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the bad old days August 29, 2007

Posted by ocmpoma in : economics , trackback

Something I’ve noted on economics-related blogs, books, podcasts, etc. is statements regarding how much better off we are now then were our predecessors.

Now, don’t get me wrong — I’m certainly not denying that life for the majority of people has improved vastly as time has moved on; and this trend is even more pronounced in the West in recent times (that is, in the last century or so). Things have gotten better for just about everyone and things have gotten much, much better for what is perhaps a significant portion of humanity.

What I don’t like is what I see as an implication that this is some sort of justification of our current state of affairs. I’ve encountered this plenty of times in the military — pointing out how much less things suck at time/place A compared to time/place B as an attempt to justify conditions at time/place A.

Just because thinks suck less at A doesn’t mean they don’t suck. Just because we’re all better off than were people in 18th century London, or because the impoverished in St. Louis are better off than the impoverished in, say, Kenya, doesn’t make our, or their, circumstances somehow okay. This line of argument is self-defeating: if the fact that the average human is better off living in 2007 than the average person was in 1907 is a reason to state that things are good in 2007, the same logic means that things were good in 1907 — after all, the average person in 1007 was better off than the average person in 1807, who was better off than the average in 1707, and so on. It may seem nice and refreshing, putting things into perspective, but it’s really just an argument against pushing further to improve our common lot. After all, don’t we want people in 2107 pointing out how much things sucked today?

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Comments»

1. kamikaze189 - 29 August 14:26

I agree with what you say about justification completely, but I generally don’t see the line used this way. It’s usually an enforced humbling by an old person directed at a young person. For example, “Why when I was kid I had to EVOLVE on the way to school! I didn’t have legs and arms and all those conflagratin’ appendages you kids have these days! It was so much harder in the thirteen hundreds to get around… etc, ad vomitum.”