This bit of wonderful news about the state of American youth was making the rounds last week:

Extra! Extra! The big news of the past decade in America has been largely overlooked, and you’ll find it shocking. Young people have become aggressively normal.

Violence, drug use and teen sex have declined. Kids are becoming more conservative politically and socially. They want to get married and have large families. And, get this, they adore their parents.

The Mood of American Youth Survey found that more than 80 percent of teenagers report no family problems — up from about 40 percent a quarter-century ago. In another poll, two-thirds of daughters said they would “give Mom an ‘A.’

“In the history of polling, we’ve never seen tweens and teens get along with their parents this well,” says William Strauss, referring to kids born since 1982. Strauss is author, with Neil Howe, of “Millenials Rising: The Next Great Generation.”

Not that anyone is complaining, but statistics like these raise some very serious questions. Or, let’s be blunt, one major question:

What happened?

To turn on old song on it’s head, “Why’s there nothing the matter with kids these days?” Glenn Reynolds suggest that multiple factors are at work:

The question is, why are teens doing better? I think there are two answers. First, people noticed problems, and tried a lot of different approaches. Private organizations, church groups, schools, and — especially — parents started taking a greater role in educating teenagers and encouraging better behavior. As with teen pregnancy, no single policy solved the problem, but multiple approaches tended to make it better until something seen as insoluble just a few years ago began to look, well, solved.

The other reason for the improvement is simple learning. Parents — who in the 1960s and 1970s thought they could pursue self-centered lifestyles without harming their kids — learned that parenting isn’t to be taken for granted. Likewise, teenagers gradually noticed things that were easy to miss when the culture of drugs and adolescent rebellion was new. However they look at age 17, the “cool” rebels tend to do worse later in life, and the geeks tend to do better. Just as smelly, desperate crackheads were the best anti-drug advertisement ever presented in the inner cities (far more persuasive than frying-egg commercials on television), so did unemployed loser guys and unwed welfare moms provide visible good reasons to stay in school, make good grades, and be careful about pregnancy.

When such a profound change occurs over such a short period of time, it seems natural to conclude that we’re talking about behavioral changes. There is little room for any debate about nature vs. nurture, here. These kids must have pretty much the same genes as their parents, right? There hasn’t been time for nature to play a role.

Right?

Well…let’s take a look at some recent findings. Here’s a study from the UK showing that, in monkeys, good mothering apparently makes the difference in whether offspring bearing a certain gene become aggressive:

Good mothering can abolish the impact of a “bad” gene for aggression, suggests a new study, adding spice to the “nature-versus-nurture” controversy.

And this might not just apply to monkeys:

Speaking on Monday at a press conference in London to mark the opening of a conference on genes and aggression, Suomi said that his results strongly mirror those of a study in 2002 co-led by Terrie Moffitt of the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London.

For 26 years, she and her colleagues followed the fate of 1037 children born in 1972 in Dunedin, New Zealand. They found that children were much more likely to grow up to be aggressive and antisocial if they had inherited a “short” version of a gene called MAOA. It makes monoamine oxidase A, an enzyme which helps to break down neurotransmitters such as serotonin, and was less efficient in the individuals with the “short” version.

But carriers only went off the rails if they had had an awful, abusive upbringing. Carriers with good mothering were usually completely normal, showed the New Zealand study. Now, Suomi has replicated the finding in the monkeys, showing that carriers of the “short” MAOA gene only turned bad when denied good mothering. “Good mothering has a buffering effect,” he says.

So the nature vs. nurture debate grows more complex. It appears that nurturing does, indeed, produce better socialized offspring, but it does this in conjunction with (or in this example, at odds with) natural mechanisms. So nature on its own isn’t completely predictive.

But it may go deeper than that. As Kurzweil reported earlier this week:

Scientists have discovered that rat genes can be altered by the mother’s behavior.

All newborn rats have a molecular silencer on their stress-receptor gene, they found. In rats reared by standoffish mothers, the silencer remains attached, the scientists will report in the August issue of Nature Neuroscience. As a result, the brain has few stress-hormone receptors and reacts to stress like a skittish horse hearing a gunshot.

(The original Wall Street Journal article is here. I don’t know whether non-subscribers can access this one because I stay logged in all the time and it works for me.)

Anyhow, if human physiology is similar to that of rats in this regard (which is a leap, I realize) it’s just possible that kids are better today because we’ve actually made them…better. Maybe they aren’t just making better use of what nature gave them, maybe nature has — through the good offices of their parents — given them a little more to work with than the previous generation had.

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A pair of recent essays on Tech Central Station by the indispensable Arnold Kling drive home (in no uncertain terms) how good the economic news looks to those willing to see beyond the pessimistic obsessions of the media and apocalyptic campaign rhetoric.

First, Kling reports that productivity is not only up, it’s way up. In fact, it’s blasting through the roof.

The 17 percent productivity growth from the first quarter of 2000 to the first quarter of 2004 stands head and shoulders above the growth rate for any comparable period. In fact, it is better than any eight-year period since 1976. In the first 13 quarters of the Bush Administration, the basic determinant of our standard of living increased by almost as much as during the entire 32 quarters of the Clinton Administration.

How’s that? Come again? The basic determi-thingy of our what?

Kling spells it out for us:

Productivity is probably the single most important economic statistic. Productivity is what determines our standard of living. In the long run, productivity is what determines how much workers are paid.

Sustained high productivity growth would cancel out any possible economic worry. Global competition from low-wage workers? High productivity would protect our standard of living. Rising costs from Medicare? As I pointed out in The Great Race, high productivity would make the welfare state affordable (although not optimal). Environmental quality? High productivity would give us the resources to devote to addressing any challenge. On the other hand, low productivity growth would mean that our incomes will be low, our tax burden to pay for entitlements will be high, and environmental issues will be much harder to address.

So our single most important economic statistic is showing marked improvement — unprecedented improvement, in fact. While Kling bemoans the fact that only bad economic news seems to get covered, I find it oddly comforting that no one is making political hay out of these productivity numbers. The whole thing would seem a lot fishier if these figures were being trodded out to prove that President Bush is saving or wrecking the economy. (Of course, I don’t actually know of a way that a productivity increase could be used to show that the economy is going downhill, but I don’t doubt there are those who could.)

The one political (or perhaps I should say politicized) question that came to mind when reading these numbers was what impact, if any, outsourcing might have on productivity. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who have published a very handy little primer on productivity, the impact of outsourcing is greater than negligible, but not by much.

So here we have some extremely good news with very little downside. Kling’s second essay, How Much Worse Off Are We? shows how productivity increases over the decades have raised our standard of living. Two tables tell the whole story. The first shows the change in the number of households lacking essential items over the past 100 years; the second shows the change in the number of households possesing certain luxury items over the same period of time. One item from the second table is especially telling. In 1970, 45% of all housholds had clothes dryers in them. Today, 45% of all poor households have clothes dryers in them.

That’s right, Poor 2004 = Middle Class 1974. The bar has been raised.

Economist J. Bradford DeLong makes the same point in an essay exploring the extreme increase in wealth that occured in the 20th century:

Suppose that you stuffed me and my family into a time machine, sent us back a century to 1890, and then gave us an income equal to eighteen times that of 1890 average GDP per worker–an income that would put us at the same place in the relative income distribution then as some $1,200,000 a year would today. We would not be among the 500 or so richest families in the country that might be invited to the most exclusive parties in the mansions of Newport, Rhode Island; but we would be among the next outer circle of 5,000 or so.

Would we be happy–or at least not unhappy–with the switch? Our power to purchase some commodities would be vastly increased: we would have at least three live-in servants, a fifteen-room house (plus a summer place). If we lived in San Francisco we would live on Russian Hill, if we lived in Boston we would live on Beacon Hill. If we lived in New York we would live on Park or Fifth Avenue.

But the answer is surely that we would not be happy. I would want, first, health insurance: the ability to go to the doctor and be treated with late-twentieth-century medicines. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was crippled by polio. Nathan Meyer Rothschild–the richest man in the world in the first half of the nineteenth century–died of an infected abscess. Without antibiotic and adrenaline shots I would now be dead of childhood pneumonia. The second thing I would want would be utility hookups: electricity and gas, central heating, and consumer appliances. The third thing I want to buy is access to information: audio and video broadcasts, recorded music, computing power, and access to databases.

None of these were available at any price back in 1890.

Without a doubt, there is some connection between economic and technological development. Technological development fuels productivity growth, which in turn drives economic growth. This raises an interesting question: is there an economic version of Moore’s Law? How fast is our standard of living increasing? If Poor 2004 = Middle Class 1974, is it fair to say that standard of living is doubling every 30 years? And if so, how does that rate of growth compared to what was experienced in years gone by?

My guess is that 30 years is a pretty short interval for Middle Class to be downgraded to Poor. And I bet the interval is getting shorter and shorter.

Original Comments