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Important to be able to answer Has progress made us worse off?. We need to make sure we are heading in the right direction.
“If, in this sense, things never get better, one can wonder whether all that economic, medical, and technological so-called progress was worth it. Many argue that it was not. We have been spiritually impoverished, they say, by the rise of individualism, materialism, consumerism, and decadent wealth, and by the erosion of traditional communities with their hearty social bonds and their sense of meaning and purpose bestowed by religion. That is why, one often reads, depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicide have been soaring, and why Sweden, that secular paradise, has a famously high rate of suicide. In 2016 the activist George Monbiot prosecuted the cultural pessimist’s time-honored campaign against modernity in an op-ed entitled “Neoliberalism Is Creating Loneliness. That’s What’s Wrenching Society Apart.” The tag line was, “Epidemics of mental illness are crushing the minds and bodies of millions. It’s time to ask where we are heading and why.” The article itself warned, “The latest, catastrophic figures for children’s mental health in England reflect a global crisis.”6 If all those extra years of life and health, all that additional knowledge and leisure and breadth of experience, all those advances in peace and safety and democracy and rights, have really left us no happier but just lonelier and more suicidal, it would be history’s greatest joke on humanity. But before we start walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the sides, we had better take a closer look at the facts about human happiness.” (Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now)
Has progress made us worse off?, related to Understanding the World with Data