Understanding the World is Hard
Most people live very busy lives and don't have time to do research into various topics and it leads to all sorts of misunderstandings about the world.
Note - As if to illustrate the above, I’ve had to make two updates to this post - first to correctly label the crime line graph and another to get the correct percentages for the Yougov bullet on university degrees. Thank you to the careful readers who found these errors.
One thing I always find interesting is the way in which our perception of reality is shaped by broad understandings, elite signaling, and our own unique experience. One common way that this manifests itself is that most people - myself included- tend to assume things about the world that are not true. Some of these are partisan assumptions, and others are just general assumptions about the world but it’s interesting to understand how they vary from reality.
“Taxes always go up”
This is a pretty common one, particularly on the right and it’s just not true. Below is a chart drawn from Federal Reserve data showing federal taxes as a percentage of GDP since 1950. I’ve added a trend line to make the point more clear, but taxes - at least federal taxes in the US - just kinda bounce around without any clear up or down trend. If you want to see this with recessions overlaid, you can go to the FRED site here (I didn’t use their chart because it has a dynamic vertical axis, which makes the changes look bigger than they actually are.
“Crime is Trending Down”
Interestingly, for a long time, this was a mistake in the other direction. From the late 1980s until the mid-2010s, US crime rates plummeted in truly impressive ways. Sociologists don’t really have a good explanation for it, with people arguing for everything from different policing techniques to abortion to the belated impact of removing lead from gas. So for a lot of people, for a long time, this argument was a common one, but since about 2016, this has swung the other way. The trend over the past ~7 years has been for rising crime, particularly in cities. It’s easy to overstate the increase but it’s certainly taking place. Note that this chart is derived from FBI crime data found here.
“The Federal Government Keeps Getting Bigger”
This is another really common one and it’s one you can look at different ways. If you’re just looking at Federal spending as a percentage of GDP, the long-term historical trend is up, but not particularly aggressively, since the late 1960s. Below is the FRED data and the current numbers look really bad, but that’s largely a function of the various COVID emergency packages (and the data only running through 2021). I expect that the number is already moving back towards trend. One important thing to keep in mind is that much of Federal government spending goes towards Medicare and Social Security and the US population is aging, so you would expect there to be some increase simply due to demographics.
Cutting the other way, I think most people would be surprised to know that the size of the government workforce is shrinking and has been for some time. The 2008 financial crisis absolutely devastated state and local governments and there have been steady cuts to staff, particularly teaching. As a result, government employment as a percentage of the population is almost a full percentage point lower than it was in 2008. One fun thing you can see is a little spike every ten years for the census, which should give you a sense of just how incredibly big a job it is to count the whole country.
All sorts of Stuff We Get Wrong
Yougov released a survey around basic infromation on the composition of the US in March and it is absolutely fascinating. Basically, they asked a ton of people basic demographic questions about the country and the clear takeaway is people really don’t know what our country actually looks like. I wish I could copy the big takeaway chart here, but I’ll flag some of the more egregious errors and encourage you to look yourself.
People estimate that 20% of the population is a millionaire - actual number is less than 1%
People estimate that 30% of the country are either Gay/Lesbian, Jewish or Asian - actual numbers are 3%, 2% and 6% respectively
People estimate that 47% of the population has a college degree - actual number is 33%
People estimate that 58% of the population is Christian when the actual number is 70%
Lastly, and this one hurts, people estimate that 77% of the population has read a book but the actual, self-reported number is only 50%
I hope no one reads this and thinks that I’m somehow writing this as some sort of back-handed bragging. Lord knows I fall into some of the misunderstandings in the survey. I was way off on the percentage of households owning a gun - I figured it was around 40% and it’s actually over 50% (54%). This is more a reminder that it’s really easy to make bad assumptions and it’s best to stay humble about what we actually know.