[susanasj]

I mean, the conclusion that things are better than people think is based entirely on measurements that the authors of the study decide represent "progress". It's true that some gender and racial inequalities have lessened slightly, but many people including myself would say they should be eliminated entirely. The authors are right that some health indicators like teen pregnancy for Americans have improved, but overall life expectancy for Americans has fallen for several years in a row now. The authors are right that incarceration rates have fallen slightly, but America still has by far the largest prison system in the world.

I do think in many ways things are getting worse. The American economic system becomes more openly exploitative by the day, and oligarchs openly flaunt their power while we are largely powerless to stop them. There is very little accountability for powerful companies that break the law (see something like Hertz Rental Cars getting people arrested with false reports of stolen cars), and income inequality in America is growing from it's already staggering heights.

The comparison for "are things getting better" shouldn't be a baseline of "things used to be even more terrible and now they are slightly less so", it should be "are we making things better at the rate that we should be", and I think the answer to the latter is clearly no.

That said I'm an optimist because my left wing politics demand it of me. A better world is certainly possible.

EDIT: this article doesn't mention climate change at all does it lol. The big looming thing that could ruin the next generation's lives entirely.

[CapricornNoble]

>>>It's true that some gender and racial inequalities have lessened slightly, but many people including myself would say they should be eliminated entirely.

Is it realistic to expect that society can eliminate fuzzy, grey-area problems like discrimination when we can't even eliminate tangible, clear-cut physical-reality problems like murder?

I agree with your general point that it's easy to cherry-pick metrics though.

[diffxx]

> we can't even eliminate tangible, clear-cut physical-reality problems like murder?

Call me a pessimist, but I don't think it's possible to eliminate murder so I think that is an unreachably high bar.

That being said, I think that there is lots of low hanging fruit that we absolutely could do something about. Traffic fatalities and injuries are an obvious one. In the US, if we collectively decided that it is unacceptable to have tens of thousands of people die every year in auto incidents and scores more seriously injured, we could rework our road infrastructure and impose regulations that would drive these numbers down dramatically, even if not to zero.

The biggest challenge to enacting the types of reforms that would improve most people's quality of life is that advocates have mostly done a poor job of communicating their positive vision for how such changes would improve most people's lives. The story progressive transit advocates (myself included) tend to tell sounds like it's about taking away the rights and freedoms of drivers. This is undeniably true. Freedoms and rights are always in tension. Progressives will always lose though if they aren't able to tell a compelling story about the benefits of the changes they wish to impose. Otherwise the other side will be able to successfully hammer them on whatever is being taken away.

In our current regime in the US, we have essentially legalized murder if you are driving a car. If someone runs me over with their SUV while I am legally crossing the street because "they didn't see me," they are extremely unlikely to face any consequences unless they were drunk. But at the same time, if I'm driving a car a lot, I also face the risk of killing or harming someone else even if I am always doing my best. This would be devastating even if I wasn't legally at fault. In other words, the freedom to kill someone with no accountability is no freedom at all.

The point is not that I want people to go to jail for killing people with their cars. I want to live in an environment where people are not killed by cars. There are many things like this where I think there is a more positive vision for society that is not that hard to imagine but that does require letting go of some of our past ways of looking at things. In this particular case, a century of marketing and pr by auto/oil companies has warped our perspective that we can't even see how anti-human the industry and our infrastructure has become. That doesn't mean we have to get rid of cars entirely, but we should rethink our relationship with them. There are many things like this.

[CapricornNoble]

Many good points in your post. I'm a car enthusiast and I agree with almost everything you've stated.....because I live in Japan, and have seen how a country can integrate a variety of transportation mediums, balancing the freedoms of car ownership with fairly strict training, enforcement, and just cultural habits that largely reduce fatalities. Automotive taxes in Japan are pretty much the only form of taxation that I'm comfortable paying, and feel like I genuinely get my money's worth for what it costs me (Japanese healthcare is a distant second but deserves a mention).

[082349872349872]

Some societies have largely eliminated classes of murder such as mass shootings or police shootings. The future's here, it's just not so evenly distributed.

[cudgy]

Not so simple. What societies have done this? How do they count the crimes? What was the composition of their demographics and religion? Was this accomplished with a great loss to people’s freedoms?

[implements]

> It's true that some gender and racial inequalities have lessened slightly, but many people including myself would say they should be eliminated entirely.

(Just to make the point) The West seems to have recently decided that people are born innately masculine or feminine, which strikes me as a Regressive step from the previous Progressive position that people were unique individuals incidentally sexed purely for the purposes of reproduction (and therefore society should eliminate normative gender expectations and other gender-based discrimination).

How can we eliminate gender discrimination when it has become problematic merely to suggest that sex is real, that sex itself can be a chosen basis for identity, and that some (arguably most) gender-based discrimination is actually sex-based - for example failure to progress in an organisation after taking one or two extended breaks for pregnancy and infant care?

[tbvix]

I very much agree, and I think it's also quite telling that on the male side, so many of them desire to be pornographic caricatures of women. We're regressing back to an era where women were stereotyped by men as submissive sex objects, rather then being actual full people.

[082349872349872]

> "are we making things better at the rate that we should be"

TFA's first few pages mention that most people underestimate current inequities. Considering that it took 80 years after the 14A for the US Armed Forces to desegregate[0], and it's been over 150 years now and the US has arguably still not managed to say "mission accomplished"[1] on Reconstruction, I would agree the answer is clearly no.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9981

[1] similarly 50 years (and counting) without ratification of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Rights_Amendment ; my country didn't have nationwide female suffrage until the late XX, but a couple of decades after doing so we had the equivalent of the ERA in our Constitution.

[s1artibartfast]

Something I wonder is if there are any countries that have successfully managed reconstruction, and if so, how?

It recently struck me that the US approach and challenges addressing the aftermath are quite different than other colonial powers.

Following the end of slavery for other colonial powers, the former slaves and their decedents were separated from the parent nation state, allowing the Colonizer to move forward without really resolving the damage and injustice.

This means that in the US, we observe the long legacy of slavery as racial inequality between citizens of different race.

However, for a country like France, this is observed of the inequality between France and a former colony like Hati.

At least for me, this was not an obvious realization and I thought that the US was uniquely bad at post slavery reconstruction. Perhaps the US is doing the better than other former slave nations. To look at this through the lens of economics, Black Americans earn ~70% of the national average. Haitians earn ~5% of the French national average, adjusted for purchasing power.

This is not to say we can't to better, but I do think it is helpful to understand the scope of the project and challenge undertaken.

[082349872349872]

Good point. On the other hand, looking at the rest of North America, Mexico managed to abolish slavery with comparatively little violence, and Canada (as part of the Empire) did so with no violence. Both did so before the US took 4 years and 650k+ deaths to getting around to it.

cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33931615

Between all that and the Monroe Doctrine having been enunciated suspiciously close to the Vienna Congress anti-slavery declaration in Europe, I lean towards the US as having unique issues with slavery and its aftermath.

[s1artibartfast]

Im not really contesting that the US banned slavery after other countries, or that there was significant resistance. I certainly agree with the US having unique issues with slavery and the aftermath. In fact, I think my point highlights that fact, but tries to dig at what some of those issues are.

Im not sure what conclusions we should draw from the difference in dates and how hard abolition was US, aside from the fact that slavery was more economically entrenched in the south than most other places. After all, the north abolished slavery it in 1804, long before Mexico or Canada.

Similarly, the number of slaves in Mexico ranged between 20,000 and 45,000 prior to abolition. Historians estimate that Canada had fewer than 4,000 slaves. These numbers are both far fewer than the 4 million slaves who toiled in the U.S. south. Both Canada and Mexico also paid the owners of the freed slaves compensation, as did many other countries [1].

Lastly, as a minor note, I think that saying it took the US 4 years and 650k lives is an understatement. The abolishment movement in the US predates the revolutionary war and formation of the country itself, so I think it would be fair say it easily took 100+ years.

I think there is also something to be said about the rise of racial inferiority as a post-hoc justification for slavery in the south, which I understand to be primarily an American invention, but I'm not sure if or where it fits in. Prior to this, most civilizations held that the only justification needed to hold slaves was the power to do so. Most also held that other races were inferior, but the two concepts were unrelated, with independent reasoning.

[edit] After writing this, another thought occurred to me. Perhaps one of the main reasons why the abolition of slavery in the US was so protracted and bloody was the weakness of the federal government. This both limited the ability to finance compensation, but also meant there was no monopoly on military power to enforce abolition on resistant states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensated_emancipation

>cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33931615

What a beautiful song

[082349872349872]

> weakness of the federal government. ... meant there was no monopoly on military power to enforce abolition on resistant states.

still digesting the rest of your reply, but on this point: prior to the civil war, the US army had made its units up out of people from the local area. In the run up to the civil war, some of these units defected en masse, with their command structure intact. Ever since, the army has been careful to rotate geographically diverse people through each unit, ensuring spatial and temporal mixing.

(if chatter surrounding events of the past few years {Bundy, Floyd, J6} is to be believed, the army is not worried about the ability of its officer corps to distinguish between legal and illegal orders as it is the inclinations of potential splinters at the squad level)