The best of times, the worst of times. Your instinct of which one we’re living through is affected by your basic temperament, but it also depends on how well you’re observing, and quantifying, things in the world around you.
Temperamentally, in the United States, or at least in that loud if not large part of it dominated by political tweets, the overwhelming weight of opinion, crossing party lines that are unusually rigid in this period of American history, is that we live in the worst of times.
President Trump, enjoying all-but-unanimous support from Republicans in polls, tells us that we are living at the brink of disaster, at risk of being sucked under the sludge by vicious creatures of the swamp.
Trump opponents, including almost the whole of the Democratic Party and a tattered but still loudly chirping fragment of the Republican Party, assure us that we are entering the dark night of Nazism, racism, and violent suppression of all dissenting opinion.
To which I say: nonsense. And so does, in more elegant terms, the science writer and British House of Lords voting member Matt Ridley in the British Spectator. “We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history,” he writes of the decade just ending.
Olden times may look better in warm memories — think of multiepisode dramas about Edwardian noblemen or carefully curated statistics showing narrower pay gaps between 1950s CEOs and assembly-line workers. But the cold, hard numbers tell another story.
“Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 percent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 percent when I was born,” Ridley writes, referring to the year 1958, a time that some of us can actually remember.
Of course, you may say, the economic progress made since China and India discovered the magic of free markets has helped people over there; but over here, in advanced countries, we’re not growing. We are just gobbling up and wolfing down more of the world’s limited resources, aren’t we?
Not so, replies Ridley. Consumers in advanced countries are actually consuming less stuff (biomass, metals, minerals, or fossil fuels) per capita, even while getting more nutrition and production out of it. Thank technological advancement and, yes, in some cases, government regulations.
We’re also experiencing, as a world and in advanced countries, less violence and more in the way of peace, international and domestic. That’s the argument of Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. Wars are more infrequent and less deadly than in the past.
So too has violent crime abated in the U.S. and other advanced nations. It used to be taken as given that disadvantaged young males, especially those minorities discriminated against, were hugely likely to commit violent crimes. Now, thanks to improved policing and changed attitudes, far fewer do so.
The natural tendency of most people is to ignore positive trends. They are not the lead stories on your local newscast, nor are they mentioned in the shouting matches on cable news. People usually focus on complaints and grievances. And there are indeed worrying negative countertrends, such as the opioid abuse that has cut life expectancies down for some demographic groups.
We tend to focus on negative trends, though, even after they’ve been reversed. Illegal border crossings peaked just before the 2007-08 financial crisis and are much fewer, though not zero, today. Wages for low-skilled workers for years rose little or not at all, as politicians of both parties complained. Since 2016, they’ve been rising faster than average, but only Trump’s fans seem to have noticed; Democrats probably will if the trend continues when their party has the White House.
One can even make the case that in places where we lament sluggish economic growth — Japan since 1990, continental Europe since 2001, the U.S. from 2007 up through 2017 — living standards still remain more than comfortable, judged by any historic perspective.
That’s a reminder that the positive force of democratic politics tends to produce the negative force of cynical partisanship, visible today not just in Trump’s America, but in most of Europe and much of Asia. But nationalistic politics has not undermined civil liberties, and the center-Left’s fumbling attempts to sell economic redistribution suggest that people are actually better off than their grumbles to pollsters suggest.
Of course bad things can happen in even the best of times, and a minor cloudburst can spoil a bright summer day. But at year’s and decade’s end, our grumbling society is closer to the best than to the worst of times.
