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Comment by xorfish | Hacker News Reader

The world is in a massively better place than 50, 20 or even 10 years ago.

Just have a look at https://ourworldindata.org/ and look at the development of extreme poverty, poverty, life expectancy, child mortality, literacy, proportion of the world that lives in a democracy and even happiness and life satisfaction.

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I think it’s more nuanced. If people perceive future volatility as having increased, then current situation will not matter for one’s “happiness”.

For many of the young, the story is that the last 60 to 70 years have been awesome, for the world as a whole, and maybe the next 20 to 30 will be too. But the cost will be what comes after.

The world as a whole may be a much better place, but that does nothing to make someone in a rusted-put rust belt town feel any better. “There are fewer starving children in Africa” is an ineffective argument for convincing someone that their life hasn’t gotten worse.

Ask those rusted-pot residents if they own a cell phone, and how life is different since they did.

At the same time, phones and social media can make you unhappy, can be for the worse

There were intentional decisions made about international trade that at least partially led to both those results. From an economic standpoint, free trade internationally leads to a higher worldwide GDP, but can also lead to losers in specific places like you mention. Good if you lived in a third world country, not good if you were a high school graduate making a living in manufacturing.

Now do the same for the US which was the subject of the study.

And regardless it is less whether people's lives are truly better or not. It is more regarding how people feel about how their life might improve in the future. In my peer group, very few people are optimistic about the future of American society. Combine the previously mentioned inequality with the looming threat of climate change and top it off with a dysfunctional government that seems unwilling or unable to address those concerns and the future doesn't look that exciting. The iPhone 18 being better than the iPhone 12 isn't exactly going to inspire hope in a better tomorrow.

But I think this lack of optimism is just another facet of negativity bias. I know a lot of people who say they're not optimistic, certainly - but all of them can point to massive social improvements made recently, and most of them have a clear vision of other things they hope to accomplish within a couple decades. They just prefer to express this vision in terms of how much things suck now or how terrible it would be if they don't improve. You can say "let's create a greener world together", or you can say "we've gotta stop greedy fossil fuel corporations from ruining the planet", and nowadays people seem to consistently choose the latter.

The problem is the assumption of linearity. Things are good now but it seems to me things are getting better at a decelerating rate, and some trends have even started to reverse in the most westernized countries. Most of what’s getting better in the world is in places like Africa or Brazil, emerging economies. Things aren’t getting better for a lot of people in a lot of cities in America. People are fleeing la, sf, etc... Empires rise and fall, predictably.

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