Globalization

[amadeus]

The fact is modern angst and despair is painful but we're dependent on the modern industrial beast for our survival.

Yay. I like food. A lot, most, is produced thanks to our modern industrial beast. Hail the Beast!

 

[Narz]

Yay. I like food.

Food industry likes you too

A lot, most, is produced thanks to our modern industrial beast. Hail the Beast!

God bless bad teeth, obesity and diabetes. Agri to pharma to mortuary pipeline

 

[Gorbles]

God bless bad teeth, obesity and diabetes. Agri to pharma to mortuary pipeline

This is incredibly funny because the health service in the UK basically tells you to get lost if you're fat. So "pharma" ain't doing much there

 

[Narz]

The NHS tells everyone to bugger off in my experience, wait, wait and then wait some more.

 

[Gorbles]

Oh I know, chronically underfunded at this point (a problem for another thread), but of that, (even mildly) overweight folk get the even shorter end of the stick. Maybe it's different in the States, but then again you have the whole insurance nonsense going on there, which inverts the priorities r.e. cost.

 

[amadeus]

God bless bad teeth, obesity and diabetes. Agri to pharma to mortuary pipeline

yeah we can go back to the preindustrial age when nobody got sick and everyone had great teeth

 

[Narz]

yeah we can go back to the preindustrial age when nobody got sick and everyone had great teeth

Usual lack of nuance as per my expectations.

Correct me if I'm wrong but you seem to be stuck in a binary, either we subsidize the modern food industry so heavily that only the rich can afford to patronize local farms & a big mac costs less than strawberries (this isn't the free market, it's a market skewed by industry profits) or we 'go back to the preindustrial age'

This is propaganda programmed into your brain, 'if you don't support the status quo you're a luddite'. A bit more nuanced thinking is in order.

I understand your thinking, I've read Pinker, but just because standardization, globalization, homogenization of culture (colonization, genocide, etc) has had massive benefits in some ways doesn't mean it hasn't had detriments in others. And it pays to try to understand the massive incentive structures at plan that guide your kneejerk reactions.

And diet does affect teeth but again, orthodontics is a huge industry & cure is more profitable than prevention. It's not like humans were evolved to have crap teeth.

 

[Narz]

Perhaps some of the sterotyping is my fault this is my fault for not making myself clear. I'm not anti-factory, importing, mass-production, I just don't think we should let industry bulldoze local business, get massive tax-breaks & subsides.

Let people have options.

If I had the choice & the market was more fair & non-coerced I'd still probably buy some industrial food, probably breakfast cereals. But I'd buy a lot more local food & unprocessed food as would many people if they had more choice.

Same as if Amazon didn't evade their taxes, people would still shop there when convenient but small businesses would have more of a chance to compete.

Free enterprise is a beautiful thing but when the playing field is tilted it hurts everyone but the very top, leading to some economic growth but low morale, rising inequality & an ever more dependent population.

 

[innonimatu]

Free enterprise is a beautiful thing but when the playing field is tilted it hurts everyone but the very top, leading to some economic growth but low morale, rising inequality & an ever more dependent population.

There is no "free enterprise". There are always rules, very many rules. Open borders or closed borders, in either case there are detailed rules saying what can and cannot be done in the market. Markets need rules to exist.

And the greater the market, the more rules it requires to function. Formalization of specifications, of payments, of competition modes, of contract law, an ever-finer grained assortment of laws and regulations because a market that connects people across jurisdictions and cultures requires a great deal of bureaucratic overhead. In your ciountry, how many burecrats per medic are necessary in the market-centric provision of health care?

The more rules a market requires, the greater the bureaucratic cost of operating in it, the more this "free market" (which is actually a constrained market) favours monopolies with economies of scale, and crushes independent operators. This is inevitable. It is a requirement for large-scale markets. Monopolies of course will encourage the growth of rules as those favour them. But the large markers required them anyway. The playing field is necessarily tilted to start with, whenever a huge market is created.

One specific example, which is valid throughout the "west", even the spaniard here who so enjoys attempting to contradict me will be unable to, and returning to food and animals: just a few decades ago there were municipal slaughterhouses across every country. Not in every one but always near. I don't know if the equivalent for the US would be counties? Those were shut down, now the bussiness of raising and slaughtering cattle is ultra-industrialized in conditions that suit the formation of monopolies. Look at how many firms control 50% of the market for each kind of food in each county I suspect that there won't be more than a couple in many categories. That is what is being sold to you as a "free market". The look at the staples, corn, grain, rice, sugar, or at processed foods most used worldwide, at the ownership of the brands. There are already international monopolies well under way despite food being such a strategic asset for any county that they should strongly impede dependance on foreign firms.

 

[Quintillus]

Focusing on Narz's first post...

I have wondered whether we're in some sort of reinforcing cycle where weaker civic fundamentals encourages retreating into online venues, which further weakens the civic fundamentals. The pandemic being an additional stressor to accelerate those weakening civic fundamentals. How do people meet and have good experiences that increase civic trust? They go to an event or venue and talk with other people. Preferably, they find something interesting in what the other person is saying.

At least in the big cities, what I see is people go to a venue with a group of their friends, and they only socialize with that group, and rarely meet new people. Society is very impersonal, service is by the book, people stick to their groups, rarely introduce themselves to strangers, and there's often a distrust of strangers or their motives. Is it much wonder that people are not thrilled with that experience and looking for an alternative?

(insert paragraph where I posit that the effect is less in small towns that haven't rusted out)

And the more there is a trend towards remote education/work, the more those civic fundamentals will be weakened. I never was a social butterfly, but I like the Bill Gates example with his mom forcing him to not be such a recluse and it paying long-term dividends. Yeah, there are going to be awkward situations with other people that can be reduced/lessened/avoided if you only have telecommunications with them. If someone's annoying here, I can add them to my ignore list (congratulations! you are not on my ignore list!). In the real world, it can cross over into problematic territory if it's bad enough, but at the usual levels it results in improved social skills and abilities to deal with various situations.

But with lower risk comes lower reward. Friendships, spontaneous positive interactions, relationships... there's a lot that can develop in the real world that's harder online. It's kind of like the difference I saw between my high school friends who were able to live on campus during college and those who only commuted in for classes. The one who were able to live on campus made far more college friends, matured more during those four years, and look back more positively on their experience. A remote educational experience would only exacerbate that. At an aggregate level, that adds up to whether you have a healthy civic atmosphere with decently well-rounded people socially, or a bunch of people who live in flats and don't know any of their neighbours (which is basically what I see today, although at least at my current flat I know one of my neighbours).

 

[Narz]

Yes, you put it better than me.

(congratulations! you are not on my ignore list!)

 

[Samson]

A book review that seems relevant:

The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness Jonathan Haidt Allen Lane (2024)

Two things need to be said after reading The Anxious Generation. First, this book is going to sell a lot of copies, because Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story about children’s development that many parents are primed to believe. Second, the book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science. Worse, the bold proposal that social media is to blame might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people.

Spoiler Rest of article :

Haidt asserts that the great rewiring of children’s brains has taken place by “designing a firehose of addictive content that entered through kids’ eyes and ears”. And that “by displacing physical play and in-person socializing, these companies have rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale”. Such serious claims require serious evidence.

Haidt supplies graphs throughout the book showing that digital-technology use and adolescent mental-health problems are rising together. On the first day of the graduate statistics class I teach, I draw similar lines on a board that seem to connect two disparate phenomena, and ask the students what they think is happening. Within minutes, the students usually begin telling elaborate stories about how the two phenomena are related, even describing how one could cause the other. The plots presented throughout this book will be useful in teaching my students the fundamentals of causal inference, and how to avoid making up stories by simply looking at trend lines.

Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers1.

These are not just our data or my opinion. Several meta-analyses and systematic reviews converge on the same message2–5. An analysis done in 72 countries shows no consistent or measurable associations between well-being and the roll-out of social media globally6. Moreover, findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, the largest long-term study of adolescent brain development in the United States, has found no evidence of drastic changes associated with digital-technology use7. Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, is a gifted storyteller, but his tale is currently one searching for evidence.

Of course, our current understanding is incomplete, and more research is always needed. As a psychologist who has studied children’s and adolescents’ mental health for the past 20 years and tracked their well-being and digital-technology use, I appreciate the frustration and desire for simple answers. As a parent of adolescents, I would also like to identify a simple source for the sadness and pain that this generation is reporting.

A complex problem

There are, unfortunately, no simple answers. The onset and development of mental disorders, such as anxiety and depression, are driven by a complex set of genetic and environmental factors. Suicide rates among people in most age groups have been increasing steadily for the past 20 years in the United States. Researchers cite access to guns, exposure to violence, structural discrimination and racism, sexism and sexual abuse, the opioid epidemic, economic hardship and social isolation as leading contributors.

The current generation of adolescents was raised in the aftermath of the great recession of 2008. Haidt suggests that the resulting deprivation cannot be a factor, because unemployment has gone down. But analyses of the differential impacts of economic shocks have shown that families in the bottom 20% of the income distribution continue to experience harm9. In the United States, close to one in six children live below the poverty line while also growing up at the time of an opioid crisis, school shootings and increasing unrest because of racial and sexual discrimination and violence.

The good news is that more young people are talking openly about their symptoms and mental-health struggles than ever before. The bad news is that insufficient services are available to address their needs. In the United States, there is, on average, one school psychologist for every 1,119 students.

Haidt’s work on emotion, culture and morality has been influential; and, in fairness, he admits that he is no specialist in clinical psychology, child development or media studies. In previous books, he has used the analogy of an elephant and its rider to argue how our gut reactions (the elephant) can drag along our rational minds (the rider). Subsequent research has shown how easy it is to pick out evidence to support our initial gut reactions to an issue. That we should question assumptions that we think are true carefully is a lesson from Haidt’s own work. Everyone used to ‘know’ that the world was flat. The falsification of previous assumptions by testing them against data can prevent us from being the rider dragged along by the elephant.

A generation in crisis

Two things can be independently true about social media. First, that there is no evidence that using these platforms is rewiring children’s brains or driving an epidemic of mental illness. Second, that considerable reforms to these platforms are required, given how much time young people spend on them. Many of Haidt’s solutions for parents, adolescents, educators and big technology firms are reasonable, including stricter content-moderation policies and requiring companies to take user age into account when designing platforms and algorithms. Others, such as age-based restrictions and bans on mobile devices, are unlikely to be effective in practice — or worse, could backfire given what we know about adolescent behaviour.

A third truth is that we have a generation in crisis and in desperate need of the best of what science and evidence-based solutions can offer. Unfortunately, our time is being spent telling stories that are unsupported by research and that do little to support young people who need, and deserve, more.

 

[Senethro]

A book review that seems relevant:

The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness Jonathan Haidt Allen Lane (2024)

Two things need to be said after reading The Anxious Generation. First, this book is going to sell a lot of copies, because Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story about children’s development that many parents are primed to believe. Second, the book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science. Worse, the bold proposal that social media is to blame might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people.

Spoiler Rest of article :

Haidt asserts that the great rewiring of children’s brains has taken place by “designing a firehose of addictive content that entered through kids’ eyes and ears”. And that “by displacing physical play and in-person socializing, these companies have rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale”. Such serious claims require serious evidence.

Haidt supplies graphs throughout the book showing that digital-technology use and adolescent mental-health problems are rising together. On the first day of the graduate statistics class I teach, I draw similar lines on a board that seem to connect two disparate phenomena, and ask the students what they think is happening. Within minutes, the students usually begin telling elaborate stories about how the two phenomena are related, even describing how one could cause the other. The plots presented throughout this book will be useful in teaching my students the fundamentals of causal inference, and how to avoid making up stories by simply looking at trend lines.

Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers1.

These are not just our data or my opinion. Several meta-analyses and systematic reviews converge on the same message2–5. An analysis done in 72 countries shows no consistent or measurable associations between well-being and the roll-out of social media globally6. Moreover, findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, the largest long-term study of adolescent brain development in the United States, has found no evidence of drastic changes associated with digital-technology use7. Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, is a gifted storyteller, but his tale is currently one searching for evidence.

Of course, our current understanding is incomplete, and more research is always needed. As a psychologist who has studied children’s and adolescents’ mental health for the past 20 years and tracked their well-being and digital-technology use, I appreciate the frustration and desire for simple answers. As a parent of adolescents, I would also like to identify a simple source for the sadness and pain that this generation is reporting.

A complex problem

There are, unfortunately, no simple answers. The onset and development of mental disorders, such as anxiety and depression, are driven by a complex set of genetic and environmental factors. Suicide rates among people in most age groups have been increasing steadily for the past 20 years in the United States. Researchers cite access to guns, exposure to violence, structural discrimination and racism, sexism and sexual abuse, the opioid epidemic, economic hardship and social isolation as leading contributors.

The current generation of adolescents was raised in the aftermath of the great recession of 2008. Haidt suggests that the resulting deprivation cannot be a factor, because unemployment has gone down. But analyses of the differential impacts of economic shocks have shown that families in the bottom 20% of the income distribution continue to experience harm9. In the United States, close to one in six children live below the poverty line while also growing up at the time of an opioid crisis, school shootings and increasing unrest because of racial and sexual discrimination and violence.

The good news is that more young people are talking openly about their symptoms and mental-health struggles than ever before. The bad news is that insufficient services are available to address their needs. In the United States, there is, on average, one school psychologist for every 1,119 students.

Haidt’s work on emotion, culture and morality has been influential; and, in fairness, he admits that he is no specialist in clinical psychology, child development or media studies. In previous books, he has used the analogy of an elephant and its rider to argue how our gut reactions (the elephant) can drag along our rational minds (the rider). Subsequent research has shown how easy it is to pick out evidence to support our initial gut reactions to an issue. That we should question assumptions that we think are true carefully is a lesson from Haidt’s own work. Everyone used to ‘know’ that the world was flat. The falsification of previous assumptions by testing them against data can prevent us from being the rider dragged along by the elephant.

A generation in crisis

Two things can be independently true about social media. First, that there is no evidence that using these platforms is rewiring children’s brains or driving an epidemic of mental illness. Second, that considerable reforms to these platforms are required, given how much time young people spend on them. Many of Haidt’s solutions for parents, adolescents, educators and big technology firms are reasonable, including stricter content-moderation policies and requiring companies to take user age into account when designing platforms and algorithms. Others, such as age-based restrictions and bans on mobile devices, are unlikely to be effective in practice — or worse, could backfire given what we know about adolescent behaviour.

A third truth is that we have a generation in crisis and in desperate need of the best of what science and evidence-based solutions can offer. Unfortunately, our time is being spent telling stories that are unsupported by research and that do little to support young people who need, and deserve, more.

Maybe conditions generally are on average slightly bad (in the centre of the west) but with the promise of continual decline without limits, and no clear route to reform?

 

[Narz]

The good news is that more young people are talking openly about their symptoms and mental-health struggles than ever before. The bad news is that insufficient services are available to address their needs. In the United States, there is, on average, one school psychologist for every 1,119 students.

Speaking of research and evidence what evidence is there that increased access to mental health services universally improves outcomes?

No access is better than low quality access (a shrink who will listen for 15 minutes w an ear for diagnostic criteria, give you some pills and send you on your way)

The psychiatric industry being the de facto solution to mental/emotional problems is an assumption worth questioning. Often getting caught up in the mental health 'care' system is about as helpful as getting caught up in the 'correctional' care system (and there's a lot of overlap)

I do agree though that social media use is more of a symptom than a cause.