You Don't Need More Resilience. You Need Friends. and Money
bloomberg.com
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Organizing society to minimize harm is an understandable impulse, but it's really harmful to people's ability to cope when difficult to avoid or unavoidable stressors hit.
With that said, friends and resources are important and necessary. It is important to have someone you can call or text and say "I need help" and the cavalry is coming. Be that person to people in your life if you can be. I'm not able to fix society, but I'll take care of the people around me until death.
https://www.gingersoftware.com/english-online/spelling-book/...
There's probably a lot more Christians talking about Calvary than there are military historians talking about an obsolete horse unit. Although it does seem like if it's uncapitalized it's likely to be military horses and not geographical locations. I bet trying to optimize autocorrect is a fun challenge!
It is much less stressful to handle a cancer diagnosis when you can afford private medicine. And not to mention how super, duper, uber less stressful having an illness like diabetes is if you can afford insulin. Imagine how much more resilience a rape victim could have if they could afford therapy.
This has been going for a while, and coupled with other factors, I don't think it's paying good dividends. I think that everyone paying attention can see the steep increase in depression and medication. It's not only the US, it's happening in Europe too.
My impression is that we're removing people from their support networks, manufacturing lonely individuals, and eroding their financial float line through housing.
I don't think mental thoughness or resilience can overcome this for too long, and many people is exposed to this stressors for many, many years, if not their entire life.
Even Taleb, who is really tiresome talking about stress, recognizes that stress is only useful if it is more or less bounded.
Improve your friendship network and improve resilience.
As social animals who will eventually face the loss of every friend we've ever made, cultivating both a good network of friends and a kind of internal resilience is probably the best way one could choose to invest their time.
There are many very questionable ways to invest this finite/precious time, and most of us don't think twice about how much of it we squander (e.g. spending time online). There is a small category of things to focus on that is almost universally worth the effort: sleep, diet, exercise, social connection. Focusing on these things also tends to help establish that inner strength.
The difference is very stark. I probably made 1-2 good friends in the _10 years_ after college, compared to 30+ friends in the 10 years prior to that. Luckily, I managed to keep most friends from before starting work.
Full time work is an absolute black hole of time and relationships.
People who don't have good networks _before_ they start full time work are absolutely boned and I don't think there's an easy solution.
In her 90s, my grandmother said to me "Your generation has far more money than we had, but we were happier and had less stress." She grew up in a just slightly more than a subsistence level farm family, then with my grandfather achieved just enough farming success to send the next generation to college. She travelled away from home just a few times in life, but as she said - it was a generally low-stress life.
Modern life on the other hand often starts the day with an utterly toxic commute. When we eat, it's often while working at our desk. Our housing costs are far above what was historically considered a safe % of income. We take almost no vacation and when we do, we take our laptop and phone with us. Even if we have health insurance, it is often very challenging to actually get preventative care.
I could go on and on, but my point is - modern life is stressful in completely different ways than the stressed encountered by the historical "peasant farmer." His stress involved things he might be able to do something about, like storing up grain for winter or reinforcing his dwelling. Our modern stress is far more obtuse and difficult to control, like the Fed raising rates or Congress introducing a rider on a bill that wipes out a tax credit that was the only thing keeping us profitable.
Yet another reason to bicycle (and to have good bike infrastructure!)
A peasant farmer was dramatically more likely to experience violence in a given year. But (from studies I've seen) they probably spent fewer hours in a week working and more with family and friends than a modern-day office worker.
It seems quite possible that the chronic, low-level stress of much modern life
- requires different methods of prevention and healing
- does more damage over the long term if untreated
I wonder why your phrasing feels like blame-the-victim?
The people I know under stress in modern society often lack clear options for alternatives or need a completely radical change in their situation.
Or alternatively perhaps we don't actually have prosperity?
I also tend to find the idea that we can "control our attitude and perspective" is sometimes used to blame others or self-guilt ourselves for outcomes that are truly outside ones own rational control. The extreme example of this is the belief in manifestation: we can pay for courses to learn how to remove "blocks" so somehow the cancer is ones own fault for not thinking right.
I agree with you that we need to take responsibility for what we can change. I believe we can learn new mindsets or Jiu-Jitsu our minds into grooves that work better. I also think that doing that is extremely difficult and that also that there is much that remains beyond our control (internally or externally). Also the territory of self-help has many traps and deceptions - a hard road to find.
Stoicism seems to also provide plenty examples of people finding stress and emotion to be first reactions muddying the waters of perception necessary for loftier goals and work than simple hunter gatherers.
Stress long term is unusual for the body and a major disadvantage imo.
And stoicism seeing some quantifiable research into aiding in depression leads me to believe the individual in the current cultural hegemony of western culture is simply a victim, a child never truly raised.
"Work, play - at sixty our powers and tastes are what they were at seventeen." - Brave New World
But we have designed ourselves into isolation. Half of marriages (built-in community) end, most people no longer go to church, there are not really civic organizations any more, etc. I can spend an entire, active Saturday without interacting with anyone: drive to the park in the morning and walk in the woods, go to the art museum (electronic tickets, so not even interaction purchasing a ticket), check books out from the library (self-checkout), buy groceries to cook dinner (self-checkout is usually faster), watch a movie on my home theater setup. That's even without mobile phones, or the numbing false sense of community of social networks.
So not only do we not have the normal human difficulty in actually caring about and loving another person, but we do not even have the social structure to find people to care about. As a result it's easy to live a life where you experience little of enjoying others and being enjoyed by others.
I still periodically hang out with about a dozen people I met via meetups like 9 years ago. Used to be a lot more, and some moved or drifted off (on both sides, I'm guilty of it as well), but that's still a decent number.
That's not including the group of game designers I befriended by hosting playtest nights, or the local writing group I still do things with every November for Nanowrimo, or a handful of people I met from a couple new meetups I started going to recently.
I've attended funerals, friendsgivings, baby showers, and the like for a few of them too, so we're not just casual friends (although a love of board games and geeky things does tie a lot of us together).
And in that toolbox should be venting to a friend or taking a break for the evening or weekend and splurging on a nice dinner or small holiday. That’s the article’s point: it’s insufficient to insist on managing it all internally.
People don't get rich with resilience, but by charisma, family support, genetic lottery, connections, friends, and opportunities.
Resilience and ingenuity are cool too, but there are tons of resilient and ingenius people that never make it. And there are extremely resilient single mothers working 2 jobs and making ends meet without complaining. But that doesn't get them any success.
It's one thing that we get the occasional natural disaster, financial crisis, or some war in some remote country. We can handle that, this has been the case throughout human history.
But we just came out of a four-year pandemic (and hell, if you look at sewage monitoring, hospitals or half your colleagues being out sick, it still isn't over), after decades of wage stagnation, multiple crises, seriously escalating wars, exploding rents, masses of people living on the streets in the US, climate change is looming, autocrats are on the rise across the world - it's fucking enough already. Politicians aren't doing a thing to help us, no one is looking out for anybody else any more because no one has the mental/physical/time/financial resources to do so.
We are in unprecedentedly bad times, and I can completely understand anybody saying "screw this, I'm out" and just going mental in one way or another. Some resort to drugs, some just break down completely, some off themselves, some off others - everyone reacts different in response to too much stress.
To be honest, I'm not sure how that can be misconstrued on Hacker News, when people frequently focus on the power of groups working together (whether that's open source, corporations, or other organizations). It's clear that some of the most lauded organizations are ones that often support their members, especially in times of hardship.
This comes from someone who is very much a proponent of perseverance. My first tattoo enshrines this Japanese proverb on my forearm where I can always see it:
七転び八起き
Fall seven times, stand up eightThese all seem like fair statements that sound like they come from the department of "no shit, Sherlock," to me.
But there are so many graduates of the school of hard knocks giving straight up dangerous advice and people might want to be more careful.
I thought my resume was a perfect fit, an intersection of fairly niche technologies and skills that I actually had. I had to do multiple screening rounds, solve leetcode-esque problems.
I made it to the onsite! My nerves were going crazy but, the first coding problem, I went right to work, my fingers were flying, and by the end of it I could see that my interviewer was more than pleased. He said I finished early and we could just chat about life at BigCo.
The second round was similar, and the third round! Fourth round, not as great, but I didn't completely whiff on the question. And..........I got rejected.
I was in the dumps for months. Maybe I wasn't cut out for big tech. I'm not smart enough. I don't have impressive credentials. But eventually I said fuck it, I'm going again. I applied to a few more jobs and.....started getting offers at top tier companies.
The algorithmic thinking is hard, coding fast is hard, not letting my nerves get the best of me is hard, explaining my thought process took practice, but just having the resilience to go through the process after hard rejection was crucial.
I had a job at the time, and part of me really wanted to just give up and say I was content with my gig at a small company. But I didn't give up.
I hope I can pass on that trait to my son one day.
The world needs more examples of perseverance leading to success. I think a lot of people think success should come without perseverance. Maybe it works that way for some people but it sure doesn't for me.
Cheers
That's a nice sentiment, but something I noticed when I eventually managed to graduate college was that there was no substitute for a good safety net and parental support.
I watched dumbfounded as some of my classmates went on to found or join risky startups during the great recession. For me, failure would have been catastrophic. I'd have likely wound up sleeping under a bridge. I was amazed they were so fearless! Only, I later learned the reason they were so fearless is they knew their parents would step in and pay for their living expenses while they got back on their feet.
TLDR: Some folks can swing for the fences, take outsized risks, and reap the rewards, because failure is always an option.
Resilience: Stay strong when you're a working single mother struggling to pay rent and feed your kids.
The techno-twitter teeth grinders would have you believe these are the same. They are not.
So much for "lazy".
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2039393/quotes/?item=qt2347398&...
(Warning, 4 letter words.)
>> "Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something."
>> "Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on."
>> "Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work."
>> "Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it."
Perhaps that's objectively true or maybe that's just your perspective (ie, what your level of resilience can handle)
Like your classmates I joined a risky startup as employee 1 during the great recession, but unlike them I didn't have any backstop. Failure would have hurt but it wouldn't have been catastrophic - including rent and income-based college loan repayment my monthly nut was maybe $1k. When I was short on cash I took a job at nights doing phone tech support and later building websites for local businesses in my spare time. That isn't to say there weren't bumps (had my first run-in with the IRS -- and debt collectors) but to me there was always a way to make ends meet. Of course i owed some of that to being young and healthy without dependents, and the availability of $600/month apartments...
Maybe 'living under a bridge' is hyperbolic. I'm sure I could have couch surfed, or at worst lived out of my truck, but my life back then revolved around how many weeks or months living expenses I had on hand.
Now at age ~40 I can afford to take risks like zuck and gates could when they were 20.
I’m my own rich parents.
On HN, apparently! You guys should get together and take some risks. Frankly, I'd much rather work with 40-year olds than 20-year olds. You may not get the same energy, but you're also much less likely to see your coworker throwing up in the office for half the day after that binge drinking night before.
i am obviously not in the same boat as when i was 20. at 20 i knew nothing, i had dumb ideas, and i would have worked my ass off building something that noone needs. now i have experience, and i know that i am not going to waste one minute on coding until i have found customers that will pay for it.
i am building a new consultancy right now. i just need a partner to help me with sales. once we get projects i can start hiring and together we can grow the business.
it's low risk because looking for projects is more or less like looking for jobs. anyone interested?
No, they are made by people who failed since their twenties and learnt a great deal along the way and made the right connections.
There are powerlifters in their 40s - but I suspect you'd damage something if you just marched into a gym and started lifting twice your weight.
I was just out of for a year and had to live off savings and do small gigs. My community I’ve built on my own for the last 20 years (including my friend jacquesm) sent me money and bought me food and took me to the doctor…
Luckily I got a full time startup job a month before i was insolvent but i have to rebuild my finances
Oh and simultaneously I’m starting a residential waste cooperative that won’t make me any money by design
Risk taking tolerance can be taught but you need to have an unquenchable fire and be intelligent
When you don't that drive for safety can leave one with a very risk adverse mindset. So yeah, you can be FI at 40, but that won't magically change the temperament that got you there.
you don't need parental support if you live in a country that actually has a decent social safety net.
my parents were/are poor. once i moved out i never needed any money from them. however when i was a child we had to live from social services. and that was enough for us to have what we needed.
that safety net gave me the same feeling of security that your friends got from their family. i was able to travel the world from money i earned myself. i took jobs and contracts wherever i wanted, because i knew, if all else fails i can go back to my home country. (edited to clarify)
and even though many people complain how social support is not enough to live on, i have learned to live frugally, and i know that it would be enough for me.
i know that, no matter how bad things could get, i'll never have to sleep under a bridge.
as a society, that should be a minimum standard to aim for. seeing how cities in the US deal with homelessness leaves me dumbfounded. how can a society allow that to happen? it absolutely makes no sense to me. you really need to fix that.
So do you need the parental support or not?
It sounds like "not"; that their support was the system of people governing their home country.
Empirically, there must be some other critical variables your hypothesis is leaving out to explain what we see in reality.
america was built by immigrants who all took a great risk getting there (with apologies to the native americans who were there first), so given equal conditions, a lot more people in america are willing to experiment.
as one consequence americans also have more rolemodels of successful risk-takers.
pretty much elsewhere in the world (at least western and asian countries that i have been to) taking a risk is considered something bad. the hackerspace in singapure has a sign that says: "this is singapures only kiasu free zone". kiasu means "extreme fear of losing", something prevalent in asian culture. european culture is better in that regard, but not much.
so yeah, despite the benefits, most people in europe are afraid to try.
also, as i mentioned, at least in germany people are complaining that the support is not enough.
they didn't have the experience to see the system working like i did. i am willing to take a risk because i have already experienced what will happen when i fail. most people don't have that advantage.
also, because of the lower risk tolerance it is much harder for startups in europe to get money. there are few investors and banks will only give you a credit if you have a proven business model.
most rich people in europe are rich because their families had been rich for centuries. it's almost all old money.
In both cases you “have nothing to lose” in the sense of, if your attempt fails, you’re back to where you started.
For the middle-class person failing hard, but having no safety net means you do get a reduction and so most people who fall into this category are the most risk adverse.
On the other hand, people who have been homeless or in excessively traumatic situations are basically like it’s never gonna be that bad again, and I survived it so I can handle basically anything.
I fall into that second category, which is why I start so much stuff including building communities, literally everywhere I go
I know a ton of people who had their credit cards paid, student loans paid, housing paid, car payments, etc .... parents all gave them the hand outs and helped them and they were able to constantly have fun, socialize and party and meet more and more people....I have been forced to work for reality
As for deeper changes, business self-help authors — who often make their real money not from selling books, but from paid speaking and consulting gigs at large companies — aren’t about to tell you to quit your draining job and take a (perhaps lower-paid) role at a less-demanding organization. Nor do most of them suggest policy changes that contribute to a more resilient workforce — such as paid sick days, parental leave or flexible staffing models — that cost companies money. It’s safer for their business model to keep emphasizing inner strength. And maybe, too, that message plays well with an audience that hates to admit there can be trade-offs.
You'll have evil corp pushing their employees to the max. Then HR sends an email "we care about your mental health", which includes a link to an e-course on meditation.
They do not care about your mental health because they don't spent a second addressing the root cause of the overload of stress.
All of society now has this fatalism built in. The believe that we can fix problems and improve life for all is largely gone. Instead, the energy is that we accept that the future is bleak, make no effort to change it, expect things to perpetually get even worse, and somehow at an individual level try to find some marginal happiness within this reality we see as a given.
I'm personally not as pessimistic as the above suggests, just saying this is the culture.
This is HN. Private bit torrent trackers anyone? The higher your seed-to-leech ratio in a small community, the more use the community will be to you.
This applies directly to friend groups. If each person tries to seed the group with actions that benefit many but are trivial for them to accomplish based on personal stats, everyone benefits disproportionately to the individual effort invested. High ratios can then be tapped for uncommon and/or infrequent requests without compromising relationships.
Anecdote: being poor is the most soul crushing thing that has happened to me. In my early 20s, I would go dancing sometimes and someone would approach me saying "you should buy me a drink" and I remember saying no because I had like 50$ total. Note, I was not blessed with loving parents. I don't know for sure, but I am willing to bet that people with more money have more friends with higher quality and deeper bonds then people with less money. I do think this plateaus however.
When you have two, you have two, when you have one, you have none, what is it? Options.
When you don't have a dime you don't choose not to spend money, your brain never gets there, it's just a "no" and the "no" is because you are poor.
That said, a club typically has people wanting free drinks and people not wanting to reciprocate. This environment is setting oneself up to be taken advantage of.
Still plenty of stay-home moms who raise the kids and make the home. I don’t think your comment about that way of life being outdated is accurate, and I predict that because of automation the over-all need for labor will decline such that we will necessarily as a society go back to breadwinners and caretakers working together to build a household.
I call hard bullshit. Without even considering luxury spending, just not having to think about money very often is incredibly nice, and $75k is nowhere near any kind of plateau on that.
At $75k you had damn well better still be tallying up how much money's going in your cart at the grocery store. Not having to do that for basic stuff anymore, not having to worry much about coupons or bargain-shopping and just being able to say "I need this, or at least it would be very nice to have" and get it, no worry, no saving, no waiting for a sale, is such a GIGANTIC load off one's mind.
Car breaks? Take it to the shop, any plausible bill won't trash your budget for the month, let alone the year. Water leak? Yeah you could fix the drywall... but if you really don't feel like it this time, or are busy, you can just have someone else do it and the bill won't sting that bad. Groceries? Barely even pay attention to the total. Need some particular clothes for some purpose? Just buy them, and decent ones that won't look like shit and do fit right, at that. Kid breaks their arm? The cost barely even crosses your mind (it'll suck, but you'll be fine).
It is SUCH a relief.
If you can't infer from those peoples' behaviour money doesn't make you happy, I think you've got a long learning curve ahead of you.
If I were to venture a guess, drug overdose prevalence is high in some disadvantaged cohorts, not among well off or rich.
Safety, improved-probability-of-continued-comfort, options, and freedom-of-action do great things for most people's happiness, and those are what money is.
Not being anywhere near as stressed, and spending at-most 5% as much time thinking and worrying about money as I did when we were struggling, sure frees up a lot of energy and time to pursue happiness, if not providing it directly (i.e. not even counting when I'm able to trade cash for things like free time to play with my kids or spend more quality time with my wife, let alone buying toys, which, hell, is also genuinely nice).
I'm certainly grateful every damn time we have some mid-tier emergency pop up and the part of my brain dedicated to money just goes "hm, that's a shame" and then shuts up, rather than screaming "OH FUCK OH FUCK OH FUCK" for a day or three. It'd be madness to suggest there's not a strong correlation between that relief and general happiness.
I think a true sense of purpose to life is likely to make someone far happier, and ironically money can't buy that. Same with most things really worth having.
Is that adjusted for COVID-era inflation? That number should be 20% higher, at least.
That claim is 100% bullshit and I'm surprised anybody on HN would ever believe it. Just consider housing prices alone!
Where was that study done? Bumfuck, Nowhere, where a 2,000 sq ft house is $50K and you can live like a king on $30/hr? Was it done in 1990 or something?
Go to ANY major city and $75K/year won't even buy you a modest condo, let alone a house. You'll struggle to even raise a family in an apartment on that.
I can certainly tell you that I'm much happier making $200K/year than when I was making $100K/year. $100K paid all the bills and still had decent disposable income. $200K means I can buy a $2,000 GPU and not feel like I need to budget for it. $200K means I can buy my $150,000 dream car. $200K means I can buy prime-quality ribeye on a whim and not care that it's $30/lb. It means flying first class to Italy when I go on vacation, rather than flying coach to somewhere in the USA.
I can't fathom how ANYBODY can think the plateau happens at $75K. Absolute and utter nonsense.
I touched on the topic of housing. I think most families would be happier in a ~2000 sq ft house rather than a <1000 sq ft apartment[0]. Certainly you can accept that truth without needing a peer-reviewed study of people's housing preferences. You can't buy a 2000 sq ft house on $75K/year unless you're in the middle of nowhere.
[0] Note that I mean MOST, not ALL. There are some people that despise single-family homes and prefer the higher-density aparments/condos, but I think they're a minority.
I would argue that life satisfaction is much more important than happiness generally regardless.
You just avoided the worst type of people anyway.
He specifically stated his reason for declining. I'm not sure why you turned the comment towards yourself...
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38918643
1: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
The world we inhabit (and by we I mean most of us who are workers and make a living by selling our labor) isn’t really for us. We are cogs in the machine that is essentially propping up the lifestyle of the capitalist class. The world is for them. Those of us here on Hacker News are closer to being human than say a Janitor and our status affords us more luxuries but we are still just machines even if some of us might become human.
To mitigate the risk of the workers taking too much power there has been a lot of effort spent atomizing workers and smashing unions over the years. Combine that with social media that seems to have the (probably unintentional) side effect of making us all hate each other we dont tend to have many friends these days.
Money is more obviously just stolen from us by the capital owning class. Directly through government intervention and wage theft, and more subtly through what Marx calls surplus value.
If there's a lot of surplus value in building a chair, that's a sign that we need more chairs. If you can't generate surplus value with the 7th coffee shop in the same city block, that's a sign there's too many coffee shops.
Any system that aims to remove surplus value removes this signal, which leaves you with a centrally controlled economy/system - and those tend to not only never work (at basically any scale) but tend to make everyone's life worse and worse over time and/or fail catastrophically.
Also, for what it's worth, I think you might be projecting on to some assumptions you have about janitorial work.
My intuition is that the missing "surplus value" exists within the answer to that question.
The option to start their own business is right in front of them. They even have a group of like-minded individuals with complementary skills that they could form a co-op with. Since they don't do that, obviously they're getting something from being a W-2 worker. It seems to me that they're not accounting for that something when asserting that there's some surplus value they're creating but not capturing. More accurately, that "surplus value" is being traded for whatever it is they get from W-2 work (e.g. a steady buyer for their labor).
IIUC Marx says roughly that laborers are beholden to capital owners because they need access to that capital to be able to perform their labor. But lots of programmers/IT people have better equipment at home than their job provides (e.g. multiple large 4k displays, powerful CPUs, plentiful RAM). Many also have hobby homelab or colocated machines that they could easily run a business off of. They don't need access to someone else's capital, but they still sell their labor.
It's the same as when people say that geo pay is "fair" because of cost-of-living differences. You're buying something (e.g. living 15 minutes from the ocean in an area with year-round perfect weather and lots of things to do) with that cost of living. Otherwise--obviously--you'd go somewhere else.
For everyone who starts there own business there are two to four orders of magnitude of employment contracts so almost by definition starting your own business can't be a solution for everyone.
1. Show me the system proven to be "better". The one you're willing to live under. Take your time I'll wait.
2. Even in capitalism you have choice. Go work for a union shop. Go work for a collective ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation ). If you dont like those, start your own company.
I feel like this article is targeting a generation... Its message is mixed, but the conclusion is spot on. You need money, friends, and a thick skin/patience (and all that is hard work, on top of your job).
I don't need to show you something proven to be better to ask that question unless you have some kind of creationist-like belief that all systems have been discovered and tried.
1930's United fruit. I dont think we're gonna argue that they were "good" but their impact was bad in the face of weak governments.
In the US we have our 3 branches. We also have Adams 4th branch (jury nullification). There is the 4th estate / first amendment. And then there is corporations. Corporations having some influence on government is good but the US is leaning into too much territory, and Europe too little. Change isn't hard in the US, it's motivating people out of apathy to get it done that is hard.
Shockingly most capitalist countries have it easy. There is a famous story about a grocery store and how it killed the USSR: https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When...
If you want change it isn't about "honest about the suck" its about motivating me and everyone else to buy into something enough to put down the phone and get off the couch and make that change happen.
We're allowed to complain about the shortcomings of the system we live under and as humans we find connection by finding commonalities with others, even though we may not have a solution for any of the problems. You might be unable to have problems you can't fix, but everyone else has to live with them.
You're blaming an economic framework for what in the majority of cases is failure of government. Frankly half a million homeless Americans is far better than the current alternatives of Russia or China... It isn't a very good point.
in 1950 the average American home was 900 ish sq ft. Today the average American has 900sqf of space IN their home. We went from united fruit (misery where governments were weak) to fruit, coffee, tea, chocolate, cobalt, nickel... Americans got fat, and everyone else had the same level of suffering (maybe).
Candidly it's been "a large proportion of the planet living in misery" forever. We're still the same monkeys who raped and murdered the neanderthals out of existence, we haven't really evolved since we salted the earth at Carthage.
Look at the USSR, everyone was going to get a house, and a car and a.... Status wasn't about money it was about who got one first. At a point in Chinese communism status was indicated by pens (how many, if you keep them in a pocket)... The way you got ahead in these systems was graft, bribery and birthright. At least in the US and EU there is some sense of being able to elevate myself and a path to get there. The problem is that some people don't want to take it, they don't want to put the work in. The reality is that their quality of life is going to decline in the continuing global future because there isn't enough to go around.
The current trend of wealth leading to decline in population (birth rate below replacement) is fascinating. The US makes up for it with immigration, china and Japan not so much, and Europe is going to have a cultural shift because of it. The next few decades will be interesting.
The reality is that we're picking the option that sucks the least. I, am not happy about it, but no one has shown up with a better alternative that WORKS.
except that the USA is a rich country, from the point of view of capitalist competition, for more than 100 years. If a place like the USA cannot solve the plague of misery and homelessness (not to talk about the lack of basic health care) then what can you expect from the rest? It is definitely a failure of capitalism to solve these fundamental issues. The USA and other countries should seriously rethink their economic system before it is too late.
Im not sure what this is, but there is no place or point in history where a mass of people has been more well off than the US at present. Fraud, corruption, homelessness were always going to have some degree of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38905889
What is interesting is that there are places in the states where they are doing a great job with homelessness. Houston springs to mind, and that (politically) is shocking till you look at why and how they fixed it... They removed the incentive to compete, and changed how people are placed.
That is so false, just compare present USA to USA 30 years ago.