> The truth is that every now has been the peak so far, so his words apply to all points in time.
That's a very strong statement and I have some doubts. There were periods of relative calm abd prosperity, then hit by plague (killed of one third of Europe's population in 2 decades), famines, little ice age, decades long wars etc. where it seems absurd to claim that now is better than before.
> This world and the standard of living we enjoy are the gift they left us. We can never pay it back. But we can pay it forward: we can keep progress going, and build an even better world for the generations to come.
I guess I'm put off by how horrible he repeatedly describes the past, seemingly ignoring that those people of the past had it extremely well compared to the people of their past.
And how people of the future will look at us with that same horror.
I’ve become less clean in my life because I believe too much cleanliness is bad for your immune system. Could be a placebo, but I haven’t had allergies since.
Why would they think that? Please ignore all the microplastics, ecological destruction and wildly altered climate due tot dumping 2 trillion tons of carbon in the atmosphere.
> the ballpoint pen, invented in the 1930s, saved many clothes and tablecloths from spilled ink
I used an inkwell and dip pen for a couple years to take class notes. Don’t really know why. Spilling the ink was never a problem, but really they are just worse than pencils in every way. Can’t erase, the nib doesn’t want to go backwards, and ink smudges.
When you're an empire being supported on the labor of a couple billion people in other parts of the world, yes, life for you and yours can be pretty okay.
Not as okay for the imperial periphery, the sacrifice zones, but they don't really count.
> You can amass a closet full of outfits, in a variety of styles and colors, with no knowledge of the spinning machines, the dyeing vats, the automatic looms, the sewing machines, or the tremendously efficient factory system they are a part of—the system that has turned this kind of product from a luxury for the rich into a commodity available to the average worker.
When I read things like this, I really understand how the lack of a liberal arts education has crippled a lot of people. I want to post that angry goose meme: "Who made the outfits, buddy? WHO MADE THE OUTFITS?"
Industrial revolution and automation still makes amenities far more accessible for all. The material conditions of the average factory worker in Thailand is still miles ahead of the condition of someone of that percentile of the worldwide socioeconomic strata in any other period of history.
Its complicated. If you are on the very lowest rung of the industrial structure, you are probably in worst conditions that working on the family farm with the local village. Things will look better monetarily, but the overall life quality will be diminished.
There would be a point that as your wealth grows it does get better but that is depended on there being others to fill the lower rung to support that.
You aren't wrong but there is also additional nuance. Clothes for everyone on the planet is just so simple nowadays due to massive excess for instance.
>I really understand how the lack of a liberal arts education has crippled a lot of people.
I think I also see how a surfeit of liberal arts education, with all its absurdly relativizing, simplifying, hand waving fashionable criticism of everything "commercial" that it depends on has crippled your own perspective.
No, the modern world isn't a simplistic black and white case of a tiny rich world being that way only because it lives off the back of a massive toiling class of slaves. The reality is much more complex and mutually transactional. The same market dynamics that make more developed countries even wealthier also heavily contribute to improved living in countries still developing further, and vice versa.
Is there exploitation? Sure. The human world has never been perfect and even while it improves, many injustices remain, but to categorize the socioeconomic structures of today's world so simplistically as your comment does is to make an argument that caricaturizes both the genuinely wealthy and the billions of poor you implicitly claim to sympathize with. They too are looking for and finding their comparative measures of improved wealth specifically by being participants in the market system that they too help build and actively participate in, and which makes the consumer goods they seek more affordable than ever before for an incrementally more comfortable life.
It's not perfect, but it's far better than the vast majority of historical alternatives. If you hate it so much, at least lay out a practical alternative that's actually desirable and realistic enough for billions of people to embrace it in practice as they do largely capitalist markets. Can you?
While you're doing that, why not look at the actual numbers for how more people than ever (in the developing or third world too) live today compared to any time in human history and try calling it all bullshit. It's easy to compare a given situation to our ideal of "how it should be". It's however much more honest to compare it to a previous reality so that the hard increments of improvement can be appreciated.
Enduring the misery is not even the impressive thing; that’s just the default condition of every animal on earth. What is extraordinary is that, despite their misery, somehow enough humans have managed to contribute to the incremental creation culture.
So what, we should just sit back and not try to improve things? I’ve never understood this perspective. It just seems like a way to try for people who have done well in the current system to justify to themselves the fact that in reality people in wealthy countries do still struggle with poverty. There are millions of people living hand-to-mouth.
Not to mention the fact that the reason wealthy countries have got to this stage of development is often because they are exporting the negative externalities associated with this lifestyle to poor countries.
For me the point of thinking like this is to remain centered and not freak out. I see some people who feel like ‘everything is going downhill and this is the worse time ever’ and that’s just not very grounded.
The benefit is that you can be optimistic that the hard work we’re putting in, more likely than not, might continue the progress. Even if there are blips along the way.
I was just talking about this today. There was a political comedy TV show here in Oz 'Shaun Micallefs : Mad as Hell'.
I cannot remember the details exactly but the general idea was something like this.
There was a dinner party with all these people talking about how bad they have things. One was complaining about how they had poor service at a restaurant. The next talked about the pain of the Covid lockdowns. The next spoke of rationing in the war time of the 1940's. The last one was a 10th century peasant that goes on about how "the skies turned dark and winter came and it never left. All the crops died and then the people. And then came the plagues..."
It was done as a way of saying, yes, we have issues but put into context, we are still doing fairly well.
No, the opposite. We should appreciate all the marvels that progress has brought us, and use that as motivation to bring about more. That was the conclusion of the piece, and I agree. Progress has gained a negative connotation to many people in recent times, and I take it that the author is pushing back against that sentiment.
I don't think that's the thrust of the piece, any more than celebrating your birthday is an invitation to commit suicide. Appreciation of where we are at, like a birthday, seems its point.
And that there are a great many people who don't feel all the blessings of these achievements. Not only is there relative inconvenience and suffering, there are also resentments and those have tangible social and political impacts. One useful step is to simply acknowledge them. I write this from a small town that lacks Uber, Doordash, and has people that basically work for a living, not sit behind a desk. Their construction and agricultural labor enables some of the luxuries-cum-expectations listed in the piece.
We'll always judge ourselves relative to surroundings and peers, so the billionaire needs to be a centibillionaire and the retired cotton field hand would like all their teeth back and AC that works. Let's not forget we, the readers of the piece, were basically born on third base already.
Exactly. My (mild) fear it that we ignore those kinds of issues and they blow back on us to start doing real harm to the overall system. To ignore the externalities like running up a credit card.
As to the second point, this is what empires do. They pump wealth away for their own gain until they are almost completely drained. And there still many countries that are empires in everything but name.
