Global warming: Are we doomed? A poll.

[The Grand Nudger]

Industry and business were more rapacious and dismissive in past, not less. Happiness and wealth, similarly, tracking up - not down. Still, you're in good company thinking otherwise, myth of a golden age, all the good times past and gone sort of thing.

I think, to tie the ancient mythicists with disaffected modern critics, the notion isn't actually informed by whether industry or business is more or less ethical (or environmentally minded) or whether wealth is going up or down - but the gulf of opportunity and property between the least and best, as they saw it. Ancient greeks never shied away from pointing out how the kings had more and the people had more - and how that had made them all soft. We never tire, it seems, to imagine that people who work harder for less today than, say, yesteryear, are somehow also softer today.

As for the other thing..younger generations, factually speaking, don't do much of anything with respect to the political or economic policies and realities of a nation. Or, at least, they haven't yet. It would be foolish to pretend that the world we live in wasn't created by boomers. This miserable poverty, as you put it, aint the younger generations bag - though we'll have to pay that bill - as the debtor plans to be dead before the taxman cometh. The rest of that was just boilerplate grievance rhetoric about being called an asshole for having "non pc fun". Finding alot of witches in these witchhunts, which is strange..for witchhunts.

I wonder if you ever had any hope for people, if all of that is just cover for bog standard misanthropy, which was a previously existing condition? To give you some context, my wife is a progressive genx christian, I'm a neocon millennial antitheist. She's in the business of selling businesses on making their jobs less shitty for employees, and I'm in the business of intensive and regenerative agriculture. We've both seen things become easier for us over the span of our careers - both in the amount of money we make, and in the amount of unsolicited interest and compliance from our respective clients. What our adult lives have been, what we see (and, granted, this is as idiosyncratic as your own perception) - is that there was a lull in progress that may be argued to have disadvantaged us, but it won't impact our children, if we have anything to say about it. Both of our sets of parents see things more in line with how you described them - but, as I mentioned..we kind of write that down to them having taken out the loan and lived on the largess and not felt the sting of the terms. Many, I think, never knew (and still won't accept) that they borrowed gravely against their own family's future with no credible ability to repay. Hell of a surprise, I try not to be a huge dick about it to them.