Problems of the Modern World

and candidate causes

There appear to be a lot of problems¹ in the modern world, many without obvious causes. Examples include:

An increase by orders of magnitude in the frequency of autism diagnoses

A large increase in the frequency of serious allergies, mate search problems, obesity, depression and other psychological problems

Cost Disease, the steep increase in the real cost of schooling along with the inability, at least in the US, to complete large projects — high speed rail in California for example — at anything close to the cost of similar projects in other times and places, or to complete them at all.

Candidate Explanations

This post does not offer explanations for any of these problems. What it does offer are candidates, changes in things that might affect us sufficiently recent and sufficiently widespread to be possible explanations. There are a lot of them, so I group them into categories.

Environmental: Perhaps, as some argue, some problems are due to toxins in the air or water. Most humans through most of history spent much of their time exposed to the temperature of the outside world — now many of us live most of our lives in the narrow temperature range set on our thermostats — that might affect us in unknown ways. We live in a cleaner environment than in the past, which might reduce the ability of our immune system to recognize threats, and in denser populations.

Political/Legal: Sitting in a classroom for many hours a day, interacting almost entirely with your age peers, is not how most people in the past grew up. Mass schooling in most developed countries is not recent enough to explain problems that have only appeared in recent decades but the extension of compulsory schooling to later ages and the increase in school size, more than an order of magnitude from 1946 to 1974 in the US, is.

Changes in law and custom relevant to courtship have arguably made mate search harder for substantial parts of the population of the developed world.² Changes in divorce law may effect how common and how stable marriages are, with consequences for both adults and children.

Medical: Medical innovation such as birth control pills or a vaccine might have long term negative side effects, as some claim. Child mortality has fallen steeply over the past century and which children died was only in part random; perhaps the deaths we are now preventing were of children particularly likely, if they survived, to develop problems. Generalizing the argument, medical progress means that many people live who in the past would have died, perhaps people particularly likely if they had lived to develop allergies, or depression, or autism, or … . If the reasons are heritable and the people who would have died not only live but reproduce, the result might be an accumulating increase in genetic tendencies to such problems.³

Dietary: Our diet has changed a great deal over the past century plus, significantly over shorter times. One current concern is “ultra-processed” foods. Another is high fructose corn syrup. Others could be diet sweeteners of various sorts.

Lifestyle: How we live has changed in ways that might explain some of the problems. Children are, on average, born to older parents than in the past; children of older parents are more likely to suffer birth defects, perhaps including ones not easily detectable. Most women experience fewer pregnancies, which surely affects them and possibly their children. Children grow up with fewer siblings than in the past. The increased use of social media, the internet more generally, could affect people in a variety of ways. So could increased mobility,

Rising Income: People in most of the world are considerably better off than they were a century ago, in much of it even than they were fifty years ago. That is one possible explanation for the rise in obesity — people have always liked to eat and calorie consumption is less constrained by income than it used to be. Increased wealth might have less direct effects. Perhaps having less need to worry about where your next meal is coming from or how you will keep a roof over your head and still feeling a need to worry about something results in worrying more about whether your feelings of bad health are due to eating something you are allergic to.

Ideological: The decline of religious belief could have long-term negative effects.

For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had forseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom had not been a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire.” (Orwell on the loss of religion)

That is the largest change in widespread beliefs I can think of, but there might be others.

Problems That Aren’t: Some of these problems may be imaginary, due not to an increased frequency of autism or depression but an increased frequency of diagnoses. Psychological problems may appear to have become more common only because we became less willing to institutionalize them. Men have always had problems finding wives, women finding husbands, perhaps all that has changed is that the internet makes it easier to complain about it.

Matching Problems With Causes

One approach to figuring out the cause of a problem is to see how widespread it is. My picture of dating problems stemming from Title IX and related changes is based on the experience of modern American college students as reflected in online talk. Has mate search gotten harder in western Europe, in India, in China, in Israel? Harder for other sorts of Americans? The U.S. has problems building high-speed rail, but China and Spain apparently do not — what might be relevant differences?

One can ask the same sort of question for other problems. Most of my candidate causes vary from place to place and, in a given place, among people living there. If the loss of belief in religion is a cause of something, we might observe less of it in religious communities or countries. The internet became available sooner in some places than in others, sooner to richer and more educated people than to poorer and less educated. Problems that are a result of less exposure to sunlight — many fewer people work outside than used to, at least in developed countries — should have been more common in the past in Sweden or Argentina than in Mexico or Spain. Birthrates have fallen almost everywhere, but more and earlier in some countries than others. Population densities are higher in cities than in rural areas and some countries are much more urbanized than others. Income has risen across the world but much faster in some places, such as China after Mao’s death and the shift away from his economic policies, than others.

A Project For Someone (Else)

I have tried in this post is to sketch out what sorts of problems seem to be associated with the modern world, what sorts of things their causes might be, and suggest how one might figure out what causes which problem. Actually linking problems to their causes is a much bigger project, one that would require a book, not a post. It should probably start with a more serious effort to figure out which are real than I have offered. I do not plan to write it.

But somebody else could.

P.S. A commenter points me at an interesting piece by Robin Hanson on cultural drift, arguing that the shift to a global culture eliminates the competition among local cultures that kept them functional. That could be a common explanation for a variety of problems.

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1. I am limiting myself to changes widely perceived as problems but the same issues of causation apply to widespread changes that some might approve of, such as the steep rise in reported bisexuality and gender ambiguity.

2. I’m thinking of changes, in the US, in college disciplinary rules associated with Title IX and broader cultural changes in perceptions what behavior in courtship is acceptable, what risks negative social or even legal consequences. I do not know to how much of the US population those changes are significant or to what degree similar changes are occurring in other countries.

3. That issue is discussed in Michael Lynch, “Mutation and Human Exceptionalism: Our Future Genetic Load.” Since the effects would accumulate, present problems might be due to reduced mortality over the past century or more. A commenter points me at a post less pessimistic about the effect of reduced mortality on genetic load": Taking mutational load Seriously.