I didn’t want to hijack the thread about outrage fatigue, so I am opening a new one. Everything that people are saying in that thread are completely true; there are a lot of problems, and many of them seem to be getting worse. That being said, there are a ton of areas where life is objectively better than it was 50 years ago. Off the top of my head, the infant mortality rate across the world has significantly dropped, the percentage of people in the world living in extreme poverty has dropped, same-sex marriage is permitted throughout the United States and in 32 other countries, etc. I don’t want to discount the negative, but I think its also good to focus on the successes every now and then too. Any other thoughts on where things have gone right, both in United States and the world as a whole in the past 50 years?
Entertainment on demand, in high definition color and sound right in your living room or even in the palm of your hand. I had to watch Star Trek in black and white, things are much better now.
Compared to 50 years ago? Other than the worsening of the climate, pretty much everything is better in almost all places. 3 years ago would be a much better timeline, although most of the stuff that has gone wrong isn’t COVID-19s fault, it just so happens that’s when the shit hit the fan for all kinds of other things as well (and IMHO the shit had been on it’s way towards the fan for about 5 or so years prior to that). Given that time period, the stuff that has gone right is somewhat more limited. Here’s some of the ones I can think of. Since we’re focusing on the positive I’ll ignore the obvious bad stuff associated with these good things.
The free world coming together more strongly to fight against authoritarianism is a good thing. We could have hung Ukraine out to dry, but we didn’t.
The leadership Zelensky is showing reminds us that good leaders can still rise to power and lead their people well.
We continue to make progress in greater acceptance of LGBTQ+ people, even up to the present day.
The speed that we identified COVID-19 and then came up with the vaccines against it shows that we can still make rapid technological progress to address a new problem if we try hard enough.
If you haven’t heard of ‘Factfulness’ (the book), it’s a project to properly quantify many of the world’s problems and by exactly how much they have improved over the last fifty years.
There’s an online quiz here:
Factfulness quiz
Women have more opportunities and more economic freedom in most places in the world.
Golly, that is one cherry-picked set of questions. For example, the survival of three “celebrity megafauna” species is celebrated, with zero reference to the bigger picture of the current massive increases in extinction rates.
I get the basic point about the need to appreciate positive changes while we try to address negative ones, but presenting snippets of decontextualized “good news” that are trivially insignificant in terms of overall trends doesn’t do anything but insult their readers’ intelligence.
Ways that life actually is better on a large scale, even taking into account overall trends, include previous posters’ mentions of improved rights and status for women and LGBTQ+ people, continuing upward trends in literacy rates worldwide, advances in public health and hygiene, and vast increases in accumulated human knowledge about everything from physics to history. I’m not sure how much other good news there is out there that really stands out in the big picture, though.
I’ve mentioned it elsewhere, but the mRNA technology that was used in the Covid vaccines is being applied to other diseases like cancer. Give it a decade or so and we’re going to see cures for things that are killing people today.
The book’s worth a read more for learning how to develop a more fact-based worldview. It’s biased towards health, given the author’s medical background, but the overall picture is one of progress. Search for some relevant charts at Gapminder.org to see a lot more detail.
We have many more therapies for mental illness now vs the 1970s.
Watch or read almost any speculation about the future from the 1970s and it’s apparent that we have wayyy outperformed expectations when it comes to quality of life.
I’m not sure the increased accessibility of entertainment is a big improvement. That black-and-white, once-a-week ST episode was a thrill in part precisely because it was a rare commodity with limited access.
Anticipation is a big part of the satisfaction in getting pretty much anything, and that has been watered down with the anything, anytime development.
Quality of human life has increased.Quality of life of all other forms except domestic animals has decreased.
I feel that way too. And yet I think we’re fooling ourselves. My parents would have grown up with the thrill of reading a handful of books, an armload if lucky, and yet when I had access to more books than I could have carried, I was watching ST. And reading the books, too.
I was just thinking how I would have loved Wikipedia 50 or 60 years ago.
I was just thinking about the irony of things like Wikipedia and the internet in general. We have instant access to tons of facts… which has lead to humanity aggressively denying them.
(never mind)
I thought about that too. In addition to the anticipation issue, do all the different entertainment options we have today contribute to isolation, since we have less in common and we’re all consuming our own private entertainment on our own private devices?
It’s hard to define “better,” at least in some areas. I do believe life is better nowadays, but many of the things that make it better can be seen as mixed blessings.
Perhaps tangentially, I am reminded of a recent Time article: Surprising Things You Think Are Making You Happy—But Aren't | Time
Measles was mostly wiped out more than fifty years ago. Yep, there are outbreaks here and there because of anti-vaxers, but it’s nothing compared to what was happening before the vaccine showed up.
Polio in the US was pretty much gone by 1960, but worldwide it’s been a much longer fight, with the global incidence rate not really getting squashed until the mid-1990s:
30+ years ago, Guinea worm infections numbered a million a year; now it’s down to a couple dozen.
Pollution is an ongoing issue, but most folks don’t remember how bad pollution was in some areas 50+ years ago. The Cuyahoga river in Ohio caught fire - not once, but over a dozen times. We’d like the air in Los Angeles (and many other places) to be better than it is these days, but it’s nothing like it was 50+ years ago.
https://waterandpower.org/museum/Smog_in_Early_Los_Angeles.html
Modern cars, in addition to having much cleaner exhaust than 50 years ago, are also much safer for their occupants. ABS, electronic stability control, airbags, dedicated crumple zones, side impact beams, seats that resist rear-end collisions, and so on. Better road design has helped, too. The red line on this plot (deaths per billion vehicle miles traveled) says it all:
The variety of foods available at mainstream grocery stores vastly exceeds what could be had 50 years ago. Not just more processed foods, but more foods and ingredients from around the world that would be unfamiliar to a lot of Americans back then: Mexican, Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Jewish, and so on. If you like things like chia seed, tofu, and matzo, you’d probably be disappointed by a 1973-vintage Kroger.
A lot of attention is focused on civil rights these days, but it’s worth looking back at how much progress has been made. 50 years ago, Stonewall was fresh news, and being gay or lesbian could get you dishonorably discharged from the military or barred from jobs requiring security clearance. In many places, same-sex bedsport was an arrestable offense. 50 years ago, sexual harassment of women wasn’t illegal.
Hans Rosling’s TED talks are enlightening. His animated statistical graphs shed a lot of light on positive global trends in things like poverty and public health.
I would agree. IMO it would be more interesting to formulate a list of ways life is not better.
As a busy adult, I like being able to stream what I want when I want (more or less) on my giant 4k television.
But having small kids, I feel like access to internet and streaming services contributes to a very different lifestyle than I experienced growing up. And I don’t know that it’s necessarily a better one.
As a kid, we walked to school every day when I was my kid’s age (uphill both ways, often through ten feet of Lake Erie lake-effect snow). We basically rode our bikes everywhere around the neighborhood until it got dark. Television consisted of Saturday morning cartoons, watching regularly scheduled shows or movies with the family, or a trip to Blockbuster to pick out a VHS tape.
These days, kids need to be supervised, even though the distance is about the same (a ten minute walk). Then tend to want to come home and jump right into watching screens (or it’s a fight). My friend was telling me about going out to dinner with a bunch of families and all 15 kids were glued to their tablets instead of interacting with each other.
I guess what I see that I don’t like is my kids have zero tolerance for “being bored”. Being bored as a kid was what motivated us to go out and find cool and interesting stuff to do. Then again, sometimes it led to throwing rocks at windows at a construction site. So there’s that.
Every now and then I shut off the router and tell the kids Optimum is doing maintenance or whatever. They nag me for an hour or so, but then go about playing with Legos or whatever.
@mjmartin I appreciate you starting this thread to balance my Outrage Fatigue thread. 
One feels compelled to quote: “They were the best of times, they were the worst of times…”
I have always loved maps of all kinds, from atlases to street maps. If Google Earth had existed when I was a kid, I’d probably never have left the house.
It’s hard to imagine how we conducted business or our daily lives without computers and the internet. And yet we did. And people did. For centuries even…