The past was not that cute

A lot of online culture laments the modern American life and blames the Boomers for all of our "woes".

The 1950s - 2000s post war boom was a tailwind very few countries get to experience. It's funny how we look back at it as the norm, because that's not what the rest of the world experienced.

There's a reason everything in America was super sized for so long.

Things have averaged out a bit now, but if you look at the trendline, we're still doing remarkably well. The fact that our relatively small population supports the GDP it does is wild.

> The fact that our relatively small population supports the GDP it does is wild.

Yes and no. It is very impressive what humans can do and the US is a remarkable country for managing to achieve what they have. On the other hand, if we're talking GDP it is basically just a trendline [0] of whether you let people better their own lives or not.

The main reason for US success on the GDP front is that the median administrator chooses to make people fail and the US does the best job of resisting that tendency. To me the mystery is less why the US succeeds but more why polities are so committed to failing. It isn't even like there is a political ideology that genuinely wants to make it hard to do business [1]. It mostly happens by accident, foolishness and ignorance.

[0] https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/the-cost-of-regulation - see the figure, note the logarithmic axis

[1] I suppose the environmentalists, maybe.

Yeah, like I said, we blame boomers who voted for and supported Reagan.

I’m very aware that a healthy minority opposed him and his policies.

Thank you for your work on ARPANET and remaining a proud socialist! Computer networking is what drew me in to the technology space (not programming like most folks here, I presume), and socialism just might finally be having its due time here in the US (e.g., Mamdani, Katie Wilson).

I think you have one big piece of it: economic progress has a lot of search problems and it is impossible to master-plan it; consequently free intelligence beats centralized regulation. It's a bit out-dated now[0] but The Fifth Discipline distinguishes between 'detail complexity' (things that have a lot of bits you have to figure out) and 'dynamic complexity' (systems that have feedback loops and adaptive participants). It might simply be that handling systems with dynamic complexity is out of the reach of most humans. Economic regulation strikes me as something that can be particularly like a thing that modifies a dynamic system.

In fact, creating good policy in a modern economy might be so dynamically complex that no mind alive today can simultaneously comprehend an adaptive solution and act in such a way as to bring it about.

Perhaps, given this, we are simply spoiled by the effectiveness of certain economic actors (e.g. the Federal Reserve) in maintaining an monetary thermostat. Their success is not the norm so much as it is extraordinary.

0: which is humorous given this, because the Seinfeld Isn't Funny effect applies to things that become mainstream - insight and humor both disappear as the spark or joke become common knowledge

> The main reason for US success on the GDP front is that the median administrator chooses to make people fail and the US does the best job of resisting that tendency.

Every component here is ill-defined and doubtful, especially the claim that lower regulation is the "main" reason.

Well; in some sense. The only person on HN who talks seriously about economics is patio11 because he writes those long-form articles that go on for days and could use a bit of an edit. Which is imperfect but certainly the best the community has come up with because it takes a lot of words to tackle economics.

That acknowledged, I did link to a profession economist's blog and he goes in to excruciating detail of what all his terms mean and what he is saying. I'm basically just echoing all that, so if you want the details you can spend a few hours reading what he wrote.

Oh I see, all our bogeymen are created by a shadowy conspiracy of very rich bogeymen.

> On the other hand, if we're talking GDP it is basically just a trendline [0] of whether you let people better their own lives or not.

Focusing on GDP handwaves away so much around externalities that it's hard to know where to start with it.

How much worse off would people be if the US GDP was 20% lower but FB/Instagram/Google/everybody-else weren't vacuuming up ad dollars by pushing as-addictive-as-possible mental-junk-food in people's faces to make them feel bad about themselves? How much of that GDP is giving anyone optimism for improving their own individual condition?

How much of the nostalgia for the olden days is about agency and independence and perceived trajectory vs purely material wealth (from a material standpoint, many people today have more and better stuff than boomers did as kids, when a single black and white TV may have been shared by a whole family)?

Would regulation preventing the heads of big-tech advertising firms from keeping as much of that profit for themselves really be a net drain? Some suggestions for that regulation, harkening back to US history:

1) bring back super-high marginal tax rates to re-encourage more deductions and spread of salaries vs concentration in the top CEOs and execs. worked for the booming 50s! preventing the already-powerful, already-well-off from having another avenue to purely focus on "better their own lives" seemed wise there. seems like there were mega-wealthy super-tycoons both before the "soak the rich" era in US history and after it, but fewer minted during it?

2) instead of pushing more and more people into overtime or second jobs, go the other way and revitalize the earlier 20th-century trends towards limited work hours. get rid of overtime-exempt classifications while at it. Preventing people from working 100 hours a week to "better their own lives" and preventing them from sending their kids to work as early to "better their own lives" seems to have worked out ok.

3) crack down on pollution, don't let people "better their own lives" by forcing others to breathe, eat, and walk through their shit

4) crack down on surveillance, don't let people "better their own lives" by monetizing the private lives of others; focus on letting others enjoy their own lives in peace instead

1850-1950 is much closer to a norm over human history -

3+ catastrophic major wars

3+ other minor ones.

2+ great depressions (each of which was as large as ever financial panic 1951-current combined)

3+ financial panic events

At least one pandemic - plus local epidemics were pretty common.

When I tell people "its never been better than it is today" they dont believe me, but its the honest to god truth.

> The 1950s - 2000s post war boom was a tailwind very few countries get to experience.

All countries who had participated in WWII experienced it, winners and losers.

What you said is the compete opposite of the truth.

>A lot of online culture laments the modern American life and blames the Boomers for all of our "woes".

>The 1950s - 2000s post war boom was a tailwind very few countries get to experience. It's funny how we look back at it as the norm, because that's not what the rest of the world experienced.

Especially ironic when perpetrated by youth from countries outside of America - like mine. I'm not a boomer, but my parents generation had it rough and my life was much easier in comparison. Importing "boomer" memes is a bit stupid in this context. Hell, even the name makes no sense here, because our "baby boom" happened later, in 1980-1990s.

The article you linked to makes a different claim.

Having grown up in East Germany, that is the truth. From both my grandparents, born early 20th century, to me things continuously got better. Apart from the war of course. They started little better than servant class and ended up with their own big nice houses, and in comfort. That is true even for the GDR. They lived through war and famine and at least four different currencies and types of government.

They also got more and more educated. From the lowest education to ever higher education degrees, one more step in each new generation. My grandfather tried many new tech hobbies as theY appeared, from (actual, original) tape recorders over mechanical calculators to at the time modern cameras and color slides, to growing hundreds of cactuses in a glasshouse, maybe as a substitute for being unable to travel to those places. I still have lots of quality 1950s and 60s color slides of people and places in East Germany.

Looking around. even the GDR until the end experienced significant improvements over what existed before, at least for the masses. Except for the environment especially near industry.

> It isn't even like there is a political ideology that genuinely wants to make it hard to do business [1].

Eeeeeh. Very debatable. One could argue that both extremes of the bi-partisan political spectrum are laser focused on making the individual businessman powerless. They just hide it all behind altruistic rhetoric.

Oh well fair enough. I'm claiming what the article says.

Such an intellectually dishonest comment.