Poll finds 71% of Americans believe country is on wrong track
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
There are many measures by which we can judge our positive success. Of course there a ton of problems, but it still seems that we only like talking about problems and not any of the positives.
I thought that had recently reversed.
>that's where we are in this country
Unfortunately it seems to be where everyone ends up in all developed societies. The US is an aberration because it is so young.
And what, I can get an extra 5 years in a nursing home where there's a decent chance I'll suffer physical and psychological abuse but will be forcefully kept alive in a stupor on a cocktail of drugs.
It's just unabashed justification for the interests of the top couple percent. They do in fact have it better right now by far than any other cohort in history.
So if we we went from 8B to 80B I'd argue we'd go from 1B -> >50B in poverty. Maybe a lot worse than that.
This is obviously dependent on where you are born but especially true once you consider that the places left with high fertility have nearly perfect overlap with the places with high volumes of extreme poverty.
And this is only in the short term. Those people are generating plastic waste, consuming fuel, and many other things that are net negatives to the planet over time. So over the long term this problem just gets worse.
you might expect poverty to go up by a factor of 50x when the population goes up by 10x, but what we see is the opposite, poverty has grown more slowly than the overall population.
On many objective measures, we are doing well. On many others, things are getting dramatically worse, fast.
Isn't _bad_ in this case a political judgement; so how are we to put politics aside in assessing this claim?
> ...entering dementia
I have no opinion about the U.S. president, favourable or unfavourable, but are there objective data in the public domain indicating a diagnosis of dementia in his case, e.g. neurocognitive test results? Even a Folstein mini-mental status test? The diagnosis of dementia and age-related cognitive decline is thrown around casually but requires more rigorous evaluation that "seems 'off'."
Half of one party thinks we’re doing “good”. All of the other party says we’re not.
My point was just that it wasn’t like 80% of one party and 60% of the other. It was WAY more lopsided.
If there were objective measures that folks were basing any of this on, it would be one thing. But the news isn't that 71% of Americans believe things are bad. The story is a bit more that "the two parties in America are increasingly polarized on their view of how the country is doing."
It's useful to know that they're unhappy. But the metric is not the target; the goal is not to get them to say "right track". The goal is to figure out how to find a political system in which we can all work together.
I believe that those answering "wrong track" automatically have not done a good job of finding ways to work together. But that hasn't really changed in a long time, so the poll doesn't really mean much, either.