To look ahead we only have to look around.
- Since 2017 homelessness has increased by 6%. Even during the Covid federal resource boom of 2020-2022, homelessness increased. (1).
- Evictions today are higher than their pre-pandemic averages with nearly 1,115,000 eviction cases filed in 2023. That’s 100,000 more cases than in 2022 and 500,000 more than in the Covid-protection-era of 2021. Blacks comprise 31% of all renters and 49% of all eviction filing defendants. (4).
- Since the 1960’s, the cost of buying a house has risen at 2.4 times the rate of inflation. (7). Since 1985, the cost of renting a house has increased 208% compared to 149% inflation. (8).
- Among high-income countries with populations over 10 million, the United States leads the world in gun deaths. (9). In the United States there are more civilian owned guns than there are people. With 120.5 guns per 100 people, the U.S. nearly doubles the 62.5-per-100 second-place Falkland Islands. (10).
- Since 1999, drug overdose deaths have increased from less than 20,000 to 107,941 with approximately 70% from opioids. (16).
- Since 1979, the top 1% have enjoyed a 218% increase in income while the bottom 20% only achieved a 33% raise in average income. (14). In 1982 the Forbes richest American was worth 6 billion in today’s dollars. In 2023 Elon Musk topped the list with $251 billion. (13). Despite recent debates, the gaps are real and still widening; accessible spending power is not misunderstood data.
- The United States has more prisoners (1.8 million) than any country in the world, including China whose population is more than four times that of the U.S. Per capita, we only lag behind El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, Turkmenistan, and American Samoa. (15).
- Compared to Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, life expectancy in the U.S. is 4.2 years less for women and 5.2 years less for men. “The U.S. has the lowest life expectancy among large, wealthy countries while it far outspends its peers on healthcare.” (12). What’s more, “from 2001 to 2014, the life expectancy of the wealthiest Americans rose by about three years—the equivalent of curing cancer—while the poorest experienced no gains.” (13).
- Over the past three decades, adjusting for inflation, average yearly tuition at public and private institutions has more than doubled. (11).
- There are currently more than 25 million uninsured individuals in the U.S. Uninsured numbers came down after Obamacare and increased during the Trump years, slightly decreasing again since Biden was elected. (2)
- Since 2013 total premiums for family health insurance coverage increased by 42% (2) and since 2003 total out of pocket healthcare expense has increased by 241%. (3). The United States, “has the highest per-person health-care costs in the developed world.” (13).
- From the 1940’s to the 1970’s, stock prices, the gross domestic product, and the median family income all rose faster than CEO pay. (5 pg. 75). But in an excessive reversal, since 1978, CEO pay has increased 1,460% “while the typical worker’s pay grew by just 18%.” (6).
- During his administration in the 1950’s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower more than doubled (as a percentage of GDP) federal spending on research and development. It has gradually declined in the six decades since Eisenhower left office. (5 pg. 80).
Trajectory: the path described by a moving object. According to our trajectory, we are not a good people.
To look ahead we only have to look around.
In the third book of ‘The Three-Body Problem’ by Cixin Liu, a then-present-day inhabitant of the year 2269 explained to a newly awakened hibernator (who had been asleep for 264 years), “in our age, conscience and duty are not ideals: an excess of either is seen as a mental illness.” If conscience is a complex of ethical and moral principles and duty is an obligation from a sense of responsibility, then the future is now. There is nothing complex or hard to understand about the reasoning behind our lack of ethical and moral principles and it is this politically simplistic selfishness that stigmatizes and trivializes duty and responsibility.
From the 1940’s into the 1970’s, driven by the Depression and the war, our American culture changed to account for inequities in income and well-being. We realized as a whole that to recover and to move ahead this change must occur. So we came together and made some things better. Since the 1970’s, like a virus that adapts and evolves, those who could, reverted once again to individualistic thinking and through divisive, inflammatory political rhetoric and an iron fist, the top 10 and 20 percent (and their acolytes) have managed to stay a step ahead of conscience and duty. In recent years this has been accomplished by portraying better than bad as good. So we spend all our time and energy arguing over which is the lesser of two evils when selection of one or any combination of both merely maintains our current trajectory. Why must it take a crisis to compel us to work together and improve? We saw a hint of this dynamic alongside the pandemic. A better question – why can’t we see homelessness, gun deaths, the cost of healthcare, the cost of higher education, the cost of housing, the ever-widening income and wealth gaps, opioid deaths, food and housing insecurity, decreasing life expectancies, our overall lack of forward-thinking as the crises that they are, and why can’t we act and react accordingly?
To look ahead we only have to look around.
Citations: informal.
