what’s going right in america
This is an excerpt from a Substack post by the economics blogger Noah Smith. We recommend you read the full version on his site, Noahpinion, here.
Our politics is dysfunctional and our media landscape resembles a demon-haunted wasteland, but underneath the surface, I see signs that our society is starting to knit itself back together after the unrest and chaos of 2014-2021. Health is improving. Violence is falling. Americans are starting to use technology more responsibly. Some of the economic sclerosis of the pre-pandemic years seems to be falling away.
I suspect that there are “macrosociological” forces at work. To my knowledge, sociologists haven’t really modeled a cycle of aggregate social division and health,1 but if you look at events like the collapse of the USSR and the decade of violence and self-destructive behavior that followed in Russia, or the multi-decade rise in pro-social behavior around the mid-20th century in America, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that such forces exist.
But I’ll leave the grand theorizing for another day. [Here are just a couple of] ten positive trends in American society. It’s been a tough year; you all deserve a little optimism!
Life expectancy is up
This is probably the most encouraging recent social trend in America. One of the biggest downsides of life in the U.S., compared to other rich countries, is our low life expectancy. A big gap opened up a few decades ago, and in recent years, and in the late 2010s, Americans’ life expectancy fell outright for several years. Then came the pandemic, of course, and it fell right off a cliff.
But I’m happy to report that this trend has now reversed! Not only has U.S. life expectancy more than bounced back from the pandemic, but the negative trend of the 2010s seems to be over as well. The gap with other rich countries remains, but the U.S. is no longer falling further and further behind.
Why is U.S. life expectancy improving? There are two main reasons why Americans live shorter lives than their rich-world counterparts: Unsafe behavior, and obesity. The first of these—overdoses, suicides, murders, and traffic accidents—surged after the pandemic but is now on the wane.
Murder is down (and violence is down in general)
The most important way in which life in America differs from life in other rich countries is our high level of violence. Murder rates—the most reliable measurement of violence—are typically around 5 or 6 per 100,000 people in America. That’s about five times as high as in Europe and ten or twenty times as high as in East Asia. And it’s a proxy for a bunch of other kinds of public violence—assaults, robberies, etc.—that are harder to compare across countries or across time. …
In the late 2010s, U.S. murder rates went in the wrong direction, rising from their low point in 2014. Then in the pandemic they spiked alarmingly. But in late 2021 or 2022, murder rates started falling, and they haven’t stopped falling since.
Most encouragingly, the drop appears to have continued, or even accelerated, in 2025. Murders are plunging in almost every big city. …
Although overall violence in America remains above its historic low point in the early 1960s, murder and property crime are now less common than they were during that famously peaceful era. Part of that is due to mitigation efforts—everyone moved out to the ‘burbs and started locking their houses and driving everywhere. America remains far too violent to support the kind of pleasant urban life that Europeans and East Asians enjoy. But for many years we were going the wrong way, and now we’re headed in the right direction.