1,000https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/
Seems to be decent data towards things not actually getting worse in most metrics long term
@TheAllMemeingEye If people think their lives are getting worse (I don't know if they do, but that is the vibe I get at least), then they are getting worse. You can call it entitlement or whatever, but quality of life is inherently a subjective measure. Nobody's brain adjusts the amount of dopamine released based on national statistics.
@zsig or maybe the physical reality is still getting better but the news cycle makes everyone think it's shit.
Years ago someone mentioned a thought excitement to me. Imagine a news paper that's only published every ten years. What would be in it? How's much would be positive and how much negative? Now make that 50 years, then 100. While the 100 year newspaper would have awful stuff in it like WWII, massive amounts of incredibly positive stuff would likely dominate and we don't think about these things because they happen slowly. Several major diseases are extinct. Countless people lifted out of poverty. Pretty much anything medical continues to increase at a incredible speed. And access to that it's better than ever, even in the US. But all that stuff happened gradually. Your political opponent saying something egregious happens constantly. Repotting about the thousands of starving children in Gaza is easier than trotting about the millions that aren't starving in Asia anymore. It's easier than reporting about the people who no longer suffer from malnutrition in the American South. Wealth disparity when you never see John D Rockefeller feels less bad then when you constantly see fake rich people on TikTok
@TheAllMemeingEye Another beautiful one: US Real (aka PPP corrected) median household income:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
it's all the same shit as captured by the poll last year where ~80% of people said they were better off than a few years ago and the same 80% thought the economy was worse.
Edit: Because it's so great, also real disposable income:
or maybe the physical reality is still getting better but the news cycle makes everyone think it's shit
That's not an "or"; I agree with you. My point is that it doesn't matter if the physical reality is getting better if everyone thinks it's getting worse, because if everyone thinks it is getting worse, then it is getting worse. (it being quality of life)
@zsig The physical reality would still be better. If shark attacks are down but everyone thinks they are up because the media decided to run a bunch of special about them, are shark attacks a worse problem now? I think not.
@AlexanderTheGreater that's why I edited my comment to say (it being quality of life). I don't argue that physical reality is not getting better, I argue that physical reality and quality of life are not one-to-one and you can't really judge whether quality of life is falling or rising without surveying the affected people.
If people think their lives are getting worse (I don't know if they do, but that is the vibe I get at least), then they are getting worse
That doesn't actually logically follow. You'd measure one with survey questions like "how good is your life compared to a [year/decade/whatever] ago" and the other with questions like "how happy are you with your life". Or more targeted questions about specific aspects and so on. You could combine multiple questions.
But there's no reason that answers to the first question have to be consistent with the trend in answers to the second question! Happiness metrics could go up, despite people's impression being that things are getting worse!
Whether measures of happiness or life satisfaction are going up or down seems at the very least like a complicated question:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-people-who-say-they-are-happy?tab=chart&country=GEO~IND~ZWE~BRA~ARG~RUS~SWE~DEU~ALB~USA~CHN
Read this and think about whether you might be confusing symptoms for causes: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
For some reason I thought this was a multiple option selectable poll, so I clicked inflation, but I think 2 other options are more responsible: breakdown of community/family, & cultural fragmentation/polarization.
Also over regulation/inefficiency is probably more a root cause of unaffordability than “inflation,” even though it has been very multifaceted in recent years.
@DavidHiggs yeah, housing cost is a major reason people feel they are failing behind and the housing shortage is largely caused by various forms of regulation. It speaks for itself that many beloved neighborhood would be illegal to build today. Of course the housing regulation issues go much further than that example
Corporate greed? It's like blaming gravity for a plane crash. Corporations are made up of people, and just like you want low prices of the goods you buy, they want high prices of the goods they sell. Maybe there has been an increase in regulatory capture and rent-seeking. But the solutions to that aren't things like price controls which would only expand state power and its capacity for corruption, similar to tariffs.
I voted "Housing Market Speculation / Corporate Landlords" but it is important to point out that the largest source of housing speculation is typical NIMBY homeowners, and not landlords, corporate or otherwise.
@Sz it's also important to note that margins haven't increased. AFAIK main drivers for price increases have been supply shocks, including rising labor cost (which one could argue is good. Low-income earners had their large comp increase in decades over the last few years. Maybe it's their "greed" that's the problem? 😜)
@AlexanderTheGreater It means the outcome changed, but doesn't mean the cause changed. Do you think the US has ever been in a stable equilibrium?
@BenM no, of course it's never been stable. Things have been getting better and better (till people got tired if it and started burning it all down)
Edit: profit margins keep going down and down. It's BECAUSE companies are "greedy" and want to take their competitors market share. Rockefeller made his fortune by putting oil into custom rail cars instead of small barrels. Greed is what drives innovation and grows the pie for everyone. Moralizing got us authoritarianism, religious wars and dysfunctional economies. "Oh but those weren't my morals!" - that's what everyone says
@AlexanderTheGreater "till people got tired if it and started burning it all down" sounds like an argument in favor of this root cause and still doesn't require any sort of sudden change.
It's also not at all in conflict to suggest that the profit margin is the reason for the success in the first place and the reason for the decline.
@BenM "till people got tired if it and started burning it all down" sounds like an argument in favor of this root cause and still doesn't require any sort of sudden change.
I'm saying that people tired oh everything getting better and better and are amplifying minor problems that used to be even worse or are imagining problems into existence. This is happening both on the farish left and right and the media with their need to report negative stuff that draws us in keeps the vicious cycle going.