Your observations about minimum wage work and globalized JIT supply chains are, I think, pretty valid.
> <50% believe in God/higher being, down from 80%+ in early 00s.
Source? The only recent poll I could find on this was a 2020 poll from Pew, and in that poll the number is still over 80% [1]: "more than eight-in-ten American adolescents say they believe in God or a universal spirit."
> most people can’t grow a potato for themselves.
Not new, especially if meant literally, but also even as an abstraction. Non-farm employment has been WAY below 50 percent for most of our country's history. The inflection point was in the mid 1800s.
Incidentally, I know how to grow potatoes thanks to rocky west virginia soil.
I'm not sure why I would, though. Spending a lots of time and an acre of land on a personal vegetable/fruit/spice garden makes tons of sense in terms of quality and price. Growing your own potatoes is just silly in every way unless you either LOVE potatoes or have land that's not productive for anything else. But even then there are probably better options.
> Youth participation in sports, especially full contact sports, had been going down since before covid which just accelerated it
This reeks of "Bowling Alone".
Contact sports are in decline because we learned a lot about concussions. Just like bowling leagues died because we learned a lot about smoking and drinking in a previous generation. People aren't "bowling alone"; they stopped bowling because they stopped drinking and smoking, and for most people bowling was a thing to do while drinking/smoking during the winter months. People didn't stop socializing, they just stopped spending their free time in the town's primary smoke+alcohol+child friendly indoor space. Lanes were replaced with places like coffee shops and gyms.
> leading to forecasts of a major contraction in commercial sports.
Maybe. But there's also way more televised skiing/climbing/dirt biking/etc. than there was in the 90s. The MBA/NFL/NBA cartels aren't owed an audience, and shifting attention to other sports doesn't necessarily portend a decrease in interest in commercial sports.
The conversations I’m in are not simply focused on brain trauma; the resource cost of hauling around teams and gear is substantial. Conversations at homes on “Main Street” are more frequently referring to multiple reasons for a decision, not reducing it to one or another.
Same goes for traditions like coin and paper money; they consume a lot of stuff and energy. That’s become a repeated talking point when polling people why they are interested in crypto, which was unexpected.
The data models I’m asked to build include more than just opinion polls though, as it’s felt by the folks I work with opinions are biased by media, anxiety of going against the grain, and frankly, lack of imagination and considering alternatives on the part of the public.
See a quote commonly attributed to Adam Smith about extreme division of labor resulting in humans dumber than animals; there’s no exploration across contexts; a farmer is a farmer and that’s it. Proper Anglo tradition of staying in lanes dictated by aristocracy.
Generational churn won’t end reality itself, or be so dramatic we stop using English. It will curve agency away from old forms of agency to new. A lot of people freak out about that.
> <50% believe in God/higher being, down from 80%+ in early 00s.
Source? The only recent poll I could find on this was a 2020 poll from Pew, and in that poll the number is still over 80% [1]: "more than eight-in-ten American adolescents say they believe in God or a universal spirit."
> most people can’t grow a potato for themselves.
Not new, especially if meant literally, but also even as an abstraction. Non-farm employment has been WAY below 50 percent for most of our country's history. The inflection point was in the mid 1800s.
Incidentally, I know how to grow potatoes thanks to rocky west virginia soil.
I'm not sure why I would, though. Spending a lots of time and an acre of land on a personal vegetable/fruit/spice garden makes tons of sense in terms of quality and price. Growing your own potatoes is just silly in every way unless you either LOVE potatoes or have land that's not productive for anything else. But even then there are probably better options.
> Youth participation in sports, especially full contact sports, had been going down since before covid which just accelerated it
This reeks of "Bowling Alone".
Contact sports are in decline because we learned a lot about concussions. Just like bowling leagues died because we learned a lot about smoking and drinking in a previous generation. People aren't "bowling alone"; they stopped bowling because they stopped drinking and smoking, and for most people bowling was a thing to do while drinking/smoking during the winter months. People didn't stop socializing, they just stopped spending their free time in the town's primary smoke+alcohol+child friendly indoor space. Lanes were replaced with places like coffee shops and gyms.
> leading to forecasts of a major contraction in commercial sports.
Maybe. But there's also way more televised skiing/climbing/dirt biking/etc. than there was in the 90s. The MBA/NFL/NBA cartels aren't owed an audience, and shifting attention to other sports doesn't necessarily portend a decrease in interest in commercial sports.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2020/09/10/religious-be...