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history and background of the morality index history and background of the morality index c copyright 2002 by carl drews last update march 15 2004 contents beginnings events personal return to morality index beginnings in the late 1990s i would hear political and religious commentators decrying the great decline in american morality in their view the united states had dropped to very low levels of moral behavior never before seen in our history at the time president bill clinton was immersed in a sex scandal involving a white house intern named monica lewinsky president clinton was eventually impeached by congress but acquitted by the senate i think the scandal influenced the views of the pundits greatly the great decline in american morality viewpoint puzzled me because i knew that the crime rate was way down in this country there were several encouraging signs too a drop in the abortion rate efforts to clean up the environment students organizing prayer meetings and an upsurge in attendance at some christian churches statistically we americans were safer than we d ever been in our history the world was pretty much at peace why all the cynical and depressing views on morality i would try to point out the good signs but usually the response would be to point to a number of recent news items robberies murders abductions scandals and so on obviously those things are terrible if they happen to you but they are news because they are unusual they don t necessarily reflect the overall morality of this country at large i call this the throw down the newspaper methodology one reads a few depressing stories in the morning paper throws down the newspaper in disgust and mutters this country is in sad shape as far as i could tell the great moral decline viewpoint seemed to suggest that the united states had reached its moral peak sometime during the 1950s this was the era of ward and june cleaver when dad drove off to work at his good job while mom stayed home and did the housework wearing her pearl necklace from that high point there has been a steady and continuous decline in morality perhaps president ronald reagan arrested the decline somewhat during his years in office but the decline resumed during the 1990s putting this viewpoint quantitatively we obtain the morality graph below i am not making up this attitude i first heard it expressed in 1965 in the protest song eve of destruction by barry mcguire and p f sloan during the years after the song there was a lot of domestic unrest and a six day war in the mideast but 37 years later it s obvious that barry mcguire was wrong we are not now destroyed more recently there was a news story on cnn com in october 2002 describing alabama supreme court chief justice roy moore s defense of a ten commandments monument that he had installed in the state judicial building the following article is from october 17 http www cnn com 2002 law 10 17 ten commandments ap index html the cnn article states moore spent more than three hours on the stand quoting from the bible the declaration of independence george washington and james madison the conservative christian took aim at the u s supreme court s decision to ban prayer in schools as one of the federal rulings he said contributed to moral deterioration in america over the past 40 or 50 years i agreed that the united states had reached its moral peak in the 1950s my viewpoint began in the 1920s the roaring twenties of excess and prohibition violations as i saw it this country was not behaving very well during that time during the 1930s the great depression dominated the american culture i have been struck by the correlation during the 1990s between good economic times and a low crime rate and i reasoned that the flip side of that same correlation existed back then not that my parents generation during the depression was so immoral but times were tough morality took a sharp turn upward during world war ii don t you know there s a war on americans came together to defeat the axis powers and restore freedom to the world the moral surge of world war ii continued during the 1950s as victorious soldiers came home married their grateful sweehearts and started to take care of all their children the 1960s saw a dramatic plunge in morality to the lowest levels ever in my view the 1960s were characterized by assassinations unrest war protests and various hippie movements this moral drop reached its nadir in the early 1970s with the watergate scandal that eventually led president richard nixon to resign president jimmy carter began the moral recovery and president ronald reagan continued to encourage it during the 1980s during the 1990s this country saw good economic times and a steady drop in the crime rate as i write this in october 2002 the economy has taken a downward turn sure enough the latest figures indicate that the crime rate has turned upwards again this is my viewpoint in october 2002 i have read the news since high school and i m familiar with the social events of the twentieth century but i have not yet collected a single datum specifically for the morality index the graph below records my non quantitative view of american morality before beginning this project it captures my bias and pre conceived notions i was born in 1960 does it show we ll see what happens when the data starts coming in i will be miffed if the political commentators are right and i m wrong but i will accept it of course i will be gratified if my pre drawn graph looks pretty much like the actual graph i will be most disappointed if the morality index comes out to be a random walk a graph drifting aimlessly along with no correlation to real events that we can see i will be thrilled if the morality index goes up and down at notable periods in history because that result will mean that the morality index has some predictive value some usefulness and some meaning the study of morals is called moralogy that makes me a moralogist events sometime in the spring of 2002 i got the idea to create a numerical index to measure morality my inspiration was the consumer price index which is a composite measure of the cost of weekly groceries and other necessary items for the average household could i do something similar with morality i settled on the ten commandments as the moral code that would be the basis of the index i also got the idea to represent the adherence to each commandment with a positive and negative component we want to penalize the index when people do bad things but we also want to credit the index when they do something good that s fair on june 24 2002 i registered the domain name moralityindex com during that summer i was working on a few other web projects in october 2002 i began work in earnest on the morality index as i begin this project the task ahead seems daunting how can i possibly measure the morality of a nation of 281 million people at times like these i think back to the throw down the newspaper methodology and i know i can at least do better than that if i merely post the united states crime rate i will do better than that so i forge ahead i haven t the foggiest idea how i m going to measure the second commandment about taking the lord s name in vain there is no governmental department that keeps track of how often american citizens curse and swear but i do have a pretty good idea how i m going to measure killing and stealing as well as the positive components of those commandments i will be gathering collected statistics not collecting them myself hopefully i will get some ideas about the harder to measure commandments as i complete the easier ones probably the most difficult problem will be the lack of reliable data i m expecting a lot of hate mail over the morality index people won t like it if the index doesn t match their opinion of what s happening to this nation atheists won t like it because the ten commandments espouse monotheism various christian denominations won t like it if i don t count certain bad behaviors that they object to these are my expectations maybe i ll be wrong about them february 18 2003 the eighth commandment comes online one down nine to go march 20 2003 the united states under president george w bush launches a military attack on iraq called operation iraqi freedom the goal is to drive saddam hussein from power he has been judged by the united nations to be in violation of his obligation to disarm under the terms that ended the 1991 persian gulf war this event makes me think surely war relates to the morality of a nation somehow either in the overall purpose of that war or in the human details of how it is fought but what are the morality index measures of war shall the negative component be the number of civilians killed shall the positive component be the number of prisoners of war treated decently september 30 2003 the sixth commandment comes online the numbers for the positive component lives saved are about two orders of magnitude larger than the other index values numerically that s a problem because it means that one measure will dominate the entire index hmmm october 15 2003 the seventh commandment comes online that one was pretty easy the numbers here are between the 6th and the 8th commandments in magnitude october 23 2003 my old college physics buddy kevin murphy includes a segment about the morality index in his web log this constitutes the first public mention of the index by a journalist march 14 2004 the first commandment comes online this is the first commandment in the morality index that deals with mankind s relationship with god personal i graduated from stanford university in 1982 with a bachelor s degree in electrical engineering i took a statistics course as part of the engineering breadth requirements i have worked professionally developing software since then about half of my work experience has been in discrete event simulation in my current job i do data mining i process large data sets and try to extract useful patterns from what seems at first glance to be a mass of unorganized information we use bayesian networks to look for trends in the data correlations that might enable us to make a useful prediction i am familiar with sampling methods and correlation tests although i am not a statistician i know how to make use of their work i m a sinful human being just like everyone else on this planet the morality index strikes at my behavior like it strikes at anyone else s i ve done things in my life that i m not proud of as a christian i believe that god offers us forgiveness and redemption if i didn t believe that i couldn t do this project my family and i are members of an anglican church this project originally got started when a software developer got ticked off at political and religious commentators it s not a very noble beginning is it and yet i believe in a god who can bring forth good out of what we consider evil see genesis 50 20 and acts 2 22 24 if i do my job here and do it well i believe god will use it to turn people s hearts toward him this is the same god who used a terrible event the crucifixion of his son jesus to free all mankind from sin and death that s why we call the day on which this happened good friday praise god this page accessed times since december 15 2002 return to morality index