Humans Are Flourishing More Than Ever. Washington Post.
Journalist Matt Ridley wrote that, in the two generations from 1955 to 2005, “the average human being on Planet Earth earned nearly three times as much money (corrected for inflation), ate one-third more calories of food, buried one-third as many of her children and could expect to live one-third longer.”
The United States, in particular, has experienced strong growth. From 1970 to 2024, inflation-adjusted household income has increased from $59,000 to almost $84,000. Lower-income households have seen gains of roughly 35 percent during that same period, and educational opportunities have expanded.
Quite different from what one sees on social media these days.
Humans have a tendency to remember good times rather than bad, and thus idealise the past. I wonder why? It seems to make us less happy in the present and more pessimistic about the future. Like the Ukrainian woman who remembered that there was always enough food under Stalin, not like when she was interviewed in the 1950s, we are quite certain life was better in the old days. The food was tastier, the girls were prettier, and kids knew how to apply themselves and understood the value of a dollar.
I often think of Garrison Keillor's line that we believe life was simpler then, because we were children, and out lives were looked after by others. But it wasn't simpler for them. In fact, it was harder. Why do we find this so impossible to believe?
In The Hobbit, Tolkien makes the competing point that good times are easily told of and not remembered all that well, whereas hardships make for good stories with many details to relate. As you know, there are different kinds of memory. I think story-based memory probably focuses on hardships for Tolkien's reason -- think how many people get wrapped up in stories about the Civil War or WWII, which each only lasted a few years out of their century but seem to dominate the era when we are in that mode.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, long-term memory that we are recalling without stories probably drops a whole lot of the details. What's left is a general sense of the era, which tends to be warm and fuzzy just because there's not much there to remind us of the hardships. I have such a feeling about my baccalaureate years; I have to remind myself that, objectively at the time, I was really quite miserable. In retrospect it seems like a nice time, but I know that I didn't actually experience it that way.