One factor in that is America is a pretty unequal society, and problems the relatively wealthy [1] face receive disproportionate attention than those primarily confined to the less wealthy. Not saying that's the only factor, but it's definitely a major one.
Ditto with de-industrialization, which a sibling comment mentioned. The relatively wealthy gain disproportionately from it in the short term, and those who are disproportionately hurt by it are less wealthy and typically live in unfashionable areas. Predictably, their problems get relatively less attention than they probably should (esp. since the relatively wealthy have the option of hand-waving those problems away with stuff like "Pareto efficiency," etc.).
[1] I'd count software engineers and similar professionals as "relatively wealthy."
Because I sure don't see opiate abuse or ODs as a problem disproportionately affecting the poor. Sure, it affects a lot of poor people, but it also affects a fair number of the wealthy, quite possibly in numbers greater than their proportion in the population. (It's hard to judge because every celebrity overdose will be widely reported, so availability bias might be affecting my perception.)
Your rephrase lost an important nuance. I said "problems the relatively wealthy face." Bathroom choice is a problem wealth can't really solve or mitigate, so it's one they still face (either directly or through their children or peers).
> but it also affects a fair number of the wealthy, quite possibly in numbers greater than their proportion in the population. (It's hard to judge because every celebrity overdose will be widely reported, so availability bias might be affecting my perception.)
IMO, celebrity drug abuse is kinda a different thing, because celebrities are a special, tiny class that's easy to hold yourself apart from.
Why? That has nothing to do with my point. Even if the US was in fact the most equal society to ever exist, it's indisputable that it still has significant inequality, which was the starting point of my comment.
> it's indisputable that it still has significant inequality
I was trying to understand where you were coming from and giving you the opportunity to change my mind.
As for the issue itself, the wikipedia article has a pretty good overview of the whole thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathroom_bill
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-03-12/shares...
A frank discussion about industrial policy would not inure to the benefit of any established political actor. It's a story of breathtaking incompetence, callousness, greed, and self-deception.
Yes, they are, and in 2016, both political parties faced outsider candidates running surprisingly strong campaigns in their Presidential primaries on explicitly repudiating different aspects of neoliberalism, including deindustrialization.
But one of those candidates was Donald Trump, and it was much more important to point out what a rude, crude bastard he was, 24/7, than to discuss the issues of political economy raised by the outsider populists. The point was to crush them, to avoid anyone in the political sphere questioning deindustrialization and financialization.
Four years later, we know that trying to silence populism while also giving Trump, a populist, 24/7 earned-media coverage did not work. At the time, though, people expected it to work.
For one thing, guesstimating the number of affected people is pretty subjective. A policy can be important to me even though it does not nominally affect me directly. Secondly, this method doesn't even attempt to weigh policies by anything else, like the magnitude of benefits/downsides, budgetary concerns, civil rights implications, etc. For instance, in my view, it's fine for a political issue involving state-sanctioned persecution or bigotry of a very small minority to share political attention with a large public health crisis.
The first example that comes to mind is US armed service veterans. Apparently, the medical care they received from the Veteran's Administration was really terrible, with apocryphal stories of veterans dying while waiting for appointments to see Drs. There were many bad actors in the VA medical service who would have been fired in any other organization but due to VA policy, kept their jobs. Through programs such as VA Choice and VA Accountability[0], the approval rating of the VA jumped to 91%, a record.
In the US, there are 17.4 million veterans, and as you indicated, they all have family and friends who are going to see these improvements in a positive light.
It makes me wonder how many other situations there are like this that we don't hear about.
On the other end, the president can pardon one person at a time. Perhaps that's the least number of people who can be positively affected by one act.
[0] https://www.va.gov/opa/choiceact/documents/choice-act-summar...
That's correlation, not causation. Even if there's a connection to election years, the causality could very well be reversed (e.g. activists increase their efforts to get attention when it matters most). However, I'm inclined to think your observation is just coincidence or misses a critical factor.
But the Washington Post has statistics that clearly show there's no four year cycle to police shootings: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
Just wait until 2024 and they'll pick another case to hype up. Despite the fact that police brutality happens every year and nothing gets done about it. It's all bread and circuses.