You Would Choose Now: Measuring America’s Progress Toward Fairness and Tolerance
If you could choose any moment in history to be born, and you did not know ahead of time who you would be — what nationality, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, or economic class — when would you choose?
Barack Obama posed this question in 2016, and it motivates the book.
Allen Downey, data scientist and author of Probably Overthinking It, uses decades of data from national surveys to see whether America has become fairer and more tolerant. He puts changing attitudes alongside the historical record of civil rights and legal protections — and asks, “Would you choose now?”
An early access edition is on LeanPub. It includes an introduction and chapters on sexual orientation and gender (about 80 pages). I plan to release additional chapters monthly and a complete draft in early 2027.
Three editions are available in PDF and EPUB on LeanPub:
Free Sample — introduction only
Community Edition — introduction and first chapter (with email signup)
Early Access Edition — all current chapters, plus updates through the final edition
This is a work in progress. Comments and suggestions are welcome on the LeanPub forum or via GitHub issues.
Technical Appendix¶
These two Jupyter notebooks walk through the statistical models used in the book. Open either link to run on Google Colab (no local setup required):
Time series models — estimate changes over time
Period–cohort models — estimate the contributions of the period and cohort components