1/ THREAD: there are a lot of narratives about western/American culture being in decline. Here is my attempt to investigate that empirically. Obviously not all these are necessarily indicators of cultural decline, so please take with grain of salt.
2/ In terms of architecture, the vast majority of Americans prefer styles from the past: civicart.org
3/This is confirmed by a study that gave people VR headsets, and saw how they responded to different areas in Norway: partner.sciencenorway.no
4/In terms of architectural achievements, the tallest building has been outside of the west since 1998. FWIW the fastest roller coasters is also in Dubai.
5/ For music, we see that all the growth in the market comes from old songs: theatlantic.com
6/ From @PopCrave we see a pretty rapid increase in streaming on Spotify that comes from songs that are more than 18 months old:
7/ From this graph from @jonatanpallesen we see that the critical acclaim of music peaked in the late 60s and has been slowly declining since: #introduction" target="_blank" rel="noopener" onclick="event.stopPropagation()">jsmp.dk
9/In terms of Christmas songs, Americas favorite songs are mostly from the middle of the 20th century: vocativ.com
11/ In terms of operas, the vast majority of operas were not composed in the past 50 years: washingtonpost.com
12/ In terms of movies, we see the majority of top 20 movies are spinoffs or sequels: experimentalhistory.substack.com
13/ However it is possible that this is just the result of catering to people preferences as the rotten tomatoes ratings seem to be improving: npr.org
14/ The average age of the top actors in increasing since 2000. This could be evidence that the actors with the highest star power aren't getting replaced with people of the same caliber: theringer.com
15/ There is also a general trend of decline in viewership of people viewing award shows (though the Oscars did recover a bit in 2022): cnbc.com
16/ I searched for polling to try to find whether people thought culture was getting better or worse, but couldn't find much. However I did find this poll from 2007 that showed 62% of Americans thought TV was getting worse. denverpost.com
17/In terms of literary culture we see that people are reading slightly less over the years:
18/ An analysis across multiple languages found that books were getting less rational and more sentimental: pnas.org
19/ There is also a rise in the number of cognitive distortions which indicate depression across many books: pnas.org
20/An analysis from done by Putnam in "The Upswing" shows that there was an increase of emphasis on "the common man" in books that peaked in the 20th century. His research finds generally that there was more of an emphasis on "we" rather than "I" in the middle of the 20th century
22/ Many people worry about classics being in decline. There does seem to be a decline in people getting Bachelors and Masters degrees in the past couple of years but it isn't very dramatic: timeshighereducation.com
23/ Looking at fashion, there seems to be a decline in formal wear as evidence by the decline in dry cleaning shops: bloomberg.com
24/ Many people dump on modern art, but this was the closest I could find to empirical evidence against this. The more "modern" the more people say it isn't art. yougov.co.uk
25/ Shifting to design it is hard to find empirical evidence about this, but an Auto Express magazine finds that only one of the top 25 most beautiful cars they ranked was from the 21st century. autoexpress.co.uk
26/Looking at the bigger picture, surveys from the NEA don't show very big changes in any category from 2002-2017. arts.gov
27/ Finally wanted to look at @charlesmurray Human Accomplishment graphs for western achievement From 1400 to 1950. Here is Philosophy:
28/ Art:
29/ Lit:
30/ Music
31/ So once again the data is mixed, and not trying to make any solid claims. Some things could be both good and bad like decline of formalwear. Please include more data if you have it.
People who may be interested: @Western_Trad @WTF_1971 @wasphyxiation @Peter_Nimitz @pegobry @Molson_Hart @Steve_Sailer @BosqueAli @whyvert @s_decatur @HbdNrx @echo_chamberz @HarmlessYardDog @ScottMGreer @Shiftant
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