Downloaded this image yesterday that I ran across on social media in an author group
Ok, funny in a wisecracking mode. But not accurate in the modern world.
Looking at decades’ (centuries) long trends, by every long term measure human life keeps improving. Lifespan, standard of living, what is possible at various levels of income.
The news loves to bring you bad news. Fear $ell$. It’s become so ingrained in the mass media culture I suspect many of them don’t understand why they do it any more.
But the solid truth is that single events are overwhelmed by the vast tide of improvements.
I’m approaching what our culture considers retirement age. I mostly grew up in a 1300 square foot home with a 35 amp main fuse. That was all the electricity it was safe to run through the wires – and it was enough. I think we replaced the main fuse twice in the years I lived there. These days, 35 amps isn’t considered enough for most single rooms. My uncle raised a family in a two bedroom, 750 square foot house – and my grandmother also lived there until she came to live with us. These weren’t apartments or condos – detached homes on their own lots, no HOA. These days, apartments are often bigger. I haven’t seen a new detached home less than about 2100 square feet in decades. Many are 3000 plus. (The lots are smaller because land has gotten more expensive, and most people really don’t use their yards any more). Modern dwellings are designed to defeat many of the hazards our parents feared. Electrical fires are a lot rarer now. Structural materials last longer, and are less likely to fail catastrophically.
The styling of the cars I grew up with has decayed, but on every technical level they’ve improved so much there is not much of a comparison. People then thought it necessary to trade in cars every two to three years. Now, more people routinely keep them a decade or more. Odometers didn’t use to have a hundreds of thousands indicator – so few cars lasted 100,000 miles. I know people perfectly happy with vehicles that have 300,000 miles on them now. Safety has improved, too – seat belts, air bags, crumple zones. The probability of surviving the same crash that likely would have killed everyone in the car fifty or sixty years ago is much higher – often without anything worse than a case of soreness the next day.
Medical care has improved massively. When I was young, people who had heart attacks mostly died, and if they survived, they were usually disabled because there wasn’t a way to repair the damage. Strokes were permanent – I had an aunt and an uncle who had strokes in their late forties or early fifties, and never walked unaided again. Polio used to be a killer until the early 1950s – and if you survived, you usually spent your life in an iron lung (FDR was one of the lucky ones). Now, it’s a vaccination and if you still get it but manage to get care, it can be arrested and you still live a normal life. Allergies could be debilitating or worse, anaphylactic shock was a routine killer. And people are living longer – it was a real red flag when life expectancy dropped during COVID, as in “hey wake up and fix this RIGHT NOW because this isn’t the way things should be!”
(The response from our government wasn’t the correct one, either – most of the decline was due to government action rather than any threat from disease, and they got away with it because fear $ell$.)
The news makes their living scaring you – so they are going to report and emphasize all the little minor threats that strike microscopic portions of the populace. But if you look at the long term trends, rather than short term news, the future’s so bright we gotta wear shades – with one exception.
The only time the measures of quality of life fall is under excessively powerful governments that control too much. Why does this happen? Because there are no rewards for individuals who improve things, and huge roadblocks to improvements from people whose current livelihoods are threatened (For one example, look at how many legal battles have been fought, and continue to be fought, over ride-sharing). Entropy takes over, things fall apart, nobody has an incentive to fix them so they don’t get fixed, and the process accelerates. Not even nuclear war has such long term devastating effects – if people aren’t prevented from fixing and improving things, they will.
Most dystopian fiction fails on precisely this point. They presume it’s a permanent hardscrabble life for the survivors and their descendants permanently. Nothing could be further from the truth. All the stuff they need to make their lives better is even sitting around in plain view – no mining necessary – all they have to do is melt down non-functional cars and tear apart already destroyed buildings. Only somebody preventing improvement at the point of a metaphorical gun stops it – in short, powerful government. Call it a religious order if you want, because it amounts to the same thing – the critical factor is they have the power to punish or the power to prevent rewards.
There are legitimate functions of governments – arbitrators of disputes, protectors of the less powerful, and of the whole against threats from without. But it is endemic to the nature of those in government to want to increase their power beyond what is required – and it is necessary to our future, and that of our children, not to allow that to happen.
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