple or as easy to get
outraged about, so we don't talk about it much.
And then there is Martin Shkreli, the bond villainesque
former hedge fund manager, whose company
acquired the rights to a drug that
treats people with toxoplasmosis and
promptly rised the price from 13 dollars and 50 cents a pill
to 750 dollars a pill.
The internet boiled with outrage until
the company promised to lower the price.
Two months later, they've just announced, that for
some customers, they are going to lower that price
all the way down to 375 dollars a pill.
But the outrage at this ass-hat masked a much
more complicated and interesting problem.
Like, even before the price hike the drug cost 30 times more
in the US than it did in the UK.
And these price hikes aren't even particularly new or rare.
Longterm Nerdfighters will remember back in 2011
when Warner Chilcott raised the price of its drug
Asacol 1200 percent overnight.
There are dozens of similar examples
and this stuff isn't happening because of
one individual's asshattery. It's happening because
there is a huge web of problems
with pharmaceutical markets in the US.
Point being, our collective outrage may have
slightly decreased the price of one rarely prescribed drug.
But it has done nothing to address the larger issues
that affect every American who takes medication.
Now, of course, the Internet can and does grapple with
big and complicated problems and it's also
given a voice to people who traditionally have been
discriminated against in public discourse.
And I also don't think there is anything wrong with being angry.
Anger combined with sustained effort
can lead to real change.
But when we allow ourselves to casually move from
one outrage to the next,
from pennies to Martin Shkreli,
nothing ever really changes.
Well... Except that maybe we have become more afraid
and pessimistic.
Like, since January of 2010, crime is down.
The U.S. joblessness rate has fallen dramatically.
The economy has grown and we report being happier
on average than we were five years ago.
And yet every single month since January of 2010,
more than two-thirds of Americans have felt
that the US is headed in the wrong direction.
And I feel like we are unnecessarily inundated with bad news
because we seek it out and when we find it,
we share it. And so we become more afraid
and pessimistic than we need to be.
But then again, as a nation we've never been healthier
or claim to be happier.
So maybe we're getting exactly what we want.
Even if we don't know it.
Hank. I'll see you on Friday.