This is an excerpt from my book-in-progress, You Would Choose Now: Measuring America’s Progress Toward Fairness and Tolerance. It’s a data-driven exploration of progress (or not) in public opinion and civil rights. The completed chapters are available as an Early Access edition on LeanPub.
If you could choose any time to be born, when would you choose? That’s the question Barack Obama asked in a 2016 commencement address at Howard University. But he added a twist:
If you had to choose one moment in history in which you could be born, and you didn’t know ahead of time who you were going to be — what nationality, what gender, what race, whether you’d be rich or poor, gay or straight, what faith you’d be born into — you wouldn’t choose 100 years ago. You wouldn’t choose the fifties, or the sixties, or the seventies. You’d choose right now. [Emphasis added]
That was a bold thing to say to new college graduates, even in 2016. Many young adults are not happy with the state of the world, and not many of them think things are getting better. I know this because I taught college students for more than 20 years (and I gave my own commencement address to some of them in 2007). I also have two children born in the 2000s; I am aware of the Gen Z experience.
So I read Obama’s address with a skeptical eye. I wondered if he was right in 2016, and if so, whether he would still be right in 2026. And I thought about how to prove or disprove it.
The objections are obvious. Taking the categories Obama listed one by one:
If you did not know what nationality you would be, you might be worried about mass deportations and the mistreatment of detainees by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Related to gender, you might think of the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and the subsequent state laws banning or restricting access to abortion.
Related to race, you might think of the murder of George Floyd by a White police officer and the increasing visibility of White nationalism.
Related to poverty, you might think about increasing inequality in income and wealth, and the increasing prices of food, housing, education, and medical care.
Related to sexual orientation and gender identity, you might think of the 2016 shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, where 49 people were killed; or public hostility toward trans people.
And related to religion, you might think of Donald Trump’s 2015 call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”, and reports of antisemitic incidents after the Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s attacks on Gaza and Lebanon.
It is not obvious that now is the best time to be an immigrant, woman, or racial minority — or poor, gay, trans, or non-Christian. But despite all that, I think Obama was right in 2016, and he would still be right in 2026. If you could choose when to be born, you should choose now.
I did not start this book with a settled conclusion, I did not cherry pick data to support my conclusion, and I did not “torture the data until it confessed”. If the results had turned out differently, I would argue that Obama was wrong, and the title of this book would be You Would Not Choose Now — or possibly The Stupidest Timeline.
To make my case, I’ll present two lines of evidence. The first is from several long-running surveys of adults in the United States, which include questions about race, gender, religion, and related topics. With these datasets, we can track how public opinion has changed over the last fifty or sixty years. We’ll see that people now are less racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and nationalist than they were in the past, at least as far back as we have data.
The second line of evidence is a history of civil rights, with a dose of civics (checks and balances!), a bit of constitutional law, and a sprinkle of personal anecdotes. Some progress in civil rights is more recent than you might think. If you were born 100 years ago, or in the fifties, sixties, or seventies, you might be surprised at the rights you did not have.
Visualizing the evidence¶
If you like graphs, I think you will like this book. If you don’t like graphs, I hope you’ll like it anyway, but I have to warn you: there are a lot of them.
To see what they’re like, let’s look at an example from the General Social Survey (GSS). Since the early 1970s, the GSS has included this question:
Do you think most people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance, or would they try to be fair?
The people who took the survey could choose “would take advantage of you”, “would try to be fair”, or “it depends”. A few people did not answer, and a few said they don’t know or couldn’t choose. Leaving them out, the following figure shows the percentage who said people would try to be fair.
Figure 1:Time series, percent saying people would try to be fair.
The dots show the estimated percentage during each survey year.
The solid line and the shaded area are the results of a statistical model based on the assumption that the percentage we see during each iteration is a combination of a smooth trend and unpredictable variation. The solid line shows an estimate of the smooth trend, and the shaded area shows the uncertainty of the estimate.
In 1972, about 59% of the respondents said people would try to be fair. By 2024, that share had fallen to about 45%. So people are more cynical now, at least by this measure.
Changing minds and generational replacement¶
When public opinions change, there are two kinds of explanation to consider:
Changing minds: People adopt different views over the course of their lives, possibly in response to events.
Generational replacement: As older people die or age out of the survey, they are replaced by young adults with different views.
With a repeated survey like the GSS, we can follow each generation to see how it changes over time. The following figure shows one line for each birth cohort — that is, people born in the same year.
Figure 2:Cohort trajectories, percent saying people would try to be fair, one line per birth year.
The labels on the lines indicate year of birth. For example, in the upper left, we can see that people born around 1900 were likely to say people try to be fair; the percentage increases from about 65% to near 70% in the early 1980s. In the lower right, people born around 2000 are much less likely to say so; the percentage drops to about 30% in the most recent surveys. So there are big differences between generations.
Following the cohorts over time, many of the lines slope upward, which means that within each birth cohort, people are less cynical over time, on average. However, it looks like this trend has reversed recently — the lines slope downward after 2015 or so.
With this model, we can make separate estimates for the contributions of generational replacement and changing minds. In statistical terms, these are the “cohort component” and the “period component”. The cohort component is the estimated tendency of each generation to give a particular response. The following figure shows the estimated tendency to say that people are fair:
Figure 3:Cohort component: percent saying people would try to be fair.
The cohort component declines slowly among people born between 1900 and 1940 — then it drops off more steeply, all the way to the most recent birth years. The total decline is more than 40 percentage points, which is precipitous.
The period component is the estimated tendency to give a particular response at each point in time. The following figure shows the period component for the fairness question.
Figure 4:Period component: percent saying people would try to be fair.
The overall trend is upward, although there was a decline between 1985 and 1995 and another decline since 2015.
I haven’t said much about how the statistical methods work, and for most readers, you don’t need to know. But if you are curious, I have published a technical appendix with the details.
Progress is not guaranteed¶
When I say things are getting better, I have learned to acknowledge — in the same breath — that we still have real problems. For example, in the 1970s about 50% of Americans thought “most men are better suited emotionally for politics than are most women”. Now fewer than 20% agree. A pessimist might look at this trend and say, “There’s still a lot of sexism in this country — we have not come far enough, and change is too slow”. An optimist might look at the same data and say:
We have made progress,
We still have work to do,
Past progress didn’t happen automatically — it happened because people worked to make it happen,
Future progress will not happen automatically — but we have reason to believe it can.
I think it’s important to know about past progress, because it gives us hope and energy to work for change. And it’s important to know how it happened, because that understanding informs beliefs about what will work in the future.
I hope that the evidence in this book will help you note the progress we have made, and I hope it will spur you to action. We all have some work to do.
The current draft of You Would Choose Now is available now as an Early Access edition on LeanPub. If you buy now, you get each new chapter as it is released and the final version when it is published in 2027.