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Comment by mjburgess | Hacker News Reader

Do you have evidence that problems in the past that these replaced were better than these?

Progress has a "flooring effect", eg., if we solve murder, the leading cause of death is heart disease. Heart disease wasn't as common in an era where people, on average, didn't live long enough to experience it (etc.).

Have you properly accounted for this effect?

Because when I look at the list of problems people had in the 1970s, 1920s, 1870s, etc. they seem far far far far worse; by orders of magnitudes.

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What are concrete ways life has improved since the 1970s?

I lived through the 1970s. We had enough good quality food, home cooked meals, and far less obesity. I had friends to play with in the neighborhood, bicycles to ride, independence ("be home for dinner!"), ball fields and basketball courts, toys, a library I could walk to with lots of books, lived close to extended family, big back yards, could walk to school, church, grocery stores, family gatherings on holidays. TV and radio for news and entertainment, which we watched too much, but not nearly as addictive as today's devices. Atari for video games.

I was fortunate enough to be accepted to a good university, and was able to pay off my student loans in a few years.

I don't remember as many people going bankrupt from medical bills (although people were starting to complain about the increasing costs).

It's not clear to me in what ways life is objectively better today. I'm sure many people in the 1970s were worse off than me, but we were squarely lower middle class. A lot of people had more than us. I imagine life is better for racial and sexual minorities, and that shouldn't be taken for granted. But I don't think life is better for the median middle class person.

I’m about middle of Gen-X and I also enjoyed many of the things you describe.

I also did not enjoy the chance to learn about, discuss with experts (and interested novices), niche topics. Programming for me was few hundred line programs saved to audio tape or typed in from magazines. I had much less concept of the world in which we actually live than my kids do. Sure, I had the same Replogle globe that you probably did, but I didn’t know that people lived significantly differently lives outside my neighborhood. I just figured it was daytime earlier or later than it was for me. When I wanted to learn something, my parents had to drive me to the library. It might take me an hour to learn a single fact that I can access as fast as I can type the query now. If it’s something new, it might not even be in the library at all, despite being known to mankind already. When I wanted to take intro college classes after exhausting the high-school’s offering, I had to commute to college as a HS senior. When we wanted to go on vacation, we had to get a bunch of folding paper maps and plot out the route. Or laboriously copy down directions from a friend. If I wanted to be reachable, I had to stay near the phone (what we’d call a landline now). Air conditioning was a relatively rare treat. If you wanted to watch a movie at home, you had to drive to the rental place and hope that they had one of the 5-ish copies of the movie you wanted to see in stock.

Plenty is better, especially around comfort, convenience, communications, and educational breadth of opportunity. (And a lot is also worse, of course.)

> if we solve murder, the leading cause of death is heart disease. Heart disease wasn't as common

Sure but all these things are increasing disproportionally. I don't think the obesity rate of americans tripled since the 70s because the murder rate dropped.

> Because when I look at the list of problems people had in the 1970s, 1920s, 1870s, etc. they seem far far far far worse; by orders of magnitudes.

I agree with you to a certain extent up the the 70s/80s, I don't think the average westerner's life got better since the 70s because of tech progress, but rather because of social progress.

To me running water is a better tech than internet. Central heating is better than the smartphone. Virtually anything that came up since the 90s are either iterative progress over existing tech or straight up gadgets. We're now enslaved to them but they're not necessary to our well being.

When all our appliances solve all our problems, the problems which remain are more prominent.

No one complained in 1990 at not being able to go to the cinema, etc., whenver they liked (netflix); to coordinate with friends without hours of conversation (messenger); to search for materials without days at the library (google).

These were taken for granted and are now reduced to "seconds of time".

Tech since the 90s has led to a massive increase of wealth via making our time vastly more productive: both social and economic.

Much of that wealth has filtered down to the masses, but the vast majority of it has been captured by rent-seekers or first-movers.

Netflix etc. has just resulted in us spending less time on the things that make us happy (time with friends and family and socializing) with things that are addictive but make us less happy (endlessly staring at pixels).

I'd say it's worse than that, they offer the perfect counter argument to soul crushing jobs. Get home, unplug your brain, spend 3.2 hours on netflix [0], go to bed and forget about everything else. Yes, your life is miserable but tonight you'll be offered a new episode of that quirky baking show.

[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/us-netflix-subscribers-watch-32-h...

I don't feel like we're looking at the right metrics to judge if people's lives actually get better. If all you focus on is production/consumption then yes, sure, we've never produced and consumed as much, but consumption of goods and entertainment hardly is enough to fulfil a life. We see it very often on hacker news, people trying to "optimise their lives", "be more productive", not everything has to be about productivity, you can't quantify "social" productivity, the simple fact of writing "social productivity" makes me sick to be honest. We're applying machine concepts to human interactions... what's the best: 10M instagram followers or a loving family ? Who's the most socially productive here ?

> massive increase of wealth

Yes, but again, once you're past a certain point perceived wealth isn't a benchmark for quality of life. A min wage worker has a faster car than kings from the 15th century, they also have better beds, better heating systems, &c. do they have better lives ? And this isn't even talking about the fact the the massive wealth increase was highly beneficial to a very limited number of people while the rest got the crumbs

A unit of out time is more productive, but we still spend as many unit of times working than 50 years ago for less and less rewarding jobs. Being stuck in a dead end meaningless job is a daily reminder that your time is worth next to nothing since you perceive your mission as useless and you're paid the bare minimum.

If all you care about is productivity we're twice as productive as in the 70s [0], are we twice as happy as then ? And by "we" I don't mean "tech workers making 2-10 times their country's min wage". The vast majority of people still have to work 8 hours a day until retirement, less and less are able to afford homes, &c.

I'm not against technology, that would be ridiculous, google search and google maps are literal miracles, but there is a flip side to tech and automation which is becoming increasingly hard to bear for a lot of people. I find that telling these people to suck it up because they have on demand cinema and facebook messenger a bit insulting.

I lived on both sides, it doesn't matter if you have barely enough money to pay for a shelter or if you have enough money to buy any new amazon gadgets, all things being equal as long as you spend 8 hours a day working you'll still be missing out by the simple fact that between work and sleep you'll barely have time to get entertained. "Panem et circenses"

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...

Even if the conclusion is that life today is better than in the past, so what? Congratulations. Their lives were different than their predecessors too. Is the whole point to self-congratulate, or should we recognize and address today's problems?

The issue is often that people with dystopian visions of the present and utopian visions of the past/future rarely have policies that are effective at actually redressing problems.

Routinely their dystopianism drives them to revolutionary ideas whose net effect has always been mass impoverishment.

And people with utopian perceptions of the present tend to have policies that ignore underlying problems until they boil over into revolutions.

Fixating on how great the present is accomplishes nothing and appeals to almost nobody.

A typical feudal serf probably lived better than a hunter-gatherer, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't want to be free, and telling them that things are better is just avoiding the question.

Any analysis which fixates on things being uniformly better or uniformly worse will paint an incoherent and unhelpful picture. A realistic look at things involves looking critically at present and past policy in a nuanced manner, even in areas where things may be better.

>Their lives were different than their predecessors too.

You don't have to go back far to get to a point where this wasn't really the case. Before the industrial revolution, life for the common person was rather similar to how their parents and grandparents lived. Estimates of GDP per capita would give you a doubling or tripling of it over a period of 1000-2000 years. A similar increase happened in the US in the last ~50 years.

Life is improving so much that we take it for granted. We've seen many facets of life significantly transformed in our lifetimes - eg social media, video games, the internet as a whole.

Of course we should look at today's problems, but we should also look at the past for perspective. If we make a mountain out of every molehill then we might end up regressing.

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