Why Prosperity Has Increased but Happiness Has Not

“That’s when progress ended”, really? That alone is enough to discredit Thiel on the topic

When people talk about how awesome the 60s were, it's usually because they were white middle-class or above in stable households and rising incomes.

Sorry, your narrative timeline is simply incorrect. Perhaps b/c you did not live in the USA?

Gore-tex was invented in 1969 but was hardly necessary. Wool has always worked extremely well and still does: polyester was pretty good except in northern USA. I lived in the south and wore predominantly cotton: Levi jeans and cotton t-shirts were our uniform in the summer; winter we bought a jacket and lived with it.

In 1971 I bought a used American car with everything on it for $300. My East Indian college roommate loved to ride in it and very quickly got a license and car of his own. I later drove my $300 car from Texas to New York via the Midwest and DC to graduate school. I later drove that car to work and school around DC. I had tools but rarely needed them except for maintenance. The car was extremely reliable and needed only tuneups and tires. I gave it to a friend when I bought another car.

You didn't (and still don't) need a cell phone. It was (and is) easy to get help from strangers.

A car accident can kill you at 35 mph but they usually didn't (and usually don't). Cars are safer now and I appreciate that, but they weren't _that_ unsafe: people would not have driven them otherwise.

You complain about carrying a map and a zip code book - you should still (I do), since your phone or network could fail at any time. But you don't b/c in your heart you believe that you can rely on the kindness of strangers!

Medicine today is not much better than it was back then. Trauma care _is_ improved (the lessons of Vietnam were absorbed). But antibiotics worked better back then than today and other than antivirals and statins, the use of drugs hasn't improved much. As someone once said, doctors got no respect until antibiotics came along and, were they taken away, doctors would not get much respect now.

The remnants of the polio epidemics was still present in students of the 1950s (Salk developed his vaccine in 1952 and I was vaccinated ~1957). I too had classmates with polio braces, but polio in the USA was stopped by the vaccination campaigns before the 1970s.

People didn't die of rabies in the 1970s unless it was untreated.

People didn't die of TB in the 1970s unless it was unattended and/or advanced before treatment.

Smallpox was wiped out and routine immunization halted in 1970. The only cholera pandemics were offshore USA (e.g., the El Tor pandemic in Indonesia->Pakistan in the '70's).

I too carried punch cards (I started in the 60's) and was glad to do so: programming turned into a career. 4 years later in the mid-70's I had a terminal and multiple computers available in a network.

3 TV channels was plenty: I got the news and entertainment too, although after awhile I began to notice TV was turning into something akin to the "Bullshit Web" of today:

https://www.metafilter.com/175703/The-Bullshit-Web

VCRs were about $1000 in 1975 but they were available used for only hundreds of dollars. I have a used one that runs still today! In comparison my first CD player died after 3 years.

Neither discrimination nor bigotry nor prejudice were ubiquitous but they _were_ still present. Your description of prejudice fits the southern USA of the '50's, NOT the '70's.

Indeed my grandparents were small farmers (sharecroppers) and their and their children's (my parents') lives were hard. But the opportunities my parents had during their time were enormous and their lives were rich and memorable.

It probably remains true even today that antibiotics are man's most significant improvement of the last century.

But in summary I find your description of the 70s is off by fully 20 years.

That is excellent advice on an individual basis, but I don't think that is the point when the goal is to try and establish a broader perspective and evaluate a societal shift.

I mean that is exactly what a manager tells you when they cut hours, increase work, and dumpster workplace morale. They have very obvious financial incentive to provide less for the same output and there is no determinable metric of what is "reasonable". You're much better off in this case in actively searching for a better job if it is affecting your day to day life negatively.

People seem to forget that consistently throughout history that the societal shift has fallen so far negatively that it has resulted in the final resort of being solved by violent revolution.

Prosperity is shockingly hard to measure for something so quantifiable - nothing quantifiable alone works as a standard. If everyone has their weight in gold but are near starving that isn't prosperous. Similarly if food becomes cheap enough it utterly fails to be a meaningful indicator because everyone has enough. Even currency can fail - if Star Trek replicators and free energy were available it would certainly qualify as prosperous even if economic value chains break for many things due to sheer lack of things to trade for.

Thus we have weird and shapeable metrics of varying use even without pushing an agenda. What do you call a tiny supercomputer that were previously unavailable to even governments more expensive healthcare and housing? Using 1940s terms a homeless person with a cellphone would be the richest man in the world as it would be priceless given the ungodly expense and time to catch up to it.

Utility is technically the true way to measure but good luck unambiguously quantifying it, much less in a way everyone could agree with.