Whenever someone mentions how much worse something is "these days" than in the past, it arouses my skepticism.
I learned to be skeptical of these claims from an odd place: a book on language. Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language is a great overview of how languages evolved and changed over time. One thing it highlights is how it's common for people to see changes as evidence their language is getting worse.
When I read the book (the yellowing of the pages reminds me this was quite a while ago), there were worries about how internet communication was corrupting our language with evil things like "lols" and emojis 🙃. There was a sense that the present moment, with widespread adoption of instant messaging, was causing our language irreparable harm.
But these claims of linguistic decline have always been around. For example:
Every age claims that its language is more endangered and threatened by decay than ever before. In our time, however, language really is endangered and threatened by decay as never before.
—Hans Weigel (1974)
Despite the self-awareness that other ages made the same complaint, Hans was apparently serious with his worry.
If we go back further, we have none other than Jonathan Swift claiming in 1712 that: "our Language is extremely imperfect … its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions."
Going back even further:
In a tome on the art of oratory from 46 BC, which he dedicated to his friend Brutus, Cicero compared the speech of public figures of the day with that of a century before, and concluded that 'practically everyone . . . in those days spoke correctly. But the lapse of time has certainly had a deteriorating effect in this respect.'
—The Unfolding of Language, Guy Deutscher
Despite these complaints, we continue communicating. We haven't descended to grunts and fist pounding. There is still Nobel Prize winning literature written, and given the increase in literacy since Cicero's time, I would say the average linguistic sophistication has increased significantly.
Language has changed and evolved, but to say this is "worse" is wrong-headed. Maybe Cicero had nostalgia for the classic speeches from the previous century. Or maybe only the good ones were preserved (a case of selection bias). Regardless of why, reading that people at all times everywhere complain about their language being in decline made me skeptical of other claims that things were better in the good old days.
The ubiquity of "decay"
Everywhere you look there are claims about how everything is getting worse. The decay of language is a relatively low-stakes example. Others claim specific declines cause all our societal problems.
For example, a recent exchange I had on Notes:
I won't post the rest of the conversation since the response was bloated, but the answer to my question was "no". I strongly suspect the reply was generated by chatGPT. It linked to a couple of blog posts making the same claim, but no actual evidence.
Maybe critical thinking skills are in decline! There are plausible mechanisms—smartphones and social media usage have changed our experiences of the world dramatically in the past two decades. I'm skeptical but relatively agnostic about these having a large effect on things like critical thinking or happiness (I'm eagerly waiting for Pete Etchells's book about this before I form any opinions).
On the other hand, there are reasons to think critical thinking could be increasing. If we take a global perspective, literacy and numeracy are certainly on their way up. In the USA, educational attainment has been steadily increasing for decades—a much larger proportion of the population has a high school or college education than twenty or fifty years ago.
I'm not aware of any broadly accepted measure of critical thinking that has longitudinal assessments, so the question of whether critical thinking skills are in decline or not isn't one we can readily answer. Even though the answer isn't clear, people find it obvious enough to proclaim decay here.
There are plenty of other areas where the answer is much more clear, and people incorrectly think there is a decline. For example, there are lots of "economic woes" posts about how life has gotten so much worse for the middle class:
Yet if you look at the evidence, median personal and household incomes are up significantly from the 90s (yes, even after adjusting for inflation).
This is real median income, meaning adjusted for inflation and isn't impacted by super rich outliers.
Not that there aren't serious and addressable issues with the economy that would make life better (more on that below). But that the middle class has less purchasing power than they did in the 1990s is simply false.
Similarly, it's an extremely common finding that regardless of how big a decline there has been in crime, most people still think crime is going up. From Pew Research:
In 23 of 27 Gallup surveys conducted since 1993, at least 60% of U.S. adults have said there is more crime nationally than there was the year before, despite the downward trend in crime rates during most of that period.
Obviously part of this is media coverage—it isn't a news story that crime has gradually ticked down each year, but it is if any type of crime spikes. I won’t dwell on the overall cause of us mistakenly seeing so much "decay" around us. Whether it's selection bias (claiming "they don't make things like they used to" because only things that were built well in the past stick around until today), negativity bias, nostalgia—whatever the cause, we're biased to be pessimistic about change. Positive progress seems invisible to us. This is a problem.
Why it's a problem
Okay, the real reason I think this is a problem is it's fucking annoying. I value understanding the world for the way it is. I'm sick of people posting mopey pessimistic takes that are just wrong. The world is not uniformly deteriorating. 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. But I see people go unchallenged when they post pessimistic takes that have no connection to reality. Pessimism isn't realism, sometimes it's just childish fantasy that absolves us of needing to accept that we live in an age where things are pretty good, actually (at least, historically speaking).
Sorry, I just had to get that out.
On a less personal level, the reason this matters: Overzealous pessimism detracts from real solutions.
To believe we can make the world a better place, we need to look to examples of where progress is made. We need to look at what is working, not just what is broken. Some things really are in decline and we need to understand the solutions.
Housing prices have become increasingly unaffordable. After adjusting for inflation, we still see a big increase that outpaces wage growth:
We could throw our hands up and blame greed, as many people do, but that's not a good explanation. Why were developers (or investment companies or whoever’s greed you think is driving this) less greedy in the past?
When we look closer, though, we can see signs of hope: places in the US where home prices have stabilized or even decreased. The cause? Building more housing.
Ironically, most people paradoxically think adding more supply will increase prices. Presumably the thinking is building makes an area nicer, nicer areas gentrify, gentrified areas are more expensive. The problem is this reasoning is wrong—building more housing in a city lowers housing costs in that city. It also doesn’t particularly matter if it is “affordable” housing or not. Through filtering, building market rate housing creates vacancies in lower income housing.
The answer to the housing affordability crisis is straightforward: build housing. The more units the better. We aren't building more because it is literally illegal to build dense housing in most desirable areas. Zoning and regulations reduce where and how much housing can be built.
Local governments are constantly under pressure to stop housing projects because locals don't want them. This creates a collective action problem: no one wants something in their backyard, but if no one is building, we all suffer a deficit of housing. One solution is laws at the state and federal levels to reduce local control over what can be built where. Reign in the tyranny of the local public hearings, gratuitous zoning, and regulations that block development projects.
Another major problem of our time: Climate change is getting worse. Global emissions of CO2 are on the rise:
This is bad! But when we look at the more nuanced picture, a lot of the increases in CO2 emissions per capita have been among poor countries while rich countries have stabilized or even decreased. So part of this is downstream of something good: Poor countries are getting better access to energy (yay!) while their CO2 emissions are going up (boo!).
The answer to this problem can't be "We need to use less CO2". Look at India and China—billions of people have been lifted out of poverty. This is a good thing. It leaves us with another very serious problem: reducing emissions while keeping access to energy.
Luckily there is good news. Prices for solar and batteries have dropped precipitously. Clean energy is becoming more attainable.
And this is reaping real rewards—China is installing a ton of solar energy and continues to accelerate.
If we want to address both poverty and CO2 emissions, making clean energy cheap is the obvious way forward. It makes energy more accessible while also reducing CO2. This is mostly going to be achieved by improving the technology. The technology will continue to improve as long as there is a market for it. Adopting more clean energy in rich Western countries will both reduce our own emissions, but possibly more importantly, create incentives to improve clean energy further to make it easier for poorer countries to adopt.
Conclusion
It is the best of times, it is the worst of times.
The world is better in innumerable ways than it was 10, 20, or 50 years ago. This is true in the USA, but especially true globally: Hans Rosling's Factfulness is a fun read and filled with surprising statistics about how various things have gotten better, like poverty, access to water, education accessibility for girls, etc. But progress tends to be slow, incremental, and not get the limelight.
It's easy to throw our hands up at the problems the world has. We have some big ones! But the world has always had problems. We've always muddled through.
It's fine to notice the bad things, but approach claims that things are getting worse in some broad-based way with a healthy dose of skepticism. We're really biased towards thinking there are negative trends when there aren't (even when the trends are positive). Most big problems are nuanced and have some things getting worse and some better. We need to see problems for what they are, make sure we understand what things actually move the needle, and not just throw our hands up in defeat.
And if you see anyone posting stupid doomer shit online, ask them for a source.
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.