Ask Lemmy

Technology is better, crime rates better, environmental issues were better, LGBT rights and racism seemed better. But the gap between rich and poor has grown, wages have stagnated. And now I fear we are regressing.

Do you have any idea how many people were always shut out of those things, in the USA? Any idea that our prosperity at home came from brutal repression and denying them to people in the global South, Asia, Africa, far away from our eyes and ears?

We still have it good. Yes, not as good, but good. Are we sliding headlong at a gallop towards overt fascism at home? Also yes. What happens depends on us, and the sacrifices we're willing to make, now. Or not.

well things are certainly better for me...

Yee, unquestionably IMO. There is of course plenty of fucked up shit but we are doubtless better off in America, on the whole, than in 1995.

Times are looking tough right now but the pendulum can swing back at any moment. And when it does we won't be starting back at square one. Might be a few years and a few wars until then. Maybe just an arms race and the odd proxy war. No way to know. All we can do is resist and wait.

Look up medical advancements over that time.

For most of the world's population, things have significantly improved by almost every conceivable measure.

I strongly recommend Roslings book, Factfulness. The difference between how people think things have changed and what's happened is wild.

Edit: Just saw the (US tag, sorry.)

I don't think they are at all.

We drag them to the future. There is no other direction.

Some of this is just the noise that society makes though.

Our billionaires have a lot of power, but I don't think they're near the Robber Barrons of the US past. The LLMs are trash, but your boss used to put who you should vote for in your paycheck and the only media that existed was sole property of big business.

I'll grant that the last few decades have been rough, but it beats the past.

Just gotta keep moving.

If we allow for the fact that nuance exists, and apply it to a response, then I agree:

No, things are definitely NOT better in a lot of ways. And I think you summed it up very well.

Everyone's experience will be personal to them, so it's not anyone's place to say your experience isn't worse, but as a whole, things are better.

Crime, no matter the category, is down ~33% since the mid-90s.
Median household income, adjusted for inflation, is up ~25% (despite the narrative).

Here's a post/graph I think about all the time: https://bsky.app/profile/simongerman600.bsky.social/post/3ktds56nqus25

Regardless of age, we are generally nostalgic for a time in our youth. Or even earlier. Notice that something like half (or nearly so) of people think "the most moral society" was before they were born.

Billionaires aren't new. I also don't really think LLMs will be as impactful as they get hyped or feared to be, and actually think AI as a whole outside mere chatbots will be positive if not the revolution it gets hyped as.

Honestly I do think there has been an improvement. It might not seem like that when viewing the past, but the past is easy to overestimate- we don't have to live it anymore.

As to civil rights, it should be pointed out that while recent years have seen regression in the US, its not always a regression to the point that things were at back then, and more importantly, the rest of the world does not necessarily share the political woes of the US.

Not I. I grew up thinking overall we were on a good track and humanity would get better. The star trek utopia future type. This started to break apart in the early 90's but I held out hope that tech was going to get us through but that started to fall apart by the late aughts and really by the 20teens is about when I lost most hope. Brexit and the first trump win was pretty much the nails in the coffin. Biden did pretty well considering but you can see how behind we already are and how we would actually have to maintain a decent path in way we just had not for the last couple of decades.

Economically for the working class, no. But it’s undeniably better to be gay or coloured in western countries than it was 30 years ago.

Some things are better. Other things are worse.

I'd still go back to when I was 10 if given the chance tho.

Yeah, definitely better, but for me personally. I... had a shitty childhood.

Some things are better. Some things are worse. Some things are about the same.

That all depends on the people. Many numbers in many places are far better than they were three decades ago. I could make a list, but so can you, so why bother.

It really depends where. In the global south? Way better, in China, it's debatable. In Poland, way better. In the US, way worse. In the UK, way worse.

It's good to bring it into perspective with numbers like Hans Rossling used to do https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8t4k0Q8e8Y sadly he died and nobody took this over after him to visualize data in this way so publicly yet.