3 Reasons You Are Wrong About ‘The Good Old Days’
By: Cee Vinny
Tags: Self Improvement, Inspiration, Education, Philosophy, Psychology

“Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.” -Franklin Pierce Adams

Looking back at history, ask yourself what era you would rather live in more than today.

You may be able to find an 80-year period when you could have avoided a major war. You might identify a time when there was relative peace, economic expansion, growth in civil rights, and optimism about the future.

But was that time really as rosy as you think it was?

The truth is that people today on average are faring much better than they were at any point in history.

This may not sound right. It may not feel right. But it is right.

The world has seen dramatic improvements over the last couple centuries, including better access to healthcare, less malnutrition, less violence, less war, less pollution, more education equality, more human rights, more democracy, and more freedom.

These are just a few tidbits about how much better life has gotten around the world in the last 200 years:

Life expectancy has more than doubled in the last 150 years to 71 years old after staying stagnant at around 30 for thousands of years

has more than doubled in the last 150 years to 71 years old after staying stagnant at around 30 for thousands of years Child mortality has plummeted in the last 200 years to about 4% of kids dying before 5 years old, down from over 40% in 1820

has plummeted in the last 200 years to about 4% of kids dying before 5 years old, down from over 40% in 1820 Illiteracy has plunged to 14% today, down from 88% in 1800

has plunged to 14% today, down from 88% in 1800 Extreme poverty has dropped to about 10% today, down from close to 90% in 1820

Despite this, people are incredibly pessimistic — especially in countries where things have improved the most.

According to a 2015 poll, vast majorities of respondents from the U.S., Great Britain, Sweden, Germany, Australia, and France think that the world is getting worse, not better.

So, why is there so much confusion?

These are just some of the reasons that we are wrong about the state of the world and why we should have more hope than we do now.

1) We take what we have for granted

In 2016, a U.S. presidential candidate challenged the country to harken back to the good old days when “America was great” and when we were all better off than we are today.

When the candidate was pinned down on the question about when this era was exactly, he said the following:

“If you look back…there was a period of time when we were developing at the turn of the century which was a pretty wild time for this country and pretty wild in terms of building that machine, that machine was really based on entrepreneurship.” -Donald Trump, March 2016

Clearly, Trump was looking at life through the eyes of a billionaire — not as the average American who was toiling on a farm or in a factory somewhere in the early 1900s.

But would he even want to be living at that point in history?

In an article written by Donald J. Boudreaux at the Foundation for Economic Education, he argued, “nearly every middle-class American today is richer than was America’s richest man a mere 100 years ago.”

Boudreaux challenged us to consider what life was like even for wealthy people back then. This was a life without airplanes, air conditioning, radios, television, films, overnight shipping, antibiotics, ethnic cuisine, electric toothbrushes, contact lenses, hair restoration, reliable birth control, veterinary care, and rock’n’roll.

By these material standards, Boudreaux argues, we’re all more well off than John D. Rockefeller in 1916.

And this doesn’t even mention that food was less appetizing and cost about one-third of a person’s income, on average — twice as much as it does today. There were also no refrigerators, stoves, clothes washers, dryers, year-round produce, computers, smartphones, videogames, Uber, and more.

Women didn’t have the right to vote, blacks were forcibly segregated from whites in many parts of the U.S., and it was illegal to be gay.

Old people were dying in squalor or working until the bitter end since the U.S. had yet to invent Social Security.

These were not great times, so when were those “good old days” we hear about?

Many of us are taught that after World War II the U.S. saw massive peace-time expansion and economic opportunities for EVERYONE.

We picture families who could thrive off of one income and had a white-picket fence, two cars in the driveway, and were filled with optimism and patriotism.

We are told about a time when college tuition and healthcare costs were less menacing and when social mobility was easier.

Trump talked about this time, too:

“[W]e were not pushed around, we were respected by everybody, we had just won a war, we were pretty much doing what we had to do.” -Donald Trump, March 2016

So was it more of a FEELING than anything else?

The power of his campaign slogan (“Make America Great Again”) was that it let people imagine any time they wanted to imagine. People could dream up some better time when everything was perfect and that was not today.

Coincidentally, many of them were picturing a time before Medicare and Medicaid, which has provided healthcare to 100s of millions of people since the 1960s. Or before Pell Grants, which have provided 100s of billions of dollars to low-income college students since 1965. Or perhaps before the Civil Rights Movement, the fight for blacks to achieve equal status under the law, which is only about 50 years old.

This sentiment towards the past ignores all the progress that has been made in just the last 100 years.

A recent book written by Harvard’s Steven Pinker called Enlightenment Now details how much progress has been achieved in just about every category.

It’s not only material success either.

Here is a list of chapters from his book where he gives detailed evidence and vast amounts of data that support this theory that things are getting better: life, health, sustenance, wealth, inequality, the environment, peace, safety, terrorism, democracy, equal rights, knowledge, quality of life, and existential threats.

Pinker’s book shatters the idea that the world is getting worse.

In reality, societies everywhere are achieving unequivocal progress. And these aren’t just linear improvements; many of the improvements in these categories are exponential advances.

So, why do we have it so wrong?

2) We are filled with biases

This is an excerpt from a recent New Yorker article entitled, “Are Things Getting Better or Worse?”

“In 1967, the United States was embroiled in the Vietnam War. Protest marches were taking place around the country, crime was surging, and race riots were breaking out in Detroit, Newark, Milwaukee, and other cities….Americans lived in smaller houses, ate worse food, worked more hours, and died, on average, seven years earlier. On the other hand, NASA launched several moon probes and Jimi Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced” helped launch the Summer of Love. By an obscure retrospective calculus, the good appears to balance out the bad…. Frightening events seem less so in retrospect. Memory is selective, history is partial, and youth is a golden age. For all these reasons, our intuitive comparisons between the past and the present are unreliable.”

Some have called this a phenomenon of “rosy retrospection” or declinism.

We are filled with cognitive biases that tell us that things were better in the past and are getting worse today.

But there are psychological reasons for this.

One reason is from negativity bias, which is the phenomenon that people frequently give more weight to negative experiences than positive ones.

Negativity bias is part of the reason why we will always remember the person that made us feel like crap 10 years ago. It’s also a contributor to why we are more motivated by fear than any other emotion, including positive ones like happiness and love.

We are more likely to remember bad news, or find all the areas where things could be better, or recall that one time a friend of a friend was robbed on a street corner and therefore the whole city is a dangerous place and no one can be trusted.

This makes it extremely hard to have an accurate view of reality.

We’re not rejoicing in all the social progress because we’re now focused on all of the unfinished business for marginalized groups everywhere.

It’s hard to pat society on the back for changing its views on LGBT issues or rights for handicapped people when there are still so many problems.

Some people will never be satisfied. Maybe that’s OK because they will help usher in more change. But they can also contribute to coloring other peoples’ views of the state of the world — and it can fill people with disproportionate negativity.

Because of these biases, the picture we paint is often wrong.

Another phenomenon in psychology is called the optimism gap, which is the fact that people are often more optimistic about their own prospects than they are about society’s.

We think that crime, immigration, unemployment, drugs, and teen pregnancy are worse on the whole than they are in our area.

Our views on crime are particularly pernicious and inaccurate:

“In almost every year from 1992 through 2015, an era in which the rate of violent crime plummeted, a majority of Americans told pollsters that crime was rising.” -Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

We may have never experienced any direct consequences from these things, and yet we still view them as being more of a problem than they are.

So, how does this happen?

The reason that we won’t let kids play outside or walk home from school unattended isn’t because the world is more dangerous — it’s because we think that the world is more dangerous.

There’s cognitive dissonance between reality and our experience of reality.

We saw this kind of sentiment in 2015 during the presidential election, when terrorism surged to a top issue in the minds of voters, besting the economy and social security.

This is despite data showing that in the U.S. you are more likely to die from choking on food, drowning while taking a bath, being buried alive, a parachuting accident, or lightning than by a terrorist attack.

So why are we filled with so much bad information?

3) The news only accentuates the bad

Sometimes you turn on your local news station and there will be a light discussion about the sunny weather or the county fair that is coming to town.

But that’s not what is mostly talked about on the news.

We are constantly given the impression that the world is on fire.

There is always some crisis, murder, child abduction, rape, natural disaster, plane crash, terrorist attack, house fire, political scandal, infectious disease outbreak, starving child, or warzone.

The most recent study to examine how the tone of news coverage has changed was done in 2011 (graph below). These researchers examined all New York Times articles published from 1945 to 2005 and found that since the Vietnam War era there has been a consistent decline in positive news coverage. This even persisted after the end of the Cold War.

Average monthly tone of New York Times news content 1945–2005 (Y–axis are standard deviations from mean). Source.

It’s hard to imagine it’s gotten any better since.

There is more recent data on how the tone of world news coverage has changed in the last few decades (graph below). It doesn’t show anything different. There has been a deterioration in the tone of world news broadcasts since the late 1990s that has only gotten worse since 9/11.

Average monthly tone of Summary of World Broadcasts news content, January 1979–July 2010 (Y–axis are standard deviations from mean). Source.

The news rarely highlights all the things that are going well.

You won’t hear about all the wars that didn’t happen, all the elections that were successfully administered, or all the people who got home safe at the end of the day.

This has a huge effect on building our perception of the world.

There is another psychological trick called the availability heuristic that causes people to estimate the probability of something based on how easy it is for them to think of an example.

This makes sense.

But it explains why people drastically overestimate the chances of dying in a terrorist attack, plane crash, public shooting, shark attack, or from getting kidnapped — events that are all so rare even in the U.S. that they’re hardly worth worrying about.

The news makes all of this worse, not better.

So, how should we think about all this?

Look up! — Things aren’t as bad as they seem

It’s become almost impossible to argue with the sentiment that things have gotten anything but worse in recent decades.

We look around and see so much inequality and injustice everywhere in the world.

Some of us have lost hope.

But it is wrong to be pessimistic about the state of the world today.

Are there still problems? Absolutely. Will things get better in the future? Almost definitely.

The purpose of this article is not to say that everything is perfect today. It’s to show that things have gotten demonstrably better over time and that they can improve even more in the future.

We should all work to solve the problems that we care most about. We should ensure that the 2020s are better than the 2010s and that the 2030s are better still, so on forever.

There are still legitimate concerns about the impending disasters brought on by climate change, a possible fall of the European Union, and the increasing political divide in the United States.

These are all issues that must be addressed.

But if history is any guide, these issues can be addressed and they will be addressed.

It is in everybody’s interest to ensure that the world does not crumble to pieces.

So, despite the feeling otherwise, the world is not on fire. We should also stop romanticizing the “good old days” — they weren’t as good as they may seem.