Comment by derbOac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by derbOac | Hacker News Reader

I find these sorts of discussions unproductive in the absence of some specific focal points. Discussing how well the US is doing overall is sort of meaningless because it's so heterogeneous; you could have serious problems even while overall the country is doing well by historical standards.

Saying things are fine by the standards of the 1940s isn't helpful either; I'm not sure that's ever really been an appropriate yardstick (I think public health and wellness opportunity costs are often more relevant). I also think you can take many of these same sorts of arguments, go back in time, and find out that many positive indicators preceded very horrific periods in world history. For instance, there were a lot of societal advancements that coincided with the emergence of the world wars, and they still happened despite (or maybe even because) of those advancements.

I also have come to believe that many forms of societal collapse or crisis emerge fairly rapidly; things seem good by many objective indicators until they really don't. If you track some of these public indicators, they often seem to covary relatively weakly with the sorts of things you might expect, and no one really understands why. Seen from a distanced perspective those indicators don't seem to work as measures of what you'd like them to.

I'm not trying to adopt a pessimistic position, as I tend to think a lot of that is equally poorly posed, and I think the article is correct that if you look to history simply for benchmarks of what to expect when something bad happens, things aren't as catastrophic as you'd think. But in the absence of some kind of rigorous understanding of what to look to for societal collapse or catastrophe, these kinds of discussions in either direction are kind of pointless. What seems more relevant are more focal discussions of specific issues, or how to predict what is important.

An example is GDP:

- GDP gains might reflect an overall loss to society, as the previously untracked work (homemaking) was more valuable than the GDP-tracked work that replaced it… and families are doing substantially worse just to survive

- GDP per capita might not reflect that 99% of society is doing worse as we experience de-industrialization and destruction of our communities because paper gains like ownership stakes in foreign companies and hyper inflated real estate “mask” the losses experienced by most people

I’m curious what US metrics look like if you exclude the top… 5% over the past 50 years. What has life been like for 19 out of 20 people?

Correct. In the same way a venture capitalist can still be successful if only 1 out of 20 of his ventures succeeds and 19/20 fail.

Not just an example, but perhaps the classic example of why averages can be misleading. The obvious comparison is median income:

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/stagnating-median-incomes-des...

GDP isn't attributed to specific individuals so you can't really show "GDP per capita excluding the top 5%"

I phrased that poorly:

I meant things like income or other household metrics, but only for the bottom 95%.

Precisely because GDP doesn’t give us that insight.

> paper gains like ownership stakes in foreign companies and hyper inflated real estate “mask” the losses experienced by most people

Paper gains and real estate holdings/transactions are not part of GDP.

If you want a book length answer to that question, Factfulness by Hans Rosling might be a good place to start.

It shows all the ways that life has actually improved in the last 100 years across the world, for all people.

There’s a reason that populations have risen sharply to all time highs during this period. Infant and maternal mortality have reduced, deaths from deadly diseases have reduced through proliferation of antibiotics and vaccines, people don’t die of starvation from famine anymore in most of the world.

And you can actually see the effect of all of these things. When people are secure that their children will live to see adulthood, they drop from having 5-6 children to 1-2.

Things aren’t perfect, but on that one heartbreaking metric - the % of parents who mourn the loss of a child - the progress is phenomenal.

And that’s just one thing. I could give as many examples as you’d like, some of which might resonate more than others. Here are two more.

- the existence of the internet, smartphones and software powering those phones. We can stay in touch with nearly anyone we want to. We can find communities of like minded people online. It’s safe to say there are many on HN who fit right in but might not fit in their physical neighbourhoods. Companionship and community are critical to our well being.

- conscription is at an all time low. You, reading this, probably will never have to do military service or die for your country. Even many nations that do require service, like Finland, Singapore and South Korea have been at peace for a long, long time. Not dying in wars started by others is fantastic.

- we have access to wider variety of foods - both ingredients and cuisines. Variety that previous generations could only have dreamed of.

- we’ve never had more or better entertainment options. There are more movies, books, TV shows and video games than ever. Even if you felt they were better in the old days, you can enjoy all the entertainment from the old days on your smartphone for the cost of a cheap subscription.

Life isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot better than it used to be. This idea that life sucks because billionaires exist is a sad, small minded philosophy.

I have "1-2" children in part because the costs have skyrocketed and also because the nanny state says I go to jail if my kid say walks alone to the playground, so there is no time to micromanage more than 1 or 2 people to the extent they can't even walk without supervision. If you read about "child abuse stories" where some evil villan allowed the kids to play outside it is almost invariably someone with 3+ children (and usually a single mom) because with that many kids it's impractical and possibly even impossible to follow the every wish and demand of every asshole with a cellphone in their hand and ready to call CPS at the drop of a hat.

You're kinda proving my point here. People will always focus on what they don't have, rather than what they do. You will likely never experience losing a child, something that was part of the human experience for all time, until the last 50 or so years. And yet, rather than enjoy that enormous privilege, you complain about the cost of child care.

I don't blame you. You're acting exactly how most people act in most situations. Dwelling on what they don't have and getting angry about it.

Even if you won the lottery and could afford to have 20 kids and a nanny for each one you still wouldn't be happy. Not because you're bad, but because that's how brain chemistry works. The hundreds of millions from the lottery starts to feel "normal" and you'd be complaining about something else. Like your yacht not being big enough or whatever.

Ultimately the thing that is keeping you unhappy isn't the childcare cost or the spectre of CPS. You're unhappy because it's inherent in the human condition.

You've shifted to why one is or isn't happy rather than factors leading to number of children.

This idea that life sucks because billionaires exist is a sad, small minded philosophy.

It certainly would be. So I think you should consider why else people say what they say.

People are more sensitive to changes, especially negative ones, rather than absolutes. It doesn't matter how many things are good. If things are wrong, they need to improve, and anything that impedes improvement is perceived as negative. If things get worse, that is a big negative score -- especially if somebody says "Hey, it was worse in the past, so be happy that it's not that bad".

A number of things appear to be getting worse now, and a number of it has to do with the very wealthy:

* We just had four years of a Presidency who was very intent on antagonizing his opponents. He is wealthy, and was supported by the party that appealed to the wealthy.

* Even with him (temporarily) out of office, the impulse that put him there is still present. Those same smartphones bring us a constant stream of people who intend to aggravate -- not just bad news, but people who want them to be unhappy.

* Some of that is driven by wealthy people who profit off that unhappiness. It drives engagement, and they sell attention.

* A lot of people feel that their rights are decreasing. Sometimes it's literally true; sometimes it's merely a threat; sometimes it's engagement as in the last point. It doesn't matter, for example, that white people are in zero danger of becoming an oppressed minority; many are certain that it is, and that drives acting out in a way that is harmful.

* It is difficult to ignore a threat with high consequences and low probability. It does no good to tell people that there's a 99.9999% chance that their children won't be shot today -- especially if it's coupled with people dismissing the ones who are shot.

And so on. My point is that it is not "life sucks because billionaires", and in fact life sucks because people think that they only thing they're complaining about is "because billionaires". That means nobody is helping as things get worse, and even standing in the way.

He directly mentions how things have been improved since 2007, so no the comparison isn’t just to the 1940’s.

His point is people think American is much worse off than it actually is and he backs that up.

You could make the argument that America is great because we think we suck and drive ourselves harder than might be necessary. It's when you think you're great that you become complacent.

That's an interesting dichotomy considering that, from an outsider's perspective, America seems to have a lot more "We're #1", "Greatest nation on the planet", "boo when you hear someone else's national anthem" sentiment than anything else. Maybe it's a collective overcompensation? But it doesn't seem terribly self aware.

Fast processes driven by chaos exist in nature everywhere. There's no reason to think you are even being pessimistic as much as you are being realistic.

>> Discussing how well the US is doing overall is sort of meaningless because it's so heterogeneous

Complete nonsense. Discussing what the temperature of an object is overall is meaningless, because it's made of individual atoms and molecules that do their own thing...

Physics is a lot more well understood than human behavior. Abstracting away details of complicated social structures often doesn't work out very well.

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