The Progress Report: We’re Divorcing Like It’s 1959!

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Zachary: What could go right. I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined by Emma Varvaloucas, the Executive Director of The Progress Network, and this is our weekly Progress Report where we look at a few select nuggets of news that suggest the world is not going to hell in a hand basket or at the very least, suggests that while the world might be going to hell in a hand basket, it also might not be going to hell in a hand basket.

It might be going somewhere else. It might be going up instead of down, it might be heading speeding toward utopia instead of careening toward armageddon. Who knows? The future remains delightfully, distressingly, uncertain, and we are all trying to read the tea leaves at the present to figure out exactly where we’re going.

We’re usually wrong, or at least we’re usually wrong-ish. But what we try to do with The Progress Report is highlight some things that are going on that get lost in the negative fray. Some positive things that are going on that get overwhelmed by the tsunami of negativity that tends to characterize our social media slash media slash public debates and discussions.

Although so do little AI videos of talking babies. So it’s either the sublimely bad or the mundanely happy silly, but there’s not a lot of quote unquote good news and we try to bring out some nuggets of that. And Emma has dedicated her life to the sole pursuit of finding such nuggets. That’s all she does.

She just sits in front of a computer screen, wakes up, goes to bed, tries to find good news, desperately, happily, joyfully, as kind of a life mission as it were.

Emma: That makes my life sound so sad.

Zachary: Yes. Well, you know, we need people guarding the walls. You’re guarding the walls of optimism and most people don’t do that. So I like to think of it as a profoundly uplifting life.

Emma: Uplifting, if not monotonous.

Zachary: Yes. Well, you know, we all have our crosses to bear.

Emma: Anyway, moving on from that discussion. Let’s get into the good news. I feel the need to frame this discussion with a very hilarious article that I found on The Guardian.

Zachary: Not usually the place one goes to for funny things.

Emma: No, no, no. Indeed not. But I found out through them that the US Department of Agriculture is trying something new to scare wolves away from livestock. And that’s to play them a very certain soundtrack. And that soundtrack is the arguments from the movie, Marriage Story. Have you seen that movie? It’s all about divorce.

Zachary: I have, Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, right?

Emma: Yeah – They’re playing the soundtrack of that movie, specifically the arguing parts, and apparently it keeps the wolves away from livestock in Oregon.

Zachary: First of all, I wanna know how many other things they experimented with before they found that one right? Because I don’t think anyone sat around as they’re spitballing ideas of things to keep the wolves away. I doubt the first 10 ideas were, let’s play them the soundtrack to Marriage Story like that had to be after many things had failed.

Before you get to that, want to be in the room where that discussion went on of like, huh, let’s try that. And someone’s like, oh, come on. That’s ridiculous. It’s like, well, we’ve tried everything else.

Emma: It’s actually, it is a good question to ask. The last time I heard about like soundtrack deterrence was that news story from a while back where they were playing western pop music, Britney Spears and stuff to deter pirates from boarding ships. Remember that? That was years ago.

Zachary: Actually, during the, during the US invasion of Panama in 1989, the US Army, in order to get Manuel Noriega out of his presidential palace, actually did set up intensely bright lights and blare heavy metal music at the time. That was kind of the most grinding music you could think of, intensely loud 24/7 to drive him batty in his palace.

I mean, he did eventually come out. I don’t know if he came out because of the soundtrack.

Emma: Yeah. Yeah. Well, we can go into a whole dark place with this. ’cause now I’m thinking about Guantanamo, but the point is. Is

Zachary: That’s right. They did the same thing in Guantanamo.

Emma: Yeah, I brought up the wolf and the livestock story about the divorce soundtrack because we actually have good news about marriage and divorce. It’s actually, the picture’s a little bit complicated the further into the data you go, but the headline news is, is pretty good.

So nearly 9 out of 10 Americans believe that the divorce rate is increasing, but it is actually decreasing. So this is from a conservative think tank, because who else would be studying divorce and marriage rates, but couples who got married in the 1990s. They had a 47% chance of divorcing. If you get married today, you have a 40% chance of divorcing.

And while that’s not exactly like a wild odds of success, the divorce rate is actually at a 50 year low in the US right now, which is interesting.

Zachary: Wow. I wonder how that compares to Western Europe, although there’s also lower rates of actual marriage.  There’s more like domestic partnerships

Emma: True, and actually that’s a factor in the US as well, not the domestic partnerships, but the fact that fewer and fewer Americans are getting married. So that is also at a record low. So what you’re really seeing in the overall picture is just less than half of Americans now get married, period. All of the ones that are getting married, it’s generally people who are high earners and highly educated, but those people that do get married are more likely to stay married these days.

Zachary: Good to know. Okay.

Emma: Yes, the topic of the newsletter, if anyone wants to read more about that. Next we’re talking a little bit more about Americans and then we’ll talk about something else. Derek Thompson, who people might know from The Atlantic, has a great new substack. He’s been doing really interesting work and he has brought it to our attention that there is a great American fitness boom going on right now.

More Americans are exercising and playing sports than ever before. Part of it is like a. We’re so rich that we wanna be fit. It’s like the new Chanel, I suppose, but it’s also because older people are healthier than they used to be. So then, if you look at the demographics of who is exercising more, it’s.

The increase is mostly in younger people, so it’s like Gen Z, trying to find social connection by going to the gym type of thing. But also particularly women over 65, they are jazzercising. They’re little hearts away. Yeah. Not everything is bad actually. There’s a lot of really good health indicators in the states right now, which Derek Thompson also talks about this, in this article and that we’ve talked about on the podcast and having to do with drug overdose, alcohol, things like that.

Zachary: Obesity is as well as a, I guess controversial but shouldn’t be controversial, push by the current administration for health in America. If Maha – Make America Healthy Again, we’re not intertwined with MAGA. Make America Great Again, oit’s hard to imagine anybody would object to the idea of health.

Emma: The idea of health, I think it’s not the idea, it’s the approach, right? That people are up in arms about. But the idea. Sure. Yeah.

Zachary: And there has been a 30, 40 year, you know, attempt to America has certainly excelled in abundance a lot – but it has also excelled in obesity and, and health issues over the past decades. So the idea that there would be more attention to that, better fitness, although there’s also a lot of debate about like fitness alone without changes to diet, doesn’t seem to have quite the effects that you would think it has.

Like it has to be, it has to be both.

Emma: Well, they actually think that the declining obesity rates, and this is very recent, have to do with ozempic.

Zachary: Yeah, that’s true.

Emma: There’s that too

Zachary: Whatever works.

Emma: Let’s talk about America’s neighbor and then we’ll finish for today. We’re staying very America’s focused today. So Mexico has a new poverty report out. It’s the first time they’ve measured multidimensional poverty with this, a different agency running it, which is its own, like we’re having a little Bureau of Labor Statistics bruhaha right now in the states.

Mexico had its own bruhaha around what agencies do, but and measure what, by the way, just so you know, this is. This is not without some controversy over the numbers, but what the report did say is that 13.4 million people in Mexico have been brought above the poverty line between 2018 and 2024. So that still leaves just under a third of the population in poverty.

But I mean, 13.4 million is not an insubstantial number of people.

Zachary: Absolutely not. And look, it does explain some of the popularity first of Obrador, who was the outgoing president and also now Claudia Scheinbaum, who’s the, the current president? Yeah, Mexico. Lots of democratic deficiencies, as does every country in the world that we can see. But they weren’t popular just ’cause, right?

There’s a degree to which they’re delivering some public goods quite effectively.

Emma: So Obrador was a populace for a reason, right? It’s in the name. He raised the minimum wage and yeah. Not to say that I’m not even defending his policies. I haven’t looked into him enough, but he was certainly popular with a large swath of the population, if certainly he also had his detractors. And like I said, this report is not without some controversy over the numbers.

Zachary: But that’s true anywhere in the world. I mean, measuring poverty is always somewhat political. How you define it, what’s the threshold? Is it the right threshold? All these questions, it’s not, there’s no something called, absolutely. Poverty of which you are above or below this line, that is hard and fast.

It’s not like being alive or dead. But that being said, we do try to measure it and assess it, and we try to measure the delta and the change over time. And everywhere in the world for the past 20 years, there is less, quote unquote poverty. There’s more caloric abundance. Their lifespans are increasing almost everywhere.

Not everywhere, but almost everywhere. And Mexico is absolutely a product of that and is attempting to measure it, which they should.

Emma: Yeah, and I should say too that they, they, they chose the hardest marker. I mean, they could have just said like, surviving on however many dollars per day. They did multidimensional poverty, which measures.

Zachary: All those things. Right, exactly.

Emma: Yeah, so there’s that.

Zachary: So on that note, we will take leave of you this week and be back with you again. Please send us ideas, stories that you’d like to highlight at hello@theprogressnetwork.org, and we will try to highlight them. Send us your comments. Send us your tired, send us your hungry. We hope you are enjoying the final weeks of summer.

Even though it is true summer doesn’t end until September 21st. We all tend to feel that summer ends at the beginning of September. At least it does culturally, even if it does not technically. So on the cultural note, we hope you’re enjoying the end period of what hopefully is a rest period, and we will be back with you as always.

And thank you, Emma, for co-hosting and for finding those nuggets.

Emma: Here to be a guardian of optimism, almost a democracy, a guardian of optimism, and a nugget finder.