DEATH OF EMPATHY IN AMERICA?

There is an interesting piece on today's Boston Sunday Globe on empathy. The piece, by Keith O"Brien, is titled "Empathy Is So Yesterday: Even as they become more connected young people are caring less about others." According to O'Brien, a "study, conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, found that college students today are 40 percent less empathetic than they were in 1979, with the steepest decline coming in the last 10 years." Anyway, the piece suggest that today's college students may be a bit shallow and narcissistic. the piece ends with a quite from W. Keith Campbell, co-author with Jean Twenge of "The Narcissism Epidemic : Living in the Age of Entitlement": 'So if you have a society where a lot of people are narcissistic, the whole thing blows up,' he said. 'It implodes.'

Sounds to me like America in the early twenty-first century.