Scott Sumner takes a shot at one of my favorite topics: Is Progress Real? I think he gets it wrong.
His argument, which I hope I am summarizing correctly, is that people who say I would never exchange the world of today for the world of yesterday are missing the point. There is a concept called the Hedonic Treadmill, which prevents us from feeling the positive effects of any progress. In other words, we keep resetting our expectations with each new benefit we achieve so we never actually benefit from improvements.
I should be more precise. Sumner is not saying there is no progress, he is saying we don't realize any net benefits from it because of the Hedonic Treadmill (I think). This is trivially correct but essentially wrong. It is true that at any given point in history you can take a timeslice of the population and not seem any indication of a greater sense of well-being, but I don't think that's what's important. All that is telling you is the phases of life remain in place. Teenagers are still disaffected. Young adults still strive and struggle. Older adults still fret over loss and regrets. If your measure of Progress is that these feelings lessen, I don't hold out much hope for you.
But over an individual life, the view can be very different. Stating that you would never want to go back to the old days is highly relevant in that context; probably the most relevant piece of data. And I strongly suspect that most mature people who objectively looked at their arc of the world over the course of their lives would agree that things are better than they used to be. To be sure, things have been lost. Folks my age often lament the loss of freedom in childhood and the increased coarseness of the world. Those are very real losses, but as I have mentioned before, as an insecure, introverted kid, I would have traded all that for one day's access to the Internet. For a longer term example, when I was 32 my gall bladder gave out on me. I spent a day in the hospital during which doctors my four small slits in my abdomen and went into my guts with a scope and pulled it out. Two days later I was back at work. Had it been 25 years earlier I would have six inch scare across my gut and have been laid up for 6 weeks recovering. Had it been 70 years earlier and I'd have been dead at 32.
The fact of the Hedonic Treadmill means I don't live closer to a state of bliss from moment to moment, but any extended reflection will verify the objective fact of progress that the Hedonic Treadmill masks. I maintain my belief that progress is real and it occurs, but it can be a ten-steps-forward-nine-steps-back affair. Which is why you need a full dose of life to see it.
