Sunday e-mail 18th August: Relax, the world probably isn’t getting worse.

Or is it?

For some reason, the media seems to think we want to know about people called Trump, Biden, Harris, Farage, Le Pen, and so on. Fox, CNN, BBC, TalkTV. Isn’t it time journalists realised that we only want to hear about Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr? He’s our favourite and we don’t want to hear about anyone else. I mean, do we?

It's easy to understand the public desire to soothe ourselves with our golden memories of the Ford administration. After all, those were better, gentler times. I mean, weren’t they?

What do today’s journalists ever have for us but distressing stories of ‘special military operations’ in far-flung countries, rampant inflation at home, unprecedented assassination attempts, secretive government agencies that we can’t trust, and young people with crazy ideas, occupying college campuses and threatening the very future of democracy? Oh, and immigration, too. That’s out of control.

Back in the day, when the world was young, our straight-talking pal Jerry Ford used to distribute a badge with these words on it: ‘I will not let you down’. Ford himself said, ‘In all my public and private acts as your president, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candour with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy in the end’. We could use some of that good old Jerry Ford medicine right about now, couldn’t we?

Well, no, we couldn’t. You know what Jerry Ford had to deal with? Distressing stories of ‘special military operations’ in far-flung countries, rampant inflation at home, unprecedented assassination attempts, secretive government agencies that we couldn’t trust, and young people with crazy ideas, occupying college campuses and threatening the very future of our democracy? Oh, and immigration, too. That was out of control.

The more you learn about Jerry Ford, the more you can’t help but think here was a pretty good guy. You wouldn’t mind having Mr and Mrs Ford over for dinner. Might be quite fun. The fact that Mr Ford was out of his depth, out of ideas, out of time…well, that doesn’t matter over the aperitifs, does it?

People in Ford’s time were queuing to watch American Graffiti (‘Where were you in ’62?’) or settling down on the sofa to view Happy Days, set in an unthreatening version of the 50’s. They were listening to Bette Midler’s cover of a song that first came out in 1941. They were reading a bestselling biography of Harry S Truman, because they reckoned they could use some of that good old Harry Truman medicine right about now.

Very little has changed. Some things are better today than in Ford’s time: some are worse. None of this is unprecedented. It may seem as if it is, but that’s because the seventies were fifty years ago and human beings just don’t live all that long. College students have always protested; lonely men and women have always had it in for politicians; inflation sometimes does spin out of control. You and I just don’t remember the last time it happened. Even if we do remember it, we still don’t remember it.

Cognitive psychologists sometimes speak about ‘recency bias’. It’s a powerful factor in your thinking and mine. Remember that year when ‘Stars’ by Simply Red was voted Best Popular Music Album Ever? (No, really, it was.) That world-shakingly bizarre event occurred in 1991. What year did ‘Stars’ come out? That’s right - 1991. (‘Stars’ was listed somewhere this year at number 3301, which seems more appropriate.) Think Better Call Saul was better than its predecessor, Breaking Bad, or Twin Peaks: The Return was better than plain-old Twin Peaks? Ask yourself, which came out more recently? Which name will be written in bigger letters in the history books: John Hinckley Jr or Thomas Crooks? Ask yourself, who took his shot more recently?

Our newsletter this week is all about phenomena like this: biases in thinking and how they apply to crime. Since it’s a follow-up to last week’s equally-brilliant newsletter, called Crime & Heuristics I, I thought I’d call it Crime & Heuristics II. Call me crazy. I have some amazing material for you. I think you’re gonna love it.

This week’s bullet lost could feature nothing else. Here are five (of the many, many) problems that President Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr had to cope with. They’ll look oddly familiar:

·       Branches of the government that seemed abruptly not only far less competent than everyone had assumed, but also far less unaccountable.  Ford’s headache was the CIA and its apparent attempt to cover up attempted assassinations of foreign leaders and brainwashing of American citizens.

·       An economy that no one could understand. The 70s saw the invention of a new word - ‘stagflation’ – to name a new phenomenon: stagnation at the same time as inflation. It couldn’t happen, all the economists said. But it did. Suddenly no one could afford to buy things.

·       Not just one but two assassination attempts. One of them was by a member of the Manson Family, no less.

·       Officials who seemed to connive behind his back and try to run the government while he wasn’t looking. Who were the actual powers in Washington? Journalists kept asking. Perhaps those young whippersnappers, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, were deeper than they ought to be in Ford’s government reshuffles.

·       Citizens who no longer trusted the government. In 1972, only 38% of Americans agreed with the statement ‘The government consistently lies to the people’. By 1975, the number was up to 68%. Ford’s own approval rating on August 10, 1975 was 55.3%. It was down to 33.8% just two weeks later.

Both pictures courtesy of WikiMedia Commons.