> Most laypeople do not organize information in ways that provide reliable monitoring of social change over time, which makes their views on progress susceptibl

> Most laypeople do not organize information in ways that provide reliable monitoring of social change over time, which makes their views on progress susceptible to memory distortions and high-profile current events and political rhetoric. My baseline for whether progress is being made is this : Is home-ownership as accessible to a single bread-winning family with 2.5 kids as it was in 1970, furthermore that's just to return to a normal time where the American dream was at least in reach, for this to be 'progressive' it'll have to encompass minorities who were most likely cut out of the ability to reach those things back in the 70s for whatever reasons. Empirically things trend towards getting worse for people when CEO's and elites are having runaway profits such as they are now. Case in point the 1920's before the great depression. CEO pay was < 100x average salaries in 1980, by 85 it was 200-300, today for some companies its as high as 5000x. Furthermore, healthcare costs have hardly made any progress in fact more and more people are having to choose to pay rent or buy diabetes medicine. When just 'living' is by default stressful and miserable for > 60% of people it can't begin to be progressive in nature.