We’re mostly living better than our parents | Hacker News Reader

We’re mostly living better than our parents

fullstackeconomics.com

38 pointsscifibestfi89 comments

It's a little weird that the author decided to lead with fruits and vegetables, and leave things like, "fewer people die of heart disease and cancer" a long way down.

That said, for those scanning the comments, I suggest you RTFA, which is a pretty good overview for the length that it has to play with. The people in the comments who are Really Upset about it aren't doing a very good job of summarizing it.

Looking through the comments, Really Upset sounds like an exaggeration. It's hard to conclude a "better life" when the stress of paying outrageous healthcare, childcare, housing, education costs outweigh things like "increased food consumption", which is what I'm seeing in the comments. Interesting charts nonetheless.

The article chooses to spend its attention in a very non-neutral manner. This is a common PR tactic and has a name:

> Shit Sandwich - Urban Dictionary

> A way of giving crappy news to someone. The news is dressed up as, first a positive statement then the bad news, and then a positive statement

It's not only fair to criticize the article for its thesis and aggressive framing, it's absurd to defend a shit sandwich on the basis that it's only 1/3 shit.

The other side of increased life expectancy is that the average person will work longer before he can afford to retire.

A huge chunk of Millenials and Gen-Z cannot afford to start families and have children.

That in itself is a major fail for our species, and should tell you everything you need to know.

It's a failure of countries like the USA, not the entire species.

Don't you think it's telling that you're saying they can't afford it, meanwhile much poorer people are still having children and starting families?

The hidden catch in your comment is perhaps that they can't afford to have children and raise them in the way you (or whomever) thinks they should.

I don't think it's a fail for our species at all. I could agree to disagree that it's a failure of some of our current societies.

Much poorer people can't afford it either. Something like half of births in US are on medicaid premiums paid for in part by taxpayers who themselves can't afford to have kids.

I don't think it's the births themselves people are complaining about the cost of. More things like housing.

Being reliant on public benefits to support and birth your family is pretty much the definition of not being able to afford it.

I dunno, where I live hospital care (including birthing) is free (tax-payer funded) for everyone. In which case it seems to make more sense to say that everyone can afford it, not that nobody can. It's the things the state doesn't pay for that people can't afford, not the things it does.

In the US, the mother being on Medicaid is highly correlative with them and/or the child being on other public benefits. On the micro level (an individual birth), it implies nothing other than they were eligible for Medicaid. On the macro level ("nearly half of births") it implies a lot more.

When health-care is universally tax-payer funded, the differential between the free-market unregulated premium you would pay for what you get and what you actually pay in taxes for it represents the net public benefit you've extracted. If you earn nothing, then odds are you can't afford health care even though you get it.

I think I fundamentally disagree with the premise that anyone "can't afford" something that the state provides for free. Would you say that someone "can't afford" to use roads because they wouldn't be able to afford to have them constructed if the state hadn't already done so?

There may be many other things that that person can't afford, but the thing provided to them is not one of them.

>I think I fundamentally disagree with the premise that anyone "can't afford" something that the state provides for free.

It makes more sense when you step back and realize it isn't provided for free. If you don't pay taxes, it was provided by others who could afford to pay for it on your behalf. Someone else could afford it, and you got it. If you otherwise could have afforded it on your own or paid the tax that represents at least the free-market rate at which you would have got it, then you could have afforded it.

>Would you say that someone "can't afford" to use roads because they wouldn't be able to afford to have them constructed if the state hadn't already done so?

The unsubsidized cost of the road for an individual isn't the cost to construct the road, it's the free market value of the utility the road provides them. While not perfectly reflected, a toll charged by a private toll road will give a ballpark of what that cost is.

Similarly if you earn nothing, have no money, and use the roads freely provided to you then you cannot afford the roads. But you're still provided use of the road. Someone else was able to afford the roads, and they paid for it instead. You're completely dependent on the charity of the public to allow you using roads you yourself didn't pay for -- and that would be pretty much the definition of being unable to afford something you were provided. Whereas if you paid taxes commensurate with your use of the roads, then it's safe to say you can afford to use the roads.

In this manner, people often have kids they can't afford, and instead others who can afford to pay (at least partially) for them do so in the form of Medicaid / WIC / EBT / Section 8 and other benefits.

Can't speak for other countries, but in the US there is a point where being poorer would almost certainly make it easier to have and raise children than being middle class. Most social benefits in the US (besides entitlements for older people which are, by far, the most costly) are distributed primarily to women with kid(s) and low income. Though it greatly depends on the state, a single mother with low income could expect:

* full health insurance through Medicaid

* Food subsidies i.e. SNAP, WIC, etc.

* Section 8 housing (which can often times be very nice housing in extremely desirable neighborhoods of large cities like DC, NYC, SF).

* TANF a.k.a. welfare cash

* free tuition / grants / job training through dozens of federal, state, and private programs

* free daycare (again through dozens of fed, state, and private programs, often included with job training grants)

* public transportation vouchers

* down payment and first-home buyer programs.

Compare that to the same-aged single or married woman living in the exact same city making $75K. She may literally live next door to the theoretical subsidized woman described above, yet be paying 60% or more of her take-home pay in rent alone. She will be paying hundreds of dollars / month for health insurance and have a $2K deductible to boot. No food or any other subsidies. Add a few hundred dollars / month for her tuition loans, and she has $0 left at the end of the month which means she will (correctly) feel unable to afford a child, especially when child-care will cost her up to $2K / month.

But at least her corporate employer will pay for her abortion!

That's a great creative example, except that she has a lot of options with her $75k/yr salary to afford kids.

In your example she's making an absolutely terrible financial decision to spend 60% of her income on housing--rent, no less. And that is apparently inflexible.

I wonder what percentage of children is raised in homes making under $75,000? I would venture a huge majority in America, and approaching 100% when you account for the whole planet.

I've noticed a lot of folks think they can't afford children when they absolutely can. But they have unrealistic expectations about housing, daycare, and education.

Housing: children used to be expected to share rooms. Now it's not the norm -- but there's no reason it can't become the norm again. When you talk to your parents or grandparents, they often had large families living in tiny houses.

Daycare: children used to be tended to by family members or religious communities. Now we isolate ourselves from family by moving far away, don't join communities (religious or otherwise), and for whatever reason don't ask mom and dad for help with the kids. Also, the age at which we trust children to stay at home without supervision has risen over time. These are all choices we're making that make children much more expensive.

Education: k-12 is free in the US, but lots of folks want private education for their kids. That's fine, I do too, but I realize it's not a required cost. University is definitely expensive, but loans are widely available. And, of course, not every child needs to go to an elite university.

These are the choices making it difficult to afford children, but they are mostly choices we don't have to make.

> Daycare: children used to be tended to by family members or religious communities. Now we isolate ourselves from family by moving far away, don't join communities (religious or otherwise), and for whatever reason don't ask mom and dad for help with the kids. Also, the age at which we trust children to stay at home without supervision has risen over time. These are all choices we're making that make children much more expensive.

It used to also be fairly common for the mother of the children to be tending to them, until the more recent trend of the mother working and paying someone else to do it. Gets especially expensive when there's more than one child.

It was also more common for the mother to be married when having children [1], which helps allow for that.

[1] https://www.childtrends.org/publications/dramatic-increase-i...

I've noticed this as well. I would add to this that a lot of people who say they can't afford kids mean they can't afford to have kids and maintain their current lifestyle. Which is true. Having kids means sacrificing your time and money.

Housing: I wouldnt say that large families in tiny houses was ever desirable or good. You might want to check other factors in your sample of parents/grandparents such as class, housing market, family culture, etc. From the people Ive talked to, my peers' parents' generation had a better QOL in their home and fewer people in the home than either today or in the preceding generation. But again, thats anecdotal.

Daycare: public funding for community resources like daycare/childcare as well as PTO for childcare has atrophied after decades of austere policy. Its not always a choice to not utilize childcare options. I am not religious and I dont have an extended family to rely on, so my options are... privatized childcare because community based options are nonexistant. not to mention the need for dual-income families to keep up with rising cost of living

Education: public school funding has atrophied after decades of austere policy. Not to mention ass-backwards funding structures that prioritize high-income neighborhoods over poor neighborhoods. US job markets are also unreasonably obsessed with college credentials, so you have families taking out loans they cant afford to give their child a chance. And hey those loans make homeownership even harder.

This idea that it is the individual's choice to make things expensive ignores a host of other systemic factors that remove choices from the board. We COULD make education better and cheaper for everyone. We COULD dedicate resources to help support new families. We COULD make housing more affordable for everyone. We kinda have to stop blaming individuals for things out of their control.

Children sharing bedrooms does not mean “large families in tiny houses.”

But I agree about public funding of education. You’re right that that one probably leads directly to smaller family sizes in some cases, when families can’t afford private school.

How does that fit in with the poorest people having the highest birth rates on average?

Pretty rich to see this story pop up on hacker news above the headline "Extreme heat, drought will permanently scar California and its social fabric"

It takes very little effort to come up with a slew of negative things to say in response to this article, there are obviously lots of problems in society we still need to fix (like healthcare). But I think that articles like this are very important to read and understand, because a lot of things in here are true. If you spend all of your time concentrating on all the bad things that need to be fixed in society, everyone involved in the conversation will constantly feel like the future is bleak and usually the conversation will devolve into a political cesspool.

Understanding and appreciating good things is as equally important as understanding and trying to fix the bad things.

I never quite understand what I'm supposed to take away from articles like this. I mean, sure, life is objectively better than it was 30 years ago. And better still compared to 70 years ago. And heck, if you compare it to 500 years ago we're not dying of collera or living in a hut, so Go Team! Right?

Comparisons to the a bygone time that you can't go back to are pointless. No one is suggesting that things are 'good' now, or even 'acceptable'. There are significant, systemic problems that cause millions of people to live worse lives than they need to, so we still have a loooong way to go. I guess looking around and saying "It's not pointless. Things do get better. It's worth trying." has some value, but this sort of article really comes over as more "Stop complaining. You've never had it so good.", and fuck that.

> I never quite understand what I'm supposed to take away from articles like this.

Progress

> I mean, sure, life is objectively better than it was 30 years ago

That’s good - there are places on earth that can’t say that

>Comparisons to the a bygone time that you can't go back to are pointless.

I just think this is so wrong.

If you were halfway through a weight loss journey, is it not heartening and helpful to look at the scale every day and see your progress? Comparing your current self to your past self and seeing what you have done RIGHT is just as important as understanding what you are currently doing WRONG. Not only that but it also gives people hope for the future, which is very important in giving people motivation to actually put in effort and work for a better future.

I always get a chuckle when people say things like "well a house is more expensive but you have smartphones, the internet, a washing machine, and a blender!"

For a lot of people, technology is a tool to live a better life, not end on its own. If post-internet technology doesn't get me housing as cheap as pre-internet or food as cheap as pre-internet, education/childcare, or healthcare as cheap as pre-internet, then that pretty much crosses off the most important necessities. Not saying this is the fault of technological progress per-se.

Declaring we're living better through the lens of 24 graphs doesn't cut it.

There's probably a thousand variables to consider as well as the variability of individual needs that could be summed up collectively.

Yes, we have made a lot of strides, but at the same time, the complexity of living life has increased. We got better technology, choices, health, rights and freedom but stating that things are better in terms of how life is lived and what's available can be misleading to some degree.

Well, the important thing is to fill the list with small picture things that support their thesis and bury the big picture things that don't.

The story loses its objectivity and becomes too reliant on the subjectivity of the writer(s).

Exactly. Something ever important to hammer on and repeat is that data does not alone make facts.

Imagine if the key performance indicator was happiness or life satisfaction, instead of how many blueberries we’re eating

And I think that the gains in healthcare discussed are under selling the point. I don’t have time to pull data, so discount my opinion appropriately, but just think about the minimally invasive surgeries that are feasible today, the life-changing drugs for things like cystic fibrosis, and the convenience of telehealth

That home ownership being more affordable is going to completely disappear as interest rates go up. Yes monthly payments were slightly lower with tiny interest rates but the assets themselves were unreasonably high in price. With interest rates now skyrocketing payments will go through the roof.

But home prices will likely drop, which will hopefully more than offset the increased interest cost. Plus, you can refinance a loan for lower overall costs, but there is no way to reduce the principal of a mortgage other than forking over hard-earned cash.

So far in my market even accounting for the drop in prices, monthly payments were slightly larger.

We urgently need to change the road safety goalposts. Deaths of people inside of vehicles have lowered, but the new larger vehicles are deadlier to pedestrians, and their "safety" headlights are blinding anyone not in the vehicle.

https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2019-02/FINAL_Pedes...

See Figures 6 and 15.

Oh perfect, this report is fascinating

1 in 10 Americans is going hungry...^1 It's not always about how many blueberries we are all eating as a group - justice demands we consider who is getting to eat at all. It would be great if we could close some of that food security gap with the savings "we" are experiencing on cheaper hammers and batteries.

I really enjoy charts and analysis like this, and sometimes a controversial headline is what is needed to start a discussion - so thanks for sharing. I think this analysis begs for follow-up charts showing how these items and spending vary by race, class, location, etc. When we say "we" are mostly living better, who exactly is in that group? Seems like that's an important consideration in asking whether "we" are achieving our goals as a society.

1. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...

> 1 in 10 Americans is going hungry

Is that more or less than before ?

I found this - food insecurity peaked in 2010 and is now the same as 2000: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...

> But down payment requirements have gotten looser too! According to the National Association of Realtors, the average homebuyer in 1989 put 20 percent down. In 2021, it was 13 percent.

I think this is important and two-sided stat. There's a mixture of programs that make obtaining large mortgages actually very easy. FHA loans and state down payment assistance programs have certainly helped many 'afford' housing. However, I think many who lived through the 2008 crash are skeptical of purchasing homes with less than 20% down. Essentially you have to be informed enough to seek out these programs but not informed enough as to be petrified knowing these programs are keeping home prices high.

In any case these graphs don't show generational differences and several obscure them. The graphs show homes have gotten larger, apartments have gotten smaller, yet rents overall have increased which is related to why younger generations are paying much more per sqft.

Well, we're in the tech industry. I'm sure people working service jobs, health care workers, or teachers might have different opinions.

It CAN be true if you get outside America.

In South America, considering the past economic crises, we're somewhat better than our parents.

The chart for college tuition increases is pretty telling when compared to the chart for consumption patterns (where the article claims that the decreasing percentage out of total spending for food and clothing was explained by the increase in the price of healthcare).

Also, none of the charts discuss child-care costs, nor travel & leisure.

The idea that house prices aren't that bad for most people is a joke. Renting or buying decent housing in any kind of economic center has been hard for the past decade, and impossible for the past year.

Those charts praising truck and SUV sales should be juxtaposed with charts showing the increase in road fatalities for cyclists and pedestrians or the rise in CO2 concentration and average temperatures.

Strollers are 72% cheaper? When I was a baby my parents had a single $15 stroller from Walmart. I don't know a single family with small children with less than 2 ~$500+ strollers.

Honestly in most cases people don’t need strollers at all, or they would be fine with a cheapo umbrella stroller for $18.99 from Wal-mart.

People just can’t seem to help over-spending on baby stuff.

It's so interesting how an article filled with positivity inspires such a vehement negative response. Is there a name for this effect? It seems like there should be.

Sure. It’s called gaslighting blowback.

Sure, so what? The question is, what could the richest country on earth have done in 40 years, besides outsourcing all its shit to poor countries?

This is pretty ridiculous.

We're eating way more fruit and vegetables and less meat than our grandparents.

I'll add another one: we also have lower cholesterol.

And our heart related incidents and cancer incidence is going up.

Sure, survival rates may be better, as the article points, but the problems are getting worse.

It's not even hard to make the link that maybe it's really a diet issue and we should be eating more meat and fats and less carbs - exactly the opposite of what 50 years of brainwashing by the USDA (and whoever is paying their bill) recommended.

Birthrates are down, people are getting married later and divorcing more often, people aren't growing as tall, life expectancy is declining.

Using the measures that don't change over time we are not living better than our parents.

EDIT:

>I'm sorry, getting married earlier has an intrinsic positive correlation with quality of life?

Yes, to the degree that civilizations often experience high degrees of social instability when it gets into the late 20s among the elites/elite aspirants.

Which people aren't growing as tall? My cohort, roughly defined--co-workers of comparable age, cousins--often have children taller than they are.

It's complicated - some countries are growing taller, some are getting shorter (especially the poor strata of the population).

It's heavily linked to diet and malnutrition (which nowadays can happen whether you're rich or poor).

I'm sorry, getting married earlier has an intrinsic positive correlation with quality of life?

Cntrl-F: "DEBT", "INTEREST", "CLIMATE" ... No results Found

> 1. We’re eating more fresh fruit

Is this supposed to be a joke? "Let them eat fruit?"

> 9. Comparing wage growth to the cost of necessities

It's here, far below the fold, that the real story begins. Spoiler: health care, housing, and education did not get cheaper. Which you already knew, because you pay out the ass for them, and that's not a feeling one forgets.

But we are eating more fruit, so I guess on the balance everything is fine.

HC, schooling and housing are essentially gov subscriptions. We all "love" subscriptions.

Avocado is a fruit, right?

gee, I should just eat 88 fewer avocados every day and use the savings to pay my rent!

The big ticket items (housing, healthcare, education) got exponentially more expensive, but at least hammers and avocados are cheaper.

Yeah education especially, it's gone up 520% of inflation, plain extortion.

"Youngest adults" meaning ages 18-25 who include the legal women that don't want to have babies immediately and whom everyone wants to fuck, and the young men who look their best in their "pretty boy" like Ashton Kutcher appearance, because they have the thick hair and best skin and are skinny, and sure enough the same is true for them there's lots of men and women out to fuck them. Or exploit them. So all of them, youngest adults.

They are being harmed. Colleges--meaning not the faculty or the adjuncts who are true to the students but the administrators in the bloated bureaucracies--just charge up the ass. They say the students don't pay for that but they absolutely do, they lump that in with Tuition. It's not Tuition, in my case the money spent on administration was mostly to persecute me (I got lynched).

There should be three categories: tuition (strictly professor salaries, fuck that adjunct status promote them to professors), Room and Board (or better yet call it Rent and let students pay for food on their own), and then Administration. Just like other non-profits.

In some colleges the professors are the administrators, there's no bureaucrats.

And the harsh part is for youngest adults, you need to go through the gauntlet--the time you're told is the best time in your life, when it's really the absolute worst--to participate in the economy with dignity. Otherwise you get a shit job.

I’m confused about what your paragraph about people wanting fuck college students has to do with the price of college.

Have some patience with them. They were lynched ffs.

So that pretty boy was me. Self-referential.

The only thing older adults want out of youngest adults, really, is their youth. They have no assets except for their admission letter, and no way to enforce their contracts to pay for college.

Older adults want to exploit that youth. And they youngest adults don't want to be prostitutes, so they go to college, but that doesn't change things by enough.

> persecute me (I got lynched).

I've never interacted with a ghost on HN before.

There's always a first time.

Very much confused by the 2nd paragraph incel screed.

> But we are eating more fruit, so I guess on the balance everything is fine.

Nowhere did the post claim this. Intake of fresh fruits/vegetables is associated with a meaningful decrease in mortality rate, and are increasingly seen as the best way to promote a healthy gut/microbiome (vs. taking probiotics).

If you interpret this post as "n reasons that everything is fine", then you might be right - everything is definitely not fine.

But if you interpret this post as "in a world where a lot is going wrong, and that's usually all we hear about, here are n things going right", it's a more useful read.

To me, this falls into a category similar to the book Factfulness [0], which seeks to correct misconceptions about the state of the world by examining certain areas of progress over a broader historical context.

Personally, I think an occasional break from the doom and gloom to focus on "here are some things that have improved" is necessary. That doesn't have to mean that everything is fine.

- [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34890015-factfulness

An honest analysis would weight its concerns by importance. This was not an honest analysis.

I don't think you or I can issue judgements about honesty without understanding the author and their motivations.

We can conclude that the analysis is poor, or misses key factors, or is only useful when answering a narrow set of questions, or requires additional disclaimers / context. But concluding that the author is dishonest takes us in a direction that is no longer focused on how the analysis can improve, and instead seeks to question motives directly, instead of expanding our shared understanding of the subject.

I do think the glaring issue with the piece is that we (the royal we) have not agreed on the list of factors that should be measured when examining living standards, nor the weights of those factors. The post doesn't really attempt to justify its chosen measures either, and would carry more weight if based on earlier scholarly attempts to quantify quality of life.

We can judge the title, the thesis, and how it focuses attention away from the problems.

> We can judge the title, the thesis

That is essentially what I said above. There are plenty of ways to pick this apart, and I have plenty of questions/issues with the content. I'm just saying we don't have to use ad hominem attacks to do so.

> and how it focuses attention away from the problems

An article titled "24 charts that show we’re (mostly) living better than our parents" is probably going to skew towards the things that are going well - that's kind of the point.

That doesn't automatically imply everything is awesome, and you might take issue with such an examination and argue it does not give enough airtime to other systemic issues, and indeed this is where I'd focus. But that is a different kind of conversation than one that disagrees with the conclusions about each of those 24 things.

Speaking of which, what are those primary problems from your perspective?

>But if you interpret this post as "in a world where a lot is going wrong, and that's usually all we hear about, here are n things going right", it's a more useful read.

"This is fine!"

No, it's not OK for an occasional break, the world is going to burn. It makes no difference if I can eat more blueberries now if my kids won't have any water left in the future to grow them.

Knowing the reality of climate change, I am sorry, there is no way I can be glad we are eating more blueberries. It cannot enter my mind at all. If it can enter your mind you do not know the scope of what we are facing.

> "This is fine!"

Why would anyone conclude this? There are things in this world that are fine, and things that are not. To conclude that acknowledging the things that are fine is equivalent to concluding that everything is fine just doesn't track.

> No, it's not OK for an occasional break

Are you arguing that the only acceptable way to live life is to remain focused on everything that is going wrong, at all times?

If we do not examine what's going right, how are we to identify (and prioritize) the areas that require attention? How does one learn from the things that have been successful so as to apply that success elsewhere?

But more glaringly, how does one achieve any level of satisfaction in life if all they do is ignore everything good? The mental health impact of such negative focus seems far more likely to immobilize someone and lead to a nihilistic/fatalistic outlook. If the future generation is fucked, and there's literally nothing we can do, why do anything? (this is not what I'm advocating for, btw).

I'm not attempting to downplay the seriousness of climate change or the magnitude of the problems the world is currently facing, but if the only way forward is to stay mired in negativity and to ignore the good things in life, truly what is the point of living?

> Are you arguing that the only acceptable way to live life is to remain focused on everything that is going wrong, at all times?

If my car is about to go off of a cliff I am not going to be happy about all the blueberries I just bought at the supermarket.

You are not giving the appropriate weight to these things.

> But more glaringly, how does one achieve any level of satisfaction in life if all they do is ignore everything good?

There is plenty I find good, non of which was included in that article. It was fully materialistic but for the parents spending more time with their kids which I do not see as a positive. And his "carbon release vs carbon graph" is just pure useless crap.

The satisfaction I get in life is by trying to fix big problems. It is not nihilist, it is hopeful. A nihilist eats blueberries while the world is burning.

Eating blueberries and watching the world burn are not inherently bound to each other.

Put another way, it is possible to enjoy blueberries while working to solve big problems.

Going a step further, intentionally avoiding blueberries (assuming you enjoy blueberries and they are sustainable) seems like actively/unnecessarily squandering an opportunity to enjoy life.

Progress and enjoying life are not mutually exclusive. To suggest that they are is a good way to scare people away from the former, or conclude it’s not worthwhile.

Editing to add: In all of the focus on blueberries, the broader point was lost - that we have better access to fruits/vegetables than we've had in the past. This is a big deal, and has a major impact on health. This does not reduce the importance or severity of climate change, and does raise questions about how sustainable that easy access is.

But today’s fruit costs much more and doesn’t taste as good.

Thought experiment: do you wish you were born 40 years earlier?

I suspect most of us do not wish this, and I think the primary reason is because our lives are much better now than 40 years ago.

Healthcare and housing is more expensive, yes. But healthcare is also much better. (Things that were once death sentences no longer are.) Our houses are more expensive, but also larger even though our families are smaller.

The technology we have access to is amazing. Traveling the world is more affordable and not just something the richest person you know has done.

Not to mention human rights have expanded for lots of protected classes.

Overall I think the doom and gloom of some younger folks about how terrible it is today and how great things were for previous generations is just wildly misplaced. There are lots of reasons to be thankful we're living in the present and not the past.

I love tech and I'm doing great. I'm not representative and neither are you.

> healthcare is also much better

ε more QALYs for 8x the cost. Boo.

> Our houses are more expensive, but also larger

Because they only built houses for rich people, thereby spiking prices into the stratosphere and forcing more people to go without homes for longer. If you're looking for a silver lining, this ain't it.

> human rights have expanded for lots of protected classes.

That's a much better silver lining.

Usually I find myself arguing with Team Optimism, because I think all the problems we have are solvable and many people disagree. The article doesn't read like a genuine case for optimism, it reads like a PR piece for someone who is part of the problem and wants to deflect attention.

> Thought experiment: do you wish you were born 40 years earlier?

Absolutely yes.

Rare divorces, booming economy, a society able to communicate instead of cancelling people, burning cars or locking everyone at home.

Technology improves our lives up to a point.

I agree with you a lot of things improved (thanks capitalism) but our culture is a complete mess and I'd rather live on another planet.

To minimise the problem I moved to a country that many would call backwards. At least they won't teach my kids that men can menstruate.

I'm sorry for my kids, hopefully things won't get too much worse in the next couple of decades and hopefully we'll find another country to move to, once idiocracy takes control of this one as well.

Rare divorces because the social pressures and stigma of divorce encourages people to marry young and stay in bad marriages. Not sure how that helps.

I would argue no-fault divorce is at least as responsible as social pressures. When someone can walk away with half + alimony + 20% child support even if they were at fault for breakdown of the marriage (i.e. adultery or abandonment) there may be a big incentive for them to do things destructive to the marriage for a payout.

Quantity of life due to healthcare has increased but quality of life I would wager has barely moved the needle. The problem is when Americans say they are dissatisfied with healthcare today it’s conflated with them being dissatisfied with the cost instead of the healthcare industry recognizing that patient satisfaction is low.

Bull shit. Fruits and veggies. What about enjoying life?

"We’re eating more fresh fruit"

Who the fck is "we"? By we he means the wealthy, because go to any lower income area and it is a food desert.

Economists are pros at making numbers tell any story they like. What he is hiding is that those statistics are all skewed by inequality.

Put 3 people with $100,000 each in a room with a millionaire and the average person is worth $325,000.

Take half of the money away from the 3 people and turn the millionaire into a two millionaire and the average person in that room is worth $537,500!

Look how much better we are doing!!!!!!!

And all this "better"? You think it does not come with a cost, one that we are just beginning to have to pay for?

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