Uncertainty about the future has always been the same.
Don't listen to those devils.
We have nukes, very worrying demographic trends in the west with massive migrations, and a declining hegemon. We're comfortable but fragile.
What I want to say is that Taleb seems to have a better handle on things than Pinker.
One thing I think this conversation has highlighted is the way we think about risks to us as individuals and risks to us as a species. So whilst in the past, the thing that worried most people was illness, predation, starvation, conflict (and in parts of the world this is happening, but they are the exception) Now our worries are expressed in nuclear war and climate change.
Perhaps in the future those global worries will manifest and it will be the worst time to be a human, but right now it is the safest. Less war, less famine, less disease, more food, better health.
I totally get that this statement flies in the face of what most people experience in their everyday reality - I feel that emotional pain as well - so whilst our physical wellbeing has improved, our ability to manage our own feelings is still difficult.
(I don't want to say bogeyman as it's too dismissive, but I don't want to say pressing issue because they're really not all that pressing in the minds of the average person. Let's just go with "long-term hovering externality")
...to deal with. Society has always been remarkably fragile, and we've stepped really close to outright annihilation a few of times, seemingly saved not by the application of the best humanity has to offer, but by what appears to be happenstance.
What if someone else had been the Russian negotiator during the Cuban missile crisis?
What if a different general that time Russia's radar malfunctioned had thought we were really nuking them? Global annihilation was literally in the hands of this one person's decision!
Hell, what if the 1859 CME event were to happen again? We had some near misses a couple years ago.
There's a difference I think between ignoring a risk and not devoting 100% of our efforts and mindshare to dealing with it.
People are losing their homes and livelihoods to deforestation, islands are being inundated with rising sea levels, fracking is polluting water tables and mass animal extinctions are a thing.
At some point the debt needs to be paid off, or we're probably going to be next.
Looking for a purpose? Give back to the natural world and I'm sure some happiness will come out of it!
God knows she needs our help.
The problem is the population growth makes it hard to implement that.
> https://www.census.gov/popclock/
the world population is currently at 7.35 billion people.
I personally like them, and feel that they're more stabilizing than not: we're less likely to go to war with a nation of whose ethnicities make up some substantial fraction of our populace, and may be treated better in the case of war (look at German-American vs. Japanese-American treatment in WWII). But these are only my views.
You can ask Taleb about his views on Middle Eastern immigration to the West; IIRC he's from Lebanon.
Places like the US and Denmark are incredibly non-corrupt, while places like Russia, Brazil, and Nigeria are highly corrupt. Why some places are corrupt and others aren't is poorly understood magic of some sort. One fairly decent guess is something like "cultural factors" - Danish bureaucrats aren't corrupt because they expect that other non-corrupt Danes would punish them for it.
If there's a clear plan and proven successes on acculturating immigrants, I'm much less worried about opening up borders. Without that, though, we may be risking a highly nebulous yet incredibly important shared resource - the cultural norms that make our communities excellent places to live.
There’s no evidence that immigrants (documented or undocumented) cause any more corruption or crime than native born residents. Indeed, the evidence we have in the USA generally suggests that first and second generation immigrants are less likely to break the law than other residents.
Nativist anti-immigrant rhetoric today in the USA about Muslims or Latin Americans or Chinese is nearly identical in content and structure to anti-immigrant rhetoric about Germans, Irish, Italians, Eastern Europeans, Catholics, Jews, etc. in the past. There’s no reason to believe that undocumented Guatemalans or Syrian refugees immigrating to the US today will be any different than my Irish ancestors were 150 years ago, w/r/t assimilation.
The immigration restrictions are a big confounder here. The US is much more likely to let doctors and engineers immigrate. If these folks then have low crime rate, it could either be because of being an immigrant or because of being a professional. If it's more the latter, that isn't great evidence for letting other kinds of immigrants in.
> immigrants [...] commit less (or at least not more) crime
For the record I'm agnostic on this issue, but it bothers me that a lot of very smart people seem to be very convinced by this particular red herring. Cohesion of the whole can be impaired despite all the parts being of good quality, if they do not fit together very well.
Jim and Deb Fallows have recently been doing a nice bit of traveling around the US writing about this and similar issues.
http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/10/refugees-immigrants...
http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/504341/immigration-in...
- apparently I've committed the sin of having sympathy for the other side, so I must agree with them
- if it's rhetoric then it's also independent invention because I certainly didn't get it anywhere and never meant to imply it; I only expressed a certain possible flaw in a purportedly logical argument, and there are others (eg that higher housing prices specifically cause crime, or that competition for low-skill labor drives down wages at the bottom and causes crime, or...). The point is not one of them but all of them; the flaw is in the structure of the argument
- I'm not utilizing a fear of immigrants in my argument and I originally said that to you, not to a poor person from eastern Colorado, which makes it hard to think I was
* when questioned, you made an about-face from criminological data to sob stories, "how could you awful conservatives hate those cute immigrant faces", which is both annoying because I'm neither conservative nor against immigration, and it torpedoes your rational credibility
You said “Cohesion of the whole can be impaired despite all the parts being of good quality, if they do not fit together very well.”
This sort of vague analogy has been a common rhetorical device used by anti-immigrant populists trying to stir up nativist resentment for 150+ years, without any strong evidence that it’s true. I’m calling the specific sentence out for being usually, in my opinion, toxic nonsense.
* * *
To answer your previous points:
As for the effect of immigration on labor markets during the Gilded Age, I’m not enough of an expert to say. That sounds like a topic which could fill a few academic research careers in labor history and produce several books (or probably has).
On the other hand, the research I’ve seen about low-skill immigration from Latin America in the past few decades has seemed reasonably convincing that such immigration has not had dramatic downward effects on wages for native workers and on average has boosted local wages by strengthening the economy generally, and that downward pressure on wages for unskilled factory work, etc., has a lot more to do with other factors (changes to labor law, global trade, automation, etc.). There’s obviously a lot of debate and controversy about the precise details.
> Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, etc weren't drastically more corrupt than the United States a hundred years ago, were they?
Well, they were all feudal societies with a landed aristocracy ruling by force of arms, with most of the migrants being rural peasant farmers driven off the land (often forcibly) and forced to migrate abroad due to population growth and lack of local employment opportunities. I’m not sure what you count as “corrupt”. In my opinion everything about a feudal society is inherently corrupt.
The situation of peasant farmers fleeing these countries is actually remarkably similar to the situation of migrants from southern Mexico in the 1980s–2000s. If you took my Irish ancestor’s story from the mid-19th century and set it side by side with the story of a rural Mexican peasant migrant from 1995, and changed all the names in both stories, you wouldn’t be able to tell which one was which.
Toxic nonsense is what happens when people misuse the idea of scientific proof to lend credence to their political beliefs. Again, I'm not talking to the kind of people who are swayed by that kind of thing. I'm discussing a flaw in the structure of your argument you refuse to acknowledge.
Look, nobody believes "scientific proof" in relation to the things where it's really important (global warming, vaccination) anymore because it's been dragged through the mud by people who want to wave the banner of science in defense of some cause which they think is noble but where the quality of evidence just isn't as strong. That's what I'm concerned about. This is Hacker News, there's nobody for me to scare here.
And, deny it or not, you're being personal, and selective in your responses, which makes me feel this has been a rather unproductive conversation.
You're going to have to provide some numbers. I don't think that you understand what's going on here.
Although, I should point out that you have no objection to discussing the Irish government in 1916. If I want to argue like you, I could try to say that proves you're a moron, but maybe it's okay to be a little less than computer-level specificity while discussing the general governance of those areas. The Austro-Hungarian Empire and the British Empire were among the world's largest economies. Italy was the first country to use airplanes in warfare.
I didn't want to get into this side of the argument because it's unsavory and frankly insulting to even consider but the point is that acknowledgment of doubt is necessary for intellectual honesty in any issue this complex. The existence of certainty among people hoping for "open borders" is likely a result of wishful thinking.
>You're clearly a crackpot who doesn't know what he's talking about.
No, I'm explaining flaws in an argument which is touted as airtight and used by a lot of arrogant bullies such as yourself to shut down dissent on a controversial issue, and you're trolling. You have contributed nothing but insults because you don't have a real argument; you just try to catch mistakes (but you didn't catch any) and call people dumb.
So you're the crackpot, and get bent.
And not to nitpick, but why are you now scare quoting corruption, when before you did not? Do you not think corruption is a real problem?
You basic argument is that immigrant culture has no effect on violence but the culture of another group(the white people) does. Ok, so in that case, nations completely ruled by the culture the immigrants comes from, must inherently be free of major violence. Hmmm does that sound correct.
If anything, the west post world war 2 bred a new culture that gave birth to true liberty. The democracies formed in this period shaped the freedoms we have today, and pushed for human rights and equality. There is still progress to make, but targeting groups of people is no solution.
Btw I am Indian, and if you want to argue that ruling whites are a source of major violence, just go and read the history of India from 1000-1800. No white people, lots and lots of violence. All races are the same.
This goes on too. Concentration camps for asian-americans, constant abuses of Native American populations, the constant harassment of immigrant cultures- none of this was imported with immigrants, it's the product of a society they desperately wants to remain homogenous
It's not just because it stereotypes individuals, groups them, and judges them based on involuntary criteria (skin color). There is a rich history of American white culture absolutely opposed to racism. For example, white Quakers fought slavery since the 17th century, often at personal cost [1]. Countless white people died in the Civil War over the issue of slavery.
So I reject the entire idea of a 'ruling race'. I guess 'ruling class' is technically more fluid, but people often have notions of class foisted on them, including here, so it's not necessarily any better.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quakers_in_the_Abolition_Movem...
http://freakonomics.com/2013/08/29/who-are-the-most-successf...
I am assuming something similar happens in America. The increase in population just means a decrease in quality of life for the existing people.
Risk prediction is one thing.
Unhinged scaremongering is another.
Pinker certainly has Taleb lapped in terms of old guard intellectual credentials. Whether that is a good thing is debatable.
America ended in 2008. We've been living off of a corpse ever since. At some point everyone is going to know it.
Tell that to Mother Earth, who is about to show us all who is boss. Climate change is much worse than most people realise.
You may also be unaware of what is going on in Syria, and the fact that NATO has ordered the deployment of thousands of troops to Eastern Europe to put pressure on Russia, a nuclear-armed country.
So, no, this is not the best time to be a human being.
Social exclusion no longer means death for humans, but our brains are wired to feel that it does, and so there is an epidemic of loneliness, disconnection, and fear.
I'm not saying that the old days of completely depending on one's tribe of family and friends for survival was better in objective terms, but it was harmonious with our evolved instincts to be part of a small, mutually-connected group. Economic and social forces in a globalized society tend to act against the sustainability of such groups. So even those who are well-connected aren't as deeply connected, and are always threatened with potential loss of connection for unpredictable, uncontrollable economic or social reasons.
[1]: http://www.npr.org/2016/05/21/478962909/sebastian-junger-s-e...
Only because "society" is too large. For millions of years, "society" meant the same as "others", who were a hundred or so folks in your particular band of primates. You could have a personal understanding with each one of them.
Now that "society" is 7 billion anonymous people, of course you don't matter in that context. Concepts like "universal brotherhood" make no sense, because meaning and belonging don't scale.
A connection with the divine is available to anyone, at any time. It is only because science has caused us to throw the spiritual baby out with the religious bathwater that we have lost our access.
He never said this was the best time for every single human being in the entire world, nor did he say that now will definitely be better than the future. I think this was obvious for anyone reading it.
It's unfortunate that you chose to focus on such a small part of the overall theme he was trying to make.
And the theme was not just about physical need, but all human need. And if the point he was trying to make was that some humans do not get the basic necessities, the article would have been about that. But the fact that we see many people that DO have their basic human needs met and still feel they have no purpose, speaks to a much larger issue than curing poverty.
To convince you, I gently ask you to see this ted.com video: "What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness"
http://www.ted.com/talks/robert_waldinger_what_makes_a_good_life_lessons_from_the_longest_study_on_happinessNever before has there been a point in time where:
-A determined individual with the right equipment could shut down the information network our society almost exclusively relies upon.
-Weapons created for war could destroy the conditions for human civilization across the entire planet.
-Everyday consumption keeps people complacent while the artificially low costs contribute to and accelerate the pace of climate change, which could be almost as bad as nuclear Armageddon.
-The speed and scale of travel is such that a disease could reach every corner of the earth and kill millions if not billions of human beings (or our food!) no matter where they live or where the disease came from.
I'm not a pessismist about humanity's future but if you ignore these things you are only fooling yourself.
But you are still living in a world that is objectively the safest it has ever been for a human being.
I think we blame "the media" as if the people doing it are bad, ignoring the real structural challenges to being positive.
"Everyone always thinks the world is getting worse, but the world is always getting better."
How to detect bullshit. Make logical choices. Be respectful, etc.
Overall we have far more ability to chose the music that fits you personally. If some people chose Bieber, that's fine. I happen to not chose Bieber, and there's plenty of ways of creating playlists on Spotify / listen to the Pandora stations I like / surf Youtube videos / etc. where I never have to hear a Bieber.
In Frank Sinatra's day, you were limited to live performances, kind of lousy sounding radio transmissions, and kind of lousy sounding 78s. Even modern compressed music sounds better than that and there's plenty of music options in full fidelity.
There's even people picking up the crooner torch these days. Some of them have a pretty decent career doing it (I'm thinking of the Michael Bubles and Harry Connick Jrs of the world). And if you want to listen to Frank, it's easy to very quickly do that too.
For the consumers, today is probably worse only in the fact that many people don't like too much choice (http://www.economist.com/node/17723028).
The part I see arguing with more justification is that it's probably worse for many musicians overall. Music never has been a great path to wealth (unless you are lucky to become a superstar) but my impression is that a lot of the jobs "in the middle" (your local cover bands and recording studios and whatnot) are either suffering from the same wage stagnation affecting other jobs in the middle, or are gone altogether due to technological advances.
Also, while the royalty and robber barons didn't have the internet or chemotherapy, they had servants to do all the menial chores most of is still have to do today, so in that respect we haven't totally surpassed them.
I don't think this is really true except in times of turmoil or famine. Reading history you find plenty of people who are unconcerned about meeting their basic needs and who had a lot of free time.
This goes for lots of agricultural societies, for many hunter-gatherer societies, and even some more 'advanced' societies, though you do generally start getting class issues there.
People imagine the past as some kind of eternal, miserable struggle for existence - it wasn't like that. There were definitely bad times, bad times we can hardly even imagine today - but it wasn't the norm. Most people got along fine most of the time and often even had more free time than we do. When people are trapped in a perpetual, miserable struggle for existence - that's when you end up with revolutions and war.
I'd say large swaths of the population definitely are not, but we're all responsible for making our own happiness. No one owes us anything. We definitely have the platform and infrastructure to be happy. They're just easy to take for granted because they're so good they support us even when we do.
> They had servants to do all the menial chores most of is still have to do today, so in that respect we haven't totally surpassed them.
That's a myopic view. What do you call robots and computers that operate at orders of magnitudes of efficiency?
That may be the case, but the way society functions in general, social norms, trust, community, and the like have a massive impact on individual happiness. We "make" our happiness within that framework. Individual choices and failings are part of, say, the misery associated with opiate epidemics, but the conditions for them don't occur in healthy societies.
> We definitely have the platform and infrastructure to be happy.
But do we, to a greater extent than ever before in human history? Does social media make people happier? Cellphones? Modern family law and norms? An economy that encourages people to move across the country in search of new jobs? Are industrial societies more or less happy than agricultural societies? Postindustrial societies? Is our 'infrastructure' for 'better' lives really that which promotes happiness more than any other in human history?
> What do you call robots and computers that operate at orders of magnitudes of efficiency?
Incredible achievements based on the hard work and genius that have revolutionized the modern economy and made many things possible that were once impossible.
That doesn't mean they make life better (depending on your definition of better) or people happier (relative to what?)
A 'robber baron' was rich enough to do whatever they wanted. They never had to do a single menial chore in their lives, if they did not want to. No dishwashing, no food preparation, no clothes folding, no babysitting, no grass cutting. They didn't have a boss who could tell them what to do and threaten them with the loss of their livelihood. They could work as little or as much as they wanted, with no effect on their lifestyle unless it was truly extravagant. They had unlimited, truly free time.
I don't know that I'd be happier in that case, but sitting here now I feel pretty confident I could exchange Netflix, Hacker News, my cell phone, and transcontinental flights for that in a heartbeat. Maybe even advanced medical care.
I don't want to hold robber barons up as living a lifestyle we should aspire to. I'm simply saying that yes, in many ways, their lives were better in simply material terms than the way the average person lives today; it is nice to have a dishwasher, but it is even better to not have to wash dishes. It is nice to not be a chimney-sweep, but unlimited free time is better than 40-80 hours a week devoted to keeping yourself employed.
I just want to touch on this last point. I read the rest of your responses, but I think your philosophy boils down to this single misconception.
Unlimited free time doesn't make you any happier than employment.
Dissatisfaction is born out of these relative comparisons you're making and not spending your attention on what matters: constant inner growth through learning and challenging yourself in addition to appreciating what you have. Nobody is forcing you to work, but if you want to maintain your lifestyle, you should make the best of it. Plenty of employed people are happy with their jobs.
I don't disagree that constant inner growth through learning and challenging myself is important. It's just my learning and challenging has more to do with the relationships I have with my friends, family, and community, and with my hobbies and personal interests (which are economically worthless), and not with learning new Javascript frameworks so I can take time away from doing the above to write web applications.
I make what of it I can - and I do get some mild enjoyment out of many jobs, particularly when I get to work closely with customers to solve their problems - because that's the way the world works in 2016, but I'm not going to lie and say I think it's a great thing. It is hard to imagine being less happy in a life where I could do what I wanted without worrying about whether it paid the bills.
But it's not terribly good for the middle class.
But it's not terribly good for the poor class.
...
Don't let wealth create unneeded divides. When you enter the mindset of "us vs. them" you will always be unhappy.
Edit: I grew up in a very poor community and our family yearly income was well under the poverty line (20,209 in Canada). The middle class has always been the richest people in the world for me. Now that I am part of it, I don't feel rich at all. However, I know that I am lucky. It's question of perception. Don't let them divide and conquer you for political gains.
I wouldn't have a problem with this except a lot of the haves are in that group via genetic lottery, nothing that they actually did or earned.
That's not a world I'd like to live in. But it would solve you having a problem with inequality. Or maybe you just need a different perspective to not put so much into genetic determinism in the first place.
Also, WTF did I just read
Mindfuck of the day achieved, back to work...
That's a hell of a leap of logic. If you want to attempt to make the argument that being born into money gives you no intrinsic advantages in life, that's your argument to make. Access to resources (in the modern world, money) is a HUGE advantage. I'm not jaded, I don't hate the rich nor do I want to forcibly remove their wealth, I recognize that the motive to attain wealth is the single greatest motivator ever applied to people and the primary reason capitalist societies are (by most measures) the most successful.
It's worth noting, however that the much derided and in recent history scaled back Estate Tax was originally intended to prevent the creation of a permanent landed gentry in the United States, or if you've never used that term, a group of wealthy estates that own so much they can effectively live from birth to death on the incomes of their properties. I would argue we have one, albiet not as bad as the one that inspired the law but one nonetheless.
The failing of this counterargument is that I'm not advocating for equal results of all people, I'm advocating for more or less equal opportunity. There are plenty of factors at play that we cannot control; genetics are indeed one, as are number of involved parents, upbringing, what the child is exposed to, etc. but there are at least a few that we can help control and access to capital is one of them.
Penicillin, socialised medicine, low violent crime rates (#), no need to hunt our food, no need to build our own shelters or rub sticks together to make fire.
The finest actors of this and past generations wait for me in my living room while I pee, something that past kings could not even achieve, I travel vast continents in the time it takes for a long sleep, I was the first of my father's line to go to University as a youth. As a consequence I can read and write (almost coherent sentences). The energy I consume per day would be equal to 40 slaves but I enslave no-one (directly) [##]
Maybe we can make an argument that for the current white western male middle class, it is not as good as it was 50 years ago, but perhaps Frank Sinatra would like an iPhone, or modern throat surgery? I do know Sammy Davis Jr would prefer the Civil Rights he would enjoy in Vegas today than in the 50s.
Compared to only a hundred and fifty years ago we are amazingly better off in every measurable way, compared to a thousand its almost shameful. If that does not make us happy, that's a different issue. After all we were only promised the pursuit of happiness.
[#] See Steven Pinkers "Better Angels of our nature"
[##] See Prof. David Mackay - http://www.inference.eng.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/sewt...
Anyway, any hunter from ten thousand years ago would laugh at the energy I expend in the gym. Hunters expend intelligence in order not to expend energy
Why ?
How many have instant access right this second?
Life is far easier and more convenient than it used to be. Most of the middle-class live as better than kings of past centuries.
But at the same time as they got that, they lost access to things their parents took for granted like job security and reliable health care and thriving, stable communities. Getting access to Wikipedia is great, but it does not automatically balance that scale.
Health care is more available to humanity than at any time in history.
Racism and sexism and other terms are used more for political purposes these days then they are for anything of worth. Why didn't you mention the discrimination people with autism face, for example? Autism simply isn't a useful political tool because it doesn't get enough votes. Yet people with autism face more discrimination then the types you have listed. It is politics and nothing more.
If you're a white male.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/opinion/26douthat.html
Could you point me to a quote from the article that tries to make us believe that there is a disaster after disaster?
As far as I know, the article seems to have an objective opinion. It mentions that it's bad, but it's much better than it used to be. Which is basically your point.
Or was your opinion unrelated to the article?
How economically secure does a hunter gatherer or subsistence farmer feel, with no medicine, lots of superstitious practices and complete dependence on the crops/weather... etc.
A hunter/gatherer with no medicine and loads of superstitions doesn't feel anxious when everybody else is a hunter/gatherer with no medicine and loads of superstitions too. They feel anxious when they are that way, but they can look over a fence and see other people living in nice houses and living forty years longer than they do.
Progress is not uniformly distributed, and even in "advanced" societies there are wide and growing gaps between a small, privileged few and the rest who have to make do with much less. It's completely understandable why that would make people anxious, even if they have access to Netflix.
Whether or not you experience the feeling of security is just as much about your internal representation of the world as it is about the external world.
So said the Romans when the Teutons migrated their men, women, and children into Italy and took town after town.
So said the Sasanians when the Mohamaddans swept up from their deserts with swords and zealotry.
So said the Native Americans when the white man brought more and more of his kin to North America.
The Romans averted demographic destruction because they acted before the migrants achieved a sure enough foothold. The Hittites were the mightiest people on Earth at the time (they were the first to work iron). The migrants they took in, first thinking they would prove useful as mercenaries to fight their enemies, destroyed them. The Sasanians ruled the powerful Persian empire. A bunch of fanatical desert nomads relying on brutal Assyrian war strategies wiped them out. Native Americans controlled an entire hemisphere, but ended up all but wiped out of the upper half of that. They had centuries to get rid of their migrants, but instead remained fractured, with parts of them allied with the migrants and others against them.
The most racially diverse nations do go to war with outsiders less; yet, they are also the ones with the most internal crime, distrust, suffering, and injustice. India's Untouchables, South Africa's Apartheid (followed by South Africa's through-the-roof black-on-white rapes and murders after the ending of Apartheid), Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, Germans and Jews in Germany.
If you'd prefer science over history, here are 24 studies in Europe, America, and other places on the effects of ethnic and cultural diversity on group cohesion, trust, strife, civility, and harmony:
http://www.truthjustice.net/politics/diversity-proximity-war...
It would be nice if we could all just join hands and get along. Unfortunately, humans compete for resources, and cooperate with each other for those resources against other groups. One of the primary ways we divide ourselves is by relatedness (the selfish gene). The more homogeneous the society, the more it trusts and cooperates; the less homogeneous the society, the more it distrusts and divides.
Aside from that, not going to france in such a case would be an additional perceived risk not an alternative one.
Don't listen to those devils."
You can call me a devil if you wish, but to me this is a classic example of a half truth. If you are already inclined to believe it, then you'll see it as the truth. If you're not inclined to believe it, then you won't see it as the truth.
To give some examples of people who are less likely to see it as the truth, go and tell Yemenis and Iraqis and Syrians that life has never been better. I'd imagine you'd be seen as a little bit kooky.
Would you do that, would you tell people who are facing famine that life has never been better? I'd suggest you wouldn't, because deep down you know what you're saying is only half true.
I understand where you are coming from, because people are brainwashed into "progressive" ideology and globalists "the world always gets better because of globalisation", but they don't really make sense. Human genes don't match modern society, so it is impossible for there to be a better time then when our genes were our closest match to society.
This is an idea that will come as a shock to people, but it is true. I don't really care to debate it because it is obvious. Also, if you just want to take less shocking ideas, you can see that developed countries have declined in the last few decades.
It's just money (power/manipulation/dominance) at work. With increasing intensity, which of course is sick.
I find the modern world a bit absurd now. The industrial revolutions have diminishing returns since a few years. We're chasing pokemons instead of dealing with the important things (social structures, education, health). Things are done but still at the surface only.
Economic and quatifiable indicators might be higher than ever, but I'm not sure existences are better.
Very myopic, first world, privileged view of the world.
† or whatever else report on the situation should you ever hold some disdain about Gates stuff.
Families, for example are a lot 'less stable'. So are many communities - at least in the Western world.
On the community level - consider a place like Detroit - which is an example of many, smaller cities esp. in the rust belt. That kind of community blight can wear on people.