Newsletter #260 Generational Regress, Underrated Progress, Homosexuality Spectrum
Happy Loving Day, Juneteenth, and Pride Month
Announcements
Weekly Shoutout
Shoutout to @MarkBlasko: we finally went lifting together after so many years!
Food for Thought
the trend in the fraction of children earning more than their parent has been downward trending since 1930 birth cohorts in the US+other countries (cite)
My current hypothesis is that the bulk of this generational regress is due to the run-up of housing prices leading to housing become unaffordable for most people
Housing crises have become a feature of most advanced economies, so it’s a global phenomenon, very much not limited just to the US
What I find so intriguing is that if look at polls of Gen-Zers, parenting has gotten better and yet kids pessimism about life in general has been tainting that progress
Crowd Pleasers
In the style of one of my all-time favorite books (Uncharted, by the foundres of Google N-Gram), “caution” and “risk” are on track to replace “progress” and “future” in terms of word frequency in Western books!
And yet, the last 50 years have been a triumph of global development taking most of humanity out of poverty
Across most important metrics, we are living lives exponentially better than most humans who have ever lived
Mind-Benders
It’s Pride Month, so here is some data about homosexuality and bi-sexuality
Sex difference in attitudes to homosexuality, with men being less accepting than women. are larger in more gender egalitarian societies. (cite)