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Have Young People Grown More Anxious? (Part B)

In 1905 Einstein explained that time is relative and we all pretended to understand what he was on about. Understand or not, over the next hundred years humans sped time up. We managed to cram a lot more information and activity into a lot less time. We opened doors and opportunity but with that came more decision making and, perhaps, pressure. The human world became more complex and young people now have more to learn before they’re ready to face it.

Maybe, or maybe not. The keys to a good and happy life may remain that same as they always were. I don’t know. Either way, I have heard people say that one outcome of modern life is that young people are becoming more anxious. In Part A of this post I wrote about whether there is any empirical data to support this. Epidemiological research does suggest a global rise in anxiety and in New Zealand, although I haven’t seen data on the youth population in general, we have had an increase in the prevalence of medical diagnoses of anxiety disorder. Of course, this may reflect changes in medical practice rather than changes in the population.

So there is growing evidence but it’s difficult to draw conclusions from the statistical data. Measurements of anxiety rely on people reporting their subjective experience. We have scales that attempt to measure anxiety indirectly but it’s still hard to discount changes in attitudes to discussing mental health. Also, the same words spoken at different times don’t necessarily mean the same thing. Language is tied to its social context.

Our discourse on anxiety and the ‘anxiety epidemic’ of the 20th century echoes the rise of the English Malady in the 18th century. The English Malady was popularised by George Cheyne, a society nerve doctor who in 1734 released a book called The English Malady that popularised the new concept of nervous disorder.

In the 18th century if we were to talk about anxiety we would probably be more likely to speak in terms of nervous disorder. Cheyne’s notion of a nervous disorder was expansive, capturing a variety of ailments of which anxiety was a part. According to Cheyne social conditions, especially prosperity, rapid social change, and self-indulgent lifestyles had led to an epidemic of nervous afflictions. Huge numbers of well-bred Englishmen suffered from the English Malady. He estimated that nervous disorders made “almost one third of the complaints of the people of condition in England”.

I’m not sure how commonly held Cheyne’s view was, but a number of his contemporaries seemed to agree that 18th century England was in the grip of a nervous order epidemic. Across the ditch in Europe this view seemed to exist as well. For example, a competition was run in the Dutch city of Utrecht for the best essay on “The causes of the increasing nervous disease of our land.”  

The English Malady coincided with a shift in medical approach in England. Up until that point English medicine hadn’t advanced much beyond the Greek understanding of mental disorder. The Greeks lumped together anxiety and depression in the concept of melancholy, characterised by unmotivated fears, anxiety, and sadness, and caused by an excess of black bile. Melancholy literally means black bile, one of the four humours. Come the 18th Century and English doctors had begun to focus on the nervous system as a source of health and illness, emphasising the importance of nerves, fibres and organs. Understanding and the language used to explain the underlying ailments shifted.  

Looking back one question is whether the population was becoming more unwell or was the concept of nervous disease just becoming more popular and more prevalent in the language of the day. Could the same thing have happened with anxiety in the 20th century?

Medically speaking, anxiety wasn’t conceived of as a distinct illness until the end of the 19th century. Anxiety was bundled together with other symptoms in both the concepts of melancholy and nervous disorders. It was Freud that gave anxiety a distinct medical classification. Freud’s view was that “There is no question that the problem of anxiety is a nodal point as which the most various and important questions converge, a riddle whose solution would be bound to throw a flood of light on our whole mental existence.”  Freud was immensely popular amongst the media and intellectuals and helped to establish anxiety as a distinct medical concept.

At the same time anxiety was increasing as a feature of the public consciousness. In 1947 W.H Auden wrote a poem titled The Age of Anxiety. A poem dealing with the quest to find substance and identity in a shifting and increasingly industrialised world for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. That title caught on as popular phrase describing the era.

Since then, we have seen an explosion in the scope of anxiety as a medical disorder. The Diagnostic Statistical Manual, known as the DSM and put together by the American Psychiatric Association, is the bible of psychological diagnosis. In 1980 the DSM III dedicated 15 pages to anxiety disorders and 18 pages in the 1987 version. The DSM IV in 1994 dedicated 51 pages while the fifth edition of 2013 has 99 pages. Commensurate with this increase we see that the DSM-III in 1980 estimated that anxiety disorders afflicted 2-4% of the US population whereas now estimates sit at more like 20-25%.

A criticism of the use and prescription of anti-anxiety medication was that the anxiety being treated has been a nebulous, ill-defined concept. A 1975 review of tranquiliser use stated “What illnesses are being treated? Most of what primary care physicians see, they label ‘anxiety’.” Early advertisements touted the ability of tranquilizers to relieve anxiety associated with the stress of problems with spouses and children, overwork, career failures, traffic jams, you name it. Part of the reason for the increase in the number of pages in the DSM dealing with anxiety is the desire to be specific and detailed about what is being diagnosed and treated.

The arrival of big pharma was a part of the growth of anxiety as a medical concept. Expand the scope of a disorder and you get a bigger market for your products. Anxiety is a big money spinner for pharmaceutical companies. When pharmaceutical companies began manufacturing and promoting their own drugs (a relatively new development, this used to be the job of chemists), anti-anxiety tranquilizers were at the forefront.  In 2009, Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug, was the single most prescribed psychiatric medication in the USA.

My underlying point here is that there were forces at play in the 20th century that might have played a part in driving the concept of anxiety to a certain prominence in our minds and in our language. This makes me a little more hesitant to draw conclusions from the statistical data.

So, despite the statistical evidence I still have reservations about whether anxiety has increased in young people generally. It remains possible for me that it’s more how we talk about anxiety that has changed. I don’t mean however to discount individual and group experiences of anxiety. The impact of anxiety can be significant. The good news is that if you feel anxiety is inhibiting you from getting what you want out of each day effective approaches are available to help you get to where you want to be.

I’ve taken a blunt broad brush view of whether anxiety has risen in the youth population as a whole. My perspective is from one of privilege, the same goes for most of the authors I read in my source material. The statistics I looked at may have primarily come from university populations which brings its own bias. Anxiety is correlated with dynamics bound in with poverty, inequality, gender, and ethnicity. I don’t offer these perspectives, though they are necessary for proper understanding of what’s going on with anxiety today.

After all that, I think I have left off with more questions than answers.  Thank you for reading though, if it’s answers you want, this guy has them.

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View of Auckland from Okahu Wharf. 

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Have Young People Grown More Anxious? (Part A)

Sixteen years ago, as a pimple faced teen, I had finished window shopping for Xbox games and sat at a bus stop enjoying a Cookie Time cookie, delicious chunky chocolate chip. A grey, happy looking woman, wrapped against the wind and moving slow but determined, approached me with a slight look of concern. ‘Now I’m not being rude you know’, she said, ‘but those cookies aren’t good for your skin. You really shouldn’t eat them’.  You all know perfectly well that the Cookie Monster has wonderful skin so, frankly, I doubted the woman’s dermatological credentials. Unperturbed by my scepticism, she ventured ‘I spent my youth in London during the Blitz but I think today’s world is more difficult for teenagers.’  This took me by surprise, given the bombs and cream shortages and all that, but ‘Oh yes!’ she said ‘You have so much choice, it’s so complicated, and it all goes so fast. Take it from an old woman, make sure you enjoy yourself! Well…not too much. What with all the diseases and all that these days. Now I’m not being rude you know, but be careful where you dip your wick if you know what I mean?’

I did think she was being rude, implying that I had bad skin and should stop eating cookies. Still, as an entitled millennial I’m inclined to latch on to her notion that the modern world isn’t all so straight forward for young people. With my confirmation bias in overdrive I’ll pick and choose from this woman’s insights thank you very much. After all it seems to me that a woman who lived through a world war might be well placed to know a thing or two about hard and not so hard times. It really struck me, and surprised me, that she would suggest that young people in the modern world might have it in any way difficult in comparison.

I’m not sure that we have any grounds to mutter in terms of economic, physical and material prosperity (setting aside the topic of inequality for another day). But I do believe the world has become more complex and more rapid. Providing new challenges for both the young and old that grapple with it. One reaction to this complexity could be anxiety, and it now seems a commonly held notion that young people are more anxious than they used to be.  Can we, with any objectivity, say that young people are experiencing more anxiety than previous generations?

This is the issue I sought to get to the bottom of with my friend Vic when we met for coffee. We sat down and Vic gave me a forced smile. A relaxed morning starting with a yoga class had quickly turned frustrating as Vic had spent 40 minutes in Sunday morning traffic to get to ‘the cool hip café’ that I knew.  Our coffees arrived, the barista had drawn a nice little heart on Vic’s perfectly frothed milk, while mine had a classic middle finger, a joke, I think. We sipped our double strength coffees and wondered what the go is with all this anxiety.

The culprits were obvious. Increased screen-time, a culture of instant gratification, carefully curated social media and the glamorisation of unattainable ideals of beauty. Not to mention individualism and suburban isolation, consumerism, less sleep and less exercise, the decline of religion replaced by…what?, and the rise of world ending phenomena like nuclear war, climate change and the return of vehemently vengeful dinosaurs.

Jean Twenge, a research psychologist, might have similar discussions over her coffees in the café of San Diego State University. Twenge, probably has a slightly more robust approach than Vic and I, having done actual research with actual data. Terms like positivism, empiricism, and Renaissance Man are bandied about by anyone with a calculator these days but Twenge has been crunching some serious numbers. After all her math-craft Twenge reckons that college and school kids in the US have indeed become more anxious. And she’s got impressive figures to back up her claim.    

According to Twenge the average US college student in the 1990s was reporting greater levels of anxiety than 71% of students in the 1970s and 85% of students in the 1950s. For US children the change was so large that “normal” 80s kids reported higher levels of anxiety than child psychiatric patients in the 1950s.

Twenge was able to get this data because it turns out they’ve been asking young people in the USA about their anxiety for a while. This has been done using standardised scales such as the Taylor Manifest Anxiety scale and the Children’s Manifest Anxiety Scale. These scales ask people to identify with statements like “I am usually calm and not easily upset” and “I have very few headaches” to measure generalised anxiety. Twenge looked at five such scales using data covering 1952 to 1993 and found a consistent trend of rising anxiety in each of them. It was this data that produced the startling figures just mentioned.

Twenge and some esteemed researcher mates from across the USA followed this up with a similar exercise using the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), this time responses went up to 2007. Fair to say the results don’t make for an overall great picture unless you’re a pharmaceutical executive.  For example, recent students were seven times more likely than those tough buggers of 1938 to score at problematic levels on depression and hypomania. Hypomania by the way is characterized by unrealistically positive self-appraisal, overactivity, and low self-control. One synonym for the term is “Current President of the United States”. Believe me, I know the best presidents. General symptoms of anxiety assessed by the MMPI were also on the rise, expressed through worry, sadness, dissatisfaction, and sometimes physical symptoms.

I relayed this research to Vic as she considered whether to order another coffee or to go for a pastry. Her response was the one that I generally get to this data. Could it reflect an increased openness to discussing mental health issues, rather than a genuine increase in anxiety?  

Twenge and her colleagues have struggled to address this. It’s one reason, I think, behind why they picked the MMPI for their later research. The MMPI includes a measure of response bias, a respondent’s tendency to appear virtuous and to obscure any mental health issues they might possess. In a sense it’s a measure of whether changing scores on the MMPI scale might reflect a greater willingness to discuss and report mental health issues.  The scores on the response bias scales did suggest that more recent generations are less defensive in their responses and somewhat less concerned with making a good impression. But the changes in response bias weren’t large enough, statistically speaking, to explain the overall shifts in scores across the MMPI. So the declining picture of mental health couldn’t be explained through greater willingness to discuss mental health issues alone. Not by the stats anyway.  

Interestingly, Twenge’s statistical analysis also suggested that declining mental health scores in the MMPI were independent of economic cycles in the USA. Economic insecurity wasn’t the issue, rather the changes correlated with a shift from intrinsic to extrinsic values. A move in emphasis from internal to external validation (please like this post).  

How seriously you take these results might depend a little bit on how much validity you give to the statistical quantification of a subjective qualitative issue. Well I’m a cricket fan and statistics make up 80% of the most important things in my life so for me the evidence was conclusive enough. I was ready to ring my bell (carry it with me everywhere) and make my pronouncement that, quite indisputably, young people today are more anxious than they used to be.

Vic though was not satisfied, neither by Twenge’s statistics or by her creamy cronut. She wanted to know if Twenge’s research had been replicated and whether similar research exists in New Zealand. Well Vic, here things are a little less clear cut. In 2015 a global analysis of anxiety scores suggested that anxiety had been increasing overall globally but variably in different countries. In the USA and Canada anxiety appeared to have risen, albeit only among students, while anxiety appeared to have decreased in the UK and remained stable in Australia. This would suggest that we shouldn’t assume that Twenge’s research coming out of the United States necessarily translates to the New Zealand context.

In New Zealand, as far as I’ve seen, the statistics are limited to diagnosed medical anxiety rather than generalised anxiety.  In this context the argument that trends may reflect changes in reporting and diagnostic practices rather than lived experience seems even more pertinent. Nonetheless, the Ministry of Health statistics do show a continuously increasing prevalence of anxiety disorder in New Zealand. Anxiety among adults was diagnosed in 10.3% of the population in 2017, up from 4% in 2006. In children the prevalence had risen from 0.4% in 2007 to 3.0% in 2017. It’s risky business extrapolating from trends in medically diagnosed anxiety to anxiety in the general population but it does suggest to me that it’s at least plausible that general anxiety may have risen here.  

Vic wouldn’t have a bar of that kind of thinking and I must admit she’d successfully shown that there are gaps in the statistics that I’ve seen. Maybe so much so that we shouldn’t yet draw any conclusions. Especially here in New Zealand. Personally, I have doubt whether population anxiety can be reliably measured over time because of the ever shifting social context, terminologies and ways of thinking that are tied in with the concept of anxiety. How can we know that we are consistently measuring the same thing.

One of the benefits of an empirical approach is that it provides data to support evidence based public policy. A clear rising trend of anxiety would suggest that it may be worthwhile to put resources into reversing that trend. But what should we do if evidence supporting a conclusion one way or another does not appear achievable?

In such ambiguous spaces our values can inform how we act. What do we want? We could look forwards and create interventions designed to reduce general anxiety and then test whether they are working. An approach that is more consistent with the scientific method of prediction and testing, as opposed to trying to draw retrospective conclusions.  For example, we might test whether policies that foster social connectedness, a known buffer against anxiety, in a neighbourhood result in reduced levels of anxiety within that neighbourhood.

If we were to make these efforts however, we should be wary of treating something that may be a natural part of the human condition. A historical review of previous approaches to anxiety suggests that we might be rehashing an old problem. I get into that in Part B of this post. Until then, enjoy yourself, but not too much, be careful eating cookies and try not to worry too much about things.  

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Chillin in Okahu Bay

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Investing in the New Zealand Share Market

I have been reading about investing in shares in New Zealand.  Historically shares in the United States have provided among the best long term returns out of any asset. I was interested if this was also true in New Zealand.  It is also frequently said that individual investors are bad investors, that they lose money.  I wanted to understand this better in order to consider whether it is better to use a professional investor.  

Well, it seems that New Zealand stock markets have provided high returns just like in the United States. It also seems to be true that individual investors are poor share investors. Not only because of the transaction costs they face but also because of poor security selection and trading. However, actively managed professional funds have also underperformed. This leaves low cost index funds as something of a middle-ground.

Sharing is learning so here is a condensed form of information that I’ve found. I hope you find it useful or interesting. You’ll find information on the long run performance of New Zealand stock markets, reasons that academics have provided for the underperformance of individual investors, and contextual information to help understand the New Zealand stock market today.

Historical returns of the New Zealand share market

Two academics, Bart Frijns and Alireza Tourani-Rad[1], have studied the average performance of New Zealand stock markets from when reliable records began. It should be noted that before 1973 New Zealand shares were traded in local exchanges rather than in the single national exchange that now exists, hence the plural reference to stock markets.

From 1899 to 2012 New Zealand stock markets averaged a 10.75% per year return on shares. This is made up of about an equal split between capital gains and dividend yields. In the same period 10 year government bonds have averaged at around 5.75% and inflation has averaged at a about 4%.

During these 114 years the stock market has given a positive return in 91 years and a negative return in 23 years. The equity risk premium has been positive in 73 out of 114 years.  This means that you would have been better off with shares than government bonds 64% of the time.

The return on stocks in New Zealand has been growing. Between 1899 and 1929 stocks averaged a 7.3% return per year, 9% between 1930 and 1969, and 14.94% between 1970 and 2012. However, since the 1980's the New Zealand market has tended to be more volatile.

There is reason for concern that shares in the United States are overvalued.  I feel wary of this in New Zealand also.  This concern relates to a potentially over-inflated average price/earnings ratio for shares.

The price/earnings ratio (P/E or price multiple) refers to the profitability of a company as against the cost of its shares. The P/E ratio equation is  

A high P/E ratio suggests that people are paying a lot per share relative to what the company is earning. The share cost is potentially overvalued, or could reflect that the market expects future growth for the company. A low P/E ratio could suggest that the shares are undervalued or that the market expects the company to tank.

In the long run average P/E’s have been between 10 and 20. Since 1900, the average P/E ratio for the S&P 500 index has ranged from 4.78 in Dec 1920 to 44.20 in Dec 1999. However, except for some brief periods, during 1920–1990 the market P/E ratio was mostly between 10 and 20. Recently in the United States the P/E ratio has been averaging in the mid-20’s. Perhaps current P/Es are unjustifiably high given historical averages.

Performance of Individual Investors

 Individual investors do seem to underperform relative to the market. Although when people say that individual investors lose money this appears to be only in the sense that they could have made more. The net returns are still positive.

Barber and Odean[2] obtained data for the stock trading of 66,000 households in the US from 1991 to 1996. The average household during that time earned an annual return of 16.4 percent compared to the market return of 17.9 percent. Those households that traded most earned an annual return of 11.4 percent. During this time, the data showed that the more a household traded the less it earned. The average household during this time held a stock for 16 months. Barber and Odean concluded that the over-trading by households could best be explained by over-confidence rather than any other factor.

In that study Barber and Odean explained the underperformance of household investors as being due to the transaction costs that they face. However, the same pair undertook a general research review in 2011.[3] Here they referred to evidence that individual investors also suffer from poor selection of securities.

They reviewed the research on reasons for the underperformance of individual investors.   Overconfidence and overtrading are factors, as is the so called ‘disposition effect’. Individual investors have a strong preference for selling stocks that have increased in value since bought (winners) relative to stocks that have decreased in value since bought (losers). The existence of this “disposition effect” is consistently supported by academic research. It means we tend to get rid of the shares that will provide us good future returns in favour of shares that will give poor future returns.

Individual investors also tend to under diversify (the average US investor holds four stocks). An individual investor may over invest in the company that employs them, be reluctant to invest in overseas stocks, or invest only in companies that they are familiar with because they operate locally or in an area that the investor has particular interest or knowledge. Sensation seeking, influence by media coverage and aversion to regret were also identified as factors.

We should consider using the services of professional investors, although transaction costs are a concern as is the independence of some advisors. One industry leader in the United States has bemoaned the increasing transaction costs for investors and stated that mutual funds have gone from stewardship to salesmanship. Another concern is the performance of professional investors themselves. Empirically, active mutual funds have also historically underperformed the market.

According to Barber and Odean, low cost index funds have historically been the best option for individual investors.  The funds will take different forms but an example is a fund linked to the largest ‘X’ number of companies in the market. The fund is managed to track these companies. In the United States these funds have almost matched the average return of the market and involve lower professional services fees.

Unfortunately, the small size of the NZ stock market means that this option is in limited supply. I’ve seen a fund linked to the top 10 NZX companies. This lacks the diversification that a fund linked to the S & P 500 in the United States can provide.  Anecdotally, the Australian stock market outperforms the New Zealand stock market. It could be worthwhile investigating investing in overseas share markets.

Putting the New Zealand stock market in context

The size of the New Zealand stock exchange can be a negative. It is small by world standards. In November 2014 there were 258 listed companies. However the NZX 50 companies comprise about 98% of the value of the shares in the market.  The 258 listed companies on the NZX can be compared to around 1000 on the Australian exchange and to around 5000 on the US stock market.

The size of the NZ stock market may make it more difficult to diversify. About half of the companies on the NZX are illiquid, this means that shares for those companies are infrequently traded.  The lack of trading may mean that we lack robust pricing information for many companies.  

Arguably New Zealand does not have a culture of investing in shares and perhaps the 1987 crash is responsible. New Zealand was the worst hit by that global stock crash. From 1982 to 1987 the NZ stock market had grown by 600% and by 1987over 40% of the adult population had shares. 1987 saw the value of the NZ share market drop by 60%.

The 1987 crash resulted in reform. Prior to 1987 the New Zealand stock market had been growing exponentially. The work load for brokers increased and they in turn employed inexperienced people. Discount brokers also appeared. In contrast to traditional brokers discount brokers give no advice or less advice so that they can charge less.

Many brokers collapsed as a result of the 1987 crash. Following a period of amalgamation there are now around 12 broker companies in New Zealand. These companies tend to have large research departments, connections to international broker companies to and deal in international shares. This is said to give the brokers better access to global capital and opportunities.

New Zealand tightened its company law and securities (shares and bonds) law in response to the 1987 crash. Tightened rules were put in place around insider trading and capital adequacy measures for companies.  Although recent events obviously question whether the current regulation is sufficient.

Concluding remark 

Personally the lesson I have drawn is that a long term passive approach is the most likely to provide a good return for share investing. A low cost index fund seems a viable option to help counter some of the common errors made by individual investors. This could be particularly relevant in terms of a KiwiSaver account.  While the historical returns of stock markets have been strong, some commentators are not so positive looking forward.  No one knows what the future holds. All I would say is that we should be wary of overconfidence when considering our own powers of prediction.

[1] Bart Frijns and Alireza Tourani-Rad, The Long-Run Performance of the New Zealand Stock Markets: 1899-2012” (2014)

[2] Brad Barber and Terrance Odean “Trading is Hazardous to Your Wealth: The Common Stock Investment Performance of Individual Investors” (2000).

[3] Brad Barber and Terrance Odean “The Behavior of Individual Investors” (2011)

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43

43

I have been living in Mexico for the past five weeks. I have witnessed some of the response of the people and the state to the case of the missing 43 student protesters. For me it’s been shocking and revelatory and I want to relay the story as best as I can to you.  

After firing on the busses forty three students were forced into police vehicles and taken to custody. From here the story is murky. The government version is that the police handed the students over to members of the Guerreros Unidos, part of a drug cartel. These narcos then killed and burnt the remains of the 43 students. The government has arrested some of these narcos who have given video testimony confessing to these crimes and stating where the remains are. The remains have been sent to a lab in Austria for verification.

The government lacks credibility and its version is not commonly believed. The testimony from the narcos is not sufficient as it was possibly induced through intimidation. For instance by threatening to kill the relatives of the confessors. Of course, there is no evidence for this but that locals can believe it speaks to the violence of the Mexican state. The testimony from the confessors itself seems dubious. Apparently it would have required an intense fire over 800 degrees centigrade to burn all those bodies in one night. However the supposed location lacks signs of such a fire. There is speculation that the bodies were actually burnt in a military crematorium 8kms away. The Austrian lab will likely verify that the remains are those of the students. However these could have been transplanted to the site by the government.

Immediate responsibility for these events was placed on the local mayor and his wife. The Mexican Attorney General alleged that the mayor ordered the police to intervene in order to safeguard the conference that his wife was featuring at.  The couple went into hiding with their family but were found and arrested. However seemingly their arrest has not shed evidence on what actually occurred. 

The events of September 26 occurred before I arrived in Mexico. I have more closely witnessed the reaction from the state and the citizens within Mexico City. The disappearance of the 43 students has sparked mass protests and has become a focus point for the broader endemic issues of violence, corruption and unaccountability within the state.

Protests have occurred in some form every day. The matter is discussed at every party, dinner, and social gathering. Banners are unfurled in theatres and “justicia” is shouted by the crowd every time a soccer game reaches its 43rd minute. The number 43 has become iconic in Mexico as has the slogan “They took them alive, we want them back alive”.  This demand is most likely impossible to satisfy given the students are almost certainly dead.  Perhaps the slogan is more expressive of an underlying wish for a different reality. Because in reality the Mexican institutions are so compromised that the road to a fairer system poses so many obstacles as to seem unlikely.

Many people I have spoken to are cynical about the prospects of change. In Mexican history there have been times where real change seemed possible but instead the efforts have tended only to uplift the next bad man into power. The Mexican Revolution being one such example. If change is unlikely, where does the sustained energy of the protesters come from? One answer is that in recent times change does seem more likely. In 2000 the PRI party was ousted for the first time having been in power after the Mexican Revolution for 71 years. Notwithstanding that elections occurred throughout that time. The PRI is back in power but Mexico does now more closely resemble a functioning democracy.  Separately, the upset and outrage over the disappearance of the 43 students can be too strong to ignore. Regardless of the outcome the protests at least allow people to express themselves. One protester was reported saying “I don’t know what we should do but we have to do something”. Of course doing nothing guarantees that nothing will change.  

A very concrete demand from the protesters has been that President Peña Nieto renounce his position. Initially Peña and the government were unresponsive to the protests and as yet Peña has failed to meaningfully engage with the protesters’ concerns. To the annoyance of many, the President has spent an extended time outside of Mexico during this time. Peña and the government perhaps feel that they can ignore the protests. Ultimate accountability could come in the next election, however the PRI can secure its re-election through corruption. It is alleged that the PRI re-entered power by paying rural poor for their vote. Friends and I stayed with a family in a rural coffee growing village.  Our hosts told us that they had been paid 1000 pesos (or $100NZ) to vote for the current PRI president. This was a significant sum for our hosts who seemed to genuinely love the President for the money that his party had given them. The core of the protesters in Mexico City are the educated middle class, and especially students.  I suppose that the PRI does not depend on these votes for re-election.  

Nonetheless, the government has eventually decided to take notice of the protests. Peña was quoted as saying that you cannot demand justice with violence, in reference to acts of burning during some protests. However in cases the people responsible are believed to be government provocateurs. One Facebook post doing the rounds shows young men dressed in plain clothes being transported in military vehicles. The next picture shows one of the men from these vehicles throwing a Molotov cocktail during a protest.

The police have made aggressive and arbitrary arrests. The average protester feels that that there is a real chance of being arrested simply for being within reach of the police. For a period “+11” was popularly added to the iconic number 43. This referenced 11 people who were arrested, placed in maximum security prison and looked to be facing charges of attempted murder. Though most of the detained probably participated in the protest march concerned, it is reported that one was a filmmaker and several were people who happened by the scene. After international outcry the detainees were released by a judge citing lack of evidence. Six of them gave a news conference in which they said police beat and psychologically tortured them, threatening to burn them alive -- an apparent allusion to the 43 students.

In a separate event, Sandino Bucio, a Mexican university student, was snatched from the streets by plainclothes police. This was caught on mobile video. Bucio can be seen being dragged into car and yelling “help me” while people on the street respond “tell us your name!” It was discovered that Bucio had ended in a local prison and that night protesters surrounded the prison. Bucio was released and explained that he had been driven around in the car for three hours.  He said that his captors beat him, grabbed his testicles and threatened to rape him. One officer told him that “making a student disappear” was no big challenge. As of writing, I have just learnt that there are photos of Bucio throwing fire bombs during a protest. There is now a legitimate reason for him to go to jail. I hate to think what might happen to him.

Today there has been another large protest. Again there was a massive mobilisation of police and I’m sure more stories will come. For me, I have come to appreciate and to feel the lack of trust that Mexicans have for their institutions. It’s made me reflect on the importance of social capital (here I refer to the term in the economic sense). I can’t help but worry about the damage that the lack of accountability over the dirty politics scandal is doing to our social capital in New Zealand.

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