I want to ask you a question.

Do you think the violent crime rate in the United States

has gone up or down

or stayed about the same

since 1990?

The answer is, that it has gone down, dramatically!

In fact, there are about half as many violent crimes

per one thousand Americans

as there were 25 years ago.

Overall, crime rates are also down dramatically

but every year since 2006

at least 60 percent of Americans polled

have said that they feel that

"crime is going up".

And I am among them. In fact, I wanted

to make a video about why crime is going up

in the Untied States only to find out...

you know...that...that it's not.

Okay, so if you are an American

this is how likely you are to die of various causes.

You see violence down there at the bottom right corner.

That's all interpersonal violence

war, terrorism, murder, etc.

Now, because its victims are disproportionately young,

violence becomes a bigger problem

if you change this visualization to

measure disability adjusted life years.

Which is like a measure of how many years

of healthy life are lost due to various causes.

But it's still a relatively small public health problem

in the United States. Smaller than

suicide, or drug overdoses, or asthma,

or complications from preterm birth,

or traffic accidents.

And also violence is shrinking faster

as a cause of death and disability

in the United States than any

other major cause except for HIV.

So Hank, several studies have shown that on the Internet

we like to share what makes us outraged.

And that incentivizes media companies, even

very small ones that make videos in their basements,

to find outrageous stories because

we know that you will share them.

I've done this. Like in 2010, I made a video about how

outrageous it is that we continue to mint pennies

even though they cost two cents a piece to make

and are never used to buy goods or services.

The problem is the penny, while it's an obvious outrage,

it's an exceedingly small outrage.

I mean the US government could save far

more money by just by passing a long term

highway funding bill which Congress has been

unable to do for the last six years.

But that isn't as narratively simple or as easy to get

outraged about, so we don't talk about it much.

And then there is Martin Shkreli, the bond villainesque

former hedge fund manager, whose company

acquired the rights to a drug that

treats people with toxoplasmosis and

promptly rised the price from 13 dollars and 50 cents a pill

to 750 dollars a pill.

The internet boiled with outrage until

the company promised to lower the price.

Two months later, they've just announced, that for

some customers, they are going to lower that price

all the way down to 375 dollars a pill.

But the outrage at this ass-hat masked a much

more complicated and interesting problem.

Like, even before the price hike the drug cost 30 times more

in the US than it did in the UK.

And these price hikes aren't even particularly new or rare.

Longterm Nerdfighters will remember back in 2011

when Warner Chilcott raised the price of its drug

Asacol 1200 percent overnight.

There are dozens of similar examples

and this stuff isn't happening because of

one individual's asshattery. It's happening because

there is a huge web of problems

with pharmaceutical markets in the US.

Point being, our collective outrage may have

slightly decreased the price of one rarely prescribed drug.

But it has done nothing to address the larger issues

that affect every American who takes medication.

Now, of course, the Internet can and does grapple with

big and complicated problems and it's also

given a voice to people who traditionally have been

discriminated against in public discourse.

And I also don't think there is anything wrong with being angry.

Anger combined with sustained effort

can lead to real change.

But when we allow ourselves to casually move from

one outrage to the next,

from pennies to Martin Shkreli,

nothing ever really changes.

Well... Except that maybe we have become more afraid

and pessimistic.

Like, since January of 2010, crime is down.

The U.S. joblessness rate has fallen dramatically.

The economy has grown and we report being happier

on average than we were five years ago.

And yet every single month since January of 2010,

more than two-thirds of Americans have felt

that the US is headed in the wrong direction.

And I feel like we are unnecessarily inundated with bad news

because we seek it out and when we find it,

we share it. And so we become more afraid

and pessimistic than we need to be.

But then again, as a nation we've never been healthier

or claim to be happier.

So maybe we're getting exactly what we want.

Even if we don't know it.

Hank. I'll see you on Friday.