[WalterBright]

Polio: http://www.plosin.com/beatbegins/projects/sokol.html Mortality wasn't the big concern with polio, it was the debilitating life-long after effects, and the adverse effects of pervasive fear of it.

You want to believe things are worse in America, I can't change your mind. In my own lifetime things have gotten visibly better. My father lived into his 90s, and he'd recount how things have gotten quite a bit better. Sure that's anecdotal, but you can look up statistics, too.

A "bunch of neat stuff" does improve standard of living. I'm almost never bored, for example.

[susan_hall]

I can put this differently: if I had a CFO who confused gross revenue with net profit, then I would fire the CFO and hire someone better.

We can easily list cool stuff that happened over the last 100 years: radio, television, cell phones, the Internet.

We can easily list bad stuff that happened over the last 100 years: environmental degradation, global warming, the increase in the percentage of income spent on transportation, difficulties in raising children.

What do we get when we subtract the bad stuff from the good stuff? Until we have good metrics for doing that, we are like the CFO who confuses gross revenue with net profit.