Compared to what? Last week in the US? 40 years ago in China? 100 years ago in England?
There’s significantly more people alive now than ever and much better communications. The chances of someone being affected by a natural disaster are higher and much of the world will hear about it within hours. This gives the impression there are more natural disasters.
There are well over a billion people in China and another billion in India. The economic situation for many of them is much better than it was even 10 years ago. While the economy in the West is worse than it was 10 years ago, for much of the world it is better. So, on average, economically things are getting better.
For some reason this question reminds me of that rage comic allegedly made by an 86 year old. In the big picture, I suspect that it is more of the “good old days” thing. Life just keeps going through a cycle of ups and downs. We’re going through hard times, but I’m not convinced that they are worse than what people experienced in the past. The Depression, WWII, heck even going back to the Civil War (in the US)…those seem like worse times to me.
I do sometimes worry that humanity in general is becoming stupider, as it seems like stupid people are more likely to have kids these days than smart people are and stupid behavior is glorified in ways that it wasn’t before. But I guess it will take a few generations to tell for sure if Idiocracy is coming true.
Then factor in all these fanatical muslims taking over the Middle East. <shakes head> I feel sorry for my grandchildren’s future. They are inheriting a pretty messed up world.
How much of this angst is the result of an actual increase in bad events and how much is merely the fact that all of us hear about them much more efficiently today? 100 years ago, a murder-suicide in Gerbil Scrotum IA would have made the front page of the local fishwrap, but somebody in NYC or Chicago would never have heard about it. Today, with the Internet, bad news from the farthest corners of the planet is as close as your computer.
I voted no after listening to my 107 year old grandmother tell us she prefers the way people live now. Indoor toilets were at the top of the list, with airconditioning, washing machines and dryer, refrigerators and modern medicine not far behind.
She also said people themselves aren’t any worse. When I was in my twenties she told me a story about when she was young, (early 1920’s) and a local farmer went on trial for the murder of a salesman who messed around with his daughter(she was retarded and didn’t know any better.) Farmer was judged not guilty, but lost his land anyway to his lawyer, because of legal fees. Grandma presented this story as an example of how some people have always done bad things. She summed it up by saying the good old days weren’t what they were cracked up to be.
How many Dopers grew up at a time when neighbors didn’t lock their back doors? Kids went out and played all over the neighborhood. Parents didn’t know exactly where they were.
We walked or rode bikes everywhere. I often biked a couple miles to the local mall and hang out several times a week.
Today some parents are afraid or their kids to even leave their yard. Even at parks parents want their kids within sight at all times. Its shocking how much the world has changed just in the past thirty years.
This, essentially, is what I want to find out. Also the effect that everybody thinks they’re living in the most important time in history (end times, armageddon etc.) makes people think things are worse.
Man, there are actually many people here more Pollyanna-ish than I am? That’s saying something. [It seems obvious to me that things have indeed been getting worse-but I hold out hope that we’ll save ourselves from ourselves before it is too late-thus I voted “worse”]
People not locking their doors is a quaint idea but really just plain idiotic and lazy in any time or place. My parents used to brag about how they could leave the keys in the car until both of them disappeared from the driveway one night. This was back in the 80’s and I never understood why they thought taking the keys out was just too much to go through.
People are paranoid these days. I’ll give you that but is that based on reality? It’s too bad we can’t just figure out what the secret was for the safest time in American history and replicate that model today. Looking at the articles and graphs, the safest time ever was RIGHT NOW. Violent crime is currently at an all time low and this follows long and steady decline. It is amazing anyone ever survived the 1970’s and 80’s to talk about them.
People have been killed over trifling shit since time immemorial. Not long ago, you could get lynched or sent to the ovens based solely on your ethnicity. And child murders aren’t exactly a new phenomenon, either. Get some perspective. There may be real points to be made for the case that the world is getting worse (I voted that it’s not, BTW), but all I’m getting from this thread is old fogey-ism.
The world would be getting better rather than worse, except for one thing: global warming.
If global carbon production doesn’t peak until 2025, it pretty much has to drop off a cliff that year in order to stay within a 2°C increase over the coming decades.
It’s not going to peak before 2025. And it won’t drop off a cliff when it does start decreasing.
Every indication, every new study, shows that we’ve so far way underestimated the rate at which our climate is changing. And there’s little reason to think we’re going to act in time.
The problem is, it’s a slow-rolling disaster. By the time the effects get to a point where people who don’t live on low-lying Pacific islands will demand action, the time to act will have been decades earlier.
It’s a shame, because other than that, the world is getting much, much better. There are far more genuine democracies in the world than there were just 30 years ago, when the Soviet bloc looked unbreakable, and Latin America was dominated by right-wing strongmen and military juntas. The current recession aside, standards of living are improving around the globe. We’ve got a whole bunch of really cool technologies that were the stuff of sci-fi just two decades ago. If it weren’t for global warming, there’d be no argument in my mind: the world, aside from that, is getting WAY better.
I think that has a great deal to do with it. Also consider the aging of the speaker (er, writer.)
I was born in 1974, in a suburb of Chicago. During my earliest years, Nixon resigned after doing some pretty horrible things, John Wayne Gacy was abducting, raping and murdering young men not far from my home (and, as we now think, in other states, too). There were lines for gasoline, The Cuban Missile Crisis and a ton of other bad things happening.
But, because I was a child, I remained blissfully unaware. The world was a safe and mostly fair place for me. We left the doors unlocked (during the day), we’d go off and play without supervision until the lights came on, etc. etc. Not until I became an adult did I learn of all the doom and gloom that the Cold War era wrought.
I suspect much is the same for older people. “The good-old days” always seem to be whenever the speaker was a child, without the responsibilities and worries of adulthood.
That being said, there has to be some point at which any civilization actually *does *begin to decline. Because of the above phenomenon, it’s particularly difficult to pinpoint it as it’s happening. You have to rely on hindsight, generally with a nice long historical lens.
Are we in decline? It feels to me like we are. But I’m not sure my 6 year old will mark this year as a particularly bad one, if you ask her in 30 years. *These *are “the good old days” of 2041!
While these are nasty events I don’t see how its any worse than when Ug killed Boog ten millenia ago or when Attila the Hun killed a few hundred thousand people rampaging through Europe or when Genghis Khan bonked off a few million and a few dozen major metropolises.
Muslims of varying fanaticism have controlled the Near East since the 7th Century AD.
As for the OP, 2011 has been one of the most positive years for humanity possibly the best since 1991 with the fall of numerous bloody dictatorships and the deaths of numerous evil men.