All kinds of bad behavior is on the rise

All kinds of bad behavior is on the rise

By Matthew Yglesias

Shootings and murders surged in 2020, and while the 2021 increase appears to have been substantially smaller (as previously covered, this data reports with annoyingly large lags), the overall trend was toward more deadly violence in most cities, even as a few posted declines.

This has been a huge political fiasco for the substantively unsound notion of defunding the police and has also unfortunately kneecapped more reasonable reform ideas. But defunding police departments can’t possibly be the cause of the national murder surge because very few departments actually cut police funding. And while it would be a stretch to say the increase has been uniform, it has certainly been broad-based — red states and blue states, jurisdictions with reform DAs and jurisdictions with traditional ones, and even the handful of cities with GOP governors were all impacted by the rising tide of mayhem.

With that in mind, I think the extent to which we seem to be living through a pretty broad rise in aggressive and anti-social behavior is under-discussed.

(Jane Tyska/Digital First Media/East Bay Times via Getty Images)

Shooting someone is an extreme behavior, even in a country as violent and gun-soaked as the United States of America. But everyone has some margin along which they can get a bit more reckless, a bit more hostile, a bit more indifferent to the people around them. And as far as I can tell, a much larger swathe of the population is moving in that direction than the tiny number of people who are doing murders. You’re seeing more killing, which is a subset of the increase in shootings, which in turn is a subset of the large increase in gun-carrying. But traffic deaths are also up. Unruly passenger incidents on airplanes have surged. Schools report more discipline and student safety issues.

Basically, the murders seem like the tip of an iceberg of bad behavior. And while we need some tailored policy measures to address specific issues, I think we might also see some broad-based benefits in trying to restore a climate of normalcy.

The epidemic of dangerous driving

The United States has always had an unusually large number of motor vehicle fatalities because Americans drive more on average than residents of other rich countries.

But in 2020, car fatalities didn’t decline despite the reduction in commuting volumes. And then in the first six months of 2021, we saw a huge increase in motor vehicle fatalities relative to before the pandemic.

Why did more people die? According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, it was basically all of the things. If there was a way to make the driving experience less safe for drivers, less safe for passengers, or less safe for everyone else on the road, people did it.

NHTSA’s analysis shows that the main behaviors that drove this increase include: impaired driving, speeding and failure to wear a seat belt.

“Safety is the top priority for the U.S. Department of Transportation. Loss of life is unacceptable on our nation’s roadways and everyone has a role to play in ensuring that they are safe. We intend to use all available tools to reverse these trends and reduce traffic fatalities and injuries,” said Dr. Steven Cliff, NHTSA’s Acting Administrator. “The President’s American Jobs Plan would provide an additional $19 billion in vital funding to improve road safety for all users, including people walking and biking. It will increase funding for existing safety programs and allow for the creation of new ones, with a goal of saving lives.” 

The safety measures Cliff mentions, some of which were funded by the bipartisan infrastructure bill, are all good ideas. As I said, the United States is a bit of an outlier among rich countries in terms of motor vehicle deaths, so it’s a problem we should try to address. But clearly the short-term rise we’re seeing isn’t a sudden deterioration in the quality of our transportation policy. People started speeding and driving under the influence more and wearing seatbelts less.

Given how highly concentrated violent crime is in a relatively small number of neighborhoods, I think the typical American’s life is more at risk from reckless drivers than from murderers.1

And the change here is clearly coming from an increased level of misbehavior rather than from road design issues. But what’s interesting about reckless driving is how much more innocent-seeming and normalized it is. Driving your car too fast is nowhere near as dangerous to others as shooting a gun at someone. So while only a tiny share of the public has ever shot someone, a huge number of people drive illegally fast at least some of the time. That’s what makes speeding so dangerous in the aggregate — lots and lots of people do it. And this seemingly unmotivated rise in speeding, especially when paired with other reckless driving behaviors, indicates to me that we’re looking at a general rise in misbehavior.

All kinds of institutions are reporting trouble

The Federal Aviation Administration’s data on the increase in unruly passenger investigations is frankly pretty shocking. In a proximate sense, this seems to be largely about mask rules. But is it really?

I’m a good mask-compliant liberal, so I’d never think to get unruly about the mask mandate per se. But there are plenty of occasions to be annoyed while flying on a plane and there always have been. Why do I need to take my shoes off? The mask thing has not made flying four times as annoying as it was in 2019. What’s happening is that people are experiencing less self-control and good judgment than they did before the pandemic — the same reason they’re driving more recklessly.

There’s also been an increase in attacks on healthcare workers. And maybe that’s political. People are watching Tucker Carlson and he’s riling them up about vaccines.

But Roman Stubbs reports in the Washington Post that, “As fans return to high school sports, officials say student behavior has never been worse.” And Chalkbeat and every other source I can find says school behavioral issues have generally gotten worse.

A month into school, she says she underestimated the challenge ahead. Student behavior referrals are up, as middle schoolers hurt each others’ feelings with comments they’d usually only be bold enough to say online. She and other social workers have seen more verbal and physical fights, and worried parents are calling with concerns about their child’s shorter-than-usual temper.

“It’s definitely a lot more than I think any of us were mentally prepared for, even though we tried to prepare for it,” Rodriguez said.

Schools across the country say they’re seeing an uptick in disruptive behaviors. Some are obvious and visible, like students trashing bathrooms, fighting over social media posts, or running out of classrooms. Others are quieter calls for help, like students putting their head down and refusing to talk.

“This is a prolonged adjustment period,” said Dr. Tali Raviv, the associate director of the Center for Childhood Resilience at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago. As children return to school, “There’s much more interaction, there’s much less downtime to recharge, there’s much less flexibility.”

By the same token, drug overdose deaths in the United States finally stopped increasing in 2018 and 2019, and there was at least some reason for optimism that we might be turning the corner on the opioid epidemic. But in 2020 and (so far) 2021, overdoses have surged again.

The Covid-19 pandemic has also been associated with a large increase in alcohol consumption, which is projected to directly induce thousands of deaths due to liver disease while also contributing to problems like murders and car wrecks.

On some level, it’s intuitive that some people would respond to the stresses of the pandemic by drinking more. Personally, I found myself drinking less because I wasn’t really going out for a while, and by the time I started doing stuff again, my tolerance had dropped and my taste for drinking kind of waned. But evidently, that’s not typical.

Deep and widespread problems

I don’t have a great policy solution here that’s going to make everyone feel happy and healthy and psychologically stable so that we don’t go out wrecking our cars and shooting people while drunk. But I can see people looking at one corner of this problem and condemning soft-on-crime liberals or fanatical anti-maskers and developing a very narrow, politicized view of things.

But even though all of these trends have their own specific etiologies, I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume an increase in unruly airplane passengers is coincidentally co-occurring with a rise in lethal violence, an unrelated rise in reckless driving, a surge in school discipline problems, and also an increase in drug and alcohol abuse. A modest shift in average behavior can generate a huge increase in outlier behavior.

If everyone is getting a little bit more reckless, and if — for a lot of people — that means having an extra drink or two each week or driving 15 miles per hour over the speed limit rather than five, that means more wrecks, more liver damage, and more problems, even though most people who drink don’t have a serious problem and most people who speed don’t crash their cars.

But it also means more kids acting out in school. It means air travel annoyances turning into blowups. And in neighborhoods where a lot of people were in gangs and carrying illegal guns prior to the pandemic, you’ve now got more shooting and more killing.

The true toll of the pandemic, in other words, goes well beyond the official death toll of the virus. American society is actually fraying at the seams in some pretty significant ways. And this to me is fundamentally part of the argument for federal leadership in setting some terms around a “new normal” of endemic SARS-Cov-2 rather than continually shifting the terms of a national state of emergency. Respiratory viruses (mostly flu, but also RSV, and even some common colds for the very elderly) killed non-trivial numbers of people before the pandemic, and it’s truly tragic that we’re going to be seeing more deaths going forward. But what we didn’t have pre-Covid were all these spillovers and disruptions in other areas of life. With vaccines in hand, we really need to be trying to address the full range of harms that have accrued over the past two years.