Despite everything you think you know, America is on the right track
I find these sorts of discussions unproductive in the absence of some specific focal points. Discussing how well the US is doing overall is sort of meaningless because it&#x27;s so heterogeneous; you could have serious problems even while overall the country is doing well by historical standards.<p>Saying things are fine by the standards of the 1940s isn&#x27;t helpful either; I&#x27;m not sure that&#x27;s ever really been an appropriate yardstick (I think public health and wellness opportunity costs are often more relevant). I also think you can take many of these same sorts of arguments, go back in time, and find out that many positive indicators preceded very horrific periods in world history. For instance, there were a lot of societal advancements that coincided with the emergence of the world wars, and they still happened despite (or maybe even because) of those advancements.<p>I also have come to believe that many forms of societal collapse or crisis emerge fairly rapidly; things seem good by many objective indicators until they really don&#x27;t. If you track some of these public indicators, they often seem to covary relatively weakly with the sorts of things you might expect, and no one really understands why. Seen from a distanced perspective those indicators don&#x27;t seem to work as measures of what you&#x27;d like them to.<p>I&#x27;m not trying to adopt a pessimistic position, as I tend to think a lot of that is equally poorly posed, and I think the article is correct that if you look to history simply for benchmarks of what to expect when something bad happens, things aren&#x27;t as catastrophic as you&#x27;d think. But in the absence of some kind of rigorous understanding of what to look to for societal collapse or catastrophe, these kinds of discussions in either direction are kind of pointless. What seems more relevant are more focal discussions of specific issues, or how to predict what is important.