6 ms·

I think it’s not perfect but probably the best we have. People forgot or simply don’t realize how much worse life was just a couple of decades ago (in terms of

by baxtr 10mo ago

I think it’s not perfect but probably the best we have. People forgot or simply don’t realize how much worse life was just a couple of decades ago (in terms of nutrition, access to knowledge, clean water, material wealth).

djtango 10mo ago
Simpson's paradox does allow for the possibility that nutrition, access to knowledge, clean water and material wealth has improved in the aggregate while it getting worse for subpopulations. A lot of people in the world are angry and one of the things that fuels this anger is the "gaslighting" that the data shows their lives are better while their lived reality is the opposite. Don't forget that Millennials are the first generation to be poorer than their parents in a long time...
- zmgsabst 10mo ago
  Millennials are 30-45, roughly. There’s now a large segment (and several generations) of society for whom the system has never worked, even if the growth of retirement accounts masks the loss of wealth and well-being.
- huhkerrf 10mo ago
  > Don't forget that Millennials are the first generation to be poorer than their parents in a long time... This is simply not true. At some point, we do need to rely on data other than "lived experience," which compares one's quality of life at 22 to someone's quality of life at 50. "Younger Americans (millennials and Gen Zers) owned $1.23 for every $1 of wealth owned by Gen Xers at the same age." "Younger Americans (millennials and Gen Zers) owned $1.35 for every $1 of wealth owned by baby boomers at the same age." https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of-us-household-wealth https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of...
  - vanviegen 10mo ago
    If they ever want to own a house they won't need just 23% or 35% more wealth, but more like 200% and 1000% respectively. You do need to start at lived experience to know which data to look at.
    - djtango 10mo ago
      Exactly - people have it backwards, when data diverges from lived experience you don't tell lived experience to shut up cuz' dataa you go back and check your models and your data collection. And you check and you check and you check. Einstein was famously wary of Quantum Mechanics rather than taking the findings at face value, and I guarantee that economic data is a hell of a lot less rigorous and more complicated than particle physics. Not to mention the data is political...
      - mlrtime 10mo ago
        It's funny, I say the exact same thing about crime in NYC. Statistically it's safer than rural Oklahoma... but your lived experience in taking the subway 45 minutes every day will not paint the same safety experience that can't be found in any statistic.
      - huhkerrf 10mo ago
        That's silly. People have wrong impressions about a lot of things. Your "lived experience" (you can just say experience, okay?) can be wrong.
      - BrenBarn 10mo ago
        The thing is that that's not a conflict between data and lived experience, it's just a conflict between different sets of data. If you measure wealth and then you measure wealth relative to housing costs, neither one of those is "lived experience". If you do a survey on people's sentiments about the economy, that's data too. I'm skeptical of the term "lived experience" precisely because people tend to use it in arguments of the form "let's disregard data in favor of my individual preferences". But when you aggregate the "lived experience" of many people, you get data, and that data can be just as valuable as more anodyne economic data.
  - sehansen 10mo ago
    That's mean wealth, not median wealth. Mean millenial wealth at 34[0] is $345,000 and median millenial wealth at 38[1] is $130,000. Given that inequality has been rising steadily in the US over the past 30 years, the mean and median wealth of Gen Xers and boomers were almost certainly closer to each other than for millenials. 0: your source has mean at 34 in 2025, https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of-us-household-wealth https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of... 1: the best I could find was median at 38 in 2022: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/feb/millennials-older-gen-zers-significant-wealth-gain-2022 https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/feb/millennia...
    - huhkerrf 10mo ago
      Yeah, but how does millennial median wealth compare to boomer median wealth? That's the question. I'm happy to be proven wrong.
guerrilla 10mo ago
It's definitely not the best we have though. People have created all kinds of metrics which measured things in better ways more relevant to our human goals. It's an entire genre of publication in economics and some of them are very popular. It's a choice to ignore them. Also, see what djtango said. It's not that simple.
- boxed 10mo ago
  It's the best that has been used by a society that didn't later collapse though.
  - guerrilla 10mo ago
    That's hardly a relevant response considering no society have used any of the ones I am speaking about in the way that you mean. The OECD, UN, IMF and others use many of them as secondary metrics though.
    - boxed 10mo ago
      I just find the "what have the romans ever done for us?" argument to be scary. It leads very quickly and easily to struggle sessions and the terror. I'm all for trying things for sure, but it has to be done in very small scale and over significant time scales.
      - NoGravitas 10mo ago
        "THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.” ― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
lnsru 10mo ago
The question is where. Couple decades ago rent in Munich was like 3x lower. While salaries were insignificantly lower with overall lower living cost. Couple decades ago Germany had electronics industry. Now it’s gone. More industries are following. Couple decades ago there were rather isolated Yugoslav Wars. Now it’s introduction into WW3 with active war in Ukraine and hybrid attacks everywhere in Europe. It depends heavily on location. Indian colleague has completely different world view and is proud how India is progressing.
- imp0cat 10mo ago
  Obviously it depends on your point of view. That entire region (India, Pakistan and Afghanistan) still has a lot of work to do.
- bojan 10mo ago
  That progress in India comes as an excuse to weaken their democratic institutions. The fallacy is that Modi is to praise - the progress comes mostly because of enormously positive global trends developed in the past decades, the ones that are now being threatened. > Couple decades ago there were rather isolated Yugoslav Wars. A bit of nuance, they ended in 1999, however the whole thing is still influencing Europe negatively and is not as isolated as it seems. Not just there are now seven countries instead of one to consider and negotiate with, a couple of them are utterly disfunctional. Further, two biggest chunks are deeply sunk into nationalism. Far too little effort had been made back then to try to reform the place into a functional system.
  - roenxi 10mo ago
    Progress in India is due to policy in India. The idea that India can handwave it's successes and failures on external forces might have been well justified in 1955, but in this century they get to choose. Best hope for the anti-Modi-policy crowd is maybe it isn't Modi's policies specifically. In fact, in the vast majority of cases (including North America, South America, Europe, East Asia, India & South-East Asia) progress is entirely about countries choosing how quickly they are comfortable with improvement happening. Africa and the Middle East it is a combination of policy choices and cultural problems. Arguably foreign interference - although even then policy and strategy tends to be the bigger thing over time.
mikelitoris 10mo ago
All of those except for access to knowledge were better in the U.S. 20-30 years ago even though GDP per capita "grew" even in real terms.
- nikanj 10mo ago
  If you take access to knowledge to mean post-secondary tuition, it was also much better 30 years ago
nikanj 10mo ago
Just a couple of decades ago a common working stiff could buy their family a nice home in any US city.
- inglor_cz 10mo ago
  If you are talking about the 1960s or so, there also were 150 million fewer people in the US? That matters for housing costs. Some places like Austin, which haven't gone down the NIMBY zoning route, are still somewhat affordable.
lm28469 10mo ago
It's utter trash, it was good when we had industry focused economies instead of service focused ones. Everybody mocked Russia for having the same gdp as Spain. As it turns out your economy is much stronger when it's focused on heavy industries, steel, mining, oil, &c. Than when it is focused on tourism and other services One produces value, the other generates money, when shits hit the fan you need energy, the drunk brits coming in your strip clubs aren't that useful anymore
- baxtr 10mo ago
  Oh yes sorry, I forgot that Russia is super successful in Ukraine and Europe is on the brink of collapse because it ran out of energy!
  - lm28469 10mo ago
    That's not my point at all Do you think Spain would fair better than Russia against Ukraine ?
    - enaaem 10mo ago
      Actually yes. Ukraine is far easier to invade for Russia. Geography is super flat. You can drive in from anywhere. Easy to supply thanks to sovjet rail. Spain is very mountainous and a pain in the ass to invade. How would Russia supply their troops that are completely rail dependent?
    - baxtr 10mo ago
      I get your point. Spain would fail miserably. But you’re not taken into account how many men Russia is losing to maintain that level of aggression. It’s compensating its small GDP with humans. Spain would never do that and thus fail.
- inglor_cz 10mo ago
  Russia is fighting the war exactly how I would expect an economy of that size to fight a war. Slow attrition coming from an inability to overwhelm their enemy decisively and fast. How exactly is their economy "strong"? By what measure? You cannot really eat tanks, that is what made life in the Soviet Union unsatisfactory as well. Current price of Ural oil is some 9 dollars above their breakeven costs. As the classic says, not great, not terrible.
wewxjfq 10mo ago
Clean water was a one-time thing and more driven by state action than GDP growth. Fittingly, right now the AI bubble is making access to clean water worse for some, fracking did so too. Nutrition? GDP growth made food harder to access for many people before it got better - city laborers had worse food access than farmers. Still today people are living in food deserts. Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" showed what kind of food unfettered GDP growth actually delivers. And mere decades ago, life was more or less the same, if not arguably better in many ways.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
hahahahhaah 10mo ago
20 years ago? probably not significantly different accept at the margins (i.e. we tamed HIV and now have ways to defend against pandemics) but other than that is life much different?
epolanski 10mo ago
It hasn't been the best for a long time, and economist have long proposed alternatives, but gdp and gdp per capita seem to be the easiest to calculate and convey.
coldtea 10mo ago
People forgot or simply don't realize how much better life was just 3-4 decades ago (in terms of nutrition, access to knowledge, clean water, material wealth, housing costs, tuition costs, healthcare costs, jobs). In advanced western countries that is. If you compare Nigeria from 2000 to Nigeria today, sure, maybe...
- huhkerrf 10mo ago
  What? Access to knowledge was better 3-4 decades ago? You're telling me that people had better access to knowledge in 1986 than they do today? Infant mortality was 10.4 per 1,000 live births in 1986 in the US. It was 5.5 I'm 2023. Life expectancy was 74. Now it's 78. The crime rate peaked in the US in 1991. Life isn't perfect now. Housing needs to be a lot more affordable, for one. University costs in the US are insane, for another. But to paint this as no progress? Come on.
- shlant 10mo ago
  > People forgot or simply don't realize how much better life was just 3-4 decades ago Are you just saying this thinking no one will ask you to back it up with data? Care to quantify what "so much better" actually means?
  - coldtea 10mo ago
    Better job prospects for more people, lower inflation, cheaper healthcare, cheaper housing (actually affordable housing), less obesity, better school programs, more distributed, less controled, and less corporate internet and web, higher fertility rates, less clouds of war and civil tension, more political legitimacy and better political climate, better nutricion (official stats show obesity at an all time high and rising - despite all the health influencer slop), less impacted rural areas and small towns, and many other stats besides. And a more stable global order too. Most of those apply both here in Europe and the US. And that's without even getting into more subjective QoL stuff, from cultural production to the widespread depression and the loneliness epidemic.
quxbar 10mo ago
Yes, look at the massive 'success' of Vail, Colorado.
HumblyTossed 10mo ago
Yes, the bottom 90% have had their lives improve a little. But nowhere near the same as the top 10%.

by baxtr 10mo ago

djtango 10mo ago

Simpson's paradox does allow for the possibility that nutrition, access to knowledge, clean water and material wealth has improved in the aggregate while it getting worse for subpopulations. A lot of people in the world are angry and one of the things that fuels this anger is the "gaslighting" that the data shows their lives are better while their lived reality is the opposite. Don't forget that Millennials are the first generation to be poorer than their parents in a long time...

zmgsabst 10mo ago
Millennials are 30-45, roughly. There’s now a large segment (and several generations) of society for whom the system has never worked, even if the growth of retirement accounts masks the loss of wealth and well-being.
huhkerrf 10mo ago
> Don't forget that Millennials are the first generation to be poorer than their parents in a long time... This is simply not true. At some point, we do need to rely on data other than "lived experience," which compares one's quality of life at 22 to someone's quality of life at 50. "Younger Americans (millennials and Gen Zers) owned $1.23 for every $1 of wealth owned by Gen Xers at the same age." "Younger Americans (millennials and Gen Zers) owned $1.35 for every $1 of wealth owned by baby boomers at the same age." https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of-us-household-wealth https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of...
- vanviegen 10mo ago
  If they ever want to own a house they won't need just 23% or 35% more wealth, but more like 200% and 1000% respectively. You do need to start at lived experience to know which data to look at.
  - djtango 10mo ago
    Exactly - people have it backwards, when data diverges from lived experience you don't tell lived experience to shut up cuz' dataa you go back and check your models and your data collection. And you check and you check and you check. Einstein was famously wary of Quantum Mechanics rather than taking the findings at face value, and I guarantee that economic data is a hell of a lot less rigorous and more complicated than particle physics. Not to mention the data is political...
    - mlrtime 10mo ago
      It's funny, I say the exact same thing about crime in NYC. Statistically it's safer than rural Oklahoma... but your lived experience in taking the subway 45 minutes every day will not paint the same safety experience that can't be found in any statistic.
    - huhkerrf 10mo ago
      That's silly. People have wrong impressions about a lot of things. Your "lived experience" (you can just say experience, okay?) can be wrong.
    - BrenBarn 10mo ago
      The thing is that that's not a conflict between data and lived experience, it's just a conflict between different sets of data. If you measure wealth and then you measure wealth relative to housing costs, neither one of those is "lived experience". If you do a survey on people's sentiments about the economy, that's data too. I'm skeptical of the term "lived experience" precisely because people tend to use it in arguments of the form "let's disregard data in favor of my individual preferences". But when you aggregate the "lived experience" of many people, you get data, and that data can be just as valuable as more anodyne economic data.
- sehansen 10mo ago
  That's mean wealth, not median wealth. Mean millenial wealth at 34[0] is $345,000 and median millenial wealth at 38[1] is $130,000. Given that inequality has been rising steadily in the US over the past 30 years, the mean and median wealth of Gen Xers and boomers were almost certainly closer to each other than for millenials. 0: your source has mean at 34 in 2025, https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of-us-household-wealth https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/june/the-state-of... 1: the best I could find was median at 38 in 2022: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/feb/millennials-older-gen-zers-significant-wealth-gain-2022 https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/feb/millennia...
  - huhkerrf 10mo ago
    Yeah, but how does millennial median wealth compare to boomer median wealth? That's the question. I'm happy to be proven wrong.

guerrilla 10mo ago

It's definitely not the best we have though. People have created all kinds of metrics which measured things in better ways more relevant to our human goals. It's an entire genre of publication in economics and some of them are very popular. It's a choice to ignore them. Also, see what djtango said. It's not that simple.

boxed 10mo ago
It's the best that has been used by a society that didn't later collapse though.
- guerrilla 10mo ago
  That's hardly a relevant response considering no society have used any of the ones I am speaking about in the way that you mean. The OECD, UN, IMF and others use many of them as secondary metrics though.
  - boxed 10mo ago
    I just find the "what have the romans ever done for us?" argument to be scary. It leads very quickly and easily to struggle sessions and the terror. I'm all for trying things for sure, but it has to be done in very small scale and over significant time scales.
    - NoGravitas 10mo ago
      "THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.” ― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

lnsru 10mo ago

The question is where. Couple decades ago rent in Munich was like 3x lower. While salaries were insignificantly lower with overall lower living cost. Couple decades ago Germany had electronics industry. Now it’s gone. More industries are following. Couple decades ago there were rather isolated Yugoslav Wars. Now it’s introduction into WW3 with active war in Ukraine and hybrid attacks everywhere in Europe. It depends heavily on location. Indian colleague has completely different world view and is proud how India is progressing.

imp0cat 10mo ago
Obviously it depends on your point of view. That entire region (India, Pakistan and Afghanistan) still has a lot of work to do.
bojan 10mo ago
That progress in India comes as an excuse to weaken their democratic institutions. The fallacy is that Modi is to praise - the progress comes mostly because of enormously positive global trends developed in the past decades, the ones that are now being threatened. > Couple decades ago there were rather isolated Yugoslav Wars. A bit of nuance, they ended in 1999, however the whole thing is still influencing Europe negatively and is not as isolated as it seems. Not just there are now seven countries instead of one to consider and negotiate with, a couple of them are utterly disfunctional. Further, two biggest chunks are deeply sunk into nationalism. Far too little effort had been made back then to try to reform the place into a functional system.
- roenxi 10mo ago
  Progress in India is due to policy in India. The idea that India can handwave it's successes and failures on external forces might have been well justified in 1955, but in this century they get to choose. Best hope for the anti-Modi-policy crowd is maybe it isn't Modi's policies specifically. In fact, in the vast majority of cases (including North America, South America, Europe, East Asia, India & South-East Asia) progress is entirely about countries choosing how quickly they are comfortable with improvement happening. Africa and the Middle East it is a combination of policy choices and cultural problems. Arguably foreign interference - although even then policy and strategy tends to be the bigger thing over time.

mikelitoris 10mo ago

All of those except for access to knowledge were better in the U.S. 20-30 years ago even though GDP per capita "grew" even in real terms.

nikanj 10mo ago
If you take access to knowledge to mean post-secondary tuition, it was also much better 30 years ago

nikanj 10mo ago

Just a couple of decades ago a common working stiff could buy their family a nice home in any US city.

inglor_cz 10mo ago
If you are talking about the 1960s or so, there also were 150 million fewer people in the US? That matters for housing costs. Some places like Austin, which haven't gone down the NIMBY zoning route, are still somewhat affordable.

lm28469 10mo ago

It's utter trash, it was good when we had industry focused economies instead of service focused ones. Everybody mocked Russia for having the same gdp as Spain. As it turns out your economy is much stronger when it's focused on heavy industries, steel, mining, oil, &c. Than when it is focused on tourism and other services One produces value, the other generates money, when shits hit the fan you need energy, the drunk brits coming in your strip clubs aren't that useful anymore

baxtr 10mo ago
Oh yes sorry, I forgot that Russia is super successful in Ukraine and Europe is on the brink of collapse because it ran out of energy!
- lm28469 10mo ago
  That's not my point at all Do you think Spain would fair better than Russia against Ukraine ?
  - enaaem 10mo ago
    Actually yes. Ukraine is far easier to invade for Russia. Geography is super flat. You can drive in from anywhere. Easy to supply thanks to sovjet rail. Spain is very mountainous and a pain in the ass to invade. How would Russia supply their troops that are completely rail dependent?
  - baxtr 10mo ago
    I get your point. Spain would fail miserably. But you’re not taken into account how many men Russia is losing to maintain that level of aggression. It’s compensating its small GDP with humans. Spain would never do that and thus fail.
inglor_cz 10mo ago
Russia is fighting the war exactly how I would expect an economy of that size to fight a war. Slow attrition coming from an inability to overwhelm their enemy decisively and fast. How exactly is their economy "strong"? By what measure? You cannot really eat tanks, that is what made life in the Soviet Union unsatisfactory as well. Current price of Ural oil is some 9 dollars above their breakeven costs. As the classic says, not great, not terrible.

wewxjfq 10mo ago

Clean water was a one-time thing and more driven by state action than GDP growth. Fittingly, right now the AI bubble is making access to clean water worse for some, fracking did so too. Nutrition? GDP growth made food harder to access for many people before it got better - city laborers had worse food access than farmers. Still today people are living in food deserts. Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" showed what kind of food unfettered GDP growth actually delivers. And mere decades ago, life was more or less the same, if not arguably better in many ways.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

hahahahhaah 10mo ago

20 years ago? probably not significantly different accept at the margins (i.e. we tamed HIV and now have ways to defend against pandemics) but other than that is life much different?

epolanski 10mo ago

It hasn't been the best for a long time, and economist have long proposed alternatives, but gdp and gdp per capita seem to be the easiest to calculate and convey.

coldtea 10mo ago

People forgot or simply don't realize how much better life was just 3-4 decades ago (in terms of nutrition, access to knowledge, clean water, material wealth, housing costs, tuition costs, healthcare costs, jobs). In advanced western countries that is. If you compare Nigeria from 2000 to Nigeria today, sure, maybe...

huhkerrf 10mo ago
What? Access to knowledge was better 3-4 decades ago? You're telling me that people had better access to knowledge in 1986 than they do today? Infant mortality was 10.4 per 1,000 live births in 1986 in the US. It was 5.5 I'm 2023. Life expectancy was 74. Now it's 78. The crime rate peaked in the US in 1991. Life isn't perfect now. Housing needs to be a lot more affordable, for one. University costs in the US are insane, for another. But to paint this as no progress? Come on.
shlant 10mo ago
> People forgot or simply don't realize how much better life was just 3-4 decades ago Are you just saying this thinking no one will ask you to back it up with data? Care to quantify what "so much better" actually means?
- coldtea 10mo ago
  Better job prospects for more people, lower inflation, cheaper healthcare, cheaper housing (actually affordable housing), less obesity, better school programs, more distributed, less controled, and less corporate internet and web, higher fertility rates, less clouds of war and civil tension, more political legitimacy and better political climate, better nutricion (official stats show obesity at an all time high and rising - despite all the health influencer slop), less impacted rural areas and small towns, and many other stats besides. And a more stable global order too. Most of those apply both here in Europe and the US. And that's without even getting into more subjective QoL stuff, from cultural production to the widespread depression and the loneliness epidemic.

quxbar 10mo ago

Yes, look at the massive 'success' of Vail, Colorado.

HumblyTossed 10mo ago

Yes, the bottom 90% have had their lives improve a little. But nowhere near the same as the top 10%.