Even a non-golden era can have something truly valuable.
Btw, we are living in a golden age. The vast majority of humanity has never had it better.
Btw, we are living in a golden age. The vast majority of humanity has never had it better.
If you haven't noticed, advanced economies are experiencing secularly stagnating growth, a crisis of democratic representation and its populist backlash, the return of oligarchic inequality to levels not seen since the gilded age, and extreme social atomisation and mental health breakdown.
We are also all hurtling towards catastrophic climate change, an AI revolution that could lead to generalised technological unemployment, and some indeterminate level of conflict between the US and China.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, most people in advanced economies look back on the post-war decades as a golden age - obviously there were problems, but there was high growth, full employment, good public services, strong unions, and comparatively cheap housing. Others look back to the 1990s as a time of untroubled horizons.
Also, the global 'we' is unhelpful. Have native Americans, Syrians or Greeks never had it so good?
Syrians are starving and in war, so they've been better. The other two examples, undoubtedly yes they are better than ever. For anyone to think it was better in any other time in history for most of the global population than now, shows such a lack of knowledge of history and the human condition that its hard to take serious. For someone so concerned with the future of humanity to create a problem with referring to all humans as "we" is a bit rich.
Scrolling instagram and fake depressions aren't worse than having 7 miscarriages, half your kids dying as babies or children, being enslaved, starving to death and a million other nice things most humans had to deal with that they don't have to deal with now. Basic access to medicine, food stability etc, on a large scale is so much better. We have the fewest people living in poverty there ever was.
Wanting to better ourselves and being aware the Maslow hierarchy continues to create infinite steps should not blind you to the amount of work millions of humans over generations have done to create such an easy mode version of the world for us. To not at least acknowledge it and just say it all sucks is myopic at the minimum.
What I object to is the extraordinarily simplistic, one-dimensional view of progress peddled by the likes of Hans Rosling and Steven Pinker.
True, lot's of material and medical indicators of progress have consistently increased. That's to be celebrated. Certainly, if asked, the vast majority of people in the West would want to be born in the post-war years, and the average would probably slant towards the end of that period. Though I do think a good slice of people would choose against the post-2008 years in particular.
But that binary - better or worse? - is a crude measure of societal health. It lacks any dialectical sense of modernity, of that fact the same socio-technological expansion which brought about that progress, has gone hand-in-hand with extreme oligarchy, world war, nuclear weapons, climate change, the anthropocene. Certainly, the risks of catastrophic global breakdown are greater today than ever before.
I also think it has a superficial and philistine grasp of politics and the common good. Besides utilitarians, few political philosophers would so easily equate the good with material abundance. Hence why I pointed, by way of counterpoint, to today's secular stagnation, crisis of democracy, inequality, and withering of public life. These are not small problems, but speak to fundamental pathologies in our body politic.
> "The other two examples, undoubtedly yes they are better than ever."
Many native Americans and Greeks would viscerally disagree with you. Perhaps you're missing something?
> "For anyone to think it was better in any other time in history for most of the global population than now, shows such a lack of knowledge of history and the human condition that its hard to take serious."
As above, you have misread what I said, and I think trying to understand and evaluate society solely from the binary standard of 'better or worse' is extremely crude. I have a PhD in history btw.
>"Scrolling instagram and fake depressions aren't worse than having 7 miscarriages, half your kids dying as babies or children, being enslaved, starving to death."
True, but I think virtually no one would say otherwise. This is an unhelpful caricature of the argument I was making.
The question is simple, given any century throughout history, would a person prefer to be born in 2000 or any century before then, not knowing anything else about their life, where they will be born, who their parents are etc. I'm pretty sure a rational person will always choose 2000 as of today if they are choosing actually thinking of the consequences and not just "I wanna cosplay as a cowboy".
If you don't think you can answer that question you don't have any knowledge. You fell into the trap of "I learned how much I didn't know and now think nothing can be answered because everything is complex" which is a trap some people fall into. At some point laws need to be written and you need answers. What is simplistic to me is saying "aw chucks it's too complex, nobody knows if it's better because for one person over there it's worse". Even complex systems have answers at the end, said another way, whatever the distribution or long tails or whatever, I can still calculate a median. You should "roll up" your knowledge into being able to still answer "yes" or "no" to something. And the answer is yes, the world is better to live in today, regardless of how much hand waving you do about specific subsets of people or caring about 2008 till now vs before as if that realistically mattered on a large scale of centuries of human existence.
It's also funny how its crude when I say it's better for everyone but it's not crude when you say it's worse for Greek people. Also still trying to understand if you think the financial crisis has anything on medieval medical practices and lack of food and societal support systems. I was poor in portugal during that period so pretty much went through the same as the Greeks and let me tell you I'd rather be poor in the 2000s than rich anywhere on earth in the 1400s.
That doesn't follow logically at all!?
Trying to reduce human history down to a summative, categorical and dichotomous judgement of '-1' or '+1' is outrageously simplistic, almost by strict definition. Incidentally, precisely this observation is baked into common idioms, like 'black and white thinking', and Manichean 'good versus evil'.
You also seen to be taking an incongruently natural scientific approach to what is a largely a meta-ethical and historical question - two fields with their own, distinctive methodologies.
I don't think this conversation has been particularly constructive, so let's wish one another the best and park it.
The logic implication is that everything is complex :)
Anyway yeah lets park it. I think you should reflect on being able to reduce complex problems to practical answers and I should reflect on not over-simplifying complex topics and if we both do that this conversation is not a waste of time. Hopefully we agree at least on that. Otherwise have a great day!
Is growth really what we should care about though? Would you prefer to live in a poor society that's growing rapidly, or a rich society that's stagnating? In terms of your quality of life (medical, food, housing, education, etc.) you're going to have a better time in the stagnant-but-rich society.
The American economy is actually doing super well right now btw: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/great-news-about-american-weal...
I haven't noticed that. The US is currently in a boom, and unemployment across the rich world is mostly at record lows.
> a crisis of democratic representation and its populist backlash,
Not sure what you mean there? Are you talking about US politics?
> the return of oligarchic inequality to levels not seen since the gilded age,
Global inequality has gone down considerably in the last few decades. Not sure what you are talking about.
> Unsurprisingly, therefore, most people in advanced economies look back on the post-war decades as a golden age - obviously there were problems, but there was high growth, full employment, good public services, strong unions, and comparatively cheap housing. Others look back to the 1990s as a time of untroubled horizons.
Those 'glorious' post-war years were when global inequality really took off. It's taken the rapid progress of the last few decades to partially undo the damage.
Fewer families being formed => more lonely adults => more people depressed.
Actual data.
I don't know how to solve this problem, either. Covid seems to have only caused all of us to double down on the social isolation that was already introduced by computing/the internet somehow.
As soon as my kid is a little older (he's 2.3 years old and still extremely high-maintenance currently), my partner and I will try to get back to what we used to do and throw more dinner parties/social events.
I would've agreed pre-covid.
Mine was that a level of poverties implying calories deficit exist in the US.
In my country the first few waves were very strong, but after a successful vaccination campaign (among other things) COVID has completely disappeared in everybody’s daily lives.
That has been happening way before Covid.
IMHO it started with the internet. Pre-internet the flow of information is gatekept by traditional media - newspapers, radio, TV, … etc. Everyone watched, listened to, read more or less the same things. This resulted in a more uniform set of opinions and more common ground between people.
The internet broke all that. People could choose what they watch/listen/read and different people picked different things, coming to very different conclusions. In the past you could ask someone if they watched X last night and there is a decent probability they did. Today it’s much harder to find common ground - you could both be on YouTube but watching completely different things.
Edit: Don’t just downvote. You got a problem with this post, say something.
The internet though is mostly chaos. There are gatekeepers, e.g. Google, but they don’t curate much - using a blacklist approach rather than whitelist - and instead just organize the information making it findable.
Niche ideas get air time and now compete in the market place of ideas.
Another teammate's family caught Covid last week.
Me and my wife caught Covid in August.
We're all vaccinated afaik (myself with 5 jabs), and thankfully we only got mild symptoms, but the problem with Covid is how easy it is for it to spread.
Do people in your life do a rapid test when they get sick? The only explanation I see for thinking that Covid has "disappeared", is that barely anyone still tests.
That and barely anyone still dies (excess of eg the flu which kills a bunch of people each year)
I did read recently that a long course of acyclovir may be a working treatment, possibly even cure, for long COVID. But in order to get that out to people, we'd have to start taking long COVID seriously.
It sucks, but you can make it through.
long covid is not something you can combat with fresh fruits, it can cause a life long disability, brain damage and more. it's quite obvious an anti-vaxxer would try to dismiss it as a "sucks but you can make it through". Look up the stories of people who still can barely get out of bed after years of long covid.
If I've dismissed anyone, I sincerely apologize. That was not my intent.
When I say "it sucks, but you can make it through" my desire is to offer hope to a group of people - that I'm a part of - that often lacks hope given the severity of their symptoms.
As for efficacy, I'd invite you to look into mitochondrial dysfunction and how long covid is related. I'll note that a carb heavy diet is one of the ways to reboot energy production on the body, which can be potent for reducing fatigue.
I choose not to believe you because you refused to vaccinate which makes everything you say suspect. Sorry.
Why?
I'll note that I haven't done what you've accused me of, though. Perhaps that counts for something, Perhaps not.
https://derekfranksmusings.substack.com/p/theres-no-such-thi...
> You see, covid is NOT really a respiratory illness. Researchers at Oxford University call it a “Serious Vascular Disease with Primary Symptoms of a Respiratory Ailment”. So, you need to stop comparing it to colds and flus. No cold killed 30,000+ Americans in less than two months in 2023. Covid did so in January and February. So, please stop comparing them.
https://www.normalcyfugitive.com/p/the-pandemic-isnt-over
One thing that (by skimming again) both articles don't touch is: excess deaths.
I've seen people suggest that we're "past it", because the excess deaths (compared to 2 years before) are now subsiding... While ignoring the fact that excess deaths compared to 2 year before are comparing against when the first few COVID spikes happened (and we didn't have vaccines, so mortality was even higher).
We need to compare our society excess mortality to 2019 (and/or average of years preceding 2020), for the foreseeable future :/
That said, I'm not spending 100% of my day worrying about COVID, and I don't take as many precautions as I could... I wear FFP2 masks in public transport, but I usually don't bother in the office, for example
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
You got the shot 5 times, still caught it, and you call it a vaccine...
Serious question. How do you keep making the decision to get the shot?
After almost 4 years of this virus, 3 years of covid vaccines, a presumably basic level of biological education, the baseline level of curiosity that I'd have thought would be present in anyone reading HN, and the world of free information at our fingertips, I don't rightly understand why people keep making elementary mistakes like this.
By redefining "vaccine" only as something that provides "sterilizing immunity" (which actually only a few of them have ever provided, and thus, this expectation was never actually part of the original definition; see: https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-few-vaccines-prevent...) and thus impugning vaccine advocacy (or specifically, COVID vaccine use) as misguided at best, you are actually contributing to a narrative of science/medicine doubt that will literally lead to more death in the world. So please reconsider your carefully-worded position.
My wife is in her 30s and healthy. COVID can still be quite brutal, although of course the extent of the measures one should take is highly debatable and subjective.
As an aside: even pre covid I was eagerly waiting for a (somewhat) affordable exoskeleton. I am going to have the best Darth Vader cosplay ever.
It's good that she had you to rely on. I did a lot of reading on long covid and there were and so are so many people isolated because they're basically spent all the time.
IMHO though, a more fitting defition of 'better' for the human condition is the amount of happiness you experience while being alife (i.e. decoupled from life expectancy).
I would then conclude (and I am really happy to be proved wrong) that the developed world being/becoming better is considerably more difficult to argue for.
Depression and sucidides in first world countries, the ones that tick all the intial boxes, are a highs not experienced since WWII. [1] is just from a quick googling and US-only. You won't have trouble finding much more evidence to support this though, for many other 1st world countries.
I would bet there is a direct link to this; between making GPD the driving factor for a country's governance vs. e.g. happiness of its citizens. Look no further than Scandinavian countries (Norway is the exeption, not declining but at least also not increasing)[2].
[1] https://time.com/5609124/us-suicide-rate-increase/
[2] https://tidsskriftet.no/en/2019/08/kronikk/why-suicide-rate-...
So, instead of measuring the objective/empirical things that:
1. Keep people alive 2. Keep them from going hungry 3. Make them healthy and pain-free 4. Keep them warm (or cool, where appropriate) 5. Etc etc etc
You instead are suggesting that we measure some subjective mood that no one can define well, test for, or detect with instrumentation? That would be the better measure?
> Depression and sucidides in first world countries, the ones that tick all the intial boxes, are a highs
I would not argue that these are insignificant, but there are methodological problems with both.
Suicide may have been traditionally undercounted for religious reasons. If you're investigating a suicide in the 1950s, it might just have been a gun-cleaning accident instead. Saves the family grief, means the deceased can be buried in the cemetery the family wants, etc.
Depression, while real, might still be subject to the sort of contagious hypochondriac panics that describe the late 20th century and early 21st so well.
Or, alternatively... it might have been undercounted until recently. We're not seeing an increase so much as that people are merely aware of it.
It's difficult to compare suicide statistics over time, especially over decades, because definitions change. (For one example, in England a coroner used to need to be able to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that a person had died by suicide, and that changed to balance of probabilities in 2018).
It's also important not to use sources like media outlets for suicide statistics, because they often don't understand what's being counted or how it's being counted. Statistics are tricky, and media often get them wrong.
You say that it's easy to show that suicides are at an all time high in many first world countries, but that's not correct. In many countries rates peaked in about 2008 - 2010 because of world wide financial crash, and have been declining since then. We might see another peak because of the financial (and other) distress caused by pandemic, but so far we're not seeing a big increase.
See the idiomatic vs. the mythological meaning on Wiktionary:
There has been a general upswing since 1600 or so, so you could say that about most years since then, at least in economic terms. In terms of happiness it seems kind of flat though.
Spiritually, we are in a deep crisis.