I think he kind of missed the elephant that is modern communication technology has reduced the marginal cost of skilled services enabling pretty much every object designed in an office and manufactured in a factory to benefit from a broader array of engineering and design professionals and methodologies. The average product and service that the average actor in the economy interacts with is designed and optimized to a far greater degree today than they were historically.
Look at the bottle of Elmers glue on the table. Today the glue probably works better (barring regulation that forces compromises to product efficacy) and comes in a bottle that uses half as much plastic. Something like a bottle revision that would have formerly required expensive salaried employees to come up with multiple options, send them to the supplier, supplier has to respond to each with details and quotes, etc, can now be accomplished in a fraction of the man hours thanks to email and CAD being ubiquitous in the entire supply chain from marketing, to engineering, to the vendor's contractor who will actually design the tooling. Sign off might take days instead of weeks. This sort of efficiency improvement allows more engineering, design work, or other optimization to be done to every good and service in our economy allowing it to penetrate into even the most thin margin use cases. From farming to high finance products and services are substantially more influenced and optimized by specialist professionals than they were in 1990. Increase efficiency like this throughout the national and global economy is how lawnmowers and A/C units can be sold on sale for $100 and still make a profit. (yes I know that example isn't perfect but you get the point).
I had a moment like this recently with, of all things, a snorkeling mask. It was one of those full face masks with a big snorkel sticking out the top like a unicorn's horn that popped on the market a few years ago. It is a marvel. It took all the downsides of the old masks and ingeniously fixed them. Full mouth and nose breathing so you can breathe naturally and comfortably, an airflow pattern that pulls dry air over the lens and keeps it fog free, a wide-angle lense for a better view and less claustrophobia, and an ingeniously designed system of valves that keeps water from flowing into the snorkel and uses your exhalation to push any leaked water in the mask out the bottom. All together, it eliminated the underwater panic I would usually have to fight through while snorkeling and made me feel like a dolphin. No way a product like this could have been made without the collaboration of a lot of very skilled professionals.
Be careful with those. Diver's Alert Network states that full face snorkeling masks can cause dangerous hypercapnia unless they have tight seals and working one-way valves.
These are somewhat dangerous as the additional airspace allows CO2 to build up. I haven't seen good studies either way, but there's lots of anecdata out there of people reporting symptoms.
The real problem with these masks is that unless you are quite good at equalizing with your jaw, it will be hard to relieve pressure if you dive down more than 6-8 feet or so.
The downside to broadening the talent pool for design/manufacturing is that it means workers now have to be among the best in the world to get business and thus earn a good living. It no longer suffices to be the best in a local region.
If each local region needs its own widget factory, then to become a top widgetsmith you only have to compete with the local widgetsmith talent pool. Just as there can be many high school star athletes across the world, there can be many top widgetsmiths within their local widget factories across the world, even if each is likely mediocre relative to the global pool of widgetsmiths.
Now the widget market has globalized. To become a top widgetsmith, you now need to be the best in the world. There is no room for locally optimal widgetsmiths when the market can globally optimize, just as there’s no room for most star high school athletes at the NBA.
The upside is that the entire world gets much better widgets. The downside is that you can only make a good living as a widgetsmith if you’re the absolute best in the world. Local markets lead to redundancy, which is globally inefficient but locally optimal.
"workers now have to be the best in the world to get business and thus earn a good living"
This is extra pronounced for singers, actors etc., but not as much for people such as software engineers. A mediocre programmer that implements functionality that you need is much more valuable for you than a star programmer immersed in his UltraFastXMLParserForHaskell library and does not take side jobs.
> that it means workers now have to be the best in the world to get business and thus earn a good living. It no longer suffices to be the best in a local region.
Yes, though for most jobs there is far more demand than can be met by the best in the world. When someone needs a lawyer or software developer, they are very unlikely to hire the best in the world.
Very well put. Excellently stated. That's one of the concepts that many have thought about, because we all feel the effects, but aren't exactly sure how to articulate. I'm going to be thinking about that comment!
It definitely applies to software. It's why trades are a much better career option, local will never not matter in that case. The best 'star high school' welders and electricians are always going to be desirable, as no one is flying in the best in the world for every little job.
Most of us, except the best in the world among us, messed up going into software. The script completely flipped on this since I was a child in the 80s and was dreaming of becoming a programmer as I am now.
It's noteworthy that you're talking about the market for products, not services. Services generally don't scale like products do. We need more plumbers than toilet manufacturers.
That is why society is (has to) move into post-employment era. It's no longer required or even beneficial for everyone to be employed and/or employed to the extreme degree they are now (~50% of waking hours).
"From farming to high finance products and services are substantially more influenced and optimized by specialist professionals than they were in 1990. Increase efficiency like this throughout the national and global economy is how lawnmowers and A/C units can be sold on sale for $100 and still make a profit. "
You can find examples of this, but overall, I dispute the generalization.
I think quality/price improvements have been monumental in some areas, stagnant in others. Computer related products have gone crazy. It's not more for less though, it's "much more for a little more." The market grew a lot and a produces a hell of a lot more. Even that isn't the norm though. More for less, even less for less, are uncommon.
Farming and manufacturing.... None of the capitalisation, gene patents and such of recent generations is anything like basic green revolution tech, in terms of productivity growth. Farming is different. It uses less labour, more capital, but it's not producing much more efficiently. The price of farm produce isn't falling, quality is not rising. Same for most manufacturing, especially basic manufacturing. Most of the last generations' gains were made by employing cheaper employees in cheaper places, not reinventing manufacturing techniques. So, low end, high volume manufactured goods got cheaper, but a car still costs what it costs. Good quality appliances generally do too.
The quality of housing has gone up, but prices are often very high.
Education... we have more and arguably better, but more expensive.
Medicine... same. More and better, but more expensive.
There's a pattern here that's more complex and interesting than the average.
> Education... we have more and arguably better, but more expensive.
There are many thousands of people on this forum that have gotten a free education and in turn, one of the best careers in history from that free education that would never have been possible until recently.
I'm seeing more and more people (that aren't designers and engineers) are forgoing classical education and making a great living for themselves just by utilizing the freely available information on the internet.
> Today the glue probably works better (barring regulation that forces compromises to product efficacy)
Regulation might do that and there is much more going on:
Regulation also protects health and safety of customers and workers (especially important with chemical products) and prevents fraud, and it corrects market distortions that damage businesses, including instituting changes that the nature of the market prevents any one business from implementing, and opening up competition.
Other things limit technological innovation, including incumbents with market power who profit more from eliminating competition than from improving their products.
Definitely a big deal, but mostly invisible on the demand side. You're talking about improvements to the supply process; the article is about what consumers experience.
I think he missed a lot bigger elephants. Things like the massive reduction in global poverty levels or eradication of polio. The global decrease in crime. We reversed ozone depletion and massively decreased the mortality rate for HIV. This post is more like a list of cool products we have now when we have monumental human development achievements no one is talking about.
This reminds me of a golden age blog post, when lists turned out to be an understudied literary device. I'm a fan of "dumps." Some interestingly debatable ones here:
"Intellectual Property Maximalism rollback: copyright terms have not and probably will not be indefinitely extended again to eternity to protect Mickey Mouse, and in 2019, for the first time since 1998, works entered the public domain"
I think the easy indicator may be the wrong one here. Defined more broadly, the public domain is not being enriched. For example, the web was a lot smaller in 1999, but it was a much more public domain. Today's web and post web internet is more centralised, controlled and therefore private property. Google could crawl pages, links, forums, because they were public, and use that access to create a search engine. Content, connections and signal are, today, proprietary. You can't order the world's information if that information is facebook's, only facebook can.
Or patents, more stuff of the last generation is patented than the previous'. Does that mean we invented more or we patented more? What happens to stuff that doesn't get patented? It's public.
Old copyright expiry deadlines might be a symbolic lead indicator, but they're determining the location of a fence post in county scale land dispute. A tiny, legible, part of the whole. In real terms, Disney's copyright portfolio is worth more, not less.
You're only arguing against the claim about copyright terms by equating two separate definitions of "public domain." public domain is being enriched by that stuff from the early 20th century. The "public feeling" stuff of the 1999 internet wasn't actually in the public domain then either.
The public domain has gotten larger as has the private domain. But all that private stuff is now on track to expire one day, while in 1999 it was not clear that that would ever happen at all.
Compared to 1999, a lot more of that "private domain" stuff is also being made freely available, price-wise.
I support copyright expiration, but making Disney's copyright portfolio worth less when they continue to create a bunch of stuff was never an explicit part of that goal for me.
> public domain is being enriched by that stuff from the early 20th century.
Well this is trivially true, but it really doesn't mean anything. If copyright length was 500 years this would still be a true statement.
It's ridiculous that there are 100 years old works of art created by people who have been dead for three quarters of a century which are still under copyright. You cannot spin this as a positive thing, I'm sorry.
Works published two years after the end of World War I will enter public domain in 2047 (Agatha Christie's first book). Star Wars will enter public domain in the 2070s. It's mad.
One other big change since the 1990s, though, is that Creative Commons is now a real thing. Many publications/sites including Wikipedia, Stack Overflow and open-access journals release everything as CC by default, and Wikimedia Commons has become a treasure trove of materials that can be freely remixed.
True. I considered clarifying, but didn't to be concise. I think publication as a reasoning for granting patents is superseded. It's mostly relevant to the history of patents, not the present.
You can't be secretive about a UI, or the chemical composition of a drug.
I would bet that today's public domain open web is larger than it was in 1999. It's just harder to find because search engines prioritize large closed silo sites and outside those sites search has been largely destroyed by spam.
It's sort of like the people who say mobile devices are destroying the more open PC market and replacing it with closed mobile "consoles."
There are far more PCs out there today than there were in the 1990s and they are cheaper, faster, easier to use, and more versatile. The reason people think mobile has eaten everything is because growth in mobile has outpaced growth in PCs and there are now far more mobile devices than PCs. The PC market has still grown though, so there are more PCs than ever.
Mobile growth is plateauing too. The mobile explosion was the creation of a new computing niche more than the displacement of an old one, though low-end and narrower PC use cases have been displaced by phones and tablets. PCs have become more like trucks vs. cars, machines for "real work."
We also have a lot more OS and architectural choices in PCs today than in the 1990s. Linux is pretty usable and MacOS no longer sucks, so with Windows there are now three major choices available. Others like FreeBSD and OpenBSD are also viable but not as popular. You can even get an ARM laptop or desktop in the form of Raspberry Pi style boards in laptop form factors, larger ARM64 "server" chip boards that can work as desktops running Linux, or in the form of Apple Silicon Macs (that can also run other OSes on ARM in VMs), so you now have two CPU architectures in the mainstream PC market instead of just one.
Lastly there's a huge market today for cheap single board computers like the Raspberry Pi that did not exist at all back then.
A similar comparison by the way applies to the metal server market vs. cloud. There are far more racked up servers today than there were in the 90s. Cloud has just grown really quickly, so there's even more cloud deployments.
>It's sort of like the people who say mobile devices are destroying the more open PC market and replacing it with closed mobile "consoles." There are far more PCs out there today than there were in the 1990s and they are cheaper, faster, easier to use, and more versatile.
Well, there definitely are more PCs now than in 1991, but pre covid-WFH era, PC sales were at an all-time low, following a multi year downward trend, thanks to people moving to those closed mobile devices and consoles.
Environment: air quality in most places has continued to improve (and considering the growing evidence on the harms of air pollution, this may well be the single most important item on this whole page), forest area has increased , and more rivers are safe to fish in
Because almost all the industrial production that pollutes water and air moved to third-world countries, where people suffer from pollution. Same for thrash that is taken to China, India, Indonesia for "recycling", but is actually burned in fires or thrown into the ocean. I wouldn't consider it an improvement due to advances in technology.
He referenced the Environmental Kuznets Curve. This provides a mechanistic understanding of what is happening. It isn't that modern industrial civilization requires a certain amount of pollution per unit of production which can be offloaded.
Rather, pollution is largely something that occurs in the production process in locations where desperation for production is so high that they are not willing to put in any personal effort or social policies to curtail it at the expense of production.
However, once you become richer, air quality and so on moves higher in our collective list of priorities. Production can occur without pollution. It is just more expensive, and requires care.
Some of the "upsides" (e.g. improvements in patent regime) just aren't there. Some aren't as wonderful as they are described.
I'm in my mid-sixties; I'm very much a candidate for the "things were better in the old days" brigade.
But I do think many (most?) things have improved. Housing is better; healthcare is immeasurably better (unless you can't afford it); and mobile telephony has improved the lives of at least a billion people worldwide.
Because I'm not miserable old git, I'm not going to list downsides.
Not exactly a new thing though is it? Plus the actual percentage of people worldwide exposed to war or directly affected by it has dropped significantly. The world is more peaceful than it has ever been.
Depending on who you ask, conflict deaths per capita have stayed the same or declined since 1990.[1] 1991 had the first Gulf War, The Troubles, the Yugoslav campaign in Croatia, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Guatemala, and many more.
I wonder if permanent war was around in the 60's it was just easier to keep things under wraps because of smart phones. From what I have heard the CIA has been involved in some unsavory activities since before the 60s. I also believe that life lost by war and violence have decreased dramatically since then. It might be an ignorance is bliss thing.
Permawar: I don't think lives lost by war and violence have diminished. If our leaders want us to support wars, they need enemies, and we're encouraged to hate them. The number of civilians killed in just Iraq is comparable with the number of combatants+civilians killed in Vietnam. But the Vietnam war lasted about 12 years, then it ended. It was confined to Indochina. The "War On Terror" has killed huge numbers of people in Afghanistan, Iran (if you include the effects of sanctions), Libya and Pakistan.
We now make bigger, more-accurate bombs and missiles, but we sprinkle them around just as carelessly. We still have to be made to hate people if we are going to support a war; and we don't pay a lot of attention to the casualty-count of people we hate.
Music: If you're referring to the 60's and 70's, I agree - the seventies were my formative years, musically. But we're speaking of 1991, I think. [checks 1991's hits] In among the dross, there are some good tunes - Clash, Should I Stay Or Should I Go; James, Sit Down. And there was some great Acid House, which didn't make the charts (clubbers didn't know the names of the songs or the artists).
Before 90's US was in permanent war just as well. It was called the Cold War. So that one downside is actually non-existent - from "before" vs. "today" point of view.
"Non-existent" is a bit hyperbolic. I have no idea how many casualties resulted from the Cold War, I'd guess a few thousand. Even if 20,000 died, which I doubt, that's pretty good going for a war that lasted 30 years.
But are people happier and more fulfilled? Are they more able to have a meaning-filled life surrounded by people with whom they have close and lasting relationships?
What should we be measuring when we measure improvement?
I can't speak for "people" at broad, but improvements have certainly made a difference for my household. Gwern mentions hearing aids. They haven't just gotten smaller, but more capable. My wife couldn't have conversations with people at all in 1991. She can now. Universal subtitling opens up the full catalog of film and television that she couldn't experience. Spinal interbody fusion existed before 1991, but it wasn't very reliable. Procedure quality has improved rapidly, and that is the only reason my life right now isn't hopelessly miserable or possibly over, as the amount of pain I used to be in made death pretty tempting.
This. I think innovation real-value is spikey. A low band of timesavers bumps along the bottom but is punctuated by occasional leaps in particular domains. From what I've seen the cochlear implant can offer an amazing difference to quality of life for those that choose it. I can only imagine the difference the implant, or the improved aids, would have made to my hearing-impaired college roommate in the early 90s.
I sure am! We have family and friends spread across 2 continents. We can travel freely to spend time near them, take our jobs with us wherever we go, rent a well appointed home with a tap, and when not physically present, have a video chat at a moment's notice and hop into a round of VR golf. In the old world we would have had to choose career or having relationships with our parents and extended families. No more.
This is definitely a marked difference. Grandma/pa get a near daily stream of pictures & video of kiddo growing up. They get video calls on a (relatively) big screen to interact on a weekly or so basis.
When I was growing up camcorders were expensive so video is limited to special occasions. Have a good amount of pictures but a lot fewer than we have of kiddo. Cameras were more expensive and each picture cost money in film and development. Long distance calls were short and infrequent because they were expensive.
Most HN users are going to say “yes” because we are generally much higher income earners. Have things gotten better for everyone? Definitely not. Looking at continued increase in “deaths of despair” it seems like some of the changes that have made some of us richer have also made a larger % of the population more miserable than ever.
We’ve also built a highly sophisticated surveillance state and generally reduced our basic freedoms and individual rights post-9/11, and despite bumps in the road for this program thanks to Snowden etc, nothing has fundamentally changed and things continue to get worse on this front.
To me, this list of improvements is really just a list of improvements absent broader context which paints a very different & disturbing picture.
Should we be measuring at all? Claiming that people have to be more happy over time is a weird proposition for a biologist like me. Not only happiness does not exist (see reification), the idea that it can be 'measured and improved' is silly. Should the next generation of birds be more happy and fulfilled than the previous one? Should the next generation of chimps have stronger lasting relationships? Does it even makes sense? To me it doesn't. We are biological creatures and each one of us chooses to construct meaning of life (or lack thereof) individually.
> Should the next generation of birds be more happy and fulfilled than the previous one? Should the next generation of chimps have stronger lasting relationships? Does it even makes sense?
Happiness is a proxy for successful adaptation to reality. So yes, if they are successfully adapting to the changing environment, they should be happy. The very least, failing at it will make them pretty “unhappy”.
> We are biological creatures and each one of us chooses to construct meaning of life (or lack thereof) individually.
A weird level of resolution to stop at. We’re also atomic creatures, maybe we shouldn’t care about death? But we’re also conscious creatures that suffer and maybe at least avoiding that is pretty meaningful? I don’t think any nihilist is nihilistic enough to self-immolate for example.
You could DIY your meaning individually, as is the fashionable belief in this age of post-modern, but it’s liable to crumbling tragically with an inopportune contact with reality. Normativity of reality seeking is a strongly built instinct in any species that knows they have to survive in it, and their meaning emerges from this relationship.
As I understand, happiness is free time from necessary work. Quote from book Hunnicutt, Free time:
Benjamin Franklin, agreeing that “the happiness of individuals is evidently
the ultimate end of political society,” offered his vision of Higher Progress:
If every man and woman would work for four hours each day on some-
thing useful, that labor would produce sufficient to procure all the necessaries and comforts of life, want and misery would be banished out
of the world, and the rest of the twenty-four hours might be leisure and
happiness.
Also Epicur:
"Epicurus believed that the greatest good was to seek modest, sustainable pleasure in the form of a state of ataraxia (tranquility and freedom from fear) and aponia (the absence of bodily pain) through knowledge of the workings of the world and limiting desires. "
On the whole, I think people's happiness depends on those people, rather than their material circumstances. After all, there's only so miserable you can get (or so cheerful). Most people are wealthier; but even very wealthy people evidently think they don't have enough money.
I don't mean to suggest that miserable circumstances don't make you miserable; just that circumstances that are twice as awful don't seem to make people twice as miserable. I suspect that most mediaeval peasants were about as cheerful as most ordinary people today.
At the most basic level, life expectancy has increased everywhere [0] and so quality of life has increased for a large number of people who would otherwise be dead.
Life expectancy has already lowered quite a bit from the pandemic we can't put a lid on, and when (if) that settles down cataclysmic climate change will continue its work. Sorry but the future seems quite bleak.
"Happier and more fulfilled" is a good question to ask about a person, but I think it gets too squishy in regards to people. Too abstract.
If you're going to broaden person to people, I think it's best to narrow to "happier and more fulfilled" in regards to something. Marriage/personal economics/profession/social life/spiritual life/etc.
I think a set of metrics would be if people's stressors have been reduced. Like Do people spend less time worrying about paying bills, job security, etc. I agree that a "happiness" metric is not great.
Our society is not structured in a way to value or measure this, our society is optimized for wealth generation and extraction. If a human activity can't be bought or sold, we don't value or measure it. For example, stay-at-home parents aren't accounted for in GDP calculations, but outside daycare providers are, so we structure society to encourage parents to work and pay for daycare instead of staying home.
I'll take 91. I get to experience all the exciting personal computing technology again before it all becomes web appliances and dark patterns. Back when the internet, if you could get it, was a place of wonder instead of terror.
In '91 nothing followed you around. You could go to prison in Tennessee and Arkansas wouldn't be able to find out without a cop or two putting in a days work and making phone calls. People would get arrested, give a fake name, plead and do time, and be released without their identity ever being verified.
Young adults in 2021 are hopelessly trying to outrun that time they tweeted a slur when they were 12.
If 1991 why not 1919? You'd want the world transition from the horse age to the space age. It might be a good while yet beforw we see any new changes as profound as that one.
Okay I guess I'd rank crispr as highly. But the list of changes that profound is short.
Do you have kids? Sounds like you don't. All people would go back in time until they become parents. After that, faced with the harsh reality that going back in time would alter your decisions hence not getting the same kids, they, admittedly begrudgingly, back off.
>I often ask people: “if you could be 20-years old in 1991 or 2021, which would you pick?”
An incredible number of people pick ‘91. Some people even ask to go back to the seventies.
There's a podcast by Jason Feifer (was called Pessimists Archive) where the repeated theme across many episodes is the recurring fallacy of the "good ole days": https://www.jasonfeifer.com/build-for-tomorrow/
E.g. you ask today's generation and they say the "good old days" was 1991; but if you ask those in 1991 what the good old days were, they wouldn't say "right now!" ... they'd say 1970s. And if you ask those in 1970s... they'd say... (you get the point).
So the conclusion is either...
- the true good old days after connecting the survey across centuries was actually the prehistoric cave man days of hunting & gathering
... or ...
- every generation repeats the rose-colored glasses narrative because we bias the past with positive memories and the bias the present with negative current events
I was 20 in 1991 in Europe. I was flying regularly without any flygskam. The USSR was just falling and we were all sure it was an unmitigated good (we still didn't know that the Russians will die by scores and see their life expectancy drop like a rock); Germany was just reunited and we thought the EU was a great project, not a bureaucratic monster working for the oligarchy; Hell, I even believed there were nice guys and bad guys in the Yugoslavian wars. I probably even believed that voting counted. Future was bright, and open. Year 2000 was still ahead, with its wonders.
My mother was 20 in 1968, and it was the good old days. They believed the revolution was around the corner. Present was somewhat grim, but future was bright; in her years of political activity she saw the pill come, abortion rights, women rights enhanced, the end of dictatorships in Spain and Portugal, the end (in civilised countries) of death penalty, the crumbling of USSR.
My children are in their 20s; my son refuses to learn to drive because cars are evil and he doesn't want to own one, ever, because they're bad; he's hell-bent of enjoying the now because he's pretty sure that there is no future, except climate catastrophe, incessant wars, and electronically-enhanced surveillance; he thinks that democracy is a complete scam and he forgets to vote if I don't nag him weeks in advance. He's just as disillusioned as I am, but 27 years younger.
So I think the picture is more complex. The global direction of evolution is much more important than the objective starting point.
> but if you ask those in 1991 what the good old days were, they wouldn't say "right now!"
Is this sourced? In Europe, 1991 was when the Soviet union fell. Sure, in many now-ex-USSR countries 1991 wasn't the best of times because the collapse wasn't very well managed. But in West, suddenly the impeding doom of nuclear war near disappeared overnight.
2021 has ... exciting climate events and Covid.
edit. What is the soundtrack of 2021? In 1991 it supposedly was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4RjJKxsamQ . TIL the year ended with band donating bunch of royalties from the single to Gorbachev 10 days before he resigned and the USSR disappeared. [1]
I'm old enough to remember 1991, even if I wasn't in the workforce then, and IIRC the mood then was kinda depressed. We were in the midst of a recession. We'd just come off the hangover of the first Gulf War. Nobody really knew what the fall of the Soviet Union would mean for America, and there were real fears about nukes falling into the wrong hands. Grunge was the hot new music, and pop culture was all about Gen-X alienation.
If you asked then what the good old days were, they'd probably say 1988. There's a reason Bush 1 was the only 1-term president between 1980 and 2020. Things didn't start perking up until around 93-95 with the WWW.
A 3rd option is society (or parts of society) can go through rough patches where 30 years before year X was better than year X + 30. Trajectories for different populations within the society can differ themselves and so individuals will have varying answers.
I grew up in the 90s, & maybe I'd do better as a 20 year old in 1991 rather than 2031 (too young to say 20 in 2021; I've succeeded already close enough to there), but I'd rather grow up in the 2000s than grow up in the 80s
There's a kind of arbitrage, where if I could take my technical abilities from 2010 back to 1990, I'd probably do pretty well. I'm not so sure about taking those abilities to 2030. So you need to frame your question more clearly: at what age does the time travel occur? For simplicity I assume the only age you've given: 20. If it's about when we're born, then that's a completely different human being
The most charitable option is that it’s simply a great pleasure to imagine retreading familiar years. Due to human limitations, those years are the ones we grew up in.
That explanation has the benefit that it doesn’t need to counter-assert against daydreamers that things are getting better, worse, or staying the same.
Going to be another person commenting that they'd seriously consider 1991 (as long as I had the smarts to still go into software). Jump back to 1991 as a 20yr old and head to the recruitment fair stalls of Sun Microsystems / DEC / Apple / Adobe / Microsoft.
Google search and showers that stay hot are pretty nice, but the relative difficulty of accessing quality education, jobs, and housing probably turn out to be much more significant as you exit your 20s in 2031 and think about starting a family.
You may want to reconsider before you step into the time machine. First of all, 1991 in particular is a tough year -- it was a crushing recession in the US, and young people were having a really hard time finding jobs. So you wouldn't be "heading to the recruitment stalls" for any of those companies except potentially Microsoft. And this is absolutely the "why-are-manhole-covers-round" era of Microsoft, and it's the DOS era as well -- so not only is the company smarmy, its products are buggy, demoralizing piles of death-marched junk. Read the (excellent) Showstopper! for a hint of what awaits you at Microsoft.
There's a big difference between 1991 and just a few years later of course, but even when I graduated from college (1996), Microsoft was absolutely suffocating. I had decided that I wanted to work for a computer company and that I had zero interest in working on Windows NT(or Copland). This left one company, Sun Microsystems, which even in 1996 was not really recruiting at universities. I got a job there by cold e-mailing a Sun engineer (Jeff Bonwick) based on a Usenet post in comp.unix.solaris. (Cold e-mailing to get a job was so unusual that a friend of mine who was a reporter for the AP wrote a story about my job search -- and it was broadly picked up nationally![0]) At Sun, I was the youngest person in OS development by a decade, and the industry broadly thought Sun to be foolish for insisting on innovating in the operating system. Conventional wisdom was wrong, of course, and I had a great 14-year run at Sun that I wouldn't trade for anything -- but it would be a mistake to overly romanticize what was honestly a pretty crappy era.
[0] I talked about this briefly in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IznEq2Uf2xk, including an (embarrassing) photo of me ca. 1996 that ran as the front page of many business sections around the US
Now I could understand this as a blue collar worker, but you’re saying you’d prefer to be a software engineer in 91 than 2021? Come on, of pretty much all the professions were the ones who have reaped the most benefits of the past 30 years
The political dangers are orders of magnitude worse now, plus there is climate change (a product of the same political problems). I'll take 1991, but without this future.
Also, IME, the culture has become hateful, poisonous, and based on trauma, despair, and survival rather than hope and dreams, freedom and self-actualization.
2021 if only for the health improvements without trying:
- You grew up in an era of not inhaling cancerous smoke everywhere you go
- Even unhealthy foods are less unhealthy due to removing hydrogenated fats from foods (god were they tasty though)
- Cars are safer than ever
- The environment is cleaner than it has been in decades
The past always looks better. People still want to return to the 50's and most of them were not alive then.
However, I believe every generation has had it "better" generally speaking than the previous and that's how it should be. Certain era's had things that were probably better but this era has things that future generations will envy as well while also having it "better" generally speaking.
Today is this best time to be alive and I'm optimistic tomorrow will be even better.
>Even unhealthy foods are less unhealthy due to removing hydrogenated fats from foods
I would say food is far more unhealthy today than in 1991. There is sugar and bastardized sugar in everything. Sugar is addictive and food manufacturers use it to get people addicted to their food. Instead of eating for nutrition, people eat for that sugar hit, and you almost can't escape it. Try finding prepackaged foods in the grocery store without some form of sugar in it.
I was in my early 20s in 1991, and I'd easily pick 2021. The 1990s were a great time to have as my formative period, and it was fun to ride the web from gopher to mobile.
But the 2020s are going to be a transformational decade too, with a lot to learn and experience, and a ton of opportunities. Far more chaotic than the 1990s, but honestly that suits me personally. I thrive on that.
I would pick the 90s over the 2000s or 2010s though.
Well, I'd go back to the 2010s and buy even more bitcoin than I did, but other than that, I could skip that decade.
I'm trying to imagine being back in the late 80's living in the squat or in the animal house I lived in during the early 90's and having this guy time travel back to tell us about the future.
"You mean we don't all die in a nuclear war or from AIDS or global warming?"
"No, the future is much better! Riding lawn mowers are cheaper, teddy bears are much more cuddly and silky, board games have been revolutionized and you can get goat cheese at Walmart!"
I'm going 91. I was there. I wasn't 20, but I was closer to 10. And 10 years old in decades past is about equal to 20 years old today, we experienced more. We had more freedom, we made more mistakes. More of us were likely beaten/raped/killed or otherwise died.. but we simply were less childlike, the generations that had analog childhoods. Less coddling. That was more true the further back you go, but there was a steep decline for children born around 1990 or after due to many factors. At least that's what I've observed.
Those quality of life improvements on that list are in reality pretty sad compared to the loss in social cohesion and quality of life in ways that matter more. You would think we didn't have indoor plumbing or antibiotics. We were in good shape. But the difference in pre and post 9/11 America is stark. This place was basically ruined on a social level, pure fear and panic, and it remains in different forms.
Now if you asked me if I'd rather be born in 1971 or 2021? I would say 2021. Because the last 20 years have been throwaway decades. Someone 20 years old in 2021 missed ALL of the good times, never saw America as it was, and has and will spend most of their life behind the 8 ball.
If you're born today, while there could definitely be more calamity, there's a good chance things turn up from the malaise of 2001-2021 in the next two decades. At least as it pertains to the working class. Which is most of us. Its been a great two decades for those that were running the show. But there's a reason why overall sentiment is and has been negative.
I'll take 20 in 1991, or 20 in 2041. But not 20 in 2021.
Factory jobs that is probably true in general--though you're still into the period when a lot of traditional union manufacturing jobs were leaving (or had left) the country.
As an engineer/software developer, you're probably going to be paid about $40K for an entry-level position [ADDED: For the US at a "tech" company]. And there is basically no equivalent to routine FAANG SWE salaries.
Housing is cheaper (relatively) in some locations although the Bay Area was still relatively expensive. Manhattan was considered the high-priced place to live at the time.
> '91 would be better though - better salaries in a lot of jobs
Not in tech though. Engineering jobs paid middle-class level well, but nothing out of the ordinary for white-collar professionals. Starting salaries were in the 30Ks for top offers in rich companies but many people started in the 20Ks. You had to be Sr.Dir/VP level to start getting close to 100K.
The concept of engineers with a few years of experience making more salary than top-level surgeons was inconceivable. So purely on a financial sense, it's much better to be a new grad in software today than in '91.
Still, I'd rather be paid 35K doing ground-breaking UNIX kernel or networking work than be paid 500K building yet another adware/spyware social app.
This was the first thing that came to mind. Rock & Roll may have died in this decade but the innovation of the 90's made it worth it. I fear for 2031 once the tik tok-ification of music has run its course.
I was 23 in 1991. It was OK, but just yesterday I was talking with a twentysomething guy who was playing for me a song he'd written using GarageBand on his phone. I told him, man, I wish I'd had YouTube and GarageBand when I was his age. It's really hard to say what I'd do. I'd probably not change anything. I've noticed that computer technology isn't really anything special to my kids. I'm not sure I would have taken up an interest in programming as a youth in 2021 as I did in the 80s and 90s.
The more I think about this, the more I realize that you pick almost any time in history and if you were wealthy and powerful, it was freaking awesome. Can you imagine what the life of a Roman Caesar was like? Or a Rockefeller or Windsor?
Similarly for life at the bottom. In almost any period in history, life at the bottom sucked hard.
There are a lot of things that younger people in particular take for granted today that were basically not available in 1990. I occasionally think that if I had to go back to 1990 and do my job as a product manager, I'd probably quit in frustration over just not having the information I needed to do my job.
But you'd only be competing against other similarly hampered project managers. Depending on how well you worked without the modern internet, you'd simply find your same place in the bell curve.
I was in my 20's in the 90's. It's tough to say. On the one hand I feel like I was the last generation to take a mid-level software salary and pay off a degree and a "short commute" detached house before I was 40.
On the other hand, since I was in my 20's in the 90's I was a young child in the 70's and 80's when nerds were to be bullied, gay people were to be beaten, and God help you if you were Trans. That's still the case in much of the world, but looking at how my kids grew up, vastly improved since then.
So as a nerd, yes, the 90's were probably better for 20 year old me, but the 10's were definitely better for the 10 year old me.
Not so incredible I guess. I was 20 in '91 so can relate.
Computers and the internet were seriously exciting at the time, uncommercialized and pure hacker culture of exploration. We were building technology because it was exciting. The concept of building adware or spyware didn't exist. Today a startup going to "make the world a better place" is a sitcom joke, back then it was truly the feeling.
Yes, I feel the same way. I was only 15 back in 1991, but was involved with BBSes, Usenet, early ISPs, etc. The "early commercial Internet" years (1991 - 1996 or so) were so much fun.
I was 7 then, and just getting into computers - playing with BASIC on the CPC464) so being 20 then would have been awesome, although I’d be proper old now ;)
I’d just like to go just far enough back to not be around for WW2 so I have to spend the least amount of time in the 21st century as possible. So I guess stick me in 1946.
That's almost an unfair comparison. I don't know how old you are but 1991 was an incredibly optimistic time in western history with the fall of communism in Europe. Maybe a closer comparison would be 2000 vs 2019, both years right before a big global event.
Overly simplifying my memories as a west coast US teenager in that era, the very late 1980s were a time of cautious optimism with news such as the solidarity movement in Poland and the fall of the Berlin Wall. However, 1989 in many ways felt like the peak. Soon after, such global optimism was soured by the Gulf War, Serbian civil war, etc. We weren't as aware or focused on other positive changes that may have been happening elsewhere.
Edit to add: in many ways, the apparent close of the Cold War just removed that one bilateral threat from center attention. In its place, we gained a new awareness of much more fragmented conflict scattered all over the world...
Destruction of the USSR in 1991 gave a boost to the Western economies by eliminating a strong competitor and opening a new huge market.
While you enjoyed your life in 1991, people around me literally died of hunger, because Gorbachev and Yeltsin and their advisors from USA killed almost all the industry on the former USSR territory overnight. People lost jobs, people lost savings, people lost meaning of life overnight.
It's a biggest case of genocide since 1940s, that is silenced and undocumented.
In 1991, distributing encryption software was a violation of US munitions controls.[1] At the time, it was not at all clear whether encryption software would remain legal for individuals to own and use. The US government was considering mandating backdoors in all consumer encryption, culminating in the development of the Clipper chip.[2]
With the exception of a few (very important) services (e.g. college tuition, healthcare, childcare), increases in income have actually outpaced inflation for most other goods and services over the last 20 years [0]. This is something I almost never see discussed; almost everyone seems to believe that real incomes have totally stagnated.
That said, given current inflationary trends, it will be interesting to see if this still holds up in a decade or two.
> This is something I almost never see discussed; almost everyone seems to believe that real incomes have totally stagnated.
Real people need to pay for tuition/childcare, housing, and healthcare, so what would be the point of excluding those from the calculation of real income?
The point of Gwern’s article is to highlight specific things that have improved since the 90s. I’m pointing out that this is supported by looking at inflation stratified by various goods and services. Nowhere in my post did I say that “inflation is fine”; I’m just saying many goods and services have gotten dramatically cheaper since the 90s, which is still counter to the prevailing narrative.
Sidenote-- is average === mean the standard lexicon now?
When I was in grade school we learned that average was a generic term for mean, median, or mode. So when I see average conflated with median in discussion (as it often is), I assume it's intentional. But others seem to interpret it as a synonym of mean.
I used to be very excited about technology and I really believed it could fundamentally improve humanity in some way(s).
Now I'm excited about prosocial things, interconnection, anything which allows humans as a social animal to truly connect, find meaning, and uplift each other. Everything else is likely a distraction.
This is the hard part though. Technology lets you make incremental progress, occasional breakthroughs, and rarely has any major setbacks that aren't purely monetary. Humans having healthy social lives at the micro and macro scale is something we arguably understand and can affect much less than technology at the moment.
Readit News
Look at the bottle of Elmers glue on the table. Today the glue probably works better (barring regulation that forces compromises to product efficacy) and comes in a bottle that uses half as much plastic. Something like a bottle revision that would have formerly required expensive salaried employees to come up with multiple options, send them to the supplier, supplier has to respond to each with details and quotes, etc, can now be accomplished in a fraction of the man hours thanks to email and CAD being ubiquitous in the entire supply chain from marketing, to engineering, to the vendor's contractor who will actually design the tooling. Sign off might take days instead of weeks. This sort of efficiency improvement allows more engineering, design work, or other optimization to be done to every good and service in our economy allowing it to penetrate into even the most thin margin use cases. From farming to high finance products and services are substantially more influenced and optimized by specialist professionals than they were in 1990. Increase efficiency like this throughout the national and global economy is how lawnmowers and A/C units can be sold on sale for $100 and still make a profit. (yes I know that example isn't perfect but you get the point).
https://blog.daneurope.org/en_US/blog/are-full-face-snorkeli...
If each local region needs its own widget factory, then to become a top widgetsmith you only have to compete with the local widgetsmith talent pool. Just as there can be many high school star athletes across the world, there can be many top widgetsmiths within their local widget factories across the world, even if each is likely mediocre relative to the global pool of widgetsmiths.
Now the widget market has globalized. To become a top widgetsmith, you now need to be the best in the world. There is no room for locally optimal widgetsmiths when the market can globally optimize, just as there’s no room for most star high school athletes at the NBA.
The upside is that the entire world gets much better widgets. The downside is that you can only make a good living as a widgetsmith if you’re the absolute best in the world. Local markets lead to redundancy, which is globally inefficient but locally optimal.
This is extra pronounced for singers, actors etc., but not as much for people such as software engineers. A mediocre programmer that implements functionality that you need is much more valuable for you than a star programmer immersed in his UltraFastXMLParserForHaskell library and does not take side jobs.
Yes, though for most jobs there is far more demand than can be met by the best in the world. When someone needs a lawyer or software developer, they are very unlikely to hire the best in the world.
It definitely applies to software. It's why trades are a much better career option, local will never not matter in that case. The best 'star high school' welders and electricians are always going to be desirable, as no one is flying in the best in the world for every little job.
Most of us, except the best in the world among us, messed up going into software. The script completely flipped on this since I was a child in the 80s and was dreaming of becoming a programmer as I am now.
That is why society is (has to) move into post-employment era. It's no longer required or even beneficial for everyone to be employed and/or employed to the extreme degree they are now (~50% of waking hours).
You can find examples of this, but overall, I dispute the generalization.
I think quality/price improvements have been monumental in some areas, stagnant in others. Computer related products have gone crazy. It's not more for less though, it's "much more for a little more." The market grew a lot and a produces a hell of a lot more. Even that isn't the norm though. More for less, even less for less, are uncommon.
Farming and manufacturing.... None of the capitalisation, gene patents and such of recent generations is anything like basic green revolution tech, in terms of productivity growth. Farming is different. It uses less labour, more capital, but it's not producing much more efficiently. The price of farm produce isn't falling, quality is not rising. Same for most manufacturing, especially basic manufacturing. Most of the last generations' gains were made by employing cheaper employees in cheaper places, not reinventing manufacturing techniques. So, low end, high volume manufactured goods got cheaper, but a car still costs what it costs. Good quality appliances generally do too.
The quality of housing has gone up, but prices are often very high.
Education... we have more and arguably better, but more expensive.
Medicine... same. More and better, but more expensive.
There's a pattern here that's more complex and interesting than the average.
There are many thousands of people on this forum that have gotten a free education and in turn, one of the best careers in history from that free education that would never have been possible until recently.
I'm seeing more and more people (that aren't designers and engineers) are forgoing classical education and making a great living for themselves just by utilizing the freely available information on the internet.
At least in the embedded space, this is definitely not true. The norm is approaching more and more features for less.
I thought we liked Raspberry Pis on HN.
Regulation might do that and there is much more going on:
Regulation also protects health and safety of customers and workers (especially important with chemical products) and prevents fraud, and it corrects market distortions that damage businesses, including instituting changes that the nature of the market prevents any one business from implementing, and opening up competition.
Other things limit technological innovation, including incumbents with market power who profit more from eliminating competition than from improving their products.
Definitely a big deal, but mostly invisible on the demand side. You're talking about improvements to the supply process; the article is about what consumers experience.
Can you really not think of any benefits of regulation to correct for pervasive market failures?
"Intellectual Property Maximalism rollback: copyright terms have not and probably will not be indefinitely extended again to eternity to protect Mickey Mouse, and in 2019, for the first time since 1998, works entered the public domain"
I think the easy indicator may be the wrong one here. Defined more broadly, the public domain is not being enriched. For example, the web was a lot smaller in 1999, but it was a much more public domain. Today's web and post web internet is more centralised, controlled and therefore private property. Google could crawl pages, links, forums, because they were public, and use that access to create a search engine. Content, connections and signal are, today, proprietary. You can't order the world's information if that information is facebook's, only facebook can.
Or patents, more stuff of the last generation is patented than the previous'. Does that mean we invented more or we patented more? What happens to stuff that doesn't get patented? It's public.
Old copyright expiry deadlines might be a symbolic lead indicator, but they're determining the location of a fence post in county scale land dispute. A tiny, legible, part of the whole. In real terms, Disney's copyright portfolio is worth more, not less.
The public domain has gotten larger as has the private domain. But all that private stuff is now on track to expire one day, while in 1999 it was not clear that that would ever happen at all.
Compared to 1999, a lot more of that "private domain" stuff is also being made freely available, price-wise.
I support copyright expiration, but making Disney's copyright portfolio worth less when they continue to create a bunch of stuff was never an explicit part of that goal for me.
Well this is trivially true, but it really doesn't mean anything. If copyright length was 500 years this would still be a true statement.
It's ridiculous that there are 100 years old works of art created by people who have been dead for three quarters of a century which are still under copyright. You cannot spin this as a positive thing, I'm sorry.
Works published two years after the end of World War I will enter public domain in 2047 (Agatha Christie's first book). Star Wars will enter public domain in the 2070s. It's mad.
The type of CC matters.
NC can't be used commercially--whatever that means.
ND, rather ironically, essentially forbids derivatives/remixing therefore prohibiting one of the reasons CC was created in the first place.
Or it's kept as a trade secret.
You can't be secretive about a UI, or the chemical composition of a drug.
It's sort of like the people who say mobile devices are destroying the more open PC market and replacing it with closed mobile "consoles."
There are far more PCs out there today than there were in the 1990s and they are cheaper, faster, easier to use, and more versatile. The reason people think mobile has eaten everything is because growth in mobile has outpaced growth in PCs and there are now far more mobile devices than PCs. The PC market has still grown though, so there are more PCs than ever.
Mobile growth is plateauing too. The mobile explosion was the creation of a new computing niche more than the displacement of an old one, though low-end and narrower PC use cases have been displaced by phones and tablets. PCs have become more like trucks vs. cars, machines for "real work."
We also have a lot more OS and architectural choices in PCs today than in the 1990s. Linux is pretty usable and MacOS no longer sucks, so with Windows there are now three major choices available. Others like FreeBSD and OpenBSD are also viable but not as popular. You can even get an ARM laptop or desktop in the form of Raspberry Pi style boards in laptop form factors, larger ARM64 "server" chip boards that can work as desktops running Linux, or in the form of Apple Silicon Macs (that can also run other OSes on ARM in VMs), so you now have two CPU architectures in the mainstream PC market instead of just one.
Lastly there's a huge market today for cheap single board computers like the Raspberry Pi that did not exist at all back then.
A similar comparison by the way applies to the metal server market vs. cloud. There are far more racked up servers today than there were in the 90s. Cloud has just grown really quickly, so there's even more cloud deployments.
Well, there definitely are more PCs now than in 1991, but pre covid-WFH era, PC sales were at an all-time low, following a multi year downward trend, thanks to people moving to those closed mobile devices and consoles.
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Because almost all the industrial production that pollutes water and air moved to third-world countries, where people suffer from pollution. Same for thrash that is taken to China, India, Indonesia for "recycling", but is actually burned in fires or thrown into the ocean. I wouldn't consider it an improvement due to advances in technology.
Rather, pollution is largely something that occurs in the production process in locations where desperation for production is so high that they are not willing to put in any personal effort or social policies to curtail it at the expense of production.
However, once you become richer, air quality and so on moves higher in our collective list of priorities. Production can occur without pollution. It is just more expensive, and requires care.
Some of the "upsides" (e.g. improvements in patent regime) just aren't there. Some aren't as wonderful as they are described.
I'm in my mid-sixties; I'm very much a candidate for the "things were better in the old days" brigade.
But I do think many (most?) things have improved. Housing is better; healthcare is immeasurably better (unless you can't afford it); and mobile telephony has improved the lives of at least a billion people worldwide.
Because I'm not miserable old git, I'm not going to list downsides.
[Edit] OK, I'll list one: permanent war.
Not exactly a new thing though is it? Plus the actual percentage of people worldwide exposed to war or directly affected by it has dropped significantly. The world is more peaceful than it has ever been.
Depending on who you ask, conflict deaths per capita have stayed the same or declined since 1990.[1] 1991 had the first Gulf War, The Troubles, the Yugoslav campaign in Croatia, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Guatemala, and many more.
1. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/conflict-deaths-per-10000...
But the music was definitely better back then!
We now make bigger, more-accurate bombs and missiles, but we sprinkle them around just as carelessly. We still have to be made to hate people if we are going to support a war; and we don't pay a lot of attention to the casualty-count of people we hate.
Music: If you're referring to the 60's and 70's, I agree - the seventies were my formative years, musically. But we're speaking of 1991, I think. [checks 1991's hits] In among the dross, there are some good tunes - Clash, Should I Stay Or Should I Go; James, Sit Down. And there was some great Acid House, which didn't make the charts (clubbers didn't know the names of the songs or the artists).
Objection!
Before 90's US was in permanent war just as well. It was called the Cold War. So that one downside is actually non-existent - from "before" vs. "today" point of view.
What should we be measuring when we measure improvement?
When I was growing up camcorders were expensive so video is limited to special occasions. Have a good amount of pictures but a lot fewer than we have of kiddo. Cameras were more expensive and each picture cost money in film and development. Long distance calls were short and infrequent because they were expensive.
We’ve also built a highly sophisticated surveillance state and generally reduced our basic freedoms and individual rights post-9/11, and despite bumps in the road for this program thanks to Snowden etc, nothing has fundamentally changed and things continue to get worse on this front.
To me, this list of improvements is really just a list of improvements absent broader context which paints a very different & disturbing picture.
Mobile phones are the pinnacle of tech - and also a superb tool for mass surveillance.
Happiness is a proxy for successful adaptation to reality. So yes, if they are successfully adapting to the changing environment, they should be happy. The very least, failing at it will make them pretty “unhappy”.
> We are biological creatures and each one of us chooses to construct meaning of life (or lack thereof) individually.
A weird level of resolution to stop at. We’re also atomic creatures, maybe we shouldn’t care about death? But we’re also conscious creatures that suffer and maybe at least avoiding that is pretty meaningful? I don’t think any nihilist is nihilistic enough to self-immolate for example.
You could DIY your meaning individually, as is the fashionable belief in this age of post-modern, but it’s liable to crumbling tragically with an inopportune contact with reality. Normativity of reality seeking is a strongly built instinct in any species that knows they have to survive in it, and their meaning emerges from this relationship.
Benjamin Franklin, agreeing that “the happiness of individuals is evidently the ultimate end of political society,” offered his vision of Higher Progress: If every man and woman would work for four hours each day on some- thing useful, that labor would produce sufficient to procure all the necessaries and comforts of life, want and misery would be banished out of the world, and the rest of the twenty-four hours might be leisure and happiness.
Also Epicur: "Epicurus believed that the greatest good was to seek modest, sustainable pleasure in the form of a state of ataraxia (tranquility and freedom from fear) and aponia (the absence of bodily pain) through knowledge of the workings of the world and limiting desires. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism
I don't mean to suggest that miserable circumstances don't make you miserable; just that circumstances that are twice as awful don't seem to make people twice as miserable. I suspect that most mediaeval peasants were about as cheerful as most ordinary people today.
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
We seem to be designed to not be content with what we have, because that would eliminate motivation to make things better.
If you're going to broaden person to people, I think it's best to narrow to "happier and more fulfilled" in regards to something. Marriage/personal economics/profession/social life/spiritual life/etc.
An incredible number of people pick ‘91. Some people even ask to go back to the seventies.
This article explains why I would much rather be young now rather than before.
Young adults in 2021 are hopelessly trying to outrun that time they tweeted a slur when they were 12.
Okay I guess I'd rank crispr as highly. But the list of changes that profound is short.
There's a podcast by Jason Feifer (was called Pessimists Archive) where the repeated theme across many episodes is the recurring fallacy of the "good ole days": https://www.jasonfeifer.com/build-for-tomorrow/
E.g. you ask today's generation and they say the "good old days" was 1991; but if you ask those in 1991 what the good old days were, they wouldn't say "right now!" ... they'd say 1970s. And if you ask those in 1970s... they'd say... (you get the point).
So the conclusion is either...
- the true good old days after connecting the survey across centuries was actually the prehistoric cave man days of hunting & gathering
... or ...
- every generation repeats the rose-colored glasses narrative because we bias the past with positive memories and the bias the present with negative current events
My mother was 20 in 1968, and it was the good old days. They believed the revolution was around the corner. Present was somewhat grim, but future was bright; in her years of political activity she saw the pill come, abortion rights, women rights enhanced, the end of dictatorships in Spain and Portugal, the end (in civilised countries) of death penalty, the crumbling of USSR.
My children are in their 20s; my son refuses to learn to drive because cars are evil and he doesn't want to own one, ever, because they're bad; he's hell-bent of enjoying the now because he's pretty sure that there is no future, except climate catastrophe, incessant wars, and electronically-enhanced surveillance; he thinks that democracy is a complete scam and he forgets to vote if I don't nag him weeks in advance. He's just as disillusioned as I am, but 27 years younger.
So I think the picture is more complex. The global direction of evolution is much more important than the objective starting point.
Is this sourced? In Europe, 1991 was when the Soviet union fell. Sure, in many now-ex-USSR countries 1991 wasn't the best of times because the collapse wasn't very well managed. But in West, suddenly the impeding doom of nuclear war near disappeared overnight.
2021 has ... exciting climate events and Covid.
edit. What is the soundtrack of 2021? In 1991 it supposedly was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4RjJKxsamQ . TIL the year ended with band donating bunch of royalties from the single to Gorbachev 10 days before he resigned and the USSR disappeared. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_of_Change_(Scorpions_song...
If you asked then what the good old days were, they'd probably say 1988. There's a reason Bush 1 was the only 1-term president between 1980 and 2020. Things didn't start perking up until around 93-95 with the WWW.
I grew up in the 90s, & maybe I'd do better as a 20 year old in 1991 rather than 2031 (too young to say 20 in 2021; I've succeeded already close enough to there), but I'd rather grow up in the 2000s than grow up in the 80s
There's a kind of arbitrage, where if I could take my technical abilities from 2010 back to 1990, I'd probably do pretty well. I'm not so sure about taking those abilities to 2030. So you need to frame your question more clearly: at what age does the time travel occur? For simplicity I assume the only age you've given: 20. If it's about when we're born, then that's a completely different human being
That explanation has the benefit that it doesn’t need to counter-assert against daydreamers that things are getting better, worse, or staying the same.
Google search and showers that stay hot are pretty nice, but the relative difficulty of accessing quality education, jobs, and housing probably turn out to be much more significant as you exit your 20s in 2031 and think about starting a family.
There's a big difference between 1991 and just a few years later of course, but even when I graduated from college (1996), Microsoft was absolutely suffocating. I had decided that I wanted to work for a computer company and that I had zero interest in working on Windows NT(or Copland). This left one company, Sun Microsystems, which even in 1996 was not really recruiting at universities. I got a job there by cold e-mailing a Sun engineer (Jeff Bonwick) based on a Usenet post in comp.unix.solaris. (Cold e-mailing to get a job was so unusual that a friend of mine who was a reporter for the AP wrote a story about my job search -- and it was broadly picked up nationally![0]) At Sun, I was the youngest person in OS development by a decade, and the industry broadly thought Sun to be foolish for insisting on innovating in the operating system. Conventional wisdom was wrong, of course, and I had a great 14-year run at Sun that I wouldn't trade for anything -- but it would be a mistake to overly romanticize what was honestly a pretty crappy era.
[0] I talked about this briefly in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IznEq2Uf2xk, including an (embarrassing) photo of me ca. 1996 that ran as the front page of many business sections around the US
Also, IME, the culture has become hateful, poisonous, and based on trauma, despair, and survival rather than hope and dreams, freedom and self-actualization.
May be with memory wipe of currently what you know and the way the world is
The past always looks better. People still want to return to the 50's and most of them were not alive then.
However, I believe every generation has had it "better" generally speaking than the previous and that's how it should be. Certain era's had things that were probably better but this era has things that future generations will envy as well while also having it "better" generally speaking.
Today is this best time to be alive and I'm optimistic tomorrow will be even better.
A recent study (2013) suggests that the idea that second hand smoke has a direct link to cancer wasn't entirely accurate.
https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article/105/24/1844/2517805
>Even unhealthy foods are less unhealthy due to removing hydrogenated fats from foods
I would say food is far more unhealthy today than in 1991. There is sugar and bastardized sugar in everything. Sugar is addictive and food manufacturers use it to get people addicted to their food. Instead of eating for nutrition, people eat for that sugar hit, and you almost can't escape it. Try finding prepackaged foods in the grocery store without some form of sugar in it.
https://www.addictioncenter.com/drugs/sugar-addiction/
But the 2020s are going to be a transformational decade too, with a lot to learn and experience, and a ton of opportunities. Far more chaotic than the 1990s, but honestly that suits me personally. I thrive on that.
I would pick the 90s over the 2000s or 2010s though.
Well, I'd go back to the 2010s and buy even more bitcoin than I did, but other than that, I could skip that decade.
"You mean we don't all die in a nuclear war or from AIDS or global warming?"
"No, the future is much better! Riding lawn mowers are cheaper, teddy bears are much more cuddly and silky, board games have been revolutionized and you can get goat cheese at Walmart!"
Those quality of life improvements on that list are in reality pretty sad compared to the loss in social cohesion and quality of life in ways that matter more. You would think we didn't have indoor plumbing or antibiotics. We were in good shape. But the difference in pre and post 9/11 America is stark. This place was basically ruined on a social level, pure fear and panic, and it remains in different forms.
Now if you asked me if I'd rather be born in 1971 or 2021? I would say 2021. Because the last 20 years have been throwaway decades. Someone 20 years old in 2021 missed ALL of the good times, never saw America as it was, and has and will spend most of their life behind the 8 ball.
If you're born today, while there could definitely be more calamity, there's a good chance things turn up from the malaise of 2001-2021 in the next two decades. At least as it pertains to the working class. Which is most of us. Its been a great two decades for those that were running the show. But there's a reason why overall sentiment is and has been negative.
I'll take 20 in 1991, or 20 in 2041. But not 20 in 2021.
GPS on the phone is awesome, but I'd still prefer financial security.
Factory jobs that is probably true in general--though you're still into the period when a lot of traditional union manufacturing jobs were leaving (or had left) the country.
As an engineer/software developer, you're probably going to be paid about $40K for an entry-level position [ADDED: For the US at a "tech" company]. And there is basically no equivalent to routine FAANG SWE salaries.
Housing is cheaper (relatively) in some locations although the Bay Area was still relatively expensive. Manhattan was considered the high-priced place to live at the time.
Not in tech though. Engineering jobs paid middle-class level well, but nothing out of the ordinary for white-collar professionals. Starting salaries were in the 30Ks for top offers in rich companies but many people started in the 20Ks. You had to be Sr.Dir/VP level to start getting close to 100K.
The concept of engineers with a few years of experience making more salary than top-level surgeons was inconceivable. So purely on a financial sense, it's much better to be a new grad in software today than in '91.
Still, I'd rather be paid 35K doing ground-breaking UNIX kernel or networking work than be paid 500K building yet another adware/spyware social app.
Similarly for life at the bottom. In almost any period in history, life at the bottom sucked hard.
On the other hand, since I was in my 20's in the 90's I was a young child in the 70's and 80's when nerds were to be bullied, gay people were to be beaten, and God help you if you were Trans. That's still the case in much of the world, but looking at how my kids grew up, vastly improved since then.
So as a nerd, yes, the 90's were probably better for 20 year old me, but the 10's were definitely better for the 10 year old me.
Not so incredible I guess. I was 20 in '91 so can relate.
Computers and the internet were seriously exciting at the time, uncommercialized and pure hacker culture of exploration. We were building technology because it was exciting. The concept of building adware or spyware didn't exist. Today a startup going to "make the world a better place" is a sitcom joke, back then it was truly the feeling.
When can I be 'improper old' ?? :-D
Dead Comment
Edit to add: in many ways, the apparent close of the Cold War just removed that one bilateral threat from center attention. In its place, we gained a new awareness of much more fragmented conflict scattered all over the world...
While you enjoyed your life in 1991, people around me literally died of hunger, because Gorbachev and Yeltsin and their advisors from USA killed almost all the industry on the former USSR territory overnight. People lost jobs, people lost savings, people lost meaning of life overnight.
It's a biggest case of genocide since 1940s, that is silenced and undocumented.
https://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/22/world/soviets-foresee-bud...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
That said, given current inflationary trends, it will be interesting to see if this still holds up in a decade or two.
[0] https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/cpi2020.png?x...
Real people need to pay for tuition/childcare, housing, and healthcare, so what would be the point of excluding those from the calculation of real income?
There's no real reason to have to pay for college when we're already paying for public education.
If you want uneducated children with no healthcare and no affordable place to live I guess things are fine, and that’s pretty much what we see now.
When I was in grade school we learned that average was a generic term for mean, median, or mode. So when I see average conflated with median in discussion (as it often is), I assume it's intentional. But others seem to interpret it as a synonym of mean.
[0] https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/gs-live/uploads%2F1527022...
Quality of life depends far more on the integrity of a person's human relationships than these trivial material gains.
I can remain bright eyed through all kinds of horribleness if I believe my suffering is meaningful and valued.
I used to be very excited about technology and I really believed it could fundamentally improve humanity in some way(s).
Now I'm excited about prosocial things, interconnection, anything which allows humans as a social animal to truly connect, find meaning, and uplift each other. Everything else is likely a distraction.
This is the hard part though. Technology lets you make incremental progress, occasional breakthroughs, and rarely has any major setbacks that aren't purely monetary. Humans having healthy social lives at the micro and macro scale is something we arguably understand and can affect much less than technology at the moment.