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> An individual can independently choose to brush, floss, engage in less risky behaviors, have a good diet, maintain a health weight, etc. It's not hard. Maybe I'm one of that percentage, but I wouldn't describe these things as not hard. But the problem GP highlights is that of a ratchet - those changes start as choices, but then become requirements. Key example: >> A person can choose to move to a new country, halfway around the world, and still have their parents be >> able to see and converse with the grandchildren every night. > Why did this person choose to move physically away from their tribe? To slave away at a job they don't care about? Would they have chosen to move away if the tech to communicate long distance didn't exist? That's the ratchet in action. Progress in transportation at first enabled people to pursue new opportunities, new living arrangements. But as more and more people did that, everyone started relying on others being able to travel long distances fast. It became a social expectation, and a professional expectation, and that's how in a few decades, we went from cars being generally-available, to car culture, urban sprawl, hour+-long commutes, and constant gridlock. Problems we can't extricate ourselves from now. The same mechanism is at play with every new invention. Even the humble clock is something you need to have, because you need to sync with people in time to minute precision, because everyone else has a clock and expects this too. Same with phones and bank accounts. Smartphones, Internet, credit/debit cards are just finishing this process too - arguably this is held back by the governments, who need to service everyone, including the elderly, but wait a few more decades for those elderly to die, and we'll see governments closing physical offices and removing in-person processes to cut costs, at which point smartphones (or their future equivalents) and Internet will become necessities. Another, more controversial example: all the efforts to make women equally able to pursue careers and have equal pay - they started as clearly beneficial, offering choice to people who did not have it before. But couple decades down the line, the market adjusted to the workforce effectively doubling, and now single-income households are increasingly impossible. And so, at first, women could choose to work, but today, they have to. There is no choice anymore. This becomes a huge problem when children are in the mix, as in an average family, neither parent can become a stay-at-home one. Instead, children get sent to daycares and kindergartens, which of course cost money, further locking both parents into their jobs, and because child care facilities are group spaces, kids constantly get sick, creating huge logistics hassle for parents... This is not to criticize women's right movements here - only to point out that the choice won was temporary, and the society/economy forcing a two-income model creates a whole set of other problems we're still figuring out how to deal with. Hopefully one of these days we'll figure out how to have equality while supporting either of the partners to be the stay-at-home one. |