What Happened in 2007?
What happened in 2007? It’s the damn phones! Inspired by WTF Happened in 1971 I wanted to make a website detailing many charts that show something weird is happening. Beginning around the late 2000s and accelerating through the 2010s, a series of troubling trends emerged. Measures of well-being, including happiness and life satisfaction, began to show signs of strain. Youth mental health entered a state of crisis, with rates of depression, anxiety, and self-harm rising to unprecedented levels. Concurrently, metrics of cognitive performance and academic achievement, such as international test scores and measures of fluid intelligence, appeared to stagnate or decline after decades of progress. Labour productivity growth, a cornerstone of economic prosperity, slowed to a crawl. We…
