Things People Believed 25 Years Ago That Ended Up Being Wrong

As the Cold War was ending, philosopher Francis Fukuyama asked in the title of a 1989 National Interest article if it was "The End of History?" He wrote in the essay that the end of the Cold War could also bring the "final form of human government," a nicer democracy. He expanded on the idea in his 1992 book and removed the question mark from the title, calling it The End of History and the Last Man.

The book was enormously influential at the time. As The Atlantic described the argument, "Democracy would win out over all other forms of government," countries would have to "embrace some measure of capitalism" in order to survive, and this would "invariably demand greater legal protection for individual rights."

Spoiler alert: not even close. As The Atlantic says, "It's hard to imagine Fukuyama being more wrong. History isn't over and neither liberalism nor democracy is ascendant ... most disturbingly, the connection between capitalism, democracy, and liberalism upon which Fukuyama's argument depended has itself been broken." So basically, Fukuyama's "End of History" idea was wrong about everything. But it wasn't the end of his career — he still gets quoted as an "expert." Must be nice.

If you were a '90s kid, you likely participated in the D.A.R.E (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program. A friendly cop would lecture your class on the evils of drugs and alcohol, the idea being that such "straight talk" would steer children clear of addiction and other terrible choices. Unfortunately, a cop daring you to resist drugs was about as effective as Mr. Mackey mumbling "drugs are bad, m'kay."

In 1999, the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology published a study bluntly titled "Project DARE: No Effects at 10-Year Follow-Up." Its results? D.A.R.E. kids were no more or less likely to abuse drugs than those who never did the program. What's more, the study linked D.A.R.E. to lowered self-esteem, noting that sixth graders in the program often felt worse about themselves ten years later than those outside the program. As Time explained in 2001, kids don't typically handle hyperbole and fearmongering statements well, and '90s D.A.R.E. was all about that. Kids hear drugs and addiction are everywhere, so they feel worse about themselves and the world around them.

D.A.R.E. is still around, albeit in a much different form that stresses a more evidence-based approach. Whether it works or not remains to be seen, though it would be difficult for it to be worse than the version we got in the '90s.

In 1992, the Food and Drug Administration unveiled a food pyramid to explain to Americans what they should eat. The bottom of the pyramid suggested eating 6-11 servings a day of carbs; "fats and oils" should be "used sparingly." Meats and nuts, meanwhile, should only comprise two or three servings a day. This super-high carb, very low-fat diet was considered the way to good health and losing weight.

One of the biggest figures in pop culture at that time pushing this sort of diet was Susan Powter. She had white-blonde, super-short hair and exaggerated eyebrows, and she was big in the 1990s with her "Stop the Insanity!" weight loss crusade, which emphasized a low-fat diet with lots of carbs."It's not food that makes you fat. It's fat that makes you fat," she insisted. She was wrong — it's a lot of other stuff that makes you fat. Time wrote that her diet "caused a run on processed low-fat food like SnackWells and frozen yogurt. But those treats, it turned out, were chock-full of sugar and a whole mess of calories. Result: you gained weight."

Since then, the FDA has made several revisions to its food recommendations, most recently with MyPlate in 2011. This new stab emphasizes veggies and fruits, suggests reducing your carb/grain intake, and make little mention of avoiding fat. There was also a National Institutes of Health study in 2014 that showed people lost more weight (and body fat) on a low-carb diet than a low-fat one. The idea of filling up on white bread, rice, and cereal — as the original food pyramid had — is completely outdated. So don't stop the insanity — stop the unlimited breadsticks at Olive Garden.

There are a lot of complaints these days about gentrification — the idea of wealthy people renovating and revitalizing forgotten, crime-ridden urban neighborhoods. Ultimately, with more affluent people moving in and rents going up, longtime residents can't afford their own homes. Some of the negative effects of this have been overblown, according to The Washington Post. But 25 years ago, the idea of gentrification was a mere pipe dream. The standard attitude then was that suburban growth, which started after World War II and accelerated in the 1960s and 1970s, would leave the cities bereft forever.

A 1990 report by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress didn't think things would ever change in the next 25 years. A tangible symbol of how bad cities had gotten was Times Square, once the place to be in the city. Then it became a nightmarish dump, filled with urban squalor and porn. In the early 1990s, the idea of fixing it seemed impossible. ”It wasn't so much that it was scary,” David L. Malmuth, a Disney filmmaker, later told the The New York Times. ”It was dead. It was this odd street in the center of the city where there was almost no life.”

The New York Times described Disney's early '90s attempts at redevelopment of Times Square as being "the first tangible sign that the long-awaited redevelopment of a tawdry stretch of Eighth Avenue is more than a pipe dream." The change of Times Square was a symbol that cities weren't dead and that putting money and effort into change could actually have tangible results. It was a microcosm for how cities became hot again.

There was once a time where buying comic books as an investment was a big thing — it was assumed that the value would always go up. The Weekly Standard noted that Action Comics #1, the first comic book with Superman, was worth $400 in 1974. By 1984, the value had shot up to $5,000, and by 1991, it was going for $82,500. That wasn't the only comic book increasing in value. Detective Comics #27, Batman's debut, sold for $55,000 in 1991.

Comic books were becoming a big investment as "stores were popping up all across the country to meet a burgeoning demand." Because of this, "even comics of recent vintage saw giant price gains," where a "comic that sold initially for 60 cents could often fetch a 1,000 percent return on the investment just a few months later." Sadly, this was a bubble that peaked in 1992, collapsing not long thereafter. Greater demand decreased the rarity. In addition, the market became flooded with tons of new comics, plenty of which just sucked.

Ultimately, the "the Golden Age glamour books" from the earlier days of comic books came back a little, the piece notes, but the ones from the '80s and '90s never really did. These days, comic books are considered "loss leaders," with the real money coming from comic movies, TV shows, toys, amusement parks, and all the rest. That mint Age of Apocalypse #1 you've kept in a baggie for 20 years? Good luck fetching even a fiver for it.

Crime was a huge issue in the early '90s, with people being concerned about "superpredators." As The New York Times put it in 2014, the idea of superpredators was "based on a notion that there would be hordes upon hordes of depraved teenagers resorting to unspeakable brutality, not tethered by conscience." There was talk by criminologists like James A. Fox, that a "blood bath of violence" was going to destroy the country. John DiLulio, Jr. was a political scientist who warned then that "the rash of youth crime and violence" was hurting the inner city, and that "other places are also certain to have burgeoning youth-crime problems that will spill over into upscale central-city districts, inner-ring suburbs, and even the rural heartland." He insisted then that "all of the research indicates that Americans are sitting atop a demographic crime bomb. And all of those who are closest to the problem hear the bomb ticking."

So you may be wondering why we're not a 24/7 cesspool of death and crime. Well, as The Times noted, the whole "superpredator" thing was total hokum. Instead, crime dropped rapidly, and America became safer. The superpredator notion was so dispelled, in fact, that Hillary Clinton using that word in a '90s speech was brought up against her during her 2016 presidential campaign.