My interest in individual experience (especially my own) is so great that I sometimes lose sight of the fact that indifference -- people's lack of care about events and people that ought to matter to them -- is also a political and economic problem. Wealthy nations are full of people who are apathetic in a way that seems, to the rest of us, deeply strange and even frightening.
The economist Larry H. Summers, a former Treasury Secretary, summarized some of the evidence in a tweet a couple of days ago:
A public-policy master of the universe will, of course, turn to the data and be troubled. On ordinary people, the same troubles weigh on the spirit, in the form of a gnawing hunch that things aren't right -- that life felt better, kinder, more human when they were younger.
Widespread indicators of pathological apathy are: people not working, not marrying, not believing in society's promises or institutions, feeling that beliefs don't matter anyway, taking a lot of reality-avoidance drugs, seeing irresponsibility as a reason to vote *for* a politician, not against. And, last but not least, caring so little for life that they leave it. Death by suicide, drug overdose and alcoholism — what the economists Anne Case and Angus Deacon famously called "deaths of despair" — are shockingly high in the United States.
Why is this happening in our time, in some of the richest, safest places on Earth? (And in the case of American deaths of despair, to people — white men — who aren't in the demographic with the most economic and social trouble?) That, dear reader, is what I launched this newsletter-and-future-book project to investigate.
I think Summers is right to want social science to figure it out. As you will soon see in future posts, there are some social scientists attempting to do just that.
The reaction to Summers' tweet, though, made clear a depressing fact: A lot of people think they know the answer already, and that it suffices simply to repeat their credo as if it were as obvious as sunlight. The responses to Summers' tweet are largely a parade of that kind of assertion. It's capitalism! It's godless secularism! It's genetics! It's technology! It's feminism! It's not your thing, it's my thing!
In an optimistic frame of mind I figure this just means, as they say in Hollywood, "no one knows anything." That's not a problem! That means humanity can try to find out. And that this didactic insistence is just a reminder that Twitter isn't the forum for this kind of conversation. In a darker mood, though, I think the "obvious answer in six words" people are themselves a symptom of the indifference epidemic. Who cares what you think? I know!