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I find these sorts of discussions unproductive in the absence of some specific focal points. Discussing how well the US is doing overall is sort of meaningless
by derbOac 4y ago
I find these sorts of discussions unproductive in the absence of some specific focal points. Discussing how well the US is doing overall is sort of meaningless because it's so heterogeneous; you could have serious problems even while overall the country is doing well by historical standards.
Saying things are fine by the standards of the 1940s isn't helpful either; I'm not sure that's ever really been an appropriate yardstick (I think public health and wellness opportunity costs are often more relevant). I also think you can take many of these same sorts of arguments, go back in time, and find out that many positive indicators preceded very horrific periods in world history. For instance, there were a lot of societal advancements that coincided with the emergence of the world wars, and they still happened despite (or maybe even because) of those advancements.
I also have come to believe that many forms of societal collapse or crisis emerge fairly rapidly; things seem good by many objective indicators until they really don't. If you track some of these public indicators, they often seem to covary relatively weakly with the sorts of things you might expect, and no one really understands why. Seen from a distanced perspective those indicators don't seem to work as measures of what you'd like them to.
I'm not trying to adopt a pessimistic position, as I tend to think a lot of that is equally poorly posed, and I think the article is correct that if you look to history simply for benchmarks of what to expect when something bad happens, things aren't as catastrophic as you'd think. But in the absence of some kind of rigorous understanding of what to look to for societal collapse or catastrophe, these kinds of discussions in either direction are kind of pointless. What seems more relevant are more focal discussions of specific issues, or how to predict what is important.
- Retric 4y agoHe directly mentions how things have been improved since 2007, so no the comparison isn’t just to the 1940’s. His point is people think American is much worse off than it actually is and he backs that up.
- zcw100 4y agoYou could make the argument that America is great because we think we suck and drive ourselves harder than might be necessary. It's when you think you're great that you become complacent.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y agoThat's an interesting dichotomy considering that, from an outsider's perspective, America seems to have a lot more "We're #1", "Greatest nation on the planet", "boo when you hear someone else's national anthem" sentiment than anything else. Maybe it's a collective overcompensation? But it doesn't seem terribly self aware.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mnky9800n 4y agoFast processes driven by chaos exist in nature everywhere. There's no reason to think you are even being pessimistic as much as you are being realistic.
- zmgsabst 4y agoAn example is GDP: - GDP gains might reflect an overall loss to society, as the previously untracked work (homemaking) was more valuable than the GDP-tracked work that replaced it… and families are doing substantially worse just to survive - GDP per capita might not reflect that 99% of society is doing worse as we experience de-industrialization and destruction of our communities because paper gains like ownership stakes in foreign companies and hyper inflated real estate “mask” the losses experienced by most people I’m curious what US metrics look like if you exclude the top… 5% over the past 50 years. What has life been like for 19 out of 20 people?
- starkd 4y agoCorrect. In the same way a venture capitalist can still be successful if only 1 out of 20 of his ventures succeeds and 19/20 fail.
- empyrrhicist 4y agoNot just an example, but perhaps the classic example of why averages can be misleading. The obvious comparison is median income: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/stagnating-median-incomes-despite-economic-growth-explaining-divergence-27-oecd https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/stagnating-median-incomes-des...
- spywaregorilla 4y agoGDP isn't attributed to specific individuals so you can't really show "GDP per capita excluding the top 5%"
- zmgsabst 4y agoI phrased that poorly: I meant things like income or other household metrics, but only for the bottom 95%. Precisely because GDP doesn’t give us that insight.
- sokoloff 4y ago> paper gains like ownership stakes in foreign companies and hyper inflated real estate “mask” the losses experienced by most people Paper gains and real estate holdings/transactions are not part of GDP.
- borissk 4y ago>> Discussing how well the US is doing overall is sort of meaningless because it's so heterogeneous Complete nonsense. Discussing what the temperature of an object is overall is meaningless, because it's made of individual atoms and molecules that do their own thing...
- caddemon 4y agoPhysics is a lot more well understood than human behavior. Abstracting away details of complicated social structures often doesn't work out very well.