Scott Alexander at ACX reviews Mastroianni and Gilbert's The Illusion of Moral Decline, and finds it imprecise, shallow, and biased. He seems to really try to find some good things to say about it, and does find a few. The largest single flaw is that the data is based over and over on polls asking whether morality is in decline, and despite sniggering at that as obviously just everyone being deplorers, still uses it as data for whether morality actually is. "Is there any area near where you live -- that is, within a mile -- where you would be afraid to walk alone at night?” The numbers are very stable between the 1960s and today. But the rate of violent crimes is 2.5x greater. I mean, they could have looked it up, right? In many polls, over many age groups it was asked whether they felt most people could be trusted. Except...that doesn't tell us anything about whether they actually can be trusted.
BTW, it can be intimidating looking at the right side of the page at ACX after having read a fair bit and seeing that you seem to have read only 5%. Not to worry. The comments - in this case over 400 - are in that measurement. The articles are often (not always) more manageable. Much more so that a half-dozen years ago.
In all the hundred-ish polls that MG used as objective morality indicators, I counted zero that involved sex, marriage, divorce, child-rearing, drugs, alcohol, loyalty, patriotism, respect for elders, hard work, laziness, religion, or anything about God.
Suppose you were born in 1940. You learned from your parents that morality was about going to church, staying chaste until marriage, loving your country, working hard, and staying away from drugs.
You notice that between 1940 and 2020:
Church membership declined from 75% → 50%
Premarital sex rate went from from 20% → 75%
Trust in government went from 75% → 20%
Prime-age-male-labor-force nonparticipation rate quadrupled from 3% → 12%
Marijuana use went from 4% → 49%
You describe this state of affairs as “I’m worried about a moral decline”. Then some psychologists pounce on you with one million graphs showing that actually we respect Hispanics as much as ever which means you’re just biased.
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In the series there is a review of Njal's Saga, comparing it to Eumenides. Loads of fun.
1 comment:
But most of those statistics you mentioned are supposed to be viewed as moral advances. Satan has contrived to conjoin a genuine, long-overdue moral restoration with the rise of unrelated evils--and also in many places twisted the long-overdue moral restoration into madness.
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