Has Society Ever NOT Been In Decline — Transcript

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1. 0:00across the world today. It's obviously a pretty  common sentiment. Our society is in decline. It
2. 0:06might be a touch pessimistic, but it's also easy  to see where people are coming from. Inequality
3. 0:10is getting worse. New technologies are going  to take our jobs. The world is boiling. The
4. 0:15zoomers are brain rotted. The boomers are  greedily trying to pad their wallets on the
5. 0:20way out while somehow being even more brained.  Everything we enjoy is being enshified. Our
6. 0:25populations are collapsing. People are falling  in love with their AI boyfriends. Every election
7. 0:31we go into is somehow the most important one  in history. And even if the right side wins,
8. 0:36we are still ultimately staring down the barrel  of fully automated techno athoritarianism. Or
9. 0:42a future where your governmentissued non-binary  Chinese EV can only be charged up by bird blending
10. 0:48homosexual windmills, [music] which as far as  we can tell, absolutely no room in the middle.
11. 0:54And yeah, I'm joking, of course, but uh also not  really. The question is though, has this kind of
12. 1:00pessimistic outlook always been so common?  Have the old always rolled their eyes at the
13. 1:05youths and vice versa? Have we always assumed  that the best times were behind us? Has there
14. 1:10ever been a society anywhere in human history  that has put their feet up and said, "Actually,
15. 1:16you know what? We have it pretty good right  now." It's a surprisingly important question for
16. 1:20a number of reasons. First, there is the simple  irony that despite our seemingly nearly infinite
17. 1:26capacity to be gloomy doomers, the world has been  getting consistently better for almost everybody
18. 1:30living in it. Even with inequality as bad as it  is, I would still rather live the life of the
19. 1:35average person on Earth today than literally  anybody from further back than 200 years ago.
20. 1:40And the reason this is so important is because  a lot of very smart people have seen this trend
21. 1:45and found that pessimism about the future  can often end up making that future worse,
22. 1:50building up a bit of a dangerous feedback loop. So  if this really is the case, should we all just try
23. 1:55to be a bit more blindly optimistic for our own  good and the good of our economies? Or is there
24. 2:01a better way to balance the idea that things  could be worse, but we shouldn't stop pushing
25. 2:06to make them better either? But in the 1980s, many  parents felt lyrics had finally [music] gone too
26. 2:12far. Well, welcome to the world of Pokemon. It's  the Nintendo game that originated in Japan and
27. 2:18has American children going crazy. [music] Right  now, we're being evicted from our home. The Khos
28. 2:22are losing their home to foreclosure. They have  5 [music] days to pack up and move out. You see,
29. 2:28in Japan, one woman tied the knot with her [music]  AI generated boyfriend in a symbolic wedding
30. 2:35ceremony. [music] The tech company now offering  buyouts to 60,000 workers. That's more than one
31. 2:41quarter of its workforce, including people who  work on everything from the Xbox to Windows. Okay,
32. 2:48so in the simplest possible terms, we are actually  statistically more pessimistic about the future
33. 2:54right now than we have been in the recent past. In  1999, Pew Research asked Americans whether life in
34. 3:00their country was better or worse than it had been  50 years earlier. back in the late 40s and early
35. 3:051950s. Just under half of them said that life was  indeed better in the late 1990s, and only three in
36. 3:1310 said it was worse. In 2023, Pew asked roughly  the same question. Was life better or worse for
37. 3:20people like you than it was 50 years ago. But this  time, only 23% said life was better. And in turn,
38. 3:2858% said it was worse. So again, in the simplest  possible terms, optimism about the future versus
39. 3:35nostalgia about the past has done a complete  180. It's also worth pointing out that 1999
40. 3:41was not a completely different world from today.  People were still nervous about what all of this
41. 3:46business could mean for them and the future of  their livelihoods. There were still arguably more
42. 3:51moral panics. And it's not like the fundamentals  of human nature have changed over that time. Oh,
43. 3:56and yeah, I guess another important detail  is that even during a year that in retrospect
44. 4:01people have collectively agreed on as humanity's  peak, we still couldn't get a majority of people
45. 4:06to say that life in America was better than the  immediate aftermath of the most destructive war in
46. 4:11human history. So, I really want you to keep these  findings in mind because we will get back to them
47. 4:16after a healthy sprinkle of historical nuance.  There are really three reasons why we are so
48. 4:22eternally pessimistic. two reasons why  that kind of makes us worse off and one
49. 4:26reason why we probably shouldn't abandon the doom  entirely. So the first and most obvious variable
50. 4:32is simply just human nature. We have evolved to  be pessimistic because the benefit of a rustling
51. 4:38bush maybe having a nice tasty snack in it is  not outweighed by the potential risk that it
52. 4:44might also be a lion. Skittishness about perceived  threats is how we avoided being lunch. Of course,
53. 4:52these hardwired lessons generally translate very  poorly into modern societies where the risks often
54. 4:58are actually worth taking for much bigger rewards.  But old habits die hard. One of the longest
55. 5:04stretches of survey data ever stitched together  on the subject found what we realistically already
56. 5:08knew. Adam Mastroyani and Daniel Gilbert drew on  177 separate surveys spanning 70 years from 1949
57. 5:17to 2019, reaching about 280,000 Americans. All  of them asking in one way or another about the
58. 5:25state of moral decline in society. The questions  were things like, "Do you think people in general
59. 5:31today lead as [music] good lives, honest and  moral, as they used to?" And well, yeah, as
60. 5:37a shock to basically nobody, most people believed  that society in the past was more upstanding than
61. 5:43it was in the present. But that perceived rate of  moral decay was pretty much consistent across the
62. 5:49entire 70-year period, despite some fairly major  historical events in the meantime. Since the
63. 5:55beginning of this study, the average respondent  has generally and uniformly agreed that society
64. 6:00started falling apart around about the time that  they were born. and that held true whether they
65. 6:05were born in the 1950s or the 2000s. Additionally,  as a bit of insight for later, people rated moral
66. 6:12change among society at large significantly  worse than change amongst the [music] people
67. 6:16they actually knew. They agreed that their  friends, family, and even their co-workers were
68. 6:22improving over time, while everybody else outside  of their little tribe was going backwards. Now,
69. 6:28before anybody in the comments says, "Well, maybe  people have just been getting worse for 70 years,"
70. 6:34the researchers checked that, too. When a separate  pile of surveys, over a hundred of them, reaching
71. 6:39more than 4 million people, asked how honest  and moral everybody was right now, rather than
72. 6:45compared to the past, the answers barely moved  across 55 [music] years. In plain English, whether
73. 6:51the question was asked in the 1960s or in the  2010s made basically no difference to how honest
74. 6:57people said everybody [music] was at the time.  They just always said it used to be better. So,
75. 7:03yes, human nature obviously skews how we see the  world, but fortunately, it skews it in predictable
76. 7:08ways. After piecing all of this together, the two  researchers proposed what they called the model
77. 7:14of biased exposure and biased memory. The biased  memory part is easy. We tend to remember the good
78. 7:20times where in retrospect we already know how  it all turned out and compare them to an uneasy
79. 7:25present and an uncertain future where there  is natural anxiety about how things could end
80. 7:30up. But on the other side there is also a bias and  how we get exposed to that negativity in the first
81. 7:35place. Yeah, of course there is the obvious stuff  like the fact that bad news sells better than good
82. 7:41news and not many politicians have won an election  by claiming that everything is great right now.
83. 7:46Let's not change anything. Researchers actually  ran tens of thousands of headline experiments
84. 7:51on a single news site, covering over a 100,000  different headlines. Every extra negative word
85. 7:56in a headline got it about 2% more clicks,  and every extra positive word lost it about
86. 8:011%. [music] Naturally, the people in both of these  businesses perform better when they sell decline
87. 8:06and fear because again, our monkey brains respond  to that much more strongly. But paradoxically, as
88. 8:13the world has become wealthier and more advanced  and more connected, we are naturally spending
89. 8:18more and more of our time exposed to a much wider  group of people. Being able to travel the world,
90. 8:24see how other people [music] live, or talk to  anybody on the planet instantly is obviously a
91. 8:28luxury that didn't exist a few generations  ago. But because it has allowed us to see
92. 8:32people outside of our little groups as the ones  contributing to moral decline, our biases have
93. 8:38much more of an opportunity to do their thing.  Compare this to more isolated agrarian communities
94. 8:43where everybody knew everybody and there just  wasn't the same exposure to those other people.
95. 8:49Of course, it's easy to just immediately jump to  immigrants or people from different cultures here,
96. 8:53but it applies much more widely than that as  well. Modern technology has made our lives a
97. 8:58lot more convenient, but it has also exposed us  to the Kardashians, Elon Musk's perpetual stream
98. 9:04of consciousness, girls, and politicians trying to  be relatable. basically all things that we would
99. 9:09have had very little access to without it. The  point is if you want to be angry about something,
100. 9:15there is an endless buffet available to you  right now. Whereas in the past, we were just
101. 9:20never exposed to nearly as much of it. So the  fact that the world has gotten better over the
102. 9:25long run has ironically given us the opportunity  to think that it's getting worse. Now, even if
103. 9:30you didn't know the specifics of the research,  I am sure none of this is a huge shock to you.
104. 9:35Media leaning on negative stories and moral panics  about other people that are slightly different is
105. 9:40not exactly unexpected. But what has changed is  how much of these ideas have started to impact
106. 9:45our ability to actually make a better future for  ourselves as well as for society at large. So it's
107. 9:51time to learn how business worked to find out how  a society permanently in decline somehow always
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123. 11:16Okay, so humans tend to be a bunch of gloomy  goosees and blame society's problems on everybody
124. 11:22else outside of their immediate circle. It's not  great, but it's also not surprising. The thing is,
125. 11:27this phenomenon shows up even in good times,  but it gets a lot worse during bad times. Today,
126. 11:33we are kind of in something of a perfect storm  for perceived decline because in many ways, yes,
127. 11:38we have things pretty good, but we can also see  that those benefits are not being spread evenly.
128. 11:43One of the fastest growing splits between groups  is intergenerational animosity. For most of
129. 11:48history where we have reliable data, young people  were generally more optimistic about the future
130. 11:53than older people. New technologies helped them  stand out in the job markets and they could see
131. 11:58that overall things were trending in the right  direction. Older people at the same time fell
132. 12:03into the usual traps of nostalgia and being less  open to new ways of doing things. Again, pretty
133. 12:09standard stuff. Even in very recent demonstrabably  bad times like the global financial crisis,
134. 12:15younger people and especially younger Americans  still maintained a more positive outlook on the
135. 12:19world. In 2010, with the crisis barely over, 64%  of Americans under 30 told Gallup that their lives
136. 12:26were going well enough to count as thriving. That  was the highest of any age group in the country.
137. 12:32Barely more than a third of the over 65s could  say the same. In theory, this kind of made sense.
138. 12:39Just purely from a personal finance perspective,  a recession early in someone's career obviously
139. 12:43sucks. But a lot of people figured that eventually  things would work out. Older people who had
140. 12:48already built up their financial nest egg were  naturally more defensive of any perceived threats
141. 12:53to it, whether they were real or not. So yeah,  it kind of made sense except that today it's
142. 12:59completely flipped. When studied, older people  are now significantly more optimistic about the
143. 13:05economy, the job market, and their own lives. That  same Gallup measure now has the over 65s as the
144. 13:12most content age group in America at 53% and the  under30s at the very bottom on 44%. Which is the
145. 13:19biggest fall Gallup has ever recorded for any age  group. Again, we are still collectively a largely
146. 13:26pessimistic bunch. But young people are now  consistently more pessimistic. In a lot of cases
147. 13:32now, the good times that people want to go back to  were years that they weren't even alive for. Even
148. 13:38right here at home, every age group in Britain,  including the ones who weren't even born yet,
149. 13:43now tells Yuggov that life was better in the  1990s than it is today. They are nostalgic
150. 13:49for a past they weren't around for. So why is  this happening? More so than ever before, we
151. 13:55have structured huge parts of our economies around  maintaining the lifestyles of a large and growing
152. 14:01group of elderly people. Their retirement assets  and their government support must be maintained at
153. 14:07all costs, all while the burdens fall on younger  people. Now, these kinds of intergenerational
154. 14:13transfers have of course happened all throughout  history, but never to the same extent. In most
155. 14:19historical settings, your retirement plan was your  direct descendants. As late as 1880, close to half
156. 14:26of retired American men were living in a house  with their children or other relatives. By 1990,
157. 14:31that was down to 1 in 20. And even in most of  those cases, it was a house that they owned
158. 14:36with their adult kids living with them rather  than them living with their adult kids. Even
159. 14:41outside for that small little technicality though,  people are naturally more happy to be burdened
160. 14:46with the financial requirements of looking after  their own parents or grandparents than they are
161. 14:50to be burdened with a nebulous economic system  that somehow shuffles their tax dollars off to
162. 14:55an old folks home in Florida. Human nature  naturally accepts things inside our little
163. 15:01bubble. But perhaps more importantly, another  reason it feels worse is because it is worse.
164. 15:08The share of the economy going towards older  generations is just a lot higher. The US
165. 15:13government now spends six times more on people  over the age of 65 than it does to young people
166. 15:18just starting out. At the same time, the wealth  held by these older people is also a lot higher.
167. 15:25American households have never been richer than  they are right now with a combined net worth of
168. 15:29about $196 trillion. And the baby boomers alone  own more than half of it. Americans under 40,
169. 15:37so statistically most of you own less than 7% of  that where back in 1989 the under 40s of the day
170. 15:45owned 12%. There is also the perception that the  older generations are benefiting from a lot more
171. 15:50of the same forces that are hurting young people.  They use an expanding population and an abundant
172. 15:55supply of cheap energy in the form of fossil  fuels to feather their own nest and left the major
173. 16:00environmental reforms to the next person. Back  in 1960, when the oldest boomers were still in
174. 16:06school, there were 5.1 workers paying in for every  one person drawing a social security check. Today,
175. 16:13there are 2.6. Even things like AI have been  great for retirement portfolios amongst people
176. 16:18who never plan on working again when compared to  young people looking at the same trends and also
177. 16:24figuring out that they may never work again  either. Just, you know, not in a good way.
178. 16:29A Stanford study that went through the records  of the biggest payroll provider in America found
179. 16:34that employment for 22 to 25 year olds in the jobs  most exposed to AI is now sitting about 19% below
180. 16:41where it would be if it had just kept pace with  everybody else. While the older workers in those
181. 16:46exact same jobs haven't fallen behind at all.  Since the industrial revolution, the expectation
182. 16:52has always been that the next generation in line  would end up wealthier than their parents. And
183. 16:57outside of a few little hiccups here and there,  it was mostly true. About 90% of Americans born
184. 17:02in 1940 went on to out earn their parents. For the  ones born in the 1980s, it's a coin flip. Today,
185. 17:09a lot of people are 40, still living in their  parents' paidoff home. And watching them get
186. 17:14six times the government support. And I'm not  even exaggerating about the age. The typical
187. 17:19firsttime home owner in America is now 40 years  old, which is a record. Now, this is also all
188. 17:26happening at the same time that there is endless  talk about how these systems are eventually going
189. 17:31to collapse under their own weight. So, they  need major reform or to be rethought entirely,
190. 17:36which isn't necessarily wrong. But it also means  that a lot of the young people bearing the load
191. 17:41today can see that they probably won't ever get  to sit in the nice comfy hammock that they are
192. 17:46helping to hold up all of these years. So, yeah,  remember those pew numbers from the start. In
193. 17:52that kind of environment, it's easy to see why  people might be more prone to thinking that,
194. 17:56yeah, in fact, society has declined from where it  was a generation ago. And that's a real problem.
195. 18:03Even beyond the real social issues that come from  an increasingly burdened young population holding
196. 18:09up an increasingly spoiled group of elderly  people, this can cause a pretty bad feedback loop.
197. 18:14Joel Mochir, an economic historian who won the  Nobel Prize just last year, has argued throughout
198. 18:20his research that belief in progress itself is  needed to actually see that progress in reality.
199. 18:26He found that societies that were on the verge of  industrializing tended to have a widespread belief
200. 18:31in progress and in the possibility of improvement.  Or as he put it, imperial China wanted stability
201. 18:37and internal peace and Europe wanted progress,  which kind of makes sense, especially back then.
202. 18:43The world was much poorer than it is today, and  people weren't going to invest limited valuable
203. 18:49resources into new technologies unless they  had some level of optimism. As a completely
204. 18:54hypothetical example, if your village in 1700 only  had one spare harvest's worth of grain, you only
205. 19:01hand it over to the weird guy who wants to build  a water pump if you believe that next year can
206. 19:07actually be better than this one. Otherwise, you  just eat the grain. On the other hand, pessimism
207. 19:12about the future can often lead to short-term  investing stances or just economic nihilism on an
208. 19:18individual level. Why invest in some amazing new  technology if nobody is going to be around to use
209. 19:23it or AI is going to replace it anyway or if you  still won't be able to afford a house? With this
210. 19:29kind of thinking, it's a lot easier to justify  that a short-term bet on value extraction is a
211. 19:34better move than a less risky long-term investment  into value creation. Yeah, it probably won't win,
212. 19:42but it's the only hope people have. Nearly  a third of American adults under 30 now say
213. 19:48they are either in or getting into sports betting,  prediction markets, or crypto. And when asked why,
214. 19:55eight in 10 of them said it was because they felt  they were already behind. In turn, it's very easy
215. 20:01for people to look at statistics like this and  conclude that society is in decline because
216. 20:05people just want to gamble all day. Either way,  this makes it much harder to actually improve the
217. 20:10world or your individual circumstances within it,  which in turn makes people even more pessimistic
218. 20:15about societal progress, which in turn, well,  you get the idea. Another economist, Benjamin
219. 20:21Freriedman from Harvard, found something similar  when all of this gets taken to the extreme. He
220. 20:27argued that even the wealthiest nation on earth  puts its democratic values at risk when incomes
221. 20:32stand still. Being rich does not protect a country  against rigidity and intolerance once its citizens
222. 20:38lose the sense that they are getting ahead.  In plain English, the perception of progress
223. 20:44was often more important than [music] the progress  itself. And if people don't feel it, they are much
224. 20:50more likely to go looking for a group to blame  rather than to go looking for an actual solution.
225. 20:55This is again perpetuated by media and politics  that can at least pretend to share those biases to
226. 21:01gain power or viewership. So, can we actually do  anything about any of this? Well, the good news is
227. 21:08that the perception of progress is actually a lot  easier to guarantee than progress itself. Shifting
228. 21:13the balance of support slightly more in favor of  young people might be politically hard given how
229. 21:19much more reliably old people votes, but it would  fix a lot of these problems. Now, to play devil's
230. 21:24advocate, the standard counterargument here is  that the old people in this story paid into these
231. 21:29systems for their entire working lives, and they  can't exactly go back to work at 85 to make up the
232. 21:34difference, which is true, but nobody is talking  about leaving grandma on an ice flow. The point is
233. 21:40that the balance has drifted a very long way, and  it's drifting further every year. Tipping it back
234. 21:46would enable people to fill skills gaps and to  start families if they wanted to. Nearly half of
235. 21:51childless American adults under 50 still say they  want kids. And the most common reason for having
236. 21:55fewer than they'd like is simply not having enough  money. This would in turn widen out the workforce
237. 22:00holding up the old folks in the first place. It  would also help to alleviate a lot of the fears
238. 22:05that we have about an uncertain future. People are  always going to be pessimistic, at least so far as
239. 22:11we can tell from basically every survey we have  ever done. But today it's particularly bad. Not
240. 22:16because we are not richer than ever, but because  the wealth hasn't translated into opportunity,
241. 22:21but giving them opportunity might quell  their pessimism just enough that they end
242. 22:25up accidentally making the world better in the  process. Or, you know, [music] we could just
243. 22:30keep on putting fires out as they happen, which  unfortunately is probably much more likely to
244. 22:35happen. And if you don't believe me, go and watch  this video next to find out why the wealthiest
245. 22:39people in the world seem to so consistently  try to break the economies that make them rich
246. 22:44in the first place. And don't forget to like and  subscribe to keep on learning how business worked.