People are so dramatic these days. Everything has to be the “end of the world”. It’s destroying society, humanity, and life on Earth as we know it. ^/s
What’s the length of the moving average?
To be fair, the spikes over 4 were all immediately following actual crises (70s Oil shortages, 2008 housing crisis, COVID). Point taken though.
Normalized misery. Clowns will say it can get better
That’s one word. You’d need to know much more to actually get a good look at how the state of the union changed over time, what language was used in the past. Did they use words like calamity or catastrophe more in the past?
This tells us very little by itself.
Now do “catastrophe,” “disaster,” etc. How much of this can be explained by linguistic change?
This paints a picture of there being more crises in recent decades, but I think that’s rather misleading. This mostly represents natural linguistic drift, rather than a change in the things being described by that language.
Just from some unsystematic spot checking:
– The 1931 Message to Congress includes the word “crisis” only 3 times, but the word “emergency/emergencies” 16 times.
– The 1919 Message includes “crisis” 0 times, but “problem” 7 times, “failure” 4 times, and “evils” once.
– The 1897 Message includes “problem” 7 times, and “evil” 5 times.
There _might_ be some truth to the idea that the Annual Message/State of the Union might focus more on negatives than positives in recent years. But it would require some more sophisticated sentiment analysis to determine that, not just a simple wordcount for a specific term that has become more generally popular.
8 comments
[The everything “crisis” 🚨](https://4lights.substack.com/p/the-everything-crisis)(Substack pos)
Viz created in Excel
Sources:
* State of the Unions: [https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/app-categories/spoken-addresses-and-remarks/presidential/state-the-union-addresses?items_per_page=60](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/app-categories/spoken-addresses-and-remarks/presidential/state-the-union-addresses?items_per_page=60)
* Google ngram Viewer: [https://books.google.com/ngrams/](https://books.google.com/ngrams/)
People are so dramatic these days. Everything has to be the “end of the world”. It’s destroying society, humanity, and life on Earth as we know it. ^/s
What’s the length of the moving average?
To be fair, the spikes over 4 were all immediately following actual crises (70s Oil shortages, 2008 housing crisis, COVID). Point taken though.
Normalized misery. Clowns will say it can get better
That’s one word. You’d need to know much more to actually get a good look at how the state of the union changed over time, what language was used in the past. Did they use words like calamity or catastrophe more in the past?
This tells us very little by itself.
Now do “catastrophe,” “disaster,” etc. How much of this can be explained by linguistic change?
This paints a picture of there being more crises in recent decades, but I think that’s rather misleading. This mostly represents natural linguistic drift, rather than a change in the things being described by that language.
Just from some unsystematic spot checking:
– The 1931 Message to Congress includes the word “crisis” only 3 times, but the word “emergency/emergencies” 16 times.
– The 1919 Message includes “crisis” 0 times, but “problem” 7 times, “failure” 4 times, and “evils” once.
– The 1897 Message includes “problem” 7 times, and “evil” 5 times.
There _might_ be some truth to the idea that the Annual Message/State of the Union might focus more on negatives than positives in recent years. But it would require some more sophisticated sentiment analysis to determine that, not just a simple wordcount for a specific term that has become more generally popular.