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Do you have evidence that problems in the past that these replaced were better than these? Progress has a "flooring effect", eg., if we solve murder, the leadi

Do you have evidence that problems in the past that these replaced were better than these? Progress has a "flooring effect", eg., if we solve murder, the leading cause of death is heart disease. Heart disease wasn't as common in an era where people, on average, didn't live long enough to experience it (etc.). Have you properly accounted for this effect? Because when I look at the list of problems people had in the 1970s, 1920s, 1870s, etc. they seem far far far far worse; by orders of magnitudes.

chungus_khan 6y ago
Even if the conclusion is that life today is better than in the past, so what? Congratulations. Their lives were different than their predecessors too. Is the whole point to self-congratulate, or should we recognize and address today's problems?
- mjburgess 6y ago
  The issue is often that people with dystopian visions of the present and utopian visions of the past/future rarely have policies that are effective at actually redressing problems. Routinely their dystopianism drives them to revolutionary ideas whose net effect has always been mass impoverishment.
  - chungus_khan 6y ago
    And people with utopian perceptions of the present tend to have policies that ignore underlying problems until they boil over into revolutions. Fixating on how great the present is accomplishes nothing and appeals to almost nobody. A typical feudal serf probably lived better than a hunter-gatherer, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't want to be free, and telling them that things are better is just avoiding the question. Any analysis which fixates on things being uniformly better or uniformly worse will paint an incoherent and unhelpful picture. A realistic look at things involves looking critically at present and past policy in a nuanced manner, even in areas where things may be better.
- Aerroon 6y ago
  >Their lives were different than their predecessors too. You don't have to go back far to get to a point where this wasn't really the case. Before the industrial revolution, life for the common person was rather similar to how their parents and grandparents lived. Estimates of GDP per capita would give you a doubling or tripling of it over a period of 1000-2000 years. A similar increase happened in the US in the last ~50 years. Life is improving so much that we take it for granted. We've seen many facets of life significantly transformed in our lifetimes - eg social media, video games, the internet as a whole. Of course we should look at today's problems, but we should also look at the past for perspective. If we make a mountain out of every molehill then we might end up regressing.
lm28469 6y ago
> if we solve murder, the leading cause of death is heart disease. Heart disease wasn't as common Sure but all these things are increasing disproportionally. I don't think the obesity rate of americans tripled since the 70s because the murder rate dropped. > Because when I look at the list of problems people had in the 1970s, 1920s, 1870s, etc. they seem far far far far worse; by orders of magnitudes. I agree with you to a certain extent up the the 70s/80s, I don't think the average westerner's life got better since the 70s because of tech progress, but rather because of social progress. To me running water is a better tech than internet. Central heating is better than the smartphone. Virtually anything that came up since the 90s are either iterative progress over existing tech or straight up gadgets. We're now enslaved to them but they're not necessary to our well being.
- mjburgess 6y ago
  When all our appliances solve all our problems, the problems which remain are more prominent. No one complained in 1990 at not being able to go to the cinema, etc., whenver they liked (netflix); to coordinate with friends without hours of conversation (messenger); to search for materials without days at the library (google). These were taken for granted and are now reduced to "seconds of time". Tech since the 90s has led to a massive increase of wealth via making our time vastly more productive: both social and economic.
  - Bakary 6y ago
    Much of that wealth has filtered down to the masses, but the vast majority of it has been captured by rent-seekers or first-movers.
  - jimbokun 6y ago
    Netflix etc. has just resulted in us spending less time on the things that make us happy (time with friends and family and socializing) with things that are addictive but make us less happy (endlessly staring at pixels).
    - lm28469 6y ago
jimbokun 6y ago
What are concrete ways life has improved since the 1970s? I lived through the 1970s. We had enough good quality food, home cooked meals, and far less obesity. I had friends to play with in the neighborhood, bicycles to ride, independence ("be home for dinner!"), ball fields and basketball courts, toys, a library I could walk to with lots of books, lived close to extended family, big back yards, could walk to school, church, grocery stores, family gatherings on holidays. TV and radio for news and entertainment, which we watched too much, but not nearly as addictive as today's devices. Atari for video games. I was fortunate enough to be accepted to a good university, and was able to pay off my student loans in a few years. I don't remember as many people going bankrupt from medical bills (although people were starting to complain about the increasing costs). It's not clear to me in what ways life is objectively better today. I'm sure many people in the 1970s were worse off than me, but we were squarely lower middle class. A lot of people had more than us. I imagine life is better for racial and sexual minorities, and that shouldn't be taken for granted. But I don't think life is better for the median middle class person.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  I’m about middle of Gen-X and I also enjoyed many of the things you describe. I also did not enjoy the chance to learn about, discuss with experts (and interested novices), niche topics. Programming for me was few hundred line programs saved to audio tape or typed in from magazines. I had much less concept of the world in which we actually live than my kids do. Sure, I had the same Replogle globe that you probably did, but I didn’t know that people lived significantly differently lives outside my neighborhood. I just figured it was daytime earlier or later than it was for me. When I wanted to learn something, my parents had to drive me to the library. It might take me an hour to learn a single fact that I can access as fast as I can type the query now. If it’s something new, it might not even be in the library at all, despite being known to mankind already. When I wanted to take intro college classes after exhausting the high-school’s offering, I had to commute to college as a HS senior. When we wanted to go on vacation, we had to get a bunch of folding paper maps and plot out the route. Or laboriously copy down directions from a friend. If I wanted to be reachable, I had to stay near the phone (what we’d call a landline now). Air conditioning was a relatively rare treat. If you wanted to watch a movie at home, you had to drive to the rental place and hope that they had one of the 5-ish copies of the movie you wanted to see in stock. Plenty is better, especially around comfort, convenience, communications, and educational breadth of opportunity. (And a lot is also worse, of course.)

chungus_khan 6y ago

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

mjburgess 6y ago
The issue is often that people with dystopian visions of the present and utopian visions of the past/future rarely have policies that are effective at actually redressing problems. Routinely their dystopianism drives them to revolutionary ideas whose net effect has always been mass impoverishment.
- chungus_khan 6y ago
  And people with utopian perceptions of the present tend to have policies that ignore underlying problems until they boil over into revolutions. Fixating on how great the present is accomplishes nothing and appeals to almost nobody. A typical feudal serf probably lived better than a hunter-gatherer, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't want to be free, and telling them that things are better is just avoiding the question. Any analysis which fixates on things being uniformly better or uniformly worse will paint an incoherent and unhelpful picture. A realistic look at things involves looking critically at present and past policy in a nuanced manner, even in areas where things may be better.
Aerroon 6y ago
>Their lives were different than their predecessors too. You don't have to go back far to get to a point where this wasn't really the case. Before the industrial revolution, life for the common person was rather similar to how their parents and grandparents lived. Estimates of GDP per capita would give you a doubling or tripling of it over a period of 1000-2000 years. A similar increase happened in the US in the last ~50 years. Life is improving so much that we take it for granted. We've seen many facets of life significantly transformed in our lifetimes - eg social media, video games, the internet as a whole. Of course we should look at today's problems, but we should also look at the past for perspective. If we make a mountain out of every molehill then we might end up regressing.

lm28469 6y ago

> if we solve murder, the leading cause of death is heart disease. Heart disease wasn't as common Sure but all these things are increasing disproportionally. I don't think the obesity rate of americans tripled since the 70s because the murder rate dropped. > Because when I look at the list of problems people had in the 1970s, 1920s, 1870s, etc. they seem far far far far worse; by orders of magnitudes. I agree with you to a certain extent up the the 70s/80s, I don't think the average westerner's life got better since the 70s because of tech progress, but rather because of social progress. To me running water is a better tech than internet. Central heating is better than the smartphone. Virtually anything that came up since the 90s are either iterative progress over existing tech or straight up gadgets. We're now enslaved to them but they're not necessary to our well being.

mjburgess 6y ago
When all our appliances solve all our problems, the problems which remain are more prominent. No one complained in 1990 at not being able to go to the cinema, etc., whenver they liked (netflix); to coordinate with friends without hours of conversation (messenger); to search for materials without days at the library (google). These were taken for granted and are now reduced to "seconds of time". Tech since the 90s has led to a massive increase of wealth via making our time vastly more productive: both social and economic.
- Bakary 6y ago
  Much of that wealth has filtered down to the masses, but the vast majority of it has been captured by rent-seekers or first-movers.
- jimbokun 6y ago
  Netflix etc. has just resulted in us spending less time on the things that make us happy (time with friends and family and socializing) with things that are addictive but make us less happy (endlessly staring at pixels).
  - lm28469 6y ago

jimbokun 6y ago

What are concrete ways life has improved since the 1970s? I lived through the 1970s. We had enough good quality food, home cooked meals, and far less obesity. I had friends to play with in the neighborhood, bicycles to ride, independence ("be home for dinner!"), ball fields and basketball courts, toys, a library I could walk to with lots of books, lived close to extended family, big back yards, could walk to school, church, grocery stores, family gatherings on holidays. TV and radio for news and entertainment, which we watched too much, but not nearly as addictive as today's devices. Atari for video games. I was fortunate enough to be accepted to a good university, and was able to pay off my student loans in a few years. I don't remember as many people going bankrupt from medical bills (although people were starting to complain about the increasing costs). It's not clear to me in what ways life is objectively better today. I'm sure many people in the 1970s were worse off than me, but we were squarely lower middle class. A lot of people had more than us. I imagine life is better for racial and sexual minorities, and that shouldn't be taken for granted. But I don't think life is better for the median middle class person.

sokoloff 6y ago
I’m about middle of Gen-X and I also enjoyed many of the things you describe. I also did not enjoy the chance to learn about, discuss with experts (and interested novices), niche topics. Programming for me was few hundred line programs saved to audio tape or typed in from magazines. I had much less concept of the world in which we actually live than my kids do. Sure, I had the same Replogle globe that you probably did, but I didn’t know that people lived significantly differently lives outside my neighborhood. I just figured it was daytime earlier or later than it was for me. When I wanted to learn something, my parents had to drive me to the library. It might take me an hour to learn a single fact that I can access as fast as I can type the query now. If it’s something new, it might not even be in the library at all, despite being known to mankind already. When I wanted to take intro college classes after exhausting the high-school’s offering, I had to commute to college as a HS senior. When we wanted to go on vacation, we had to get a bunch of folding paper maps and plot out the route. Or laboriously copy down directions from a friend. If I wanted to be reachable, I had to stay near the phone (what we’d call a landline now). Air conditioning was a relatively rare treat. If you wanted to watch a movie at home, you had to drive to the rental place and hope that they had one of the 5-ish copies of the movie you wanted to see in stock. Plenty is better, especially around comfort, convenience, communications, and educational breadth of opportunity. (And a lot is also worse, of course.)