While Looking Ahead, Let's Also Look Back
Responding to the notion that future generations are going to be worse off because of the actions (or non-action) of those living today, a U.S. reader offers another perspective:
By the time I graduated high school everyone personally not only knew someone who had “˜been to war’ but everyone knew someone who had been killed or maimed in a war. Sit down and make a list of all the “˜trials and tribulations’ our generation had to contend with and our parents generation had to contend with then compare them to the younger generation.
Our children aren’t going to get a perfect world, it’s a lot better then what was handed to us by our parents and it’s a lot better then was handed to our parents by their parents.
“Our children aren’t going to get a perfect world, it’s a lot better then what was handed to us by our parents”
Is it? I look around at things like social mobility, youth unemployment and wage growth and don’t see anything better.
Maybe our glib assumption that the future will be necessarily better without us having to do anything is part of the problem.
There’s nothing notably wrong with harrywr2’s comment, but what does it add? Some assert that we aren’t going to experience any significant impacts from anthropogenic climate change and other sustainability issues, others disagree.
Personally I disagree that I’m passing a better world on to my children than my parents passed on to me, if we are talking about the personal experience of the world as opposed to the world taken as a whole. I, and the vast majority of people I directly interacted with, had a very happy childhood and there were no restraints on my opportunities. I had everything I could need, comfortably enough access to resources to be as happy as I could want to make myself. If anything my children have too much access to ‘stuff’ and there is too much aspiration being imposed on to them, but that’s a niggle. Much more important is the uncertainty they face.
Of course there were many people around the world when I was growing up who didn’t necessarily have access to everything they needed to be content and there are, at least proportionally, less such people now – looking at the world as a whole, yes it’s a better world than our parents passed on to us. Looking at the future uncertainty we cannot assert with any confidence that we are passing on a better world to our children. Prospects of war and want are growing again because of anthropogenic climate change. There are many positive trends in the world, but the prospect of increasingly building negative trends too.
#2
Personally I disagree that I’m passing a better world on to my children than my parents passed on to me, if we are talking about the personal experience of the world as opposed to the world taken as a whole.
I think we are talking about the world as a whole…
Want in this world is usually caused by bad government. Wars and AGW…. we’ll see.
Yes, we’ve figured out a way to completely disconnect ourselves as citizens from the 2 of the longest wars in US history and make sure the entire brunt is felt by the military and their families. Progress!
what metric(s) do we use to define better? And whose children are we talking about? It seems to me that the axiomatic belief in the inevitability of progress as evidenced by the harry’s comment is one of the predictable traits of u.s. conservatives. why is that?
grypo,
Yes, I thought about that, too. Good point.
It seems to me that the axiomatic belief in the inevitability of progress as evidenced by the harry’s comment is one of the predictable traits of u.s. conservatives. why is that?
Infant mortality:
http://bit.ly/rqSWna
Mortality rate, under 5:
http://bit.ly/uMmj37
Life Expectancy:
http://bit.ly/sdrqJV
Prevalence of HIV, total (% of population ages 15-49):
http://bit.ly/tvjF8N
For all you population bomb fans:
http://bit.ly/uFgqDj
Ratio of girls to boys in primary and secondary education (%):
http://bit.ly/vSvgbT
GDP per capita (current US$):
http://bit.ly/vpww58
This was a viral video that was making the rounds a while back but is pertinent to this discussion:
http://vodpod.com/watch/1323272-the-technium-so-amazing-but-nobody-is-happy
#1
Is it? I look around at things like social mobility, youth unemployment and wage growth and don’t see anything better.
Compared to when? Last year, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 40 years ago.
Page 3 of this report has US per capita residential floor space
http://epb.lbl.gov/homepages/rick_diamond/LBNL55011-trends.pdf
Wow.. per capita residential floor space tripled in the last 60 years in the US.
It’s easy to forget(because I want to forget) that 80 square foot bedroom I shared with my brother and the 36 square foot bathroom the whole family shared. But I should not complain..my parents lived with my older sister for a few years in an apartment house where they had a 200 sq foot one room apartment and shared the bathroom with everyone who lived on the entire floor.
Here are the minimum section 8 housing standards(for non americans housing for the poor)
http://www.hud.gov/offices/adm/hudclips/guidebooks/7420.10G/7420g10GUID.pdf
Each unit has to have its own bathroom, stove, refrigerator and kitchen sink. Even poor people who are on welfare are ‘entitled’ to better living conditions then my parents and sister had with my father working two jobs.