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by chungus_khan 1944 days ago
Even if the conclusion is that life today is better than in the past, so what? Congratulations. Their lives were different than their predecessors too. Is the whole point to self-congratulate, or should we recognize and address today's problems?
2 comments
Aerroon 1943 days ago
>Their lives were different than their predecessors too.

You don't have to go back far to get to a point where this wasn't really the case. Before the industrial revolution, life for the common person was rather similar to how their parents and grandparents lived. Estimates of GDP per capita would give you a doubling or tripling of it over a period of 1000-2000 years. A similar increase happened in the US in the last ~50 years.

Life is improving so much that we take it for granted. We've seen many facets of life significantly transformed in our lifetimes - eg social media, video games, the internet as a whole.

Of course we should look at today's problems, but we should also look at the past for perspective. If we make a mountain out of every molehill then we might end up regressing.

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mjburgess 1944 days ago
The issue is often that people with dystopian visions of the present and utopian visions of the past/future rarely have policies that are effective at actually redressing problems.

Routinely their dystopianism drives them to revolutionary ideas whose net effect has always been mass impoverishment.

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chungus_khan 1944 days ago
And people with utopian perceptions of the present tend to have policies that ignore underlying problems until they boil over into revolutions.

Fixating on how great the present is accomplishes nothing and appeals to almost nobody.

A typical feudal serf probably lived better than a hunter-gatherer, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't want to be free, and telling them that things are better is just avoiding the question.

Any analysis which fixates on things being uniformly better or uniformly worse will paint an incoherent and unhelpful picture. A realistic look at things involves looking critically at present and past policy in a nuanced manner, even in areas where things may be better.

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