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DinoNerd's avatar

You write:

"But why, when things have been getting rapidly better for your entire life and well before, would you predict that they are about to start, or have just started, to get rapidly worse?"

You appear to be looking at global statistics. I don't think most people look there when deciding whether "things have been getting rapidly better for [their] entire life and well before". I suspect they are more likely to compare what they have with what they expected to have by this stage of their life. That's a little hard for outsiders to measure (we don't know what they were thinking 20, 40, or even 60 years ago). So one commonly used proxy compares individuals with their own parents.

I regularly read articles stating as an unchallenged truth that the median American is less well off than their parents. Their parents bought homes younger; their parents lived comfortably on a single income; their parents had relatively secure jobs; their parents had far less debt. This is blamed on a combination of increasing inequality and a rearrangement of the work force requiring two incomes to attain the same living standard previously attained with a single income. (That would of course be among those not desperately poor - poor women have always had to work, even while middle class feminists were complaining about being stuck in their homes.)

You will of course notice what isn't mentioned. Their parents didn't have the same tech tools modern youngsters can't imagine living without. Their parents may or may not have had better access to routine care, but moderns who can afford them have access to effective treatments for conditions which would have killed their parents. (I compare my experience with cancer to that of my grandfather.)

And that's before we talk about unrealistic expectations - in particular, that they'd be doing *better* than their parents, perhaps enormously better.

My parents imagined me as becoming a famous academic scientist, perhaps complete with Nobel prize. Instead, I'm merely a retired Principal Software Engineer. That's more prosperous than they were - dad was a unionized factory worker. But I certainly didn't live up to their (inflated) expectations. I'm pretty sure there are a lot of folks like me, not achieving inflated expectations ;-)

Bottom line though: improvement or its reverse can be in the eye of the beholder. and the perception of improvement, as well as hope for future improvement, tends to be very localized.

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David Friedman's avatar

For people who would like to interact in real time, I host an online meetup on Saturday mornings as well as a very occasional realspace meetup, originally for readers of the blog Slate Star Codex. Details:

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html

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