字幕表 動画を再生する 英語字幕をプリント Good morning Hank. It's Tuesday. I want to ask you a question. Do you think the violent crime rate in the United States has gone up or down or stayed about the same since 1990? The answer is, that it has gone down, dramatically! In fact, there are about half as many violent crimes per one thousand Americans as there were 25 years ago. Overall, crime rates are also down dramatically but every year since 2006 at least 60 percent of Americans polled have said that they feel that "crime is going up". And I am among them. In fact, I wanted to make a video about why crime is going up in the Untied States only to find out... you know...that...that it's not. Okay, so if you are an American this is how likely you are to die of various causes. You see violence down there at the bottom right corner. That's all interpersonal violence war, terrorism, murder, etc. Now, because its victims are disproportionately young, violence becomes a bigger problem if you change this visualization to measure disability adjusted life years. Which is like a measure of how many years of healthy life are lost due to various causes. But it's still a relatively small public health problem in the United States. Smaller than suicide, or drug overdoses, or asthma, or complications from preterm birth, or traffic accidents. And also violence is shrinking faster as a cause of death and disability in the United States than any other major cause except for HIV. So Hank, several studies have shown that on the Internet we like to share what makes us outraged. And that incentivizes media companies, even very small ones that make videos in their basements, to find outrageous stories because we know that you will share them. I've done this. Like in 2010, I made a video about how outrageous it is that we continue to mint pennies even though they cost two cents a piece to make and are never used to buy goods or services. The problem is the penny, while it's an obvious outrage, it's an exceedingly small outrage. I mean the US government could save far more money by just by passing a long term highway funding bill which Congress has been unable to do for the last six years. But that isn't as narratively simple or as easy to get outraged about, so we don't talk about it much. And then there is Martin Shkreli, the bond villainesque former hedge fund manager, whose company acquired the rights to a drug that treats people with toxoplasmosis and promptly rised the price from 13 dollars and 50 cents a pill to 750 dollars a pill. The internet boiled with outrage until the company promised to lower the price. Two months later, they've just announced, that for some customers, they are going to lower that price all the way down to 375 dollars a pill. But the outrage at this ass-hat masked a much more complicated and interesting problem. Like, even before the price hike the drug cost 30 times more in the US than it did in the UK. And these price hikes aren't even particularly new or rare. Longterm Nerdfighters will remember back in 2011 when Warner Chilcott raised the price of its drug Asacol 1200 percent overnight. There are dozens of similar examples and this stuff isn't happening because of one individual's asshattery. It's happening because there is a huge web of problems with pharmaceutical markets in the US. Point being, our collective outrage may have slightly decreased the price of one rarely prescribed drug. But it has done nothing to address the larger issues that affect every American who takes medication. Now, of course, the Internet can and does grapple with big and complicated problems and it's also given a voice to people who traditionally have been discriminated against in public discourse. And I also don't think there is anything wrong with being angry. Anger combined with sustained effort can lead to real change. But when we allow ourselves to casually move from one outrage to the next, from pennies to Martin Shkreli, nothing ever really changes. Well... Except that maybe we have become more afraid and pessimistic. Like, since January of 2010, crime is down. The U.S. joblessness rate has fallen dramatically. The economy has grown and we report being happier on average than we were five years ago. And yet every single month since January of 2010, more than two-thirds of Americans have felt that the US is headed in the wrong direction. And I feel like we are unnecessarily inundated with bad news because we seek it out and when we find it, we share it. And so we become more afraid and pessimistic than we need to be. But then again, as a nation we've never been healthier or claim to be happier. So maybe we're getting exactly what we want. Even if we don't know it. Hank. I'll see you on Friday.