Vox reader Dov Stein asks: Why do people think the past is so good when so many things have improved so much?
That’s a great question, I think a lot as someone who runs a segment at Vox dedicated to covering how meaningful economic and scientific and social progress can and is.
There is nothing new about Longing for a supposed golden ageOr it seems as if the present doesn’t measure up to an imagined past. But you’re right that hatred of the present seems particularly acute these days – and you’re right that hatred ignores the many, many ways in which today is better than yesterday.
Much of the world is gripped by nostalgia politics, an assumption that we must return to a moment when everything was good. After all, “Make America Great Again” is but a slogan that implicitly argues that the United States was once great; No longer great; And turning back the clock can make it great again. This isn’t just a right-wing issue – climate change politics is based on the assumption that past climates are optimal.
I share your frustration that many people miss ways to improve the present over the past. It’s not really our fault: people have memories that are both short and bad, which make us forget how bad things were even in the recent past and take for granted the improvements that have been made. But let’s go deeper.
Do people wish they could turn back the clock?
Apparently! A 2023 survey from the Pew Research Center It found that six out of ten respondents in the United States said that life was better for people like them 50 years ago. Although certain groups, such as Republicans and older adults, were more likely to say the past was better than the present, these sentiments were fairly widespread. And that nostalgia is deepening — the share of Americans who say life today is worse than life in the past rose 15 percent in 2023 from two years ago.
Nor is it just an American phenomenon. Another Pew poll, This is from 2018People from 27 countries were surveyed. In 15 of them, a plurality of respondents reported that the financial situation of the average person in their country was better 20 years ago than it is today. A Poll by YouGov Among people in the UK, 70 per cent of respondents thought the world was getting worse, compared to less than 10 per cent who thought it was getting better. (Although to be fair, the UK had one Rough 21st century.)
Beyond the polls, there is evidence that popular culture is stuck in a nostalgia loop around the past. According to music analytics firm MRC Data, Represents old songs About 70 percent of the US music market, while the new music market is actually shrinking. Movies and TV programs Irresistibly turned on For sequels and reboots, constantly mining the same old stories. (In 2024, nine of the top 10 highest-grossing movies were sequels—and with one exception, evilThere was an adaptation of a 21-year-old Broadway musical that was an adaptation of a 29-year-old novel that was a prequel to an 85-year-old movie that was itself an adaptation of a 124-year-old novel. Wow.)
You see a lot Nostalgia politics memes like this one:
Were things better in the old days?
Putting aside pop culture like movies or music, where I think we can all agree that whatever was happening between the ages of 15 and 25 represents the pinnacle of human progress, the answer is: no, of course not, almost entirely.
Take the meme above. Like Matthew Yglesias writesThe underlying argument of Nostalgia Politics memes is that “the material standard of living of the average American family has worsened since the post-WWII era. This is completely wrong.”
Is it ever! We have access to all kinds of technology that didn’t exist 70 years ago even for the richest people on the planet, Americans. Very, very rich Now they were back when. As you can see, everything from car ownership – which is twice as high now as it was in 1960 – to the size of our homes, which About 25 percent larger 1960 average. was almost as common Then there is the air conditioning system as it is now.
It’s just economics. Educational attainment — the percentage of Americans who graduate high school or higher — is now much higher than then. It’s true though College used to be less expensiveIt was much rarer; A smaller proportion of the US population had a bachelor’s degree in the 1960s, than today More than a third of adults have such degrees.
Perhaps most important is social progress. The 1950s might have been an okay place if you looked like the family in the meme above — if you were okay with a much reduced lifestyle. But that’s not true if you’re a woman who wanted to work, or a person of color, or LGBTQ, or disabled, or anyone other than a straight white person. In the 1950s, interracial marriage May still be bannedThere will be anti-sodomy laws Still on the books for decadesAnd there was the Civil Rights Act Still a decade away. Oh, and we were living under the constant threat of much more nuclear annihilation What we face today.
And that’s just America. In 1950, More than half The world lived in extreme poverty, which meant they had a small place to live, lacked enough money to have enough food to stave off heat and malnutrition. As of 2018, it was only 10 percent, even though the world population has more than tripled in that time. About 30 years added up Average global life expectancy since 1950 – this is roughly equivalent to adding one extra life to humans. Although the world has experienced a democratic retreat in recent years, don’t forget that in the 1950s three-quarters The world population lived What political scientists call “closed autocracies”, including much of Europe. Today less than 20 percent of the world’s population lives under such oppression.
Of course, to call the past better than the present is to judge what we mean when we say “the past.” Not everything improved, and sometimes periods of progress were followed by periods of decline. The pressure of history doesn’t just go up and to the right. But if you go back a bit, although you will see some dips, the trend lines are pretty clear.
so why to do So many people think?
One reason, I think, is the reality of progress.
As I wrote late last year, as the world improves politically and materially, so do our expectations. In climate science there is a term for this: “Baseline shift” When things improve — say, a vaccine comes along that essentially eradicates polio — we’re not in a constant state of gratitude that we don’t live with the same limitations and threats as our grandparents. We reset our expectations, and how things were. Forget that. When progress stumbles — like the Great Recession of 2008 — we’re not grateful that we’re still much better off than we were a few years ago We’ve gotten a little worse in comparison, though it’s almost certain that we’ll be better off than we were a few years from now.
Our brain helps us to deceive. Thanks to “selective memory”, people tend to forget negative past events and reinforce positive memories. One of the reasons our feelings and memories about the past are so inaccurate is that we literally forget the bad things and give the good things a nice, pleasant glow. The further back the memory goes, the stronger the tendency can be.
We are also wary of change. Psychologists call this “loss aversion” – we fear that the sting of losing something will do more harm than the benefit of gaining something. As a result, change can feel fundamentally scary, which makes us feel warmer about the era before change: the past.
Then there’s the inexorable pull of nostalgia. I was serious when I said that to most people, the movies or music that was popular as a child is the “best” pop culture. When we think the past was good, what many of us long for is not the past, but our past themselves – When we were young. Because things are really getting better with time, we are really getting older with what comes with that experience. And no amount of progress — at least not yet — can reverse that.
