Stop wasting your breath, dead0man. People are addicted to pessimism. I see that with my mom, who talks about how bad crime is getting, when it's actually at its lowest levels in decades.
In reality,
- People don't care that the number of people worldwide living on $1.90/day (today's dollars) has dropped from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 710 million in 2015.
- People don't care that in 2015 Africa went a full year without a polio case or that the average life expectancy there is above 60 for the first time ever.
- People don't care that with the FARC truce, there are currently no wars in the Western Hemisphere.
- People don't care that the average number of people killed by NYPD police has dropped from 90 per year in the 1970s to 8 in 2015.
- People don't care that the number of "stage 1" smog days in Los Angeles went from 125 per year in the 1970's to less than one per year now.
- People don't care that the average Frenchman was more likely to die in a terrorist attack in the 1970s or 1980s than they are the current decade, even including the attacks of 2015 and 2016.
- People don't care that through the coordinated action of governments around the world, the ozone hole is shrinking. (You young people have probably never heard of the ozone hole, but it was the big environmental bugaboo when I was your age.)
In all of these, I said "don't care", but "don't believe" might be more accurate. And, dead0man, if you can somehow convince people that things
aren't actually getting worse, then they'll say that we should be enraged that things haven't improved
more or that the improvements have been going to "not our kind of people".
And they always seem to be so smug about their short-sightedness. Their late-19th-century equivalents were probably extrapolating the extant data and bemoaning that New York City was about to be overrun by horses and that the end was nigh
*, when they completely failed to foresee the new technology of the automobile. (And even then, there are probably some current-day apocalypse fetishists who think that car emissions are somehow a worse health risk than streets full of horse feces being constantly kicked up into the atmosphere.)
These pessimists are the reason Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders did so well in 2016, because the pessimists wanted politicians who can take any statistic and put the worst spin on it. Politicians were able to center campaigns around manufacturing jobs disappearing, as if that meant an end to American manufacturing altogether. But guess what. In 1900, 85% of jobs were in agriculture, while today it's down to 2%. No one says that meant an end to American agriculture.
And politicians can find plenty of voters who complain that they somehow can't afford even to
live on today's prices, when food and clothing costs have dropped from 59% of American incomes in 1900 to 21% in 2001. (It's not as if I don't understand the fear of losing a job. I worked for a company once of 200 people that laid off 25 in a single day. I work for a company now that's experimenting with outsourcing some of our work to India. If I lose my job again, I'll move on, like I've moved on from other job losses in the past. And yes, I do realize how lucky I am to good health and a reasonably good education. But I'm also resilient enough not to wallow in the times when things have gone bad for me.)
I get so frustrated by how much pessimism there is out there, especially when it seems so unwarranted based on actual metrics. It's not that I'm opposed to movements that want to change things--in fact, I'm a strong believer, for example, in California's energy conservation targets, but probably because I come at them from a strong "waste not, want not" perspective--but I despise movements that don't recognize how much we've achieved already.
Sorry for the rant. (Or maybe not. People who talk about how much better things were in "the old days" really push my buttons, and I see a lot of the comments above as being a flip side of the same coin.) As it is, I'm about to finish a book,
It's Better Than It Looks, that addresses this topic head-on, so I'm very much on board with the sentiments dead0man was expressing in his original post.
*I didn't intend this, but after typing this, I realized that since I was talking about horses, I probably should have said, "The end is neigh."
