The plague of apoplexy supposedly afflicting young people may just be a response to socially desired incentives.
The plague of apoplexy supposedly afflicting young people may just be a response to socially desired incentives.
T he results of a national poll released this week by the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s Kennedy School confirms a growing suspicion that America’s young adults are rapidly dissolving into a bundle of nerves. Nearly half of all young Americans between the ages of 18 and 29, Institute of Politics director John Della Volpe told the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, “are under this constant threat of fear.”
A disturbingly high number of young adults reported experiencing existential dread just leaving the house — at the shopping mall, in school, or on campus, riding public transportation, or simply navigating their own neighborhoods. Thirty-six percent of young people fear they will be a victim of gun violence. Thirty-five percent worry about being caught up in a mass-shooting incident or becoming a victim of crime. Twenty-eight percent worry about their risk of sexual assault, and just under one quarter of this demographic fear the prospect of being targeted in a hate crime.
A staggering 55 percent of young adults polled report feeling “nervous, anxious, or on edge” at least “several days” within the last two weeks. Fifty-two percent have “trouble relaxing.” Nearly half feel “down, depressed, or hopeless” and have “little interest or pleasure in doing things.” Forty-two percent express apprehension over the potential that “something awful might happen” to them or others, and a full quarter of respondents report thinking that they “would be better off dead” or have considered engaging in self-harm. Nearly two-thirds are “fearful about the future of America.” This data, Della Volpe said, “speaks to” a “generation who is carrying these fears every single day.”
As it turns out, this manic trepidation benefits advocates of certain cosseting progressive social programs that purport to soften life’s sharp edges and mitigate the risks associated with navigating the modern world. Increasingly, young Americans are inclined to support the predicates upon which universal benefits programs are based. They back the idea that access to services others provide — such as health care, food, and shelter — should be considered basic human rights. They believe that it is the government’s duty to “curb climate change even at the expense of economic growth,” and they think government should devote whatever truncated revenues it retains “to reduce poverty.”
Indeed, it would be irrational for conscientious consumers of the messages with which young Americans are bombarded on a near-daily basis to avoid concluding that they live in a very dangerous world. If you believe catastrophic climate change is imminent, one in five women will experience sexual assault, and a majority of Americans will experience the threat of gun violence in their lives, you should be apprehensive about leaving your bunker. Unfortunately for America’s addled youth, the trepidation that is being inculcated in them is largely based on a misreading of their environments.
In March 2021, Penn State assistant professor of criminal justice Lacey Wallace tackled the misapprehension promulgated in the press that had led so many Americans to believe they were at heightened risk of being targeted by indiscriminate mass murderers. Then, mass-shooting deaths accounted for just 0.2 percent of the just over 10,000 gun-related homicides that occurred in 2019 — the pre-pandemic baseline. Shootings in schools or academic settings are especially rare — far more rare than incidents of domestic gun violence in which children and young adults are victims.
Moreover, Wallace added, the FBI’s data on episodes of mass gun violence conflicts with popular media’s definition of what constitutes a mass shooting. The result is that the general public believes those events are more common than they are. Northeastern University researcher James Alan Fox agrees, noting that college campuses are among the safest environments for young adults. “According to Fox’s research, since 1990, there have been 26 shootings on U.S. college campuses involving two or more victims,” CBS reported in February. The casual inflation of the number of episodes of mass gun violence persists with utter disregard for fact-checkers’ efforts to reacquaint those doing the inflating with their sense of shame. The rewards for this campaign of misinformation are just too great.
It’s harder to say that young peoples’ perception of their heightened risk of sexual assault is misplaced, but only because the statistics around incidents of sexual violence are unreliable. The regularly cited claim that roughly 20 percent of women will experience sexual victimization derives from a 2007 Web-based survey commissioned by the Justice Department, but the survey’s response rate was low, and its methodology lent itself to self-selection and, therefore, selection bias. Moreover, a victim’s perception of what constitutes sexual violence factors into their reports, or non-reports, of such incidents. Many victims of sexual violence, including those who fall within the legal definition of rape, don’t report their experiences at all.
There is, however, reason to be skeptical of the most regularly cited statistics around sexual violence. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2021 that the percent of teen girls who report having been “forced to have sex” increased by 27 percent since 2019, but Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler discovered that the CDC had “inflated” those figures by almost ten percentage points. Kessler cites data that conflict with the CDC’s conclusion, such as “the National Crime Victimization Survey, conducted by the Census Bureau for the Bureau of Justice Statistics,” which indicates that sexual assault among teens “has been declining for three decades.”
The difficulty in compiling reliable data on these crimes presents an intractable problem for researchers attempting to assess the relative statistical risk of individual victimization. But even self-reported statistics indicate that young adults enrolled in college are far less likely to experience rape or sexual assault than non-students.
As for the prospect of cataclysmic climate change, young Americans can take heart in the hip-deep pile of flawed catastrophism that has fueled the fashionable hysteria to which they have dedicated themselves.
A 1990 U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report projected rates of warming that never materialized. The 2001 IPCC prediction that the world would by now experience less severe snowstorms and an ice-free Arctic never came to pass. It took the work of an amateur skeptic to disprove the consensus around rates of oceanic warming in 2018 that somehow emerged intact from the deliberative peer-review process this study underwent. In 2019, the globe had somewhere between twelve years and 18 months left to “save the planet.” But by 2021, a more dispassionate review of the data concluded that a combination of “incomplete reporting” and “apparently willful mistakes” mooted that hyperbolic assessment.
Young adults are not unaware of or immune to all this mitigating context. Indeed, a careful look at Harvard’s survey data suggests that the plague of apoplexy supposedly afflicting young people may just be a response to socially desired incentives.
Young people believe the country is in a state of disarray, but seven in ten rate their personal financial situation highly. Young people take a dim view of the future, but most believe their personal financial situation will improve and they will be homeowners in the neighborhood of their choice in that grim tomorrow. Despite the worryingly high numbers of young people who report debilitating apprehension, majorities say they are not lonely, depressed, or hopeless. They’re not worried about being shot or assaulted, and they don’t lie awake at night worrying that “something awful might happen.”
Those results don’t produce any headlines because those aren’t the headlines anyone wants to read. What the people want is confirmation that the effort to neuroticize young adults is working. The result is a self-perpetuating cycle in which young people know what is expected of them, and they respond to those rather perverse incentives.