{"id":15041,"date":"2015-03-30T17:17:25","date_gmt":"2015-03-30T21:17:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15041"},"modified":"2015-03-30T17:17:25","modified_gmt":"2015-03-30T21:17:25","slug":"bad-imply-worse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15041","title":{"rendered":"bad does not imply worse"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Christopher Jencks makes a characteristically <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/archives\/2015\/apr\/02\/war-poverty-was-it-lost\/\\\">wise point<\/a> (after displaying a graph that shows that real poverty has declined a lot since 1959, and a bit since 2009):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The equation of \u201cbad\u201d with \u201cworse\u201d is so tight in American political discourse that when I tell my friends or my students that \u201cthere is still a lot of poverty, but less than there used to be,\u201d they have trouble remembering both halves of the sentence. Some remember that there is still a lot of poverty. Others remember that there is less than there used to be. Few remember both.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I observe\u00a0the same\u00a0phenomenon constantly. The problem, for example, with our students&#8217; civic knowledge is not that it has declined. Scores on civics tests have been remarkably stable over a long period. It&#8217;s just that civic knowledge is (and used to be)\u00a0too low. The same is true of voter turnout: quite flat since the 1970s, but at a problematically low level. I offer additional examples from social policy in &#8220;<a title=\"Permalink to why do we feel compelled to argue from decline?\" href=\"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=8721\" rel=\"bookmark\">why do we feel compelled to argue from decline?<\/a>&#8221; It seems that you cannot get attention for a problem unless you pose it as a recent\u00a0and alarming deterioration from a\u00a0previously superior state. That is an obstacle to taking our most stubborn\u00a0problems seriously.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Christopher Jencks makes a characteristically wise point (after displaying a graph that shows that real poverty has declined a lot since 1959, and a bit since 2009): The equation of \u201cbad\u201d with \u201cworse\u201d is so tight in American political discourse that when I tell my friends or my students that \u201cthere is still a lot [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15041"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15041\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15073,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15041\/revisions\/15073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}