I agree, exposure to lead, particularly from gasoline, was a huge factor in violent crime.
It probably also explains the "weird spike" in violence from the 60's to the 80's mentioned at the end of the article, as more and more people started driving and cities converted to car-centric.
The phrasing makes it seems the scientists dismiss unleaded fuel for "possibly had some effect" while their phone theory accounts for "19 to 29 percent". I got good feelings from the theory that unleaded fuel prevented brain damage and reversed climb of violence and Thomas Midgley, credited with both leaded fuel and CFC crisises was strangled by one of his inventions before he could harm Earth a third time.
The whole world went from leaded to unleaded fuel around the same time. During that time in Poland, where I live, crime, if anything, went up. Someone should do a study across all countries where the data is obtainable to confirm/refute the lead hypothesis.
You absorb the lead when you are a child. It's biggest effect is in young adult years. I'd expect at least a 10 year delay from "reduction of atmospheric lead" to "reduced crime rates".
This is an interesting freakonomic style perspective.
It makes the 1984 Lifeline (more commonly yet erroneously known as ObamaPhones) project to get phones to impoverished people have larger network effects.
It also points to the faults of the 'War on Drugs', as very little of this territory would be needed without black markets.
So much drug and gang related crime can be pinned on the conceptual failure of the “war on drugs”. But it succeeded where it was supposed to: incarcerating millions of black and brown people, and maintaining white supremacy.
For a brief history of the racial motives behind the war on drugs, check out this episode of On The Media:
So weird when people say the war on drugs was about racial superiority. Sure some people promoting it were racists, but a lot of voices in drug ridden communities demanded action against the addicts and criminals. Shockingly enough (to those not paying attention), the communities with the largest drug usage suffered the most from drug related crime.
There were multiple potential solutions to drug use/crime. The chosen solution was the one that took away the freedom of millions of POC without actually solving the problem. And when it failed, they just doubled down even harder, because of course it didn't actually fail.
I don’t believe there are multiple potential solutions that anyone in the 70’s believed worked better than throwing criminals in jail. To this day it is a primary possibility for why crime receded so quickly in the 90’s.
Tell that to the millions of (mostly black and brown) people whose lives were ruined due to possession or sale of small amounts of cannabis. I’m sure as states legalize cannabis we’ll see a spike in crime now?
Even if we agree that tough-on-crime works (I do not agree, but say I did), the way the war on drugs applied tough on crime was predominately on people of color. If you were white and sold weed you were MUCH less likely to go to jail than if you were black or latino. We could have locked up all those white weed dealers and driven the crime rate down even lower. So at very very very best the war on drugs was the right policy applied in a racist way. At very best.
I don't have a strong opinion on whether cell phones or abortion or anything else caused the collapse in crime, but do feel like the theories you'll read about the most (assuming you're not an academic in the social sciences) are the ones that make for the most interesting headlines.
In reality, it is probably a hugely complicated blending of all these different effects that is almost impossible to tease out root causes for. Complex systems are complex.
The drop is likely related to the precipitous technological change at the time though.
The Internet, wireless communication, video games, cheap cable TV. Even Internet porn.
I don't really see cellphones as being the defining factor here. They were relatively rare during the 90s. Even by the early 00s, only rich folks owned them.
You're mixing up abortion and contraception, timelines, and omitting the fairly important fact that eugenics was a pretty mainstream idea in the 1920s.
> Sanger opposed abortion. She believed it to be a barbaric practice. In her own words, “[a]lthough abortion may be resorted to in order to save the life of the mother, the practice of it merely for limitation of offspring is dangerous and vicious.” Her views are, ironically, in keeping with the views of many of the anti-choicers who malign and distort her legacy.
> In fact, Planned Parenthood did not even begin performing abortions until after 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade legalized the practice. Margaret Sanger had been dead for four years by then.
Thank you for the correction, you are right. I wonder what is special about abortion where this purposed effect can be observed and not simply with contraception.
Abortion legalization has a concrete start date in the US (and a number of other countries), and it's during a time where we were collecting plenty of statistics to measure correlations with other things.
It is difficult to interpret her words in a generous fashion, without seeing her support for abortion of the "unfit":
> Knowledge of birth control is essentially moral. Its general, though prudent, practice must lead to a higher individuality and ultimately to a cleaner race.
> Birth control is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defective.
How other than abortion could she envision "... preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defective."? Perhaps we could assume she means, by hiring clairvoyants and those who can see the future, and then forcing 100% effective birth control or sterilization on the the unwashed masses not consistent with her "cleaner race" qualifications?
Attempting to white-wash Sanger's stances to be against abortion is disingenuous at best.
It's not so much "these attitudes are fine" as it's "these attitudes were the norm in the 1920s". Complaining about Sanger's beliefs on eugenics is a bit like complaining about Washington's on black people - abhorrent today, but hardly surprising given the time.
As with Washington, trying to malign today's Planned Parenthood via normal-at-the-time opinions of its founder is dishonest and misleading.
edit: Regarding clairvoyants, I'm not clear on your argument. Any determination of "defectives" that works early enough to use abortion against it is equally usable prior to pregnancy, permitting contraception. Eugenicists certainly advocated for sterilization - Georgia still has laws on the books permitting it, and adjusted them in the 1980s to pass SCOTUS muster.
It wasn't my intent to claim the this is the mission of planned parenthood currently, just that a thought leader at the time purposed a policy that is abhorrent today and yet possibly effective.
I'll have to do more research. The repercussions here are staggering if you take the time to consider them.
Hey, thanks a lot for this article. I just encountered the "We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population" quote yesterday, and when I corrected it using the context of the paragraph before it, people said "Yeah, but it's consistent with her views". This showed that it decidedly was not.
Unpopular opinion but eugenics definitely has the potential to create a "better" population. The problem is its highly highly unethical in any deliberate implementation and is typically orchestrated by tyrannical dictators who's ego and ideologies supersede the science needed to make it effective. I mean look at the nazis - they had some stupid ass theories that allowed them to claim they were a superior race.
But yeah if this weren't the case then you'd have to explain away genetic engineering of livestock and crops over the millenia. That said - no one should be orchestrating that shit.
I think every definition of better is bound to be ego and ideology driven or extremely modest (exactly like their parents except not a Tay Sachs carrier or similar).
Also tyrannical in the long term, I believe future generations have a right to a genome that was made of only their ancestors (and retroviruses I guess). Maybe in 100 years it will be different but not yet.
A further point to this- I don't believe our science is advanced enough to define better even in a perfect world where subjective considerations are somehow discarded.
I'm thinking of stuff like people prone to sickle cell anemia having increased malarial resistance.
I believe even an otherworldly morally correct implementation of eugenics would not account for unknown quirks like this and be counter productive in the long term.
No there's plenty of universally good attributes. Not being prone to cancer, death and aging for one. You're trying to shoe horn a complex topic because you're uncomfortable with it. Theres more to it than waffling around idiocy in an attempt to shut down discourse on the topic.
"Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of." - Justice Ginsburg (July 7, 2009)
If the Ford or Gates Foundation dump hundreds of millions into contraceptive/abortion services in Africa the direct effect is culling the world of black babies. Wrapping it in a veneer of do-goodery is what imperialists have always been doing. Eugenics is still VERY much alive-- I run into sophisticated urbane people all the time who openly believe child-bearing should be restricted to people who pass IQ or means testing.
Um, no. The direct effect is on the lives of those who would otherwise have to birth and support those babies as they grow into children and adolescents. Using words like "culling" and "veneer of do-goodery" leads the discussion in the direction you want it to go.
Nope. Video games IMO. Cheap awesome entertainment for basically everyone. Everyone can afford consoles and escape reality. Why act out aggression in real life and risk prison when video games let you do all that and more?
90s dialup Internet was not in every house yet. Microsoft succeeded in getting PCs in homes but free was not the name of the game with pay per minute online access. Things didn’t really take off until the 00s with broadband access.
Not true. Pay per minute Internet access did not last that long, by the mid 90s it wasn't even a thing. Image porn on the Internet was a big deal in the 90s, especially in the second half of the decade. Plenty of people had dial up, hence the massive popularity of ICQ and later AIM. And of course email, online gaming, and the dotcom bubble...
And I never said Internet porn. While not free, porn was still cheap and easy to get on cable or satellite, or at video rental stores.
I doubt it was just porn though. I believe that simply getting teenagers / young adults inside for long periods of time (and not just for the purpose of abusing drugs / alcohol) is a big victory (for crime stats, not society in general).
Haven't the cost of illegal drugs been falling in real terms since the 1970s. Would be interesting to look into what the cost of drugs does to crime rates.
Crime is primarily carried out by young men 16-25. They now have a very interesting activity that many of them engage in. There is far less 'hanging around' with dodgy mates on streets with little to do.
The crime decline also didn't occur just in the US but all across the developed world which suggests that Roe vs Wade had less impact than Levitt and other suggest.
By the 1990s consoles had become cheap enough that many more people could afford them.
That and as someone else has said, cheap and available porn. Cheap porn was available by the 1990s in magazines and videos. Online it's now much cheaper and prevalent, but it's been there for quite a while.
Any correlation like this - as implicitly stated in the article - should be taken with a massive pinch of salt. They're only given any credence because they "make sense" - i.e. fit preconceived notions of how the world works, mixed with a magic PR-friendly sprinkling of supposedly counter-intuition - rather than anything meaningful in the stats.
For more, see http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations where you will find that, for example, the number of people who drowned by falling into a pool correlates with the number of films that Nicholas Cage appeared in that year.
Yup, through the 90's you can likely find all sorts of factors that correlate pretty well just because they were on the rise too. The question really is how to pick out causation given spurious correlations, noise, and multiple causal factors.
But the article does enumerate flaws wit the cellphone-violent crime hypothesis:
The University of Leeds criminologist Graham Farrell, who is closely associated with the hypothesis that better security technology is the primary cause of the crime decline, also took issue with some of the paper’s data analysis. “At first glance, it seems to be that antenna [density] increased mostly after homicide already declined,” he wrote to me in an email.
The data that the economists presented don’t match the chronology of the decline of homicides, especially considering that their proxy variable—how many antennas were up—would almost certainly precede cellphone usage by some period of time. The timing, he said, is “not even close.”
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but no one said it did.
> their proxy variable—how many antennas were up—would almost certainly precede cellphone usage by some period of time.
I find this assumption VERY suspect.
Cell tower density is going to increase in the most profitable areas first--and those are not necessarily going to be correlated with high-crime areas (in fact--probably anti-correlated).
Cell phones are useful even if just a small number of drug dealers have them (remember when drug dealers used to have pagers?). You would probably have to correlate cell phones with pagers in some way in order to make a valid correlation.
It's the title, combined with the fact that they've even given the idea air time, which made me write that comment. My argument is essentially that this article shouldn't have been written.
I hope this is correct. If it's correct, then this is something very powerful! It would mean that disintermediation can reduce violence! In retrospect, this seems obvious. There was a recent study of house cats in a southern English town, where the cats were tracked with GPS collars, and some were given camera collars. (There was also a documentary on the study on streaming services.) One thing they saw, was that cats used chemical and auditory signalling, as well as physical encounters, to negotiate schedules that prevented them from encountering each other.
I wonder if it would be possible to create an app where people could (with consent) register people they really don't like. The exact locations and identities wouldn't be displayed, but venues might glow red as if they're radioactive. Couples who have broken up might want to use this, for example. It would be like an anti-Foursquare. (Just spitballing a silly idea.)
Another mystery is why the police have not used the cellphone data to take out every dealer. They would only have to do so a city at a time to put the fear into everyone nationwide. The text messages are always incriminating only if you pretend to be naive and a stickler for evidence (wanting to see the drugs) can the nature of the messages be denied.
America is different, but in the pre-cellphone UK there were pubs to meet dealers in. After a beer and a walk to the car the transaction could be made. A fully legit landline call could be made to arrange meeting up for a beer, no code words needed. With cell phones and messaging there is invariably some discussion on quantity required, hence evidence one would think would be good for court.
Coupled with this change there has been woeful cutbacks to policing in the UK so there are no resources for clearing drugs out of a community. It sort of suits the government to have people stoned rather than demanding social change, people with drugs or related paraphernalia are not wanting to get in trouble with the authorities.
What are you on about? You can totally text someone to "come over and play some Xbox" or some other generic term just as much as they can say "come grab a pint" over a landline.
Opening words: I'm a dreadfully inferior being, and so are you, dear reader, when stood next to the genetically engineered humans of the future.
That said. Strap yourselves in for some crazy talk...
I think we could probably safely organize a Ship Of Theseus scenario, to migrate humanity into a future where the gene pool gets better and better, with each successive generation of children, so long as two things hold
true:
1. We don't solve for immortality in a way that forces us twentieth century descendants to burden the genetically engineered betters.
2. A system of machines of loving grace watch over the lot of us, to see to it that we all live in a yellow submarine. That is, we strike a chord that rings in a stable, reasonable world peace of sorts.
Long shots, but I think it could be done. The first part takes shape whether we achieve ultra longevity or not.
Genetic super people are going to show up, and in a hundred years there will be a lot of them. They be smart. They won't be interested in any kind of stifling hang ups we insist on carrying forward into the future. That said, I surmise they'll be mostly gracious and reasonable, even if a bit inflexible yet fair. This is usually symptomatic of intelligent people with met needs. So they'll probably solve a lot of problems for themselves, not get in the way, and excel in life, no matter what's fair.
With ultra longevity in the picture, we'll look stupid next to geniuses, but they'll have to live with us like insufferable racist grandparents rendered mostly harmless by the frailty of our lesser bodies built upon natural genes and yesteryear's diet and lifestyle. Mostly. We probably won't be much of a threat, face to face, on the street.
That said, power and influence of large mobs is still relevant, and nuclear weapons and other spectres of 20th century global conflict will still pose credible threats.
So, the machines. How can the machines change things? Well, if we manage to automate most drudgery, holding down a day job would be superfluous. Meanwhile, our internet arts and crafts and musical stylings will be like kindergarten scribbles hung up on the refridgerator. For the most part they already are, but it should become possible to lead loves of stimulating leisure, far and wide, so long as no one freaks out about it with economic holy wars of reputation and status. Ample distribution in a world of mostly efficient recycling is close enough to taste, if we automate all the things, and no one has to lift a finger. There really hasn't been a prticularly novel invention one store shelves that wasn't a miniaturized elite version of something that existed in 1970. So food and possessions are kind of a solved problem, damn near.
So, whether we're really immortal, whether we enjoy longevity or not, us lesser being should be capable of dying off peacefully by attrition. With enough to go around, patience will probably hold up, and over time, our genetically alter descendents will evolve at the geological light speed of the birth rate, and in less than another thousand years, maybe we'll still be around, and maybe not, but I think it's possible for everyone to squeeze into this elevator, and get off at whichever floor they want, if need be.
I don't feel much panic in the evolutionary sense. Just so long as the machines are kept at bay.
I have for a long time believe that the entertainment value provided by the internet and connected devices should not be overlooked when considering factors that contributed to this decline in crime during this period. Just having something to entertain people can help keep them out of trouble.
Bread and circus of the modern era. Not that surprising. Most criminality is/was done due to opportunity[0] after all, and when you're busy consuming entertainment...
>The data that the economists presented don’t match the chronology of the decline of homicides, especially considering that their proxy variable—how many antennas were up—would almost certainly precede cellphone usage by some period of time. The timing, he said, is “not even close.”
So the response to the post title is "No, not really"?
A rise in cell phones coupled with a decrease in cash (more and more CC usage) making robbery less profitable while penalties stayed the same makes intuitive sense.
Ok, not the first time I see the land-less business theory. Half surprising, half sad (that people still ~need to make money this way), half happy since it makes most lives better I suppose.
82 comments
[ 86.4 ms ] story [ 2054 ms ] threadIt probably also explains the "weird spike" in violence from the 60's to the 80's mentioned at the end of the article, as more and more people started driving and cities converted to car-centric.
It makes the 1984 Lifeline (more commonly yet erroneously known as ObamaPhones) project to get phones to impoverished people have larger network effects.
It also points to the faults of the 'War on Drugs', as very little of this territory would be needed without black markets.
For a brief history of the racial motives behind the war on drugs, check out this episode of On The Media:
https://www.wbez.org/shows/on-the-media/this-american-war-on...
The bit about Billie Holiday is particularly heartbreaking and infuriating.
Even if we agree that tough-on-crime works (I do not agree, but say I did), the way the war on drugs applied tough on crime was predominately on people of color. If you were white and sold weed you were MUCH less likely to go to jail than if you were black or latino. We could have locked up all those white weed dealers and driven the crime rate down even lower. So at very very very best the war on drugs was the right policy applied in a racist way. At very best.
Direct MP3:
https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/otm/...
https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/on-the-media-2017-08-25
I don't have a strong opinion on whether cell phones or abortion or anything else caused the collapse in crime, but do feel like the theories you'll read about the most (assuming you're not an academic in the social sciences) are the ones that make for the most interesting headlines.
The Internet, wireless communication, video games, cheap cable TV. Even Internet porn.
I don't really see cellphones as being the defining factor here. They were relatively rare during the 90s. Even by the early 00s, only rich folks owned them.
https://rewire.news/article/2015/08/20/false-narratives-marg...
> Sanger opposed abortion. She believed it to be a barbaric practice. In her own words, “[a]lthough abortion may be resorted to in order to save the life of the mother, the practice of it merely for limitation of offspring is dangerous and vicious.” Her views are, ironically, in keeping with the views of many of the anti-choicers who malign and distort her legacy.
> In fact, Planned Parenthood did not even begin performing abortions until after 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade legalized the practice. Margaret Sanger had been dead for four years by then.
Contraception's harder to pin a start date on.
> Knowledge of birth control is essentially moral. Its general, though prudent, practice must lead to a higher individuality and ultimately to a cleaner race.
> Birth control is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defective.
How other than abortion could she envision "... preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defective."? Perhaps we could assume she means, by hiring clairvoyants and those who can see the future, and then forcing 100% effective birth control or sterilization on the the unwashed masses not consistent with her "cleaner race" qualifications?
Attempting to white-wash Sanger's stances to be against abortion is disingenuous at best.
As with Washington, trying to malign today's Planned Parenthood via normal-at-the-time opinions of its founder is dishonest and misleading.
edit: Regarding clairvoyants, I'm not clear on your argument. Any determination of "defectives" that works early enough to use abortion against it is equally usable prior to pregnancy, permitting contraception. Eugenicists certainly advocated for sterilization - Georgia still has laws on the books permitting it, and adjusted them in the 1980s to pass SCOTUS muster.
I'll have to do more research. The repercussions here are staggering if you take the time to consider them.
But yeah if this weren't the case then you'd have to explain away genetic engineering of livestock and crops over the millenia. That said - no one should be orchestrating that shit.
Also tyrannical in the long term, I believe future generations have a right to a genome that was made of only their ancestors (and retroviruses I guess). Maybe in 100 years it will be different but not yet.
I'm thinking of stuff like people prone to sickle cell anemia having increased malarial resistance.
I believe even an otherworldly morally correct implementation of eugenics would not account for unknown quirks like this and be counter productive in the long term.
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/magazine/12ginsburg-t.htm...
Are people only responding to headlines, anymore?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–crime_hypothesis
And I never said Internet porn. While not free, porn was still cheap and easy to get on cable or satellite, or at video rental stores.
I doubt it was just porn though. I believe that simply getting teenagers / young adults inside for long periods of time (and not just for the purpose of abusing drugs / alcohol) is a big victory (for crime stats, not society in general).
Also note: Prison provides free housing, free meals, free gym, and free healthcare.
Crime is primarily carried out by young men 16-25. They now have a very interesting activity that many of them engage in. There is far less 'hanging around' with dodgy mates on streets with little to do.
The crime decline also didn't occur just in the US but all across the developed world which suggests that Roe vs Wade had less impact than Levitt and other suggest.
By the 1990s consoles had become cheap enough that many more people could afford them.
That and as someone else has said, cheap and available porn. Cheap porn was available by the 1990s in magazines and videos. Online it's now much cheaper and prevalent, but it's been there for quite a while.
I think there were articles in the year following, at least in scandinavia, about it.
For more, see http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations where you will find that, for example, the number of people who drowned by falling into a pool correlates with the number of films that Nicholas Cage appeared in that year.
Exhibit A - Murders by sharp object correlates with visitors to SeaWorld - http://tylervigen.com/view_correlation?id=41291
The University of Leeds criminologist Graham Farrell, who is closely associated with the hypothesis that better security technology is the primary cause of the crime decline, also took issue with some of the paper’s data analysis. “At first glance, it seems to be that antenna [density] increased mostly after homicide already declined,” he wrote to me in an email.
The data that the economists presented don’t match the chronology of the decline of homicides, especially considering that their proxy variable—how many antennas were up—would almost certainly precede cellphone usage by some period of time. The timing, he said, is “not even close.”
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but no one said it did.
I find this assumption VERY suspect.
Cell tower density is going to increase in the most profitable areas first--and those are not necessarily going to be correlated with high-crime areas (in fact--probably anti-correlated).
Cell phones are useful even if just a small number of drug dealers have them (remember when drug dealers used to have pagers?). You would probably have to correlate cell phones with pagers in some way in order to make a valid correlation.
I wonder if it would be possible to create an app where people could (with consent) register people they really don't like. The exact locations and identities wouldn't be displayed, but venues might glow red as if they're radioactive. Couples who have broken up might want to use this, for example. It would be like an anti-Foursquare. (Just spitballing a silly idea.)
America is different, but in the pre-cellphone UK there were pubs to meet dealers in. After a beer and a walk to the car the transaction could be made. A fully legit landline call could be made to arrange meeting up for a beer, no code words needed. With cell phones and messaging there is invariably some discussion on quantity required, hence evidence one would think would be good for court.
Coupled with this change there has been woeful cutbacks to policing in the UK so there are no resources for clearing drugs out of a community. It sort of suits the government to have people stoned rather than demanding social change, people with drugs or related paraphernalia are not wanting to get in trouble with the authorities.
https://www.wired.com/2014/06/silk-road-study/
That said. Strap yourselves in for some crazy talk...
I think we could probably safely organize a Ship Of Theseus scenario, to migrate humanity into a future where the gene pool gets better and better, with each successive generation of children, so long as two things hold true:
1. We don't solve for immortality in a way that forces us twentieth century descendants to burden the genetically engineered betters.
2. A system of machines of loving grace watch over the lot of us, to see to it that we all live in a yellow submarine. That is, we strike a chord that rings in a stable, reasonable world peace of sorts.
Long shots, but I think it could be done. The first part takes shape whether we achieve ultra longevity or not.
Genetic super people are going to show up, and in a hundred years there will be a lot of them. They be smart. They won't be interested in any kind of stifling hang ups we insist on carrying forward into the future. That said, I surmise they'll be mostly gracious and reasonable, even if a bit inflexible yet fair. This is usually symptomatic of intelligent people with met needs. So they'll probably solve a lot of problems for themselves, not get in the way, and excel in life, no matter what's fair.
With ultra longevity in the picture, we'll look stupid next to geniuses, but they'll have to live with us like insufferable racist grandparents rendered mostly harmless by the frailty of our lesser bodies built upon natural genes and yesteryear's diet and lifestyle. Mostly. We probably won't be much of a threat, face to face, on the street.
That said, power and influence of large mobs is still relevant, and nuclear weapons and other spectres of 20th century global conflict will still pose credible threats.
So, the machines. How can the machines change things? Well, if we manage to automate most drudgery, holding down a day job would be superfluous. Meanwhile, our internet arts and crafts and musical stylings will be like kindergarten scribbles hung up on the refridgerator. For the most part they already are, but it should become possible to lead loves of stimulating leisure, far and wide, so long as no one freaks out about it with economic holy wars of reputation and status. Ample distribution in a world of mostly efficient recycling is close enough to taste, if we automate all the things, and no one has to lift a finger. There really hasn't been a prticularly novel invention one store shelves that wasn't a miniaturized elite version of something that existed in 1970. So food and possessions are kind of a solved problem, damn near.
So, whether we're really immortal, whether we enjoy longevity or not, us lesser being should be capable of dying off peacefully by attrition. With enough to go around, patience will probably hold up, and over time, our genetically alter descendents will evolve at the geological light speed of the birth rate, and in less than another thousand years, maybe we'll still be around, and maybe not, but I think it's possible for everyone to squeeze into this elevator, and get off at whichever floor they want, if need be.
I don't feel much panic in the evolutionary sense. Just so long as the machines are kept at bay.
[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/2193-7680-1-3
So the response to the post title is "No, not really"?