Technology and innovation has made people’s lives better at the same time that politicians and bankers have made them worse. Just because the politicians and bankers failed to totally eclipse technology does not mean they are not a severe detriment.
> Technology and innovation has made people’s lives better at the same time that politicians and bankers have made them worse.
That's the SV fantasy!: I'm awesome and a super-genius, everyone else is useless, dumb and annoying, and therefore I should be all-powerful!. It's like they're all still 13 year olds hacking on their computers, where they finally feel really powerful. It's almost as if they've never learned anything more about the world - humanities are just entertainment for the wealthy - leaving themselves vulnerable to the most obvious self-deception.
One might say that technology and innovation have turned our world into a hellscape, with massive social and political breakdown, massive mis/disinformation, and climate change. Maybe some innovation can build us new supersonic jets, better oil extraction, more effective automated online persuasion, or some snazzy financial tech - like CDOs, crypto, and private equity.
On the other hand, our political institutions did an amazing job of getting the US through a global pandemic without even a recession. There are serious problems, such as housing and education prices, but I don't think anyone could have predicted how well things went economically.
Technology is the only reason the economy could somewhat continue during the pandemic. Did you hear about working from home?
Technology is how we got a vaccine so quickly.
Technology is how we tracked the spread. Technology is how we notified of potential exposure.
Nobody with a humanities background did anything meaningful to help compared to the last pandemic. It was all technology, engineering, medicine, and science that let us approach this one differently.
> Nobody with a humanities background did anything meaningful
If you learned a bit about it, you wouldn't show off rigid tunnel vision or you might express yourself clearly and without the blind destruction of hyperbole.
Why did people make or not make vaccines? Humanities (and social science). How were they funded, regulated, etc.? Ditto. What is the scientific method? Humanities (really). Why did the US and EU as expected, but not, e.g., Russia make the most effective vaccines? Humanities. Why did people take or not take vaccines? Humanities, or not enough humanities, or they were owned by people who mastered messaging and mass political communication, which is humanities.
They were funded by other scientists and medical professions who became heads of the CDC, etc. People from humanities are ill quipped to select grant recipients for any real research.
The scientific method is philosophy, but the majority of humanities never go anywhere near the scientific method other than to convince themselves that doing a qualitative oral survey of some classmates is just as much a “science” as the falsifiable ones.
> Why did people take or not take vaccines? Humanities,
The failure of humanities to produce any meaningful predictive behavior of humans is a pretty good example of why it’s a failed branch of inquiry.
> mastered messaging and mass political communication, which is humanities.
The people who have done this are completely outside of the grasp of the humanities taught in US universities. Every Ivy League economist, sociologist, social psychologist, etc that was in US leadership for the last 20 years has done nothing but flounder.
Yeah, I was torn but his last paragraph is 100% satire
> On the other hand, our political institutions did an amazing job of getting the US through a global pandemic without even a recession. There are serious problems, such as housing and education prices, but I don't think anyone could have predicted how well things went economically.
As of this week the yield curve has been inverted for a longer period than ever before in history, that's how you know the economy is healthier than ever
They can objectively afford less housing, education, healthcare and such things than 40 years ago. They can afford better computers, but that is just thanks to technology, other than technology making things cheaper their lives are worse.
"Housing" ... mostly a NIMBY problem. AKA not a small group of capitalists ruining it for everyone else, but a bunch of soccer moms who hate any densification and insist that their neighborhood must stay the same forever, weaponizing environmental laws to stop any development. Notably, cities that build nonetheless, be it Austin, TX, or Warsaw, Poland, buck this otherwise very widespread trend.
"Education, healthcare" ... depends on the country involved, plus the extent of healthcare you can now get is vastly bigger due to scientific progress. Forty years ago, HIV infection was a death sentence and most cancers too.
At any given time of year there are ~23 empty housing units for every single homeless person in the US, even close to 3 per homeless person in Los Angeles and New York City; somehow the constant, coordinated line of "supply constraints" and "grr NIMBYs!" doesn't hold up to the actual data
Vacant doesn't mean available. Apartments that are being shown to renters are vacant. Houses for sale are vacant. Houses that have sold or rented but haven't been moved into are not available.
It would be impossible to house homeless in vacant houses. Sellers and landlords would never accept it because would make it hard to find people. The short-term rentals would be hard to mange, not good for the homeless to always be moving, and easily go wrong. Is the government going to compensate for damages? For delayed moving into new house? It is almost certainly cheaper to build the homeless housing.
Land zoned for development is the one thing you cannot produce in factories. No wonder that densely populated areas feel the shortage.
Zone more land for denser development, and you will see the rents and home prices fall, or at least stagnate. That is why people started building skyscrapers immediately after reasonably developed lift technology was available.
40 years ago I could work a summer job at minimum wage and earn enough to pay a full year's tuition at UCSD. Doing the same thing in 2023 paid for less than 1/3 of the tuition.
That has more to do with California not funding the UC system as well as they used to.
Prop 98 in 1988 shifted funding away from UC and CS systems towards community colleges. The UC system went from about 6% of the budget to a bit over 2%.
That amounts to a loss of ~$15,000 per student in today's dollars.
People don't compare how well they were off 40 years ago vs today, they remember how things were in recent history - i.e. 3-4 years ago and then decide if they are better or worse off.
Inflation is a killer for the poor and most of the middle class - and a boon for the wealthy (who own appreciating assets) - everyone I know who is not wealthy enough to not care, is feeling it.
The only way to answer this question is with data, not anecdote. And the people in this discussion thread are saying they don't trust the inflation data.
I trust the data, and the data shows their lives are better. If you don't trust the data, it's impossible to know.
A read of the data shows that, but it's not the only read nor the only data.
So we can say wages have increased to keep up with inflation, but left out is all the money lost during the time lag before wages caught up. And whose wages caught up? If you use average wages, then you can hide the details. You really need to look at different income levels, or at least the median wage and the inflation experienced for that median person, bare minimum.
you need to make adjustments for the question to make since, was the lowest earning quartile of the population worse off relative to the upper quartile 40 years ago verses the lower compared to the upper today.