Well being loopy isn't too good for economic success so that's a factor? Though for sure I've met some incredibly loopy people that had some great dice roll streaks.

But there are a lot of other factors in the problem and making it an economic issue really obscures some of the more important factors.

Intellectual laziness, idle brains, idle hands, toxic memes and bad actors making bad use of them.

Actually, I think our quality of life is going downhill. Things are very expensive and the taxes are still high. I think that the reasons the far right is winning everywhere is because people feel they have lost something. I agree. We have. We bought into the neoliberale thought mill and simultaneously lost our belief in social democratic welfare state. We are in short, becoming more like the states. But without the things that make the states so great. The states can basically print money and then other countries will begrudgingly buy dollars to keep it from inflating top much. So its basically global nation state socialism.