Nice broad piece here. Humans are biologically wired to be “attracted” to negativity. The problem for us, in a fast changing world, is that the media seizes upon this. We are fed an endless stream of negative “news” that makes it appear that, in the present, everything is falling apart.
At the same time, our brains suppress negative memories, making the past appear more rose-colored than it really was. I call this effect the “reality distortion field” https://www.lianeon.org/p/progress-is-counterintuitive
You are correct to illustrate that it distracts us from true problems (and their solutions).
Great piece Tommy. Really good read. I hear you. My issue with the CO2 debate is that the decline in per capita emissions for the rich countries has been far too slow. And many rich countries continue to rise. And that graph is on a log scale so the magnitude of difference between developing and developed is somewhat muted. So there is good news in that sense somewhat but change has been nowhere near what is required.
Thanks! That's a totally fair point that the log scale paints a rosier picture of the CO2 changes. And of course I agree, progress should be faster and we should be pushing harder--climate change is a huge problem that we're not taking seriously enough. Understanding the nuance and where we're making progress is important for knowing what solutions work
Brilliant. I appreciate that we can’t make people read different sources of information, or organize say their news programs – but what a difference it might make to the overall psychological and social atmosphere if all news broadcast sources, after telling us about the murders and disasters and deteriorations, also had to tell us something every day about what has been going right over the last century and how this is shown by evidence. But there will still be fools, e.g. carrying their Just Stop Oil placards and not having the faintest understanding of the economic, social and even environmental effects of their “policy”. It’s easier to “believe” we are doomed than to find out about the staggering efforts taking place over the last thirty years on an international scale in clean energy sources, reforesting, and so on. It’s easier to believe in an arbitrary Net Zero time-threshold than to understand anything about science or economics that would make it into a huge desperate mistake. And of course political people would rather chase votes than work seriously on education and improvement. This is not to be “head in the sand” about problems, as God knows there are plenty of them - it’s just to recognize objectively how many things in the world have been and are being improved.
The Jews in Europe before World War II were in trouble because of the rise of an irrational ideology, which had no interest in the evidence for the intellectual and cultural contributions of Jews and refused to accept their worth as human beings. The doom mongers of today are also ideologically blinded: the environmental apocalypticists, for example, wouldn’t watch the YouTube videos which list the endless discredited doom prophecies of the last sixty years, and they wouldn’t read “Not Zero” by Ross Clark or “Apocalypse Never” by Michael Shellenberger or “Fake Invisible Catastrophes” by Patrick Moore. The people who insist we are going down the drain wouldn’t read “The Rational Optimist” by Matt Ridley or “Enlightenment Now” by Steven Pinker. People have insisted we are about to face the end since at least John the Baptist said so (and many of them still think he was right, he was just too early with his prediction, and perhaps they will in another two thousand years as well). We’ve had the luck to survive the Black Death and the sense to survive the Cold War and the Hydrogen Bomb so far, so fortunately there are plenty of people who don’t want to just throw up their hands and become survivalists because of the supposedly inevitable – which actually doesn’t exist, because it is part of the chaos of potential, which we can also shape to a better future.
No, I mean John the Baptist. He was preaching the coming of the Kingdom of God, the sweeping away of the existing order - oppression of the Jews by the Roman Empire. That would be "the end of the world", which is "apocalypse". This was then spread by Jesus and the early Christians, e.g. as in the New Testament Gospels and in the Letters of Paul, who insisted it was all coming to an end in his lifetime. Which it didn't. And I strongly suspect that the doom forecast by, say, Greta Thunberg, will similarly fade into history, as things change, but don't all end catastrophically. People love a bit of dramatic narrative, though.
The only real positive is that it's the richer and more powerful people in the relatively richer (at least resource wise) countries that control nuclear weapons. This limits the figurative and literal fallout, but it already sucks for poorer people in poorer, central latitude countries, and will continue to suck worse than even today on the current trajectories.
I imagine that geoengineering will take place. But I'd prefer people, especially the richer ones, just plain reduce polluting than continue to count on technological solutions. Technological solutions are a constant drain on human power that could be better spent tackling problems of nature instead of remedying the externalities of the solutions of yesteryear.
What I really feel is for the wildlife who cannot fight for their interests against us.
John the Baptist wasn't just a "character" in a New Testament story. His existence and influence were written about by the Roman Jewish historian Josephus, and the Baptist had followers, independent of Christianity, for hundreds of years.
I can't possibly engage in anything resembling intelligent discourse with someone who thinks I was "listing apocalypses", or who thinks that "sunshine and rainbows" is any kind of analytical or intellectual response to being presented with literary sources containing truckloads of data. Perhaps I should sign off with something irrelevant, like "unicorns and mermaids".
The irony that between 2 comments you were able to go from “These fools wouldn’t possibly look at contrary evidence.” to “You fool, I couldn’t possible discuss this topic with you.” is hilarious.
You know who else had Roman historians swearing to his existence and had national influence by way of followers that bridged different cultures? Hercules.
I know damn well who he was. I knew some of the last of the Sabaeans from Iraq when I volunteered to serve as a volunteer for Iraqi refugees in Jordan. Sorry, but I'm just a nonbeliever, even if a figure involved in biblical stories was real.
If you're going to be a bible thumper, you should get used to being criticized for it.
Thanks for posting this, Tommy. For anyone who hasn't encountered it, Hans Rosling wrote a great book called 'Factfulness' that overlaps with many of your points.
If either of you are keen I've done a deep dive review on factfulness here which offers some counter points and challenges. I'd be interested in your thoughts.
we have indoor plumbing and a machine in our pocket that will deliver almost anything you can dream up. Optimism is just so much more fun. Have more fun, that's why we are all down here.
To me, doomer behaviour is a manifestation of a pathological tunnel vision on what should be and not what is + a general lack of belief in human agency. Of course, the media exploiting the negativity bias doesn't help either, as you rightly pointed out. Great stuff as always!
Poorer people in all societies have long lacked proportional actionable agency. Even if they vote their wellbeing is disproportionately ignored compared to the wellbeing of richer people.
Rich people long ago learned that they could extract from the public coffers and commonweal through sociopolitical machinations and are currently (in the US) around a local apex of doing so.
In such a context of course people are going to be doomers. When someone, other than one's well meaning parents, constrains one's freedom/agency, it's rarely for one's own good, and far more often for the good of the constrainer.
This piece is (chef's kiss) spot on. It seems people forget how we humans have a long history of doing a really good (albeit slow) job of figuring things out. We iterate, screw up, change, repeat until we improve - all the time in everything we do.
Haha, some level of feeling crappy about actual problems is totally legit. I just think we should keep it in context -- the world has always had problems, there are lots of things that are way better now, and our problems aren't insurmountable! Let's find what's working and push in those places. Climate change is a big, scary problem. Let's fix that shit.
I've personally adopted the "oh well" method for my sanity as well as deleting social media. Fixing it would be great but it would take collective effort that just isn't happening.
Great piece. I just wrote a book that gives some credence to Doomer arguments, and deconstructs the aesthetics of apocalypse narratives. I'd be interested in your take, if you'd like a digital copy.
I have to push back on this, as while some aspects are accurate, others are not. The fact is some people are just not very skilled at telling where the decline is and follow red herrings. That's what's known as the fallacy fallacy. The fact that an argument is argued in a flawed way doesn't mean it's inaccurate but that the person presenting the argument isn't well informed. While people have complained that things are changing since the beginning of recorded history, we're also in a stage of society where literally everything is different than it was 100 years ago, and most things are different than they were 30 years ago. That is going to have a profound effect.
The fact that education, critical thinking and trust in institutions is on the decline is best demonstrated by the emergence of groups like the Flat Earth Society. Every generation has an increase of Flat Earth believers over the one before it to the point where 1 in 10 Americans now doubt the shape of the globe. I know anecdotal evidence doesn't account for much but I constantly had conversations with people claiming that their educations gave them the ability to think critically, and then I'd identify an area they were uninformed in because I'd know through previous experience where they likely lacked, give them the opportunity to show critical thinking, and almost every single time they'd fail. It led me to using a saying that Americans hand out diplomas like North Koreans hand out military awards. If you show up and pay your bills, they'll give you a diploma, but it doesn't mean you know how to think.
The prevalence of emojis might not be the best qualifier of the decline of language, but popularity of song lyrics is. I personally went through and compared the lyrics of modern songs with top hits at the same time the year before going back about 30 years and it was very noticeable. People are becoming less articulate. They use vague language and in my opinion its so it's harder for people to correct them for stating things that aren't true because they avoid actually saying anything. Weasels words are becoming more common, and everyone is calling it gaslighting when you correct them. There are Nobel Prize winners, but do you know who they are? If you brought them up with other people would they know who they are? In the days of Einstein and Stephen Hawking winning Nobel prizes people knew who they were. Now, hardly anyone can name a current intellectual.
When it comes to economic woes I don't know about globally but I know in the US and Canada it is objectively getting worse. Education to achieve better jobs is more expensive and pay hasn't increase with inflation or cost of living. It's true that home prices have skyrocketed and ownership has dropped. Those who do manage to secure a home are locked into mortgages that take longer to pay off and while they have lower interest rates, the amount itself is much higher and they have to pay them for longer. While mass produced goods are often cheaper, they're one of the only things that are. All major purchases are more expensive and don't last as long so they have to be repeated. The idea of generational wealth is practically taboo to the point where if your parents are able to leave you an inheritance or pay for your education it's seen as a character flaw.
And it's true crime has been on decline, but the fact that so many people think it's getting worse is a problem itself. We're being told it's getting worse by the very media institutions we're supposed to be trusting, and there's a very good chance it's intentional. We weren't worrying about a civil war in the past and we are now. The concern for fascism is on the rise and while the risk of actual fascism is nearly impossible to quantify specifically, all the predictors are lighting up. Authoritarianism, surveillance, incarceration rates, mental health levels, addiction, fear of criminality, all are on the rise. In the past the conversations around Presidential elections were whether they were good for the economy, not whether they're going to arrest their political opponents when they get the chance and start throwing people into gulags.
It's ironic that while the author says critical thinking might not be on the decline, the entire article itself is proof it is in one way or the other. Either all these people the author has a problem with aren't using their critical thinking and accepting an inaccurate narrative, or the author is. It's true that in order to solve problems we need to be solution based, but pretending there isn't an elephant in the room because 'it's annoying' doesn't help solve problems either. We need to accurately identify real problems, stop getting distracted by false leads, and implement real solutions, and we are getting worse at doing that.
In particular, "The fact that education, critical thinking and trust in institutions is on the decline is best demonstrated by the emergence of groups like the Flat Earth Society."
Back in the 1970s I noticed what I called "The Death of a Liberal Arts Education" -- a failure in our education system to teach thinking (let alone critical thinking) as well as a failure to broaden minds. You mentioned song lyrics. I've long wanted to figure out how to do an analysis of the conceptual complexity of fiction. My *sense* is that, as you say with song lyrics, complexity and definiteness have declined. We've become mentally more simplisitic. I think modern culture encourages not thinking -- people are spoon fed what they should think.
Politics may be the best indicator of our intellectual decline, but it's visible in many other sectors.
"then I'd identify an area they were uninformed in because I'd know through previous experience where they likely lacked, give them the opportunity to show critical thinking, and almost every single time they'd fail. "
I've read that critical thinking and reading requires a certain amount of pre-existing topical knowledge. Given the expansion of knowledge over the years it would be surprising if an average person's critical ability toward a randomly chosen topic doesn't plateau at some point, even with improved education. Exactly when that plateau is, and if Google searches and AI are filling in the holes for the typical person faster than advances are creating holes, is a question I don't have an answer to.
Yeah it would be extremely difficult to measure precisely. I've given a lot of thought to how one would go about teaching people to think critically and it's slightly paradoxical because any regimented instruction would demand specific outcomes based on specific behaviors which is basically the opposite of critical thinking. The more prescribed the process becomes, the less it actually resembles critical thinking.
However one of the most important things to acknowledge in my opinion is that most people may have access to more knowledge but they aren't utilizing it. Many, and in my opinion most, people are spending their time spreading and consuming junk information. Things that don't actually help them think more effectively. Rather the opposite, it's mostly information which gets in the way of effective deduction.
For example let me just take one look at the 'trending' tab on Youtube.
The top 6 recommended videos are:
1. At 877k views, a teaser trailer for Geshin Impact.
2. At 863k views, the UK election results explained
3. At 1.1m views, a reaction video to Kendrick Lamar's music video
4. At 1.8m views, "I Recreated Impossible Goals" which is someone kicking a soccer ball
5. At 992k views, another teaser for Geshin Impact
6. At 356k views, "I Started a Melon Cult (In Minecraft)
I'm actually shocked that one of the entrees actually had something to do with politics today. Normally it's garbage the whole way through. And even though it was about politics, it's not that impressive. It's just explaining election results which normally in the past, everyone would basically already be aware of and not need explained to them. Everything else does nothing to help someone figure out the world around them. If anything when you focus on such things you end up dumber than if you were doing something else.
>> "However one of the most important things to acknowledge in my opinion is that most people may have access to more knowledge but they aren't utilizing it."
Indeed. We have unprecedented access to knowledge, but how many avail themselves of it?
To be fair the majority of my Youtube watches are of wildlife or cute pets, followed by clips of shows or movies. I've got an economist and a lawyer in my frequent watches, and a few vocational practitioners in my less frequent watches, but I'm primarily going to Youtube for escape, not knowledge.
I find it a positive that undoubtedly quite a few of the viewers of the UK election explainer are non-UK citizens. In the past we people in other countries would just get a brief news clip or newspaper blurb about it.
The mistake you are making with the median income graph is how you afre correcting for time. You are adjusting for change due to the value of the dollar relative to a basket of consumer goods. The relavant deflator should be per capita GDP. This is a measure of rising wealth of the nation, which determines the cost of living. For example, the cost of medical care goes up faster than inflation over time. Part of this rise is due to the fact that medicine simply can do more today than in the past. Sixty years ago,you got cancer, you pretty much died. Today that is not necessarily the case. As a result people die in their eighties rather than their seventies. Middle age ends at 70 rather than 60. This new reality of longer lifespan costs money we did not spend years ago. This spending is part of the normal standard of living that is an expected part of life. It is not tracked by CPI. Thus to compare apples wtih applies one needs to adjust with GDP per capital, not CPI.
If you make this adjustment you will find that median income has indeed headed down. It necessarily must since income inequality has gone up, means a minoroty is seeing rising income when adjusted for per capital GDP.
No, to compare cost of living you use a basket of goods, e.g. inflation measures. These measure the cost of living. You expect some components to rise faster than the aggregate, but what you're interested in is how much cost of living has changed on average. Medicine might go up while food and transportation go down.
Deflating by GDP doesn't make much sense to me. That would only make sense if the aggregate wealth/standard of living of a country couldn't go up, which is obviously false.
I understand you write on economics and might have alternative views, and that's fine. I'll stick with standard economic consensus.
People's sense of well being are not absolute. When I was a kid we did not suffer for our lack of Internet. My folks did not miss TV when they were kids nor did their parents miss radio, or their grandparents cars.
Life is based on comparisons to what others have *at that time* and what they had in the recent past. If one adjusts for different times using just a price index they get misleading results. Colonial America looks like it was desperately poor when using price, when in actuality Americans were rich *for their time*. The Hessians were simply amazed at how wealthy the colonial Americans were.
If one adjusts with GDP measures this perception can be transmitted to modern readers.
Cassandra versus Chicken Little, that is the question. Societies do fall -- nothing lasts forever -- and in every fall there were those who were right about the direction of things. The same civilization that long ago proclaimed, "There is nothing new under the Sun," is long vanished. In contrast, yes, there are always those who think, for whatever reason, that the sky is falling. The difficulty is separating valid and troubling concerns from business as usual.
Income may be increasing, but so are prices of just about everything, especially since COVID supply chain issues. And global warming is starting to affect supply chains and production. A trip to the grocery store takes a bigger chunk of your income than it used to.
>> "The world is a complex, nuanced place with some things getting better, some worse, and it's up to us to understand that complexity if we want to understand the world."
Indeed, and isn't our failure to do that indicative of a dual problem? Firstly, that the world has become incredibly more complex than it used to be, so understanding requires considerable effort. Secondly, that the playpen of modern media doesn't encourage the effort or paint it as worthwhile, so few people bother. Learning stuff is hard!
I've been bothered for decades by the anti-intellectual currents swirling in society. It's gotten worse over time. One can certainly point to politics, but I think it's also reflected in our literature and art. We've become victims of our own success as a species, and I think a key point missed when claiming "it was ever thus" is the sheer size and scope of humanity. The dynamics of eight billion people in contrast to the small band of hunter-gatherers we evolved as. Tragically, our intellect has yet to catch up with our monkey cleverness.
Value extraction mechanisms such as credit cards and payday loans aren't factored into inflation, despite hitting certain demographics disproportionately.
Pensions have never factored into net worth or current income, but 401(k) investments do. The savings rate has precipitously declined as well. Perhaps this is because people are investing more for retirement (now that pensions aren't as abundant?), but if not (and from what I've read people aren't saving alot), then trying to match this spending rate when retirement comes around will be that much more difficult.
One person's hedonic adjustment is another person's wish for something old-school.
I’m in general agreement, but one thing that I would sightly push back on is that while of course construction can make a city more affordable given supply versus demand, it’s no full solution in itself. Dedicated infrastructure is required to support development. If the political will isn’t there for such investment, then associated housing should not be built. Thus poorer people should be priced out of those areas for as long as those areas remain more desirable.
What many fail to grasp I think is that poorer people naturally ought to live in less desirable areas given that they don’t have as much money to pay. Furthermore if certain lower paying jobs are also required in those more desirable areas then the market ought to correct for this somewhat through higher wages in them. And if poorer people need to commute to fill such jobs, then infrastructure may need to be improved to facilitate such commuting. Whatever works. What irks me most is the popular perception that while no one expects poorer people to have the same sorts of things that richer people do, they do expect all cities to affordably house poorer people. Thus all manners of politically motivated “bandaids” are funded in this regard. “Yay, look how our policies are fixing the housing crisis!” No, that would just be standard political nonsense given equally standard human ignorance about how things work.
Nice broad piece here. Humans are biologically wired to be “attracted” to negativity. The problem for us, in a fast changing world, is that the media seizes upon this. We are fed an endless stream of negative “news” that makes it appear that, in the present, everything is falling apart.
At the same time, our brains suppress negative memories, making the past appear more rose-colored than it really was. I call this effect the “reality distortion field” https://www.lianeon.org/p/progress-is-counterintuitive
You are correct to illustrate that it distracts us from true problems (and their solutions).
Great piece Tommy. Really good read. I hear you. My issue with the CO2 debate is that the decline in per capita emissions for the rich countries has been far too slow. And many rich countries continue to rise. And that graph is on a log scale so the magnitude of difference between developing and developed is somewhat muted. So there is good news in that sense somewhat but change has been nowhere near what is required.
Thanks! That's a totally fair point that the log scale paints a rosier picture of the CO2 changes. And of course I agree, progress should be faster and we should be pushing harder--climate change is a huge problem that we're not taking seriously enough. Understanding the nuance and where we're making progress is important for knowing what solutions work
Absolutely, Tommy! 100% agree. Cheers
Brilliant. I appreciate that we can’t make people read different sources of information, or organize say their news programs – but what a difference it might make to the overall psychological and social atmosphere if all news broadcast sources, after telling us about the murders and disasters and deteriorations, also had to tell us something every day about what has been going right over the last century and how this is shown by evidence. But there will still be fools, e.g. carrying their Just Stop Oil placards and not having the faintest understanding of the economic, social and even environmental effects of their “policy”. It’s easier to “believe” we are doomed than to find out about the staggering efforts taking place over the last thirty years on an international scale in clean energy sources, reforesting, and so on. It’s easier to believe in an arbitrary Net Zero time-threshold than to understand anything about science or economics that would make it into a huge desperate mistake. And of course political people would rather chase votes than work seriously on education and improvement. This is not to be “head in the sand” about problems, as God knows there are plenty of them - it’s just to recognize objectively how many things in the world have been and are being improved.
I wonder how many European Jews in 1929 had convinced themselves that things weren't really as bad as they seemed.
The Jews in Europe before World War II were in trouble because of the rise of an irrational ideology, which had no interest in the evidence for the intellectual and cultural contributions of Jews and refused to accept their worth as human beings. The doom mongers of today are also ideologically blinded: the environmental apocalypticists, for example, wouldn’t watch the YouTube videos which list the endless discredited doom prophecies of the last sixty years, and they wouldn’t read “Not Zero” by Ross Clark or “Apocalypse Never” by Michael Shellenberger or “Fake Invisible Catastrophes” by Patrick Moore. The people who insist we are going down the drain wouldn’t read “The Rational Optimist” by Matt Ridley or “Enlightenment Now” by Steven Pinker. People have insisted we are about to face the end since at least John the Baptist said so (and many of them still think he was right, he was just too early with his prediction, and perhaps they will in another two thousand years as well). We’ve had the luck to survive the Black Death and the sense to survive the Cold War and the Hydrogen Bomb so far, so fortunately there are plenty of people who don’t want to just throw up their hands and become survivalists because of the supposedly inevitable – which actually doesn’t exist, because it is part of the chaos of potential, which we can also shape to a better future.
John the Baptist? Do you mean John, the Author of Revelations? Not the same.
No, I mean John the Baptist. He was preaching the coming of the Kingdom of God, the sweeping away of the existing order - oppression of the Jews by the Roman Empire. That would be "the end of the world", which is "apocalypse". This was then spread by Jesus and the early Christians, e.g. as in the New Testament Gospels and in the Letters of Paul, who insisted it was all coming to an end in his lifetime. Which it didn't. And I strongly suspect that the doom forecast by, say, Greta Thunberg, will similarly fade into history, as things change, but don't all end catastrophically. People love a bit of dramatic narrative, though.
As a civilization we're still pretty crap at adjusting to climate change without drastic consequences impacting a large portion of the population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moche_culture#Collapse
The only real positive is that it's the richer and more powerful people in the relatively richer (at least resource wise) countries that control nuclear weapons. This limits the figurative and literal fallout, but it already sucks for poorer people in poorer, central latitude countries, and will continue to suck worse than even today on the current trajectories.
I imagine that geoengineering will take place. But I'd prefer people, especially the richer ones, just plain reduce polluting than continue to count on technological solutions. Technological solutions are a constant drain on human power that could be better spent tackling problems of nature instead of remedying the externalities of the solutions of yesteryear.
What I really feel is for the wildlife who cannot fight for their interests against us.
Sunshine and rainbows. Perhaps you should consider that the apocalypses you list didn't occur because people fought back.
And was John the Baptist a real person?
John the Baptist wasn't just a "character" in a New Testament story. His existence and influence were written about by the Roman Jewish historian Josephus, and the Baptist had followers, independent of Christianity, for hundreds of years.
I can't possibly engage in anything resembling intelligent discourse with someone who thinks I was "listing apocalypses", or who thinks that "sunshine and rainbows" is any kind of analytical or intellectual response to being presented with literary sources containing truckloads of data. Perhaps I should sign off with something irrelevant, like "unicorns and mermaids".
The irony that between 2 comments you were able to go from “These fools wouldn’t possibly look at contrary evidence.” to “You fool, I couldn’t possible discuss this topic with you.” is hilarious.
You know who else had Roman historians swearing to his existence and had national influence by way of followers that bridged different cultures? Hercules.
I know damn well who he was. I knew some of the last of the Sabaeans from Iraq when I volunteered to serve as a volunteer for Iraqi refugees in Jordan. Sorry, but I'm just a nonbeliever, even if a figure involved in biblical stories was real.
If you're going to be a bible thumper, you should get used to being criticized for it.
Thanks for posting this, Tommy. For anyone who hasn't encountered it, Hans Rosling wrote a great book called 'Factfulness' that overlaps with many of your points.
I mention Factfulness in the conclusion :)
If either of you are keen I've done a deep dive review on factfulness here which offers some counter points and challenges. I'd be interested in your thoughts.
https://open.substack.com/pub/spearandspoon/p/on-reading-factfulness-by-hans-rosling-d72d7336b7bc?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=rboqp
Excellent piece, well researched and well written. Totally agree.
we have indoor plumbing and a machine in our pocket that will deliver almost anything you can dream up. Optimism is just so much more fun. Have more fun, that's why we are all down here.
To me, doomer behaviour is a manifestation of a pathological tunnel vision on what should be and not what is + a general lack of belief in human agency. Of course, the media exploiting the negativity bias doesn't help either, as you rightly pointed out. Great stuff as always!
Poorer people in all societies have long lacked proportional actionable agency. Even if they vote their wellbeing is disproportionately ignored compared to the wellbeing of richer people.
Rich people long ago learned that they could extract from the public coffers and commonweal through sociopolitical machinations and are currently (in the US) around a local apex of doing so.
In such a context of course people are going to be doomers. When someone, other than one's well meaning parents, constrains one's freedom/agency, it's rarely for one's own good, and far more often for the good of the constrainer.
Good post, we need more of that voice nowadays!
This piece is (chef's kiss) spot on. It seems people forget how we humans have a long history of doing a really good (albeit slow) job of figuring things out. We iterate, screw up, change, repeat until we improve - all the time in everything we do.
Reading this as I'm writing a piece on Schopenhauer and climate change, I think i would be labeled as a doomer OH MY
Haha, some level of feeling crappy about actual problems is totally legit. I just think we should keep it in context -- the world has always had problems, there are lots of things that are way better now, and our problems aren't insurmountable! Let's find what's working and push in those places. Climate change is a big, scary problem. Let's fix that shit.
I've personally adopted the "oh well" method for my sanity as well as deleting social media. Fixing it would be great but it would take collective effort that just isn't happening.
Great piece. I just wrote a book that gives some credence to Doomer arguments, and deconstructs the aesthetics of apocalypse narratives. I'd be interested in your take, if you'd like a digital copy.
I would be happy to take a look (though it might be a while before I actually read it, I'm very underwater with various obligations atm)
Tremendous, I'll drop you a DM
I have to push back on this, as while some aspects are accurate, others are not. The fact is some people are just not very skilled at telling where the decline is and follow red herrings. That's what's known as the fallacy fallacy. The fact that an argument is argued in a flawed way doesn't mean it's inaccurate but that the person presenting the argument isn't well informed. While people have complained that things are changing since the beginning of recorded history, we're also in a stage of society where literally everything is different than it was 100 years ago, and most things are different than they were 30 years ago. That is going to have a profound effect.
The fact that education, critical thinking and trust in institutions is on the decline is best demonstrated by the emergence of groups like the Flat Earth Society. Every generation has an increase of Flat Earth believers over the one before it to the point where 1 in 10 Americans now doubt the shape of the globe. I know anecdotal evidence doesn't account for much but I constantly had conversations with people claiming that their educations gave them the ability to think critically, and then I'd identify an area they were uninformed in because I'd know through previous experience where they likely lacked, give them the opportunity to show critical thinking, and almost every single time they'd fail. It led me to using a saying that Americans hand out diplomas like North Koreans hand out military awards. If you show up and pay your bills, they'll give you a diploma, but it doesn't mean you know how to think.
The prevalence of emojis might not be the best qualifier of the decline of language, but popularity of song lyrics is. I personally went through and compared the lyrics of modern songs with top hits at the same time the year before going back about 30 years and it was very noticeable. People are becoming less articulate. They use vague language and in my opinion its so it's harder for people to correct them for stating things that aren't true because they avoid actually saying anything. Weasels words are becoming more common, and everyone is calling it gaslighting when you correct them. There are Nobel Prize winners, but do you know who they are? If you brought them up with other people would they know who they are? In the days of Einstein and Stephen Hawking winning Nobel prizes people knew who they were. Now, hardly anyone can name a current intellectual.
When it comes to economic woes I don't know about globally but I know in the US and Canada it is objectively getting worse. Education to achieve better jobs is more expensive and pay hasn't increase with inflation or cost of living. It's true that home prices have skyrocketed and ownership has dropped. Those who do manage to secure a home are locked into mortgages that take longer to pay off and while they have lower interest rates, the amount itself is much higher and they have to pay them for longer. While mass produced goods are often cheaper, they're one of the only things that are. All major purchases are more expensive and don't last as long so they have to be repeated. The idea of generational wealth is practically taboo to the point where if your parents are able to leave you an inheritance or pay for your education it's seen as a character flaw.
And it's true crime has been on decline, but the fact that so many people think it's getting worse is a problem itself. We're being told it's getting worse by the very media institutions we're supposed to be trusting, and there's a very good chance it's intentional. We weren't worrying about a civil war in the past and we are now. The concern for fascism is on the rise and while the risk of actual fascism is nearly impossible to quantify specifically, all the predictors are lighting up. Authoritarianism, surveillance, incarceration rates, mental health levels, addiction, fear of criminality, all are on the rise. In the past the conversations around Presidential elections were whether they were good for the economy, not whether they're going to arrest their political opponents when they get the chance and start throwing people into gulags.
It's ironic that while the author says critical thinking might not be on the decline, the entire article itself is proof it is in one way or the other. Either all these people the author has a problem with aren't using their critical thinking and accepting an inaccurate narrative, or the author is. It's true that in order to solve problems we need to be solution based, but pretending there isn't an elephant in the room because 'it's annoying' doesn't help solve problems either. We need to accurately identify real problems, stop getting distracted by false leads, and implement real solutions, and we are getting worse at doing that.
Yes. What he said.
In particular, "The fact that education, critical thinking and trust in institutions is on the decline is best demonstrated by the emergence of groups like the Flat Earth Society."
Back in the 1970s I noticed what I called "The Death of a Liberal Arts Education" -- a failure in our education system to teach thinking (let alone critical thinking) as well as a failure to broaden minds. You mentioned song lyrics. I've long wanted to figure out how to do an analysis of the conceptual complexity of fiction. My *sense* is that, as you say with song lyrics, complexity and definiteness have declined. We've become mentally more simplisitic. I think modern culture encourages not thinking -- people are spoon fed what they should think.
Politics may be the best indicator of our intellectual decline, but it's visible in many other sectors.
"then I'd identify an area they were uninformed in because I'd know through previous experience where they likely lacked, give them the opportunity to show critical thinking, and almost every single time they'd fail. "
I've read that critical thinking and reading requires a certain amount of pre-existing topical knowledge. Given the expansion of knowledge over the years it would be surprising if an average person's critical ability toward a randomly chosen topic doesn't plateau at some point, even with improved education. Exactly when that plateau is, and if Google searches and AI are filling in the holes for the typical person faster than advances are creating holes, is a question I don't have an answer to.
Yeah it would be extremely difficult to measure precisely. I've given a lot of thought to how one would go about teaching people to think critically and it's slightly paradoxical because any regimented instruction would demand specific outcomes based on specific behaviors which is basically the opposite of critical thinking. The more prescribed the process becomes, the less it actually resembles critical thinking.
However one of the most important things to acknowledge in my opinion is that most people may have access to more knowledge but they aren't utilizing it. Many, and in my opinion most, people are spending their time spreading and consuming junk information. Things that don't actually help them think more effectively. Rather the opposite, it's mostly information which gets in the way of effective deduction.
For example let me just take one look at the 'trending' tab on Youtube.
The top 6 recommended videos are:
1. At 877k views, a teaser trailer for Geshin Impact.
2. At 863k views, the UK election results explained
3. At 1.1m views, a reaction video to Kendrick Lamar's music video
4. At 1.8m views, "I Recreated Impossible Goals" which is someone kicking a soccer ball
5. At 992k views, another teaser for Geshin Impact
6. At 356k views, "I Started a Melon Cult (In Minecraft)
I'm actually shocked that one of the entrees actually had something to do with politics today. Normally it's garbage the whole way through. And even though it was about politics, it's not that impressive. It's just explaining election results which normally in the past, everyone would basically already be aware of and not need explained to them. Everything else does nothing to help someone figure out the world around them. If anything when you focus on such things you end up dumber than if you were doing something else.
>> "However one of the most important things to acknowledge in my opinion is that most people may have access to more knowledge but they aren't utilizing it."
Indeed. We have unprecedented access to knowledge, but how many avail themselves of it?
To be fair the majority of my Youtube watches are of wildlife or cute pets, followed by clips of shows or movies. I've got an economist and a lawyer in my frequent watches, and a few vocational practitioners in my less frequent watches, but I'm primarily going to Youtube for escape, not knowledge.
I find it a positive that undoubtedly quite a few of the viewers of the UK election explainer are non-UK citizens. In the past we people in other countries would just get a brief news clip or newspaper blurb about it.
The mistake you are making with the median income graph is how you afre correcting for time. You are adjusting for change due to the value of the dollar relative to a basket of consumer goods. The relavant deflator should be per capita GDP. This is a measure of rising wealth of the nation, which determines the cost of living. For example, the cost of medical care goes up faster than inflation over time. Part of this rise is due to the fact that medicine simply can do more today than in the past. Sixty years ago,you got cancer, you pretty much died. Today that is not necessarily the case. As a result people die in their eighties rather than their seventies. Middle age ends at 70 rather than 60. This new reality of longer lifespan costs money we did not spend years ago. This spending is part of the normal standard of living that is an expected part of life. It is not tracked by CPI. Thus to compare apples wtih applies one needs to adjust with GDP per capital, not CPI.
If you make this adjustment you will find that median income has indeed headed down. It necessarily must since income inequality has gone up, means a minoroty is seeing rising income when adjusted for per capital GDP.
No, to compare cost of living you use a basket of goods, e.g. inflation measures. These measure the cost of living. You expect some components to rise faster than the aggregate, but what you're interested in is how much cost of living has changed on average. Medicine might go up while food and transportation go down.
Deflating by GDP doesn't make much sense to me. That would only make sense if the aggregate wealth/standard of living of a country couldn't go up, which is obviously false.
I understand you write on economics and might have alternative views, and that's fine. I'll stick with standard economic consensus.
People's sense of well being are not absolute. When I was a kid we did not suffer for our lack of Internet. My folks did not miss TV when they were kids nor did their parents miss radio, or their grandparents cars.
Life is based on comparisons to what others have *at that time* and what they had in the recent past. If one adjusts for different times using just a price index they get misleading results. Colonial America looks like it was desperately poor when using price, when in actuality Americans were rich *for their time*. The Hessians were simply amazed at how wealthy the colonial Americans were.
If one adjusts with GDP measures this perception can be transmitted to modern readers.
Cassandra versus Chicken Little, that is the question. Societies do fall -- nothing lasts forever -- and in every fall there were those who were right about the direction of things. The same civilization that long ago proclaimed, "There is nothing new under the Sun," is long vanished. In contrast, yes, there are always those who think, for whatever reason, that the sky is falling. The difficulty is separating valid and troubling concerns from business as usual.
Income may be increasing, but so are prices of just about everything, especially since COVID supply chain issues. And global warming is starting to affect supply chains and production. A trip to the grocery store takes a bigger chunk of your income than it used to.
>> "The world is a complex, nuanced place with some things getting better, some worse, and it's up to us to understand that complexity if we want to understand the world."
Indeed, and isn't our failure to do that indicative of a dual problem? Firstly, that the world has become incredibly more complex than it used to be, so understanding requires considerable effort. Secondly, that the playpen of modern media doesn't encourage the effort or paint it as worthwhile, so few people bother. Learning stuff is hard!
I've been bothered for decades by the anti-intellectual currents swirling in society. It's gotten worse over time. One can certainly point to politics, but I think it's also reflected in our literature and art. We've become victims of our own success as a species, and I think a key point missed when claiming "it was ever thus" is the sheer size and scope of humanity. The dynamics of eight billion people in contrast to the small band of hunter-gatherers we evolved as. Tragically, our intellect has yet to catch up with our monkey cleverness.
Value extraction mechanisms such as credit cards and payday loans aren't factored into inflation, despite hitting certain demographics disproportionately.
Pensions have never factored into net worth or current income, but 401(k) investments do. The savings rate has precipitously declined as well. Perhaps this is because people are investing more for retirement (now that pensions aren't as abundant?), but if not (and from what I've read people aren't saving alot), then trying to match this spending rate when retirement comes around will be that much more difficult.
One person's hedonic adjustment is another person's wish for something old-school.
I’m in general agreement, but one thing that I would sightly push back on is that while of course construction can make a city more affordable given supply versus demand, it’s no full solution in itself. Dedicated infrastructure is required to support development. If the political will isn’t there for such investment, then associated housing should not be built. Thus poorer people should be priced out of those areas for as long as those areas remain more desirable.
What many fail to grasp I think is that poorer people naturally ought to live in less desirable areas given that they don’t have as much money to pay. Furthermore if certain lower paying jobs are also required in those more desirable areas then the market ought to correct for this somewhat through higher wages in them. And if poorer people need to commute to fill such jobs, then infrastructure may need to be improved to facilitate such commuting. Whatever works. What irks me most is the popular perception that while no one expects poorer people to have the same sorts of things that richer people do, they do expect all cities to affordably house poorer people. Thus all manners of politically motivated “bandaids” are funded in this regard. “Yay, look how our policies are fixing the housing crisis!” No, that would just be standard political nonsense given equally standard human ignorance about how things work.