The 2010s Have Been Amazing | Hacker News Reader

The 2010s Have Been Amazing

wsj.com

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This guy’s upbeat editorials in the Swedish media have consistently applauded our transformation from a world leader along just about every metric of human development, to a country that blindly adopts market solutions to societal problems whose political leaders settle for goals such as “being on par with the rest of Europe”. His focus on the positive provides the winners of this transformation with the conversational ammunition they need not to feel guilty, and diverts attention away from the glaring issues (growing inequality, racial tensions, exploitation of employees by employers, etc) that I’ll assume Norberg doesn’t have much insight into, given his writings.

The comments in this thread trying to complain about things, without addressing the facts stated in the article, are bizarre. People really need to believe that things are bad, don’t they? It’s not enough that free people and free markets are enabling incremental progress toward prosperity. There must be a problem so that there needs to be a solution.

> It’s not enough that free people and free markets are enabling incremental progress toward prosperity. There must be a problem so that there needs to be a solution.

To some people, freedom is a problem, and the solution is to convince the world that everything is terrible, to justify implementing their "solutions."

Here's an interesting video that talks about how poorly informed most people in the world are about the world situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1dvfH3s1Ak

While all these metrics show progress, nationalism is on the rise. Echo-chambers are on the rise. People do not listen to each other, especially when it comes to politics. Social media has eroded privacy. Advertisement is king. Global warming is a huge "soft" risk to humanity. Surveillance is rampant as we heard from Snowden in 2013. China is a complete totalitarian state with 6 million cameras and a social credit score. Indian democracy is tearing apart.

Good stuff: Private space industry's progress is jaw dropping. SpaceX, RocketLab, BlueOrigin, Boeing, etc are all doing incredible things. Incredible progress in ML/AI. NASA is planning for a moon mission, there is excitement to go to Mars.

My hope for the 20s: The intellectuals form a world-citizen class movement, nationalism would be shamed and looked down upon (regardless of nation), citizens wake up to privacy issues and next round of politicians have libertarian ideologies. I hope.

Not going to happen, sorry. Global climate catastrophe will cause even more increases in migration, causing more nationalism, and more right wing politics.

Why else would ring wing politicians deny it exists?, to cause more climate change, and more migration, to get more votes.

>The intellectuals form a world-citizen class movement

I think unfortunately the elite class has morphed into an extractive leech on lower classes to an extent we haven't seen in recent history in the west. This helps explain the rise of nationalism, xenophobia, etc.

This title would be better corrected to "The 2010s Have Been Amazing *For the Type of Person with a WSJ Subscription".

> nationalism would be shamed and looked down upon

Why should regional self-governance by likeminded people be replaced with lowest-common-denominator global government?

In tech terms, attitudes like these sound like everyone in the world should adopt the same set of values and use the same programming language, which would be Javascript if chosen democratically, or Ada if chosen by experts. :)

Wonder how many countries will follow the UK in the next 10 years or so. The current system won't really work when the next budget debate (2021-27) is up. More and more western countries and especially the voters are fed up how they are net contributors to the system (UK, Germany, France, Nordic countries) while eastern countries like Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria etc are only taking money out with a staggering rate of corruption as well. And there is also the whole migration crisis as well which will only be worse as Syria/Iraq/Kurdistan situation has no ending in sight on top of the global warming which will move more and more people to Europe. There will be a fundamental shift in Europe for sure.

I find Limits To Growth's view https://www.amazon.com/Limits-Growth-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/19... more compelling, especially that its business as usual model is still reasonably accurate based on 2014 research https://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/publications/research-pap....

They didn't intend to predict but only to reveal patterns. One of the main patterns it found was prosperity in overshoot preceding collapse of population and standard of living. The Cato Institute and Wall Street Journal describing a relatively short time is consistent with the LtG view, but lacks the half-century of accuracy and projection beyond.

WSJ should say about this piece, "Past performance does not indicate future results."

LtG does suggest what could avoid collapse. At this date it basically reduces to everyone doing everything possible, which is still possible. At the top is to change our beliefs and values from pushing growth, faith in technology, and externalizing costs to enjoying what we have and stewardship.

It's not crazy. Having applied it in my life has improved it.

The entire comment section is full of naysayers who, nevertheless, choose not to dispute the facts. What's up with doom and gloom? By all _reliable_ accounts the world has never been more prosperous or less violent than it is today. Why do you feel the need to argue with this? Perhaps some self-examination is in order?

I'm not sure why the opposing opinion is somehow the holder's fault. Anecdotally, I've seen much more hate, violence, calls for violence, unhappiness, and economic dissatisfaction today compared to 10 years ago. This could be due to any number of things, some real and some related only to perception. This is a subject for debate, but it doesn't make sense to imply that the observation itself is somehow wrong. Your dismissal is antagonistic where it doesn't need to be.

What you're experiencing is called the "good old days" syndrome. You're evolutionarily predisposed to first forget the bad stuff, so the way you remember the past is an idealized version that didn't really exist. This is very easy to see if you're into journaling.

Because the prosperity of the present is built on selling out our future selves, polluting the world now, ignoring the warning signs

Also because there's a paywall so no one actually read the article

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair...

And it always will be. Every decade, century, millenia is amazing and dreadful. And that's the beauty of it. You can cherrypick and slant things to push a narrative you want. Someone could write "The 2010s Have Been Dreadful".

This article reminds me of a documentary I watched recently about the Maya. I’m paraphrasing, but the guy said all civilizations were richest before their final fall.

I don’t see the 2010s through the same lens this article does. It seems like the last orgyistic quantitative-eased decade of excess before the whole thing collapses.

Didn't the Roman empire fall centuries after its peak?

Also, the US (and many other nations) have been growing and improving for hundreds of years at this point. So by your logic, at almost any point in the past you could have said, "We're doing better than we've ever done, therefore this is the end."

There seems to be some strange human predisposition toward predicting that doom and gloom are just around the corner -- a prediction that is almost always wrong.

You're on the Titanic and someone shouts "Iceberg Dead Ahead!" Everyone gets to turning the wheel.

What do you think of the people who say, "Is that really an Iceberg?" Or "What the opportunity cost of swerving the ship suddenly vs. the risk of hitting - please also take into account what the damages and risk of sinking might be if we don't move and hit it?"

I'll tell you what everyone thinks of those people. "You guys are nuts! Just turn the damn ship and we'll figure out if it was a sensible move later!"

That's fine on the one hand. Everyone loves a good argument. The biggest problem I have with all of it is that a lot of people on both sides see nothing wrong with being particularly nasty about it.

"You want us to hit the iceberg!" "You know there's really no iceberg!" "You're being disingenuous!" "You're a liar." "I may be telling a lie but it's only to save the ship from hitting an iceberg."

Those who have lived under a rock for a decade would most definitely draw to this utopian conclusion of describing the 2010s as being "Amazing".

The actual reality of the 2010s brought technological advancements alongside the endless possibilities of abuse of privacy, security, bias and policies by its many creators upon its users. We have devices loaded with micro-sensors that track everything we do created by the so-called unprofitable 'unicorn' companies floating in IPOs every day, meanwhile in other countries there are claims of foreign interference in elections and referendums via the use of the same data we created, Which gives bad actors the opportunity to use them against us to easily bring terror to our streets. The list of damages from the 2010s go on.

No doubt that the tech and data we created can be used for good, but as the tech grows up we must prepare to create detection and prevention methods against the bad actors. The 2010s did not do this enough and it has riddled us with these issues.

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