6 November 2023. Young people | Music

Why young people’s mental health is getting worse. // Taylor Swift is a billionaire.[#511]

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1: Why young people’s mental health is getting worse

There’s increasing concern at the moment about the state of young people’s mental health. The usual suspect is the amount of time spent online and academics like Jean Twenge have built quite a big reputation on the back of this argument.

But a recent academic paper in The Journal of Pediatrics, outside of a paywall, suggests this might be a symptom not a cause.

It’s short, as is the way of science and medical papers, and it has its hypothesis as its title:

Decline in Independent Activity as a Cause of Decline in Children’s Mental Well-being: Summary of the Evidence.

They suggest that much of the current discussion is looking at too short a timeframe—we need to look back at decades, not a decade:

Although most current discussions of the decline in youth mental health emphasize that which has occurred over the past 10-15 years, research indicates that the decline has been continuous over at least the last 5 or 6 decades.

They argue that the critical issues—and the primary cause for the increase in “mental disorders” is the long-term decline, over multiple decades, in children’s opportunities to engage in play and other activities without adult oversight. Such activities

may promote mental well-being through both immediate effects, as a direct source of satisfaction, and long-term effects, by building mental characteristics that provide a foundation for dealing effectively with the stresses of life.

(Play street in New York. Photo: Street Lab. CC BY-NC 4.0) 

To construct their case, they review the evidence for four (related) issues:

• a large decline over decades in children’s opportunities for independent activity;

• a large decline over the same decades in young people’s mental health;

• effects of independent activity on children’s immediate happiness; and

• effects of independent activity in building long-term psychological resilience.

They define ‘children’ for the purposes of the article as being anyone less than 18. And I should say that this is research by US-based academics, but it draws on research in the USA, Europe and elsewhere.

It’s easy for anyone of a certain age to conjure up a lost age in which children did have the freedom to play unsupervised. But the researchers suggest that this is also borne out by the research:

Books on the history of childhood in America have likewise documented the decline of both free play and children’s independent, responsible contributions to family and community. Chudacoff describes the first half of the 20th century as “the golden age of unstructured play” and shows how children’s free play, especially outdoors, declined from about 1960 on. Mintz supports the premises that “contemporary children are more regimented and constrained than ever before” and have “fewer socially valued ways to contribute to their family’s well-being or to participate in community life.”.

Surveys of parents tell the same story: their children play independently less than they themselves did, and that this is because they limit their children’s freedom because of fears about “crime and traffic”.

They quote UK data that notes the falling number of parents of elementary (primary) school parents who let their children walk home alone or catch buses:

in England, license to walk home alone from school dropped from 86% in 1971 to 35% in 1990 and 25% in 2010, and license (permission) to use public buses alone dropped from 48% in 1971 to 15% in 1990 to 12% in 2010.

A further constraint on independent play is the increase in homework:

One study revealed that the average amount of time that US children in school, ages 6-8 years, spent at school plus school homework increased by 11.4 hours per week between 1981 and 2003, equivalent to adding a day and half to an adult’s work week.

This might be starting to reverse. I did some work recently with a London education authority, and the heads who were involved in our workshops were clearly rolling back expectations about homework—sometimes in the teeth of opposition from parents.

Their evidence for the decline in children’s mental well-being has a couple of striking data points in it. The first:

(A)verage scores on the Children’s Manifest Anxiety Scale, for children mostly ages 9-11 years, increased by a full SD between 1956 and the late 1980s. A change this large means that roughly 85% of children by the late 1980s were more anxious than the average child in 1956.

There’s a change on a similar scale in depression among high school students. And the rate of suicide among young people has increased significantly, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:

(T)he rate of suicide among children younger than age 15 years rose 3.5-fold between 1950 and 2005 and by another 2.4-fold between 2005 and 2020. No other age group showed increases nearly this large. By 2019, suicide was the second leading cause of death for children from age 10 through 15 years.

The researchers describe that as “an epidemic of psychopathology among young people”.

Looking at their summary of the evidence that independent play is good for mental well-being, again a couple of data points jumped out, the first from Swiss research on five year olds:

The main findings were that those who could play freely in neighborhoods spent, on average, twice as much time outdoors, were much more active while outdoors, had more than twice as many friends, and had better motor and social skills than those deprived of such play.

Similarly an Australian study concluded that “active travel to school (walking, cycling, or scootering) correlated positively with a measure of psychological well-being in primary school children.”

They also discuss the impact of this on long-term wellbeing, although the evidence here is less strong, because there seems to be less of it.

(A play street in Chester, England. Photo by Jaggery, on Geograph.org.uk. CC BY-SA 2.0)

They acknowledge in the Discussion that the studies are mostly correlative, and don’t prove causation. But they do contextualise the research against ‘self-determination theory’ (SDT), pioneered by Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, and also have an evolutionary perspective. An important strand of SDT is about “the psychological foundations that enable self-determination”:

To feel in charge of one’s life, one must feel free to choose one’s own paths (autonomy); feel sufficiently skilled to pursue those paths (competence); and have friends and colleagues for support, including emotional support (relatedness)... Play and other self-directed activities are, by definition, autonomous; such activities build skills in endeavors that the children care about, so they promote competence; and such activities are a primary means by which children make friends, so they support relatedness.

They’re not over-claiming. They are not suggesting that the decline in independent activity is the only cause—just that it is a cause. They think it’s possible that changes in competitiveness within schools and within education may also be a factor—certainly this is a self-reported cause of psychological distress from young people.

But they are also, frankly, a bit dismissive of the “social media” hypothesis about declining mental health:

(A) “review of reviews” concluded that “the association between digital technology use, or social media use in particular, and psychological well-being is, on average, negative but very small” and noted some evidence, from longitudinal research, that negative correlations may result from declining mental health leading to more social media use rather than the reverse.

I wrote about some of this evidence here in April. The adverse mental health effects of social media use among teenage girls was much stronger among heavy users of social media.

This piece is already too long, but one observation here from me. In our current socio-political environment, it is easier to get theories to stick that blame individuals for their behaviour than look at structural factors. And the structural factors here include the rise of the car and all of the vast lock-in of powerful political and economic interests around it and its infrastructure (see the Update, below). Of course it’s easier to blame social media.

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2: Taylor Swift is a billionaire

A tour here, some merchandise there, some streaming royalties, and what do you know? Suddenly you are talking about real money.

And Bloomberg marked the occasion with a couple of infographics that are definitely worth sharing here. The first one shows how the billion dollars is made up. The second one shows the steady increase in her tour revenues over the past decade and a half.

(Source: Bloomberg)

The Bloomberg article is behind a paywall, and is frankly a bit gushing, but here you go:

Her prolific songwriting, negotiations around streaming and shrewd decision to re-record her first six albums have enabled her to create massive financial success at a time musicians have lost clout in the industry. The close relationship she’s cultivated with her millions of ardent fans has led to a more unified demographic than just about any political party, evidenced by the swapping of beaded Swift-inspired friendship bracelets that’s become a universal rite among concertgoers.

Gushing? The next paragraph describes Swift Inc as “a multinational conglomerate with the world’s most devoted customer base”, and the one after quotes an economist as saying, “In addition to being a generational talent, Taylor Swift is a great economist.” Yeah, right.

Bloomberg isn’t very public on its methodology, and when you look at the categories they seem to conflate some of the wealth (a stock, such as the properties) and some of the income (flows, such as streaming royalties). Equally, it’s not clear how they assess “the value of music released” since 2019”, since this would only crystallise as royalties of some kind, and this is a different heading. But I’m guessing or hoping that Bloomberg wouldn’t make such a rookie error.

Forbes, which keeps score of how the world’s richest are getting on, also reckons she’s worth $1.1 billion.

But the diagram does give a sense of the shape of the way the music industry works these days—concerts, expensive in themselves, create and reinforce the fan base, who also buy merch, and creates a demand for the recorded music beyond people who are unlikely to go to a concert. (Swift has also been successful in selling vinyl and CDs to fans.) It creates a musical and financial ecosystem. Meanwhile, the profits get traded into less ephemeral assets such as property.¹ FN: The Liverpool striker Robbie Fowler invested a lot of his earnings into property. When Manchester City played Liverpool, City fans would chant, “We all live in a Robbie Fowler house.”

Part of this is just down to how much work you’re willing to put in. Swift has done 57 shows in 21 cities across the USA so far this year.

Forbes notes that unlike most other billionaire celebrities, Swift has done this just off music. She has no lucrative “side hustles” (although with this fan base, this can only be a matter of time. The magazine brackets her with Bruce Springsteen , whose fortune has been largely built on a combination of touring and the value of the catalogue. So it is also worth noting how the value of her touring has increased over the past two decade:

(Source: Bloomberg)

Although this is a story about a billionaire, in practice this model is now how the music business works, even if you are earning the average industrial wage or thereabouts as a folk or jazz musician. It’s just a question of scale.

They build a relationship with audiences through touring, and workshops. They hold on to as much of their catalogue as they can—easier now that recording technology is more affordable—and licence their catalogue rather than sell it. They sell merch and vinyl. And in an odd way, all this aligns better with why people want to be musicians in the first place: to play music which reaches audiences.

As opposed to the models that prevailed when record companies managed the industry around sales of records, when it was all about building profile of bands and controlling distribution.

As the Cluetrain Manifesto said presciently in 1999: “Markets are conversations”. They overclaimed a bit here. Markets for breakfast cereal or soap powder are unlikely to be conversations any time soon. But this is definitely true of things that people care about—like music.

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Update: SUVs

I wrote about what I called the ‘SUV catastrophe’ here almost three years ago. They are a classic example of a private good that is exporting a vast amount of external costs onto other people. Now the Guardian has published a long article on the same theme, by Anthony Andrews called ‘Monsters of the road’.

Here are a couple of extracts, the first on the emissions effects of the growth in SUVs:

After a period of falling, the CO2 emissions of new cars sold in both the UK and the EU have been rising since 2016. Experts attribute the reversal to an increase in SUV sales. In 2006 SUVs accounted for 7% of new cars in Europe. By the early part of this year more than half of all new car sales in Europe were SUVs or SUV-styled cars… The International Energy Agency has said that annual CO2 emissions from the world’s 330m SUVs reached almost 1bn tonnes last year .

Despite the perceived safety arguments for buying an SUV (meaning the safety of those inside, rather than those outside, some research suggests they are more dangerous to their occupants than smaller cars. In a forthcoming book, Andrew Simms and Leo Murray suggest the market for SUVs was created from scratch by advertising. This was in the interest of the car companies because the margins were much higher:

(B)etween 1990 and 2001, $9bn (£7.4bn) was spent on advertising off-road-themed cars to an audience that hadn’t before shown much interest in driving down that path. In this century, SUV advertising has eclipsed all other car promotion… Simms and Murray conclude that, following the example of cigarettes, an advertising ban on the biggest polluting cars would be effective in bringing down sales and emissions.

A more aggressive tax regime—and, come to that, a meaningful carbon price—would also bring the purchase costs of SUVs into line with their external costs. But in the face of bad actors, there are also limits to what market mechanisms can do. There are also things that we don’t allow people to sell because they are dangerous to everyone—flammable pyjamas, for example, or lead-based paint. Maybe SUVs actually come into this category.

One other thing I learnt from the article was that if you take a dustcap off an SUV, and insert a lentil on top of the air valve before putting back it on, the tyre will slowly deflate. As a self-organised group called ‘Tyre Extinguishers’ is busy doing. But don’t try this on someone else’s car, obviously.

j2t#511

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1. The Liverpool and England striker Robbie Fowler invested a lot of his football earnings into property. When Manchester City played Liverpool, City fans would chant, “We all live in a Robbie Fowler house.”