Brief: When statesmen weren't elderly

A book that I'm reading casually mentioned that the English politician Bolingbroke became Secretary at War in 1704 -- at age 26. When something seems like it's from another world, it probably reflects the massive changes that the West has seen since making the transition to a society characterized by open entry and competition in both the economic and political spheres. To check this, I've plotted over time how old the entering British Secretary at War was (or whatever new title he may have had, such as Secretary of State for Defence). Here are the results:


Sure enough, up through the first quarter of the 18th C., the Secretary at War's age hovers around 30. By the end of the century, his age has moved to the upper 30s and 40s. During the 19th C. there is more variance, with a handful of Secretaries in their early 30s, but the trend is still upward into the 40s and 50s. After 1900, the youngest has been 38, the oldest 73, with the average at 52. The men with heavy war responsibilities are about 20 years older in post-industrial than in pre-industrial times.

One reason may be that everyone started living longer with industrialization, not just the statesmen. But when you think about it, that cannot explain things. Presumably the 17th C. counterparts of today's lead singers of a rock band were also in their 20s. Elite athletes were likely also in their 20s, as they are today. If there were supermodels back then, you can bet they would have been in their 20s as well. Instead, there has been a shift in what type of people are considered fit for war secretary, which in turn reflects a change in the job description itself.

Violence and Social Orders, the book I'm reading, posits a framework for understanding history through the lens of controlling violence. In a primitive social order, such as those of hunter-gatherers, there is continual violence, no state, and mostly no social organizations beyond kin networks.

The limited access order (or "natural state") controls violence by using the state to create rents for elite members of a dominant coalition. Each elite gets his own piece of turf to extract rents from, and each elite respects the turf of the others because otherwise violence will break out, and that disorder would destroy the rent-creation. To make sure that the rents are sufficient to persuade elite members to refrain from violence, access to the elite is restricted -- if it were open, lots of people would pour in and shrink the amount of the rents going to each person. Still, the shadow of violence always looms over the society, since the means of violence are spread out over the entire elite -- not monopolized by the state -- and they only refrain as long as no one trespasses against them. The threat is always there.

Open access orders are the ones we live in today, where there is political control of the military, the state is used to provide public goods for the masses rather than private rents for the elites, and where the economically powerful earn their money through profits -- doing something productive -- rather than parasitizing rents from the peasants under their control. Violence is rare because the state monopolizes the legitimate use of violence, rather than every elite member being a violence specialist himself or closely allied with one. Elites compete on the basis of the price and quality of the goods and services they provide -- not based on who can defeat whom in a violent battle.

My guess for why open access orders have older statesmen is that since the shadow of violence has been largely removed, you don't need people running military affairs who are itching to pick up arms and go kick some ass. Being a hormone-crazed young person is great in a natural state -- your hair-trigger emotions are suited to a world where you always have to be prepared to fight, and your choleric temper provides a credible threat to would-be trespassers during peacetime. For example, Alexander the Great became King of Macedon at 20 and had conquered much of the known world by his death at 32.

But in open access orders, violence has been stripped from the broad elite and concentrated in the state, and civil war -- that is, intra-elite war -- is rare. So, too, are elite uprisings against the state -- before, these resulted from elites losing their rents and going after the people who were supposed to be providing them. So in these societies hot-headed young people are only going to threaten the peace. The elites are no longer constantly prepared to battle each other, so we only require a calm person to make sure everyone continues to get along. A 26 year-old in charge of the army, by contrast, would grow bored with peace so quickly that he'd want to stir things up "so we at least have something to do."

It's funny that we worry today about how to control young males' violent impulses, which threaten the peace. Only 300 years ago, we would have been grateful to have a young violent male in our social circle -- he would've been extracting rents from us, but at least we'd have someone to protect us from all those other specialists in violence. We truly live in a different world.

Brief: Generational views of communism

On the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, let's take a look at how the various generations viewed communism.

The General Social Survey asked a question from the early 1970s through the mid-1990s about your view of communism. I've restricted the respondents to those between the ages of 18 and 30 to make sure that we're looking at those most prone to idealistic foolishness of one stripe or another. The generations I've chosen are earlier Baby Boomers, later Baby Boomers, the disco-punk generation (perhaps Second Silent Generation is better), earlier Generation X-ers, and later Generation X-ers. Here are the results:


I knew beforehand that those born between the two most recent loudmouth generations (Boomers and X-ers) would be the least sympathetic to commies because they came of age during a decidedly non-ideological period -- roughly the late '70s and early '80s, in contrast to the highly ideological Sixties and early '90s that the other two generations grew up during. Young people during the social hysterias felt compelled to embrace the larger world in order to change it for the better, while young people during a period of relative social calm felt like telling the larger world to go get a life of its own, leave us alone, and let us have fun.

I'm putting together a more detailed post about generational differences in voting patterns across the years, so stay tuned.

The robber barons slashed prices, boosted output, and saw eroding profit margins

One of the lessons we take away from our high school and college history classes is that during the latter half of the 19th C. America was ruled by robber barons -- powerful businessmen who wielded nearly monopolistic power over the hapless little guy, riding roughshod over the entire society for want of regulatory restraints. That all changed when populist and progressive politicians and muckraking journalists exposed the abuses of Gilded Age and turn-of-the-century industrialists.

Like most folktales, though, it bears little resemblance to the truth. Its function is instead to provide a creation mythology for contemporary regulators to justify present-day attacks on so-called robber barons. I've gone through data on railroads from a turn-of-the-century edition of the Statistical Abstract of the United States, and right in the middle of all of that populist and progressive agitation, it was totally clear that they were pushing an image of the world that was completely backwards. If powerful monopolists are harming consumers, we should see output shrinking and prices soaring. If they were gouging consumers, they should have seen ever greater profits over time -- again, until they were restrained by the government. This approach also allows us to test whether the antitrust legislation had any beneficial effect -- we can just look at what was going on before and after it was passed.

I've chosen railroads because the Wikipedia article on robber barons shows that most of the outrage was directed at railroad magnates -- they are more represented in lists than are captains of other industries. Let's first take a look at output. Imagine De Beers, which used to control almost all of the world's diamond supply, responding to lower revenues -- they'd simply choke off the flow of diamonds into the market, so that diamond buyers would compete more intensely over an artificial shortage of diamonds. Here are graphs showing the total number of miles of railroad in operation, the number of miles added each year, the number of passengers carried, and the amount of freight carried:


The antitrust era began more or less in 1890 with the Sherman Act. Before this time, output did not contract. There is stagnant output from about 1830 to 1850 while the industry is in its infancy. After 1850, though, there may be cycles up and down, but the clear trend is toward steadily greater output over time. If anything, the decade after the Sherman Act was passed saw shrinking or stagnant output. The number of passengers served and the weight of freight carried also rose steadily at least from the early 1880s for the next decade (earlier data are not available). The picture after 1890 isn't clear, but we can rule out a beneficial effect of the Sherman Act, which would have sent the numbers steadily upward and at a faster rate than before. Remember, the trend was already increasing before 1890.

This behavior is the opposite of a monopolist who would want to only serve fewer and fewer people. Imagine if the Super Bowl organizers sold 1000 fewer tickets year after year -- prices would skyrocket. So, these three separate measures of output show that railroad owners behaved in the opposite way of monopolists -- they kept giving consumers more of what they wanted.

We might predict from this that prices that consumers paid would have fallen as a result of expanding output -- when there's a glut of stuff, people prefer to pay less for it. The evil robber baron picture predicts that prices should have shot up. Let's see who is right by looking at freight rates on wheat per bushel (in dollars), while comparing rates across three types of transportation:


Water-only transport became nominally more expensive from the early 1850s through the late 1860s, although this is not adjusted for inflation. The key is that it began falling sharply from the late 1860s through the late 1870s, fell a bit more shallowly for another decade, and declined very modestly after 1890. Here is a completely different method of transportation -- by water rather than over land -- and we see falling prices. So at least owners of water transport were not monopolists. Was the story any different for the rates that railroad owners charged? Not at all: we see the same pattern of rapid decline from the late 1860s through the late 1870s, modest decline for another decade, and very slow decline after 1890. Again, we see no effect of the Sherman Act -- if anything, the antitrust era saw slower price decreases.

So, railroad magnates were the opposite of monopolists, boosting output and charging lower prices over time. Still, we might salvage the picture of bloated industrialists by looking at their profits -- you could charge lower prices and make up for it on volume. Alas, when we look at how much money they brought in for carrying either passengers or freight for a mile (in cents), we see that railroad owners pocketed less and less dough:


Whether it was from freight or passengers, railroads received less and less money from at least the early 1880s onward, again with no sign of the Sherman Act in the data. The leading railroads have data going back farther, and they show falling revenues going back at least to the 1870s. Here too we see that the antitrust era that began in the 1890s was associated with a slower rate of declining revenues. In fact, the robber barons took their biggest clobbering of the Gilded Age during the 1870s, decades before there was any substantial elite outcry to rein them in.

That is exactly what we expect from a new and highly profitable industry -- once businessmen hear about how profitable it is, more and more will enter it, and the resulting bitter competition will drive down profits until the industry is no more profitable than a typical industry. If you were one of the lucky initial railroad owners back in the 1830s, you may have made a pretty penny for the moment when you had little or no competition. But at least by 1870 -- and probably somewhat earlier -- that brief period of uncolonized paradise was long gone. The magnates saw leaner and leaner profit margins, while consumers saw more and more miles of railroads that could carry them and their stuff for lower and lower prices.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but a lot of what we learned in school about businessmen was utter nonsense. If we taught facts, we would teach kids that the robber barons kept giving their consumers more of what they wanted and at lower prices -- and these data don't even factor in the consumer benefits of enjoying improvements in quality that railroads implemented as they grew from newcomer to mature industries. A railroad trip in 1885 was more pleasant than a railroad trip in 1845. And all the while, they made less and less money on these ventures, rather than fatten themselves up by abusing their power, which they clearly had very little of.

The facts are not hard to understand, so that's not the reason that they aren't taught. Indeed, the teachers themselves don't know these facts because they're not taught in intro college history classes either. The idea that captains of industry were ruining the lives of ordinary people can be very easily tested with data available to anyone with an internet connection, and the results show that our received picture of the world is not just a little bit off but completely wrong. As I said earlier, this mythology about the dark demons known as robber barons and the angelic saviors called populists and progressives is really just another creation myth. Like other such myths, it merely rationalizes the will of the group that is currently in power -- namely, the government and particularly the regulators.

"Why do those people have jobs, teacher?"

"Well, you see Jayden, if we didn't have them, darkness would descend over the land. Let me tell you the story of how the world used to be before the antitrust regulators arrived to deliver us from the wickedness of the robber barons..."

This fake picture we have extends to other industries as well -- I got the idea for this post by learning about the history of Standard Oil, which also was responsible for higher output, lower prices and profits, and saw its market share erode over time. In the popular-audience stuff, I haven't seen much discussion of railroads, although there may be academic articles on the topic. The most important thing here is the graphs, which you rarely see even in journal articles. You're lucky to see full tables. Here, the pattern jumps out at you, showing just how ridiculous the stories we've been told are.

Brief: Do people vote selfishly when it comes to vices?

In Bryan Caplan's eye-opening book The Myth of the Rational Voter, he devotes some time to the literature showing that voters do not vote their narrow self interests. The well-to-do favor social safety net programs, men are typically more pro-choice, and so on. In general, people claim to and do vote for what they believe will make society better off. He says that the exceptions are personal vices, such as smokers being much more against smoking bans than are non-smokers. I went to the General Social Survey to see what other examples I could dig up on this pattern.

First:


Those who saw an x-rated movie last year, compared to those who didn't, are much more likely to want to keep pornography legal for adults, rather than ban it altogether.

Second:


Among married people, those who have cheated on their spouse are much more likely to want easier divorce laws. The idea is that if we had stricter laws, their vice could be more harshly punished, say by having to pay massive damages in divorce court if it were uncovered.

Next:


The more sex partners a woman has had in the past year, the more willing she is to support abortion for any reason whatsoever. The idea is that for such women, abortion is one form of birth control, and lacking this method of last resort would constrain their ability to indulge their vice of sleeping with a variety of men.

Finally, an exception to the "vice leads to selfish voting" rule:


These two graphs show that illegal drug users feel the same way as non-drug users about how well our drug policy is doing, rather than view it as too harsh or unjust, as we might have expected from the previous three cases. This case is different in that the vice is illegal, while the other three vices are perfectly legal. Obviously they could not vote selfishly because there are no "legalize it" pieces of legislation on the table.

But even when you just ask them their opinion, they still don't espouse the view that promotes their own self-interest. Perhaps the vices that we criminalize, on average, really are more harmful than those that we don't criminalize -- shooting heroin really is more ruinous than cheating, sleeping around, or watching porn. If that's so, then the heroin addict doesn't view his vice as something that's unobjectionable, and so doesn't view tough drug laws as an untenable constraint on his liberty, in the way that a porn addict would view his own vice and the attempts to criminalize it. He probably recognizes that shooting heroin is something that people should be protected from by making it harder to try out. The porn addict, by contrast, realizes that it never really hurt anyone, so people should not be protected from a false menace.

So, by experiencing how destructive illegal drugs are first-hand, users put on their "do what's best for society" hat and confess that current drug laws aren't as bad as ivory tower detractors might think. The other vices don't appear to destroy society, so those who indulge in them don't think about what's best for society -- you only get into that mindset when you perceive that something is a real problem that needs to be solved.

GSS variables used: pornlaw, xmovie, divlaw, evstray, abany, partners, sex, natdrug, hlth5, evidu

Brief: Relationship anger by political views for men and women

The stereotype is that liberal women are more combative and temperamental in relationships, compared to the more docile and even-headed conservative women. Let's take a look at the GSS and see if it's true. We'll look at the same question for men.

The survey asks about some recent event when the respondent was angry, and it follows up to ask who they were angry at. I pooled all three degrees of liberal, and all three degrees of conservative, to get roughly equal sample sizes for liberal, moderate, and conservative. The pattern is clear even without doing this, but this is to make the presentation easier. Here are the results (the y-axis should read "fraction angry," not "% angry"):


First, note that women are about twice as likely to be angry at their relationship partner than are men. No surprise there. Also note that the pattern by political views isn't so different between the sexes. Among females, moderates and conservatives aren't really different from each other, but both are twice as likely as liberals to get angry at their partner. Among males, moderates and conservatives are about 1.5 times as likely as liberals to get angry at their partner.

There are a million different ad hoc reasons I could give for why the stereotype isn't true, but I'd have no way of verifying them with just these data. Whatever the cause, liberal women are actually a safer bet if you're looking for peace in the relationship.

GSS variables used: madat1, polviews, sex

The changing social climate of young people from 1870 to present

[This will end up being quite long, so I will post it in three stages for easier digestion. Expect two updates during the week. First update on generations added.]

OK, so the title is a bit ambitious, but I've finally found a way to measure this. Anyone who's read my personal blog knows that one of my obsessions is documenting what's going on among young people. They typically leave very little in terms of a written record, and as adults most people erase the memories of their adolescence -- to the benefit of their mental health -- and replace them with whatever accords with their grown-up worldview. For example, they may imagine adolescents as relatively innocent creatures, whereas their memories -- if unearthed -- would remind them of what an anarchic jungle secondary school was, in contrast to the much more tranquil social lives of adults.

So, the need for a clearer picture of young people's lives is great, yet clearly unmet. As luck would have it, The Harvard Crimson (the undergraduate newspaper) has placed all of its content online, stretching back to the paper's origin in 1873, and it is fully searchable. This allows me to search for some signal of the zeitgeist year by year and plot the strength of this signal over time. If you read my three-part series at GNXP on the changing intellectual climate, as judged by what appears in academic journals, the approach is the same. (Here are those articles: Death of Marxism, etc., A follow-up, and Popularity of science in studying humans.)

In short, I count the number of articles in a given year that have some keyword -- "Marxism," for example -- and then standardize this by dividing by a very common neutral word. This protects against seeing an imaginary trend that is simply due to the newspaper pumping out many more articles over time (or fewer in hard times). Ideally, I would standardize by using "the" since it appears in every article and therefore gives us the total number of articles, answering the question "What percent of all articles in that year contained this keyword?" Unfortunately, the Crimson search engine won't allow me to use "the," but it did let me search for "one," which is also a highly frequent word and will be a decent substitute. Before getting into the meat of the post, here is the number of articles found by searching for "one" across time:


We were correct to standardize somehow, given the huge increase since the early 1990s (probably reflecting the greater ease of desktop publishing with cheap computers and software).

A real improvement over the previous series that used JSTOR is that the Crimson archives run right up to the present, whereas JSTOR typically has a 5-year lag between the article's being published and being archived in JSTOR. The only limitation here is that we only see what's going on among upper-middle class young people, rather than all of them, but I'm mostly looking at events or topics that permeate our society, rather than academic fads as before. (Although I will probably look into that as well using the Crimson database.) So these youngsters ought to be fairly representative.

Moving on to the substance, I've put together graphs on three broad topics that are of great importance to young people. Adults also tend to worry about where the next generation stands on these topics. They are identity politics, religion, and generational awareness.

Identity politics

Everyone knows that the 1960s brought a sea change in college student culture, but I don't think anyone has presented a clear picture of how the concern with racism, sexism, etc. began or how it has changed over time to the present. In particular, most people (in my experience) over-estimate how prevalent identity politics were in the '60s, while forgetting how widespread the corresponding hysteria was in the early 1990s.

I began at the earliest date that the word appears or 1960, whichever came first, and end in 2008. The y-axis shows the count of articles with the keyword divided by the count of articles with "one." I chose the following identity politics keywords: "racism" or "racist," "sexism" or "sexist," "homophobia" or "homophobic," "date rape," and "hate speech." I also made a composite which sums all of them up. Here are the results:


"Racism" increases sharply through the '60s, peaks in 1970, and declines moderately through the '70s and '80s. However, starting in the late '80s, there's another surge which peaks in 1992. After the early '90s panic, though, the preoccupation with racism has declined substantially, so much so that it is now back down to its pre-late-'60s level. You'll recall how little widespread disruption there was in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the Jena Six, and the Duke lacrosse hoax, despite every professional activist -- and even Kanye West on a televised awards show -- struggling to whip up society into another revolution. But 2006 had none of the racial hysteria to fuel it that 1992 did, so it was impossible to spark another round of race riots in L.A.

As for "sexism," it only begins in 1970. Many people who weren't alive back then don't remember how little of a role women's liberation played in The Sixties. But I used to be a radical activist in my naive college days, and Z Magazine operator Michael Albert emphasized that second-wave feminism was largely a delayed response to the perceived sexism of the anti-war, civil rights, and anti-capitalist movements that formed the basis of the counter-culture's concerns. Although there is not much change during the '70s and '80s, it got a pretty high jump initially, so it's not as though there were few adherents -- there just wasn't a massive increase. But once again, starting in 1988 there's a resurgence that peaks in 1992. This is when third-wave feminism was born, and it coincided with the resurgence of racial politics.

However, just as with race, panic about sex plummeted shortly afterward and is currently even lower than its initial level. Again, recall how few massive protests there were -- if any -- about the Duke lacrosse hoax, whose bogus premise was a bunch of jocks raping a stripper. Or for that matter, how pathetic the response was to the Larry Summers brou-ha-ha of early 2005. It surely generated some controversy among academics, but even that didn't last very long, and no one outside of academia gave a shit. In particular, the students didn't care -- influence from their leftist professors notwithstanding. If the zeitgeist lacks an obsession with sex roles, their feminist professors can preach all they want, but it will only fall on deaf ears.

Paying attention to homophobia only begins in 1977 -- 8 full years after the Stonewall Riots. And remember, that was in 1969, a ripe time for liberationist and revolutionary movements. This underscores the importance of using quantitative data in reconstructing history, since most people nowadays would imagine that back in the turbulent '60s, they were surely fighting against homophobia the way that their counterparts do now. Far from it. Back in the '60s, and even for most of the '70s and early '80s, campus radicals and liberals couldn't have cared less. Again, back then it was all about civil rights, stopping the imperialist war machine, and maybe smashing capitalism -- not about gay marriage or getting more women into science careers.

As we saw with "racism" and "sexism," "homophobia" saw a sharp rise in the late '80s and peaked in 1989 or '90, before dropping precipitously afterward. Currently it is more or less where it was before the late '80s surge. Liberals and young people may support gay marriage, but the larger meta-narrative of homophobia, as the activists would say, does not interest them.

Now we come to two more specific topics. "Date rape" basically tracks third-wave feminism, although there is an isolated occurrence in 1979 (which I exclude from the graph to keep the trend clear). Quite simply, there is rape and there is not-rape. "Date rape" was a term that tried to criminalize sex that wasn't rape, but where the girl regretted it or was unsure of what was happening. Probably the guy was stinking drunk too. Importantly, claims about "date rape" drugs later turned out to be bogus, as doctors in the UK pointed out -- most of the women claiming to have been slipped a "date rape drug" had no such drug in their system, although they typically did have lots of alcohol or other hard drugs present. It was essentially a witch-hunt or moral panic. By now, we know what to expect -- a sharp rise during the late '80s that peaks in 1992 and falls off a cliff shorter thereafter. Nowadays no one takes the idea seriously.

"Hate speech" shows roughly the same pattern, although it doesn't get started quite as early. It appears suddenly in 1990, peaks in 1991, and plummets right away. Aside from an anomalous jump in 2002 - '03 (which may reflect some event specific to Harvard), it has remained very low for nearly 15 years. Compared to college students during the heyday of Generation X back in 1991 - '92, young people today are more likely to view the concept of "hate speech" as a thinly veiled attempt to censor unpopular viewpoints.

It's interesting to note the differences in scale among the five topics. The "racism" scale is 3 times as great as those for "sexism," "homophobia," and "date rape," confirming what many others have observed -- that in the struggle for a bigger piece of the identity politics pie, race has trumped sex or sexuality. The scale for "hate speech" is about 3 times smaller than the previously mentioned three topics, perhaps because it is so specific, while "racism" pops up in many more contexts.

The composite identity politics index shows roughly the same pattern that we've noted before. There's a jump during the '60s which peaks in 1970 -- this only reflects a concern with racism. There is little or slightly negative growth during the '70s and '80s, but this was only the calm before the storm. In the late '80s, another wave of panics sweep through, and there is a sustained peak from 1989 through 1992. I have often pointed out in my personal blog and less often at GNXP that the peak of the social hysteria is 1991 - 1992, and this confirms that claim.

As with other epidemics, eventually it burns out, and obsessing over identity politics is now at or below its pre-late-'60s level. This overall pattern does not change even if I remove the two topics of "date rape" and "hate speech" that might seem to bias things toward producing an early '90s peak. Hard as it may be to believe for anyone younger than the Baby Boomers, identity politics was simply a very small piece of the radical chic calling back in the '60s -- it was about civil rights, anti-war, and capital.

Generational awareness

We often speak of young people as an entire generation, but that only works when they have strong generational awareness or solidarity. Otherwise, they are merely a cohort. To give a personal example, I am too young to be part of Generation X, yet I'm a bit older than the Millennials. Almost no one my age (roughly mid-late 20s) is stuck in the culture of their adolescence and college years and never will be, in the way that many Baby Boomers are culturally stuck in 1968 and many Gen X-ers are stuck in 1992. It is possible to be a traitor to your generation if you're a Boomer or X-er, but since my cohort doesn't view itself as a Generation, the idea of defecting fails to make sense.

The same goes for the cohort born between roughly 1958 and 1964 -- their age-mates will not burn them at the stake for saying that they never liked disco music or punk rock, unlike a Boomer who said he didn't like the Beatles' later albums or a Gen X-er who said he always thought alternative rock was lame.

In any case, how do we quantify this sentiment? I simply searched the Crimson for "generation," which will turn up any time a member of a Generation writes about their age-mates as though they were a cohesive group, as well as when older people recognize the young people of today as being different and a cohesive group. I assume that its secondary use as a synonym for creation is roughly constant over time, so that changes reflect its primary use. The counts for the very early years are low, and the number of articles with "one" is also low, so I'm not so sure that the standardized measurement is telling us something real for that time period. Thus, along with the standardized graph, I've included one that shows just the counts. Here are the results:


The trendline is exponential, although other simple trends show roughly the same picture. It seems that during Gilded Age and Progressive Era, thinking in generational terms was not very common, although it does turn up toward the end of the Progressive Era. I'll get to my conjecture about this after surveying the other periods.

During the Roaring Twenties and through the Great Depression and WWII, the level is much greater than the historical trend and lasts very long. This may strike us as unexpected because we associate inter-generational conflict mostly with the late 1960s -- but if you thought young people were going crazy then, you should have seen them during the 1920s! Women started driving, smoking, swearing, and cutting their hair short like men -- take that, you dinosaurs! Jazz and later swing were just as much of a middle finger to older people as rock and roll was later on -- perhaps more so, given how much jazz broke with other forms of popular and classical music that formed the cultural background. Rock and roll, compared to its background, wasn't so different. One central way by which young people mark themselves off from older people is by inventing their own slang, and they indeed made a bunch of it in the 1920s, much of which is still with us today.

After WWII and through the first half of the 1960s -- the Golden Age of American Capitalism -- the level dips below the historical trend. The name "Silent Generation" was coined in 1951 to refer to young people at the time, and silent they were. If we must use "generation" instead of cohort, I prefer using distinct names for what I've been calling Generations -- Boomers, X-ers, etc. -- and numbered Silent Generations for everyone else (i.e., Silent Generation 1, 2, 3, ...). Of course, after them come the Baby Boomers, although surprisingly the late '60s level is not so far above the historical trend. Still, in absolute terms, it's as high as it was during the 1920s, even if it doesn't last as long.

There is a dip below trend for most of the 1980s, when Silent Generation 2 was in college. Then there's a spike in the early 1990s, reflecting Generation X finding its megaphone, to everyone's annoyance. It's hard to make out the end -- it looks mostly at the historical trend, perhaps with a recent jump. Sometime in the middle of the next decade, we'll be hit by another wave of social hysteria, and that will crystallize the young people then (say, age 16 to 24) into a new generation. We already have a name for them -- the Millennials -- but their generational self-awareness doesn't seem very deep to me right now. Voting for Obama has been the extent of them making us hear the voice of a new generation. But just wait.

I'm not too sure what causes the increasing historical trend -- maybe it just shows that the word is becoming more and more common to describe something we already talked about before, and hence the trend isn't interesting. Or it could mean that with an increasing pace of cultural change, we are able to pay better attention to generational changes, and we can therefore talk about them a lot more than before.

What's really interesting are the oscillations above and below the trend, which correspond pretty well to what we consider the heydays of Generations and Silent Generations, respectively. Trying to piece it all together, I think that generational awareness is low when times are prosperous and young people are small as a fraction of the population. This combination of good economic times and little competition means they can more easily establish themselves during early adulthood on their own. They don't feel gipped or embittered, so they aren't anti-establishment (which in practice means anti-elders). In contrast, when economic times are bad and there are a lot of young people competing to establish themselves, anxiety about the future sets in, many feel cheated -- they went to college and didn't end up making it rich -- and they have to band together to support each other.

This is really just a rough guess, and I don't have good data to present on the percent of the population that's 16 to 24, or what their average wages were, over this entire time period. And there are exceptions, of course. But looking at the whole thing, that's what I see.

Next update: religion, which will cover five topics and include a composite index.

The rate of invention from 0 to 2008 A.D.

A quick update: in case you didn't see, there is now a table of contents on the right, with links to each post, as well as an index of categories that I've written about, in order to ease browsing.

Moving on, here is a much more detailed follow-up to a GNXP article I wrote about the slowing of innovation after the government downsized or busted up the two main sources of invention in recent times -- AT&T's Bell Labs and the Department of Defense -- over concerns about monopolistic entities. Try to think of something invented after Bell Labs was broken up in 1984 - '85, and that would pass the "telling your grandkids" test. Is it something they will continue to use, or if not, something they would still find really neat? The compilers of "lists of really important inventions" truly struggle to come up with such things invented in the last 25 years, and typically they're highly derivative of other entries -- for example, including not just the cell phone, but the digital cell phone, and even the particular model of the iPhone!

Now let's put this decline in a greater historical perspective. After all, perhaps we could only expect to have one really good run, this run happened in the mid-to-late 20th C., and that's it. Something like the technological Renaissance. Well, we'll see. In contrast to the book that I used before -- Big Ideas: 100 Modern Inventions that have Transformed Our World -- there's a new book out called 1001 Inventions that Changed the World. Instead of starting in 1940, it begins far back into human evolution, including stone tools, clothing, and so on. Plus, it obviously has 10 times as many data-points. There isn't a whole lot before the Common Era, so I've restricted the dates to lie between 0 and 2008 A.D., leaving 855 data-points. (It took a few trips to Barnes & Noble to copy them all down!) It's written by several authors, so there is little chance that the entries reflect an eccentric's view. Flipping through it, just about everything made sense (again, with the exceptions of some desperate attempts to include very recent inventions).

It's not clear what the time scale should be for technological change, so I've included time series graphs at several time scales. They all show roughly the same picture, although fitting a model to these data would show less error in some rather than others. The time intervals are century, half-century, decade, year, and a 10-year moving average of the yearly data to smooth them out. The points for century, half-century, and decade are plotted at the mid-point of the interval (e.g., at 1825 for the decade of the 1820s). The y-axis measures count of inventions. Here are the results (click to enlarge):



If you just looked at the century-scale data, things would look pretty good! Starting in the Early Modern period, there's an accelerating increase that really takes off during the Industrial Revolution and apparently continues straight through the 20th C. Sure, the most recent increases shows diminishing returns, but maybe we just had a mediocre century and things will bounce back.

Unfortunately, zooming in to just the half-century-scale data gives us reason to be pessimistic. Here we see an S-shaped curve (such as the logistic) that clearly shows a near-saturation of the rate of invention. Focusing even closer to the decade-level data, the picture looks even gloomier and confirms the picture I presented in the previous GNXP post: after a fairly steady increase, there is something of a plateau (or perhaps two peaks) lasting from 1885 to 1975, after which there is a 30 year-long plummet to the present.

This recent decline is visible even at the yearly level: you can see the heavily shaded curve dip steadily downward toward the end. In the smoothed 10-year moving average graph, this stands out even more clearly. The peak is around 1984, and there is a steady decline afterward until the latest value at 1998. Now, there are certainly other periods of decline in this graph, but to find one that lasts so long, you have to go back to the decline from roughly 1790 to 1810. And the sheer magnitude of the drop is right up there with the other declines of the past two centuries. Things are not looking so good.

Ignoring the overall rise-and-fall trend, there is an apparent 20 to 25-year cycle, judging from the distance between peaks or between valleys. That's the length of a human generation, although this may be a coincidence. If not, then this would reflect generational changes in how encouraging of innovation the society is -- if they want plenty of cool new things, they may have to trade that off against increasingly monopolistic bodies like AT&T. Conversely, if the zeitgeist is for breaking up corporations that are "too big," the invention rate may suffer. Perhaps the sharp drop starting around 1905 was due to the Progressives and muckrakers.

Whatever the mechanism, it is clear that there need to be at least two groups interacting dynamically -- otherwise we would only see an increase. (This is from the study of differential equations.) Moreover, they need to interact in a way that includes growth and decay terms for each -- rather than, say, one group being gradually converted to the other. I'll leave the modeling aside for now and just note that any good model of invention needs these features.

Even at the level of the centuries-long trend up and down, we need these features. Aside from whatever interactions one generation has with another, which show up on the smaller time scale, it seems that there are two or more groups that people can fall into, and that interact to produce rises and falls over the centuries. For a long time, one of those groups appears to not even exist -- namely, before the Early Modern period. I'm reminded of Greg Clark's popularization of "the industrious revolution" in his book A Farewell to Alms, where English people suddenly became more industrious and future time-oriented, as a prelude to the Industrial Revolution. Under this view, there was a surge in the numbers of smart and hard-working people as the merchant classes genetically replaced the old aristocracy, which killed itself off through wars and feuds, the last of which was the War of the Roses in the late 1400s.

Institutions may matter too. The first patents were granted in Europe during the 15th C., although this requires believing in a century-long lag, given the dearth of inventions during the 15th C. -- it doesn't stand out against the previous 1400 years. At the same time, perhaps the effect took so long because patents -- governmental promises of protection -- mean little unless the state is powerful enough to deliver the tough protection it promised. And they weren't nearly as muscular in the 15th C. as they would become in the 16th.

Maybe it was modern centralized states and the rise of civil servants, bureaucrats, etc., which required new things to keep everything organized and flowing smoothly. Or more likely, it could have been the Military Revolution which began around that time -- the original military-industrial complex. Lots of cool gadgets are the direct fruit of military technology or are barely modified spin-offs (like commercial airplanes).

Whatever the genetic and institutional factors are, it's not hard to tell a plausible story about their decline in the late 20th C. Sure, elite fertility rates had been falling long before then (back to the 1700s in France), but maybe the invention rate is a saturating function of elite population size -- after the elite gets so big, no more inventors will be drawn from it, the rest preferring to go more into law, business, medicine, etc., or uncolonized career fields like community organizer. And certainly the decline in militarism, the skepticism of large state sectors of the economy, and an even greater disgust of monopolistic corporations than even the muckrakers had, all contribute to the decline in institutional support for invention.

Lamentably, the sociological view (even while grounded in individual's behavior) of interacting groups leaves little room for optimism. Given the right conditions on the parameters, the interactions between infected, uninfected, and recovered or immune people when an epidemic sweeps through may spell doom for the disease -- it will flare up but inevitably burn out, and there is nothing we can do to prevent that (a good thing). Of course, changing the parameters to some new combination may result in a qualitatively different outcome, such as the epidemic never infecting most people in the first place.

But we don't even know what the differential equations are that describe how invention changes over time, let alone have good estimates of the parameters involved. Still, gathering lots of data, seeing the rough patterns, and then making mathematical models, may eventually allow us to manipulate the invention rate just as we can affect the course of an epidemic with enough knowledge. That's really all we can do, and whatever extra power over society we get, we get.

Intelligence and patronizing the arts in red and blue states

Continuing to explore whether the stereotypes about red vs. blue states are as strong as people made them out to be in recent years, or whether factors like social class matter more, let's take a look at going out to a performing arts event. The story was that blue staters breathe the arts, if only to lord their refinement over everyone else, while red staters were more suspicious of the arts -- what with all that my-kid-could-make-that garbage funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

However, a more plausible account is that regional status shouldn't matter so much because what allows a person to enjoy the higher arts is greater brainpower. IQ researcher Linda Gottfredson says that one of the most reliable yet quick ways to tell if someone is smart is to simply ask a few questions to see if they like classical music at all. If so, they're smart.

So which matters more -- regional culture or intelligence? Let's turn to the GSS and find out. This time I restricted the respondents to Whites only, so that race is not a confounding factor when we look at red vs. blue states. The survey asked questions about attendance for various performing arts -- going to an art museum or gallery, a dance performance, a classical music or opera performance, and a non-musical drama. Unfortunately they don't ask these questions every time, so the sample sizes are a bit smaller than for questions about belief in god. Only one group was over 100, but I've kept the groups of people that were at least of size 40. The museum, dance, and classical music questions had IQ data available, but the non-musical drama did not, so I used years of education instead (in two-year bins).

Here are the relationships for both red and blue states (in those colors, respectively):


First, we notice that attendance increases as we move up the intelligence scale, which confirms what most people think. There are apparent differences in exactly how the line increases for red vs. blue states, but because we're dealing with somewhat smaller sample sizes, I wouldn't make too much of it. At the least, there's no consistent difference -- say, if the red - blue gap widened or attenuated as we moved up the intelligence scale.

And in general, the blue line is a bit above the red line, also confirming the stereotype about blue staters being bigger arts aficionados than red staters. Still, as we saw with religious fundamentalist beliefs and hunting and NASCAR preferences, the red - blue gap is miniscule compared to the gap between below-average and above-average IQ people (which ranges from about 25% to 45%, while the red - blue gap is typically 5% to 15%).

So far, we've seen that some measure of social class -- whether income, job prestige, IQ, or education level -- is by far more powerful in causing differences between people than is regional culture. That's true for voting patterns, religious beliefs, going hunting and fishing, watching NASCAR, and now patronizing the arts.

Of course, things don't have to be this way -- it could easily be that the elites would be more like the commoners of their region and very different from the elites of other regions. If red and blue states were literally at war with each other, we might imagine that they would define their identity based on region much more than on class. As things are, though, the different regions of the country cooperate a lot with each other. That only leaves "vertical" or social class distance as the dimension along which most inter-ethnic competition will be waged. Already during the twilight years of the Cold War, Americans didn't care about a potential battle between the USA and the Russkies -- they were more absorbed in the war between white trash and yuppie scum, as they called each other.

Perhaps this is the source of the red state - blue state mythology -- people want to engage in an Us vs. Them ethnic conflict based on "horizontal" distance, not just (or even primarily) based on "vertical" distance. But since there are no more Kaisers, Fuhrers, or Soviets, we had to invent a wide ethnic gulf. Surely we weren't going to pick any old way of splitting up the country, so we chose one with some plausibility -- after all, the data analyses so far do show that there is something to the red - blue stereotypes, even if they're profoundly exaggerated.

The other large source of horizontal ethnic conflict in America is based on allegiance to local sports teams. But this won't do very well because aside from a few teams like the Yankees, there aren't a handful of superpower teams that would provide as much dramatic conflict as the Allied vs. the Axis powers. Plus sports only appeal to a fraction of the population, so it would be hard to whip up everyone into a war mindset. But mention those latte-sipping liberals in blue states, or those low-IQ Biblical literalists in the red states, and suddenly everyone's passions become inflamed.

GSS variables used: race, region, wordsum, educ, visitart, dance, gomusic, drama

Class and religious fundamentalism in red vs. blue states

In the lead-up to and just after the last presidential election, much of the quant parts of the blogosphere were talking about Andrew Gelman et al's excellent book Red State Blue State Rich State Poor State. In it, they showed that increasing income predicted increasing likelihood of voting Republican, no matter if you live in a red state or blue state. The only catch was that this trend is more pronounced in red states, and more muted in blue states.

So, despite all of the red state vs. blue state mythology that people began telling each other during the past five or so years, rich people even in liberal blue states still tended to vote fairly Republican, and working-class people in conservative red states still tended to vote fairly Democrat. In fact, the split between red and blue states increased as you went up the income scale -- it seems that the culture wars of the 1990s were mostly an intra-elite competition.

I briefly jumped on the bandwagon and showed how an interest in hunting, fishing, and watching NASCAR fit this pattern. That is, it's mostly the lower-IQ people who do these things, regardless of whether they're in red or blue states, although for a given IQ level, red staters do have a greater interest. Still, a smart red stater is far less likely to care about hunting than a lower-IQ blue stater. IQ differences matter much more than red state vs. blue state differences.

After the election, interest in this topic naturally faded, which is unfortunate because there must be plenty of other examples of red state elites looking mostly like blue state elites, in addition to voting Republican and not caring about hunting or NASCAR. Of course, aside from voting patterns, the thing that's supposed to show the widest gulf between red and blue states is religion. But since we've seen that working-class people tend to vote Democrat, even in red states, we suspect that this other part of the conventional "red vs. blue" mythology is wrong. So let's turn to the General Social Survey to see how class and religious beliefs are related in both red and blue states. *

I'm looking here at fundamentalist religious beliefs, since that was the story -- not just that elite red staters went to church more often than lower-class blue staters, but that fundamentalist beliefs pervaded red state culture, while a staunchly secular mindset characterized blue state culture. The GSS measures such beliefs in two ways -- by asking if you think the Bible is God's word and is to be taken literally, and by asking if you know God exists without a doubt (the latter might not be so fundamentalist, but it's worth looking at too). I simply found the percent of each group who agreed with each of these statements.

I measured class in four ways, just to ensure that it doesn't matter which part of class we focus on -- socioeconomic index (a measure of job prestige), real income, education level, and IQ. The SEI bins are of size 5 and range from 17 - 22 through 92 - 97, real income is measured in 1986 dollars (in $5000 bins, centered on values ending in 5 or 0), education level is simply years of school completed, and IQ is the number of vocabulary words correct on a 10-question test.

Here are the plots for how religious fundamentalist beliefs are related to these measures of class, for both red and blue states (shown with red and blue lines, resp.):



No matter which belief we look at, and no matter which measure of class we choose, the same pattern shows up: the relationship between class and fundamentalism is more or less the same in red and blue states, namely that it declines pretty steadily as we move up the class ladder. The red - blue gap is roughly the same across the class spectrum, unlike voting patterns, where there was a widening of the gap as you moved up the income scale. In all cases, the upper-class red staters are well below the lower-class blue staters in fundamentalism. So, despite all of the rhetoric about godless blue states and Bible-thumping red states, fundamentalism is mostly a class-based phenomenon.

At the same time, the red lines are generally above the blue lines, showing that when we ignore class, red states are more fundamentalist than blue states. However, this overall red - blue gap is usually under 20% at most, whereas the drop from lower-class to upper-class fundamentalism is usually at least 30%. In other words, class distinctions trump red - blue distinctions.

The two pieces that fit with the reigning mythology are easy to see -- i.e., highly secular elites in blue states and highly religious working-class people in red states. But the problem of popular stories like the red state - blue state narrative is that we only see what agrees with them, while we blind ourselves to what clashes with them. In this case, no one saw that working-class people in blue states were highly religious and that upper-class people in red states were very secular. Rather than take a narrative for granted and look for data that support it (and ignoring those that refute it), we should simply take an empirical approach and look at all the data -- only then should we come up with the story, which by that point is just a common-language phrasing of what the data say, not some grand vision of how the world is presumed to be.

* I counted the following GSS regions as blue states:

New England - Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut
Middle Atlantic - New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania
East North Central - Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin
Pacific - Washington, Oregon, California, Alaska, Hawaii

These regions are the red states:

West North Central - Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas
South Atlantic - Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida
East South Central - Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi
West South Central - Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas
Mountain - Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada

GSS variables used: bible, god, sei, realinc, educ, wordsum, region