- Author
- Adam Mastroianni
- Published
- 8 July 2026
- Kind
- Newsletter essay, a sequel answering reader responses
- Original
- www.experimental-history.com/p/the-decline-of-deviance-2
- Subject
- Writing with models
What it is
Adam Mastroianni writes the Experimental History newsletter. The post follows an October post claiming risk-taking has declined since the 1990s. This sequel takes up critiques and builds on the idea.
What it says
- Mastroianni says falling teen drinking, smoking and crime since the 1990s went unnoticed.
- The post says the internet came too late: most Americans lacked broadband until 2007.
- Mastroianni says the internet sped up three trends: cultural carcinization, de-frictioning and the flat-Earth problem.
- The post argues faster communication makes culture converge on a few winning strategies, like crabs.
- Citing Komar and Melamid, Mastroianni says new tastes need friction, including disliked things.
- The post argues rising wealth raises the opportunity cost of risky, poor artistic lives.
- Mastroianni says rising tolerance explains part of the decline, but traces that too to prosperity.
What evidence it gives
It cites a YouGov music poll, the General Social Survey and teen trends. It also uses anecdotes, a game analogy, and Komar and Melamid's painted surveys. The charts and images were not viewed in the text version.
Interests and limits
The author writes a personal newsletter and offers hypotheses, not tests. Causal claims about prosperity rest on argument and analogy. The author notes the Gen Z music data could be an age effect. The page's comments were not read beyond the first two.