Hi, I would be very interested in discussing this. I am from Hungary, I have a good knowledge of many trends here.
My first comment is that the whole history of the last three decades was completely different here, and in all neighbouring nations. Indeed after the fall of communism there was a decline in everything: standard of living, and various measures of mental and bodily health. The local minimum was reached around 2010, the last big recession hit us strongly. Afterwards things started to improve starting from 2010. The whole region was a big winner of the last decade. All neighbouring countries. In effect, fertility rates increased, marriage rates increased, divorces, abortions, suicides went down.
My conjecture is that this trend counters the effects of social media.
Also, I conjecture that the negative effects of social media will eventually show up.
Note that tiktok use started later here, and it is not yet as widespread. But it is happening.
The idea is that the good things affect everybody the same way but social media disproportionately affects young people, especially young girls. This is what all the research in Western countries shows. If this is true, changes in wellbeing should be different between age groups and sexes. Even if the overall trend is up, the improvement should be smaller for those who are negatively affected by social media. But this is not what we are seeing! It's a good question why. We certainly don't lag more than months behind adapting bad habits from the US now so we should have seen the effects by 2021. I have applied from more data from KSH and other sources and I will try to follow up once I have the time.
A little nitpiciking: the post-communist "local minimum" was sometime around 1992-1993, not later. After this time, economic growth was fairly robust until ~2006, but even life expectancy started to climb in 1994 (after quite literally stagnating for 30 years). But it is true that our 2008 crisis started in 2006 and lasted until ~2013.
,, the improvement should be smaller for those who are negatively affected by social media''
OK but where do you see this? Which data shows it? Is it in your post or somewhere else? I am sorry but not all things are clear.
,,We certainly don't lag more than months behind adapting bad habits from the US''
I am not sure about this. Do you have data to back up your claim? I have been watching apps like instagram, tiktok, tinder, whatnot, and my general observation was that we are years behind. Always. Fewer users, later adoption of trends. But this is just my personal impression.
,, the post-communist "local minimum" was sometime around 1992-1993''
It depends on what you look at. I was not precise either. But for example, the fertility ratio was almost constant between 2000 and 2010 and actually reached the lowest point in 2010. The number of new marriages also had a low point around 2010.
,,one of which is that there was so much room for improvement in mental health that other trends dwarfed the negative effect of social media. ''
This is basically what I was saying too.
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It would be interesting to compare the situation to Hungary to neighbouring countries. This takes time and I am not a good person for this. Are you? Do you know people who did comparative studies?
In most things related to wellbeing and happiness, etc, the countries in the region tend to move together, with small differences. For example, patterns in the fertility ratio are very similar. Most post-communist countries in the region had a minimum between 2000 and 2010, and have reached a somewhat better TFR, often between 1.5 and 1.7.
----
Richard Hanania quoted your post and he also claimed that other outliers are Netherlands and South Korea. Both countries are also small, but they are very different from Hungary. So if reasons will be found, they don't lie in the usual dichotomy of conservativism and progressiveness or whatever. But again, it would be great to see a better comparative study. Just naming a few countries as examples is not so enlightening. Having a full list is better.
The absence of group differences is what the interaction effects test. These are nonsignificant so there are none. You can also look at the charts and see how similar the red and blue lines on both sides are - no big change by age group and sex.
Maybe a few months in trend adaptation is an exaggeration but it is true that you can download any app immediately in Hungary and read about when it appears in the US. Unlike for older media tech like VCRs, there is no material limits (money, transportation, compatibility of other devices) to trend adaptation. In any case, social media is definitely widely used in Hungary and worsening mental health trends started in the US at least half a decade ago so any trend we adopted must have taken its toll by 2021. If you are saying that we never quite adapted the same kind of social media use Americans do (even because we use Tinder, Facebook or TikTok in a different way) then I think you are on to something and saying a very similar thing I also thought of and wrote about.
I thought by "local minimum" you meant the economic shock and its direct economic consequences. If we branch out to other metrics, I'm afraid we may be still falling down the well. TFR and marriages rebounded somewhat but we have bad population momentum and global trends are also way down and we won't be bucking them for long. But even suicide has been declining for much longer than 10 years, so I think if you want to ask in which the Hungarian people were in the worst shape since the fall of Communism it still is probably 1992-94.
I also think that other neighboring countries will have similar trends, possibly with reduced variance across countries over time - this is what happened with economic trends. One of the datasets I'm about the get has data about Hungarians living in neighboring countries. Other than this, I probably won't be able to get data from neighboring countries because I don't even really know how to look due to the language barrier.
,,If you are saying that we never quite adapted the same kind of social media use Americans do (even because we use Tinder, Facebook or TikTok in a different way)''
Yes. But I am also saying that I think it will come with time.
A potential cause can be that in these smaller countries you can not have superstars. I am not sure whether this is a reason, but it might contribute. People might look up to celebrities in the US or elsewhere, but local people just can't have as big follower counts. Simply because the country is small. And I think this will have an effect that young girls will not think that ,,much more beatiful'' women live just next door. Therefore, they might get fewer negative feelings, less insecurity. In Hungary there are no tiktok videos with likes in the millions. For these you need to look at content creators in the US. And they are far away, and perhaps girls will get less jealous or worried about themselves.
But this is just an idea.
Other than that, you should also examine similar trends. How many onlyfans models do we have? How many camgirls? Did these trends grow in the last decade? LiveJasmin was started here, and we used to be a country known for porn. But I think this has shifted away. Which also tells you something.
,, if you want to ask in which the Hungarian people were in the worst shape since the fall of Communism it still is probably 1992-94.''
Yes, I can agree with this. In any case, the period from 2010 till today was really good for the countries in this region (us, Czech Rep., Slovakia, Poland, Romania, but also Slovenia).
--
You mentioned the use of twitter as well. That it did not become widespread in Hungary. I agree it did not, but this is irrelevant to the wellbeing of teens. Meanwhile, political polarization is strong in Hungary. It is also irrelevant to the wellbeing of teens, but I just wanted to add it. Twitter does not matter, hungarians are polarized even without the use of twitter.
In Hungary the question doesn't make much sense, the closest thing we have to a racial minority is roma/gypsies, whose minority status is very different from American minorities for a number of reasons. I tried to look at but apparently ethnicity was not reported in the 2013 Hungarostudy and very few people responded to this question in 2006. In 2021, gypsies clearly have worse mental health outcomes than non-gypsies, but the long-term trend we are the most interested in cannot be identified using this data.
Hi, I would be very interested in discussing this. I am from Hungary, I have a good knowledge of many trends here.
My first comment is that the whole history of the last three decades was completely different here, and in all neighbouring nations. Indeed after the fall of communism there was a decline in everything: standard of living, and various measures of mental and bodily health. The local minimum was reached around 2010, the last big recession hit us strongly. Afterwards things started to improve starting from 2010. The whole region was a big winner of the last decade. All neighbouring countries. In effect, fertility rates increased, marriage rates increased, divorces, abortions, suicides went down.
My conjecture is that this trend counters the effects of social media.
Also, I conjecture that the negative effects of social media will eventually show up.
Note that tiktok use started later here, and it is not yet as widespread. But it is happening.
The idea is that the good things affect everybody the same way but social media disproportionately affects young people, especially young girls. This is what all the research in Western countries shows. If this is true, changes in wellbeing should be different between age groups and sexes. Even if the overall trend is up, the improvement should be smaller for those who are negatively affected by social media. But this is not what we are seeing! It's a good question why. We certainly don't lag more than months behind adapting bad habits from the US now so we should have seen the effects by 2021. I have applied from more data from KSH and other sources and I will try to follow up once I have the time.
A little nitpiciking: the post-communist "local minimum" was sometime around 1992-1993, not later. After this time, economic growth was fairly robust until ~2006, but even life expectancy started to climb in 1994 (after quite literally stagnating for 30 years). But it is true that our 2008 crisis started in 2006 and lasted until ~2013.
Thanks!
,, the improvement should be smaller for those who are negatively affected by social media''
OK but where do you see this? Which data shows it? Is it in your post or somewhere else? I am sorry but not all things are clear.
,,We certainly don't lag more than months behind adapting bad habits from the US''
I am not sure about this. Do you have data to back up your claim? I have been watching apps like instagram, tiktok, tinder, whatnot, and my general observation was that we are years behind. Always. Fewer users, later adoption of trends. But this is just my personal impression.
,, the post-communist "local minimum" was sometime around 1992-1993''
It depends on what you look at. I was not precise either. But for example, the fertility ratio was almost constant between 2000 and 2010 and actually reached the lowest point in 2010. The number of new marriages also had a low point around 2010.
https://pcdn.hu/articles/images-md/v/a/r/varandossag-hazassag-480574.jpg
---
In your post you say:
,,one of which is that there was so much room for improvement in mental health that other trends dwarfed the negative effect of social media. ''
This is basically what I was saying too.
---
It would be interesting to compare the situation to Hungary to neighbouring countries. This takes time and I am not a good person for this. Are you? Do you know people who did comparative studies?
In most things related to wellbeing and happiness, etc, the countries in the region tend to move together, with small differences. For example, patterns in the fertility ratio are very similar. Most post-communist countries in the region had a minimum between 2000 and 2010, and have reached a somewhat better TFR, often between 1.5 and 1.7.
----
Richard Hanania quoted your post and he also claimed that other outliers are Netherlands and South Korea. Both countries are also small, but they are very different from Hungary. So if reasons will be found, they don't lie in the usual dichotomy of conservativism and progressiveness or whatever. But again, it would be great to see a better comparative study. Just naming a few countries as examples is not so enlightening. Having a full list is better.
The absence of group differences is what the interaction effects test. These are nonsignificant so there are none. You can also look at the charts and see how similar the red and blue lines on both sides are - no big change by age group and sex.
Maybe a few months in trend adaptation is an exaggeration but it is true that you can download any app immediately in Hungary and read about when it appears in the US. Unlike for older media tech like VCRs, there is no material limits (money, transportation, compatibility of other devices) to trend adaptation. In any case, social media is definitely widely used in Hungary and worsening mental health trends started in the US at least half a decade ago so any trend we adopted must have taken its toll by 2021. If you are saying that we never quite adapted the same kind of social media use Americans do (even because we use Tinder, Facebook or TikTok in a different way) then I think you are on to something and saying a very similar thing I also thought of and wrote about.
I thought by "local minimum" you meant the economic shock and its direct economic consequences. If we branch out to other metrics, I'm afraid we may be still falling down the well. TFR and marriages rebounded somewhat but we have bad population momentum and global trends are also way down and we won't be bucking them for long. But even suicide has been declining for much longer than 10 years, so I think if you want to ask in which the Hungarian people were in the worst shape since the fall of Communism it still is probably 1992-94.
I also think that other neighboring countries will have similar trends, possibly with reduced variance across countries over time - this is what happened with economic trends. One of the datasets I'm about the get has data about Hungarians living in neighboring countries. Other than this, I probably won't be able to get data from neighboring countries because I don't even really know how to look due to the language barrier.
,,If you are saying that we never quite adapted the same kind of social media use Americans do (even because we use Tinder, Facebook or TikTok in a different way)''
Yes. But I am also saying that I think it will come with time.
A potential cause can be that in these smaller countries you can not have superstars. I am not sure whether this is a reason, but it might contribute. People might look up to celebrities in the US or elsewhere, but local people just can't have as big follower counts. Simply because the country is small. And I think this will have an effect that young girls will not think that ,,much more beatiful'' women live just next door. Therefore, they might get fewer negative feelings, less insecurity. In Hungary there are no tiktok videos with likes in the millions. For these you need to look at content creators in the US. And they are far away, and perhaps girls will get less jealous or worried about themselves.
But this is just an idea.
Other than that, you should also examine similar trends. How many onlyfans models do we have? How many camgirls? Did these trends grow in the last decade? LiveJasmin was started here, and we used to be a country known for porn. But I think this has shifted away. Which also tells you something.
,, if you want to ask in which the Hungarian people were in the worst shape since the fall of Communism it still is probably 1992-94.''
Yes, I can agree with this. In any case, the period from 2010 till today was really good for the countries in this region (us, Czech Rep., Slovakia, Poland, Romania, but also Slovenia).
--
You mentioned the use of twitter as well. That it did not become widespread in Hungary. I agree it did not, but this is irrelevant to the wellbeing of teens. Meanwhile, political polarization is strong in Hungary. It is also irrelevant to the wellbeing of teens, but I just wanted to add it. Twitter does not matter, hungarians are polarized even without the use of twitter.
I wonder what the data look like if you stratify by race & ethnicity.
In US or Hungarian data? US trends need a closer look. Some studies find that the effect is strongest for White girls, but other data sources clearly show this for others as well, like here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uZOW2dC-NjnPsyohy9z8NguldL05HcpIDpYZXbj5HhY/edit#gid=0
In Hungary the question doesn't make much sense, the closest thing we have to a racial minority is roma/gypsies, whose minority status is very different from American minorities for a number of reasons. I tried to look at but apparently ethnicity was not reported in the 2013 Hungarostudy and very few people responded to this question in 2006. In 2021, gypsies clearly have worse mental health outcomes than non-gypsies, but the long-term trend we are the most interested in cannot be identified using this data.
Thanks! I'd meant to suggest it would be interesting to compare Hungarian-Americans to Hungarians in Hungary, but such may not be possible.