Technological development. There's an alternate theory that the rate of technological change requires vastly more regulation over a much wider range of function

Technological development. There's an alternate theory that the rate of technological change requires vastly more regulation over a much wider range of functions, meanwhile the population has vastly increased diluting the level of control that any individual has. That combination of requiring more input while diluting individual input causes apathy. As an illustrative example, there are ~10x more words in the tax code and regulations today (~10 million) than there were in 1950 (~1 million) and about double the population. As a citizen today, I have to do ~10x as much work to understand the tax code and I have about half as much influence over it (assuming that complexity scales linearly with word count, which I somewhat doubt). Go back to 1900 and there was about 1/4 the people and the tax code was ~0.5% the length it is today. I'm not surprised that more people are apathetic when it takes an order of magnitude more effort to get half the influence.