Great article! One interesting datapoint is that 1992 or 1993 was the year with most DALYs (absolute), that is where most healthy human life was lost.. so I think there is an argument that those were the worst years
Yeah, that's possible, but I used the data from IHME.. however, I was wrong in two important aspects: (a) 1994 was actually the worst in that period (Rwandan genocide) https://ibb.co/xtw3v33K (b) COVID is worse.. so maybe things have indeed been bad lately. But as Scott Alexander pointed out, we have collectively memory-holed all that dying: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-other-covid-reckoning
"Best Medical Care" NOW??? When the well-being of US children continues to worsen, with 45.7% of teens having at least one chronic condition , when US is Ranked 33rd for infant mortality of the 38 OECD countries, when those under age 20 now 80% more likely to die, and when the US has the lowest life expectancy of any rich country... this "now"????
Okay, but couldn't that just mean that medical care is really spectacular in other OECD countries, which would be reinforcing the idea that the present has better medical care than the past?
No, you really can't. The US largely has lower life expectancy than other countries due to lifestyle factors like car accidents, not healthcare. Life expectancy has continually gone up in the US, and child mortality has gone down. If you want to feel bad about the situation, you're certainly entitled to, but the facts are pretty clear.
"from 2007 to 2022, infants born in the US were 78 percent more likely to die when compared with those in other high-income countries. Similarly, American children from age 1 to 19 were 80 percent more likely to die."
Agreed, and important for people to remember. On infrastructure, one important aspect that you don't refer to is cycling infrastructure, which has shown insane improvements in many places and certainly hasn't gotten worse anywhere that I've been. It has never been safer or more pleasant to travel by bike in any major US city that I've been to than it is today. I live in Cambridge, and have biked extensively also in NYC, Chicago, and done many longer trips around the Northeast. There's no question that things have never been better.
I do think nostalgia can be a bit of a toxic emotion / psychological disorder. When you pursue nostalgia hedonically it becomes a kind of irrationally conservatism.
Did you read any of the rest of this article? Like it's fine to say some things are worse, but would you at least agree that medicine is better? Dentistry? Food delivery?
Naturally some things have gotten better, but not at the expense of the overall experience getting worse.
Loss of meaning trumps everything else. It doesn't matter how long you live or how many teeth you have when you're a slave to a global coordination problem or up against a future ruled by AI slop.
This is exactly what Ted K spoke of: "A further reason why industrial society cannot be reformed in favor of freedom is that modern technology is a unified system in which all parts are dependent on one another. You can’t get rid of the ‘bad’ parts of technology and retain only the *‘good’ parts."
Food delivery is simply banal and depressing, by the way. As is every step that removed us from hunting and gathering our own food, really.
I actually think we had the best radio in 2015 or so.
Podcasts now are all focusing on YouTube and making clips for shortform video. And people are constantly working to exploit Spotify's recommender system, including to some extent Spotify themselves. It still mostly works but it's slightly degraded.
Whereas 2015-2017, podcasts were still an audio medium. And Spotify had just put out Discover Weekly which made fantastic recommendations every week.
Best time to play outside: basically monotonically better the further back you go until 1930, possibly earlier.
Between less snow each year (Calvin and Hobbes's snow adventures were meant to be evocative, not aspirational) in favor of shitty New Jersey-like winter conditions (immiserating rain and bare trees and dead grass with none of the splendor of snow or the joy of playing in it or of skating on a lake or even an outdoor ice rink) and the insect apocalypse, the world is a substantially less wondrous place for my kids to play outside than it was for me, and it's worse every year.
Don't forget the fact that today, in way too many places, you've got no choice but be a helicopter parent, lest you get sicced for child neglect or worse.
Shortly after WWII my father and his older brother got sent off to the countryside. So my grandparents put them on a train to wherever, then the two of them walked two miles to their summer home, on country roads. On their own. They were short of nine and seven years old.
I think Zvi acknowledges this with his allusion to lacking the best child freedoms, which is a topic he has written on extensively. I am arguing that the physical experience and affordances of being outside are substantially worse (hotter summers, snowless winters) than they were in living memory.
Is it warmer? Yes. Better? Not in my opinion. Setting aside my personal preference against the heat, wildfire smoke has become a regular feature of late summer, and this is a massive downgrade.
2- many car features past “connects to my phone, power windows and back up cameras “. Honesty many of the smart features are a pain.
3- Smart appliances- they break way too easily
4- I heartily disagree that tv and movies are better now than they were up till maybe 2016. Having the old options is good and it is often easier to see them, but new cinema and television is worse on average, without the high points as suggested.
5- I think medical procedures are better, but medical care and processing seems a lot worse. More hoops and seeming traps to get the better procedures, and seemingly endless attempts to get you to do unnecessary things. I might be wrong, but I never had dentists suggest needless fillings every six months until ~2014 or so. Now you have to be able to read X-rays. (Probably file that under coarsening morals.)
6- to an extent tools are worse than they used to be, being less well built and durable. However I am loathe to say that is worse necessarily because prices are often a bit lower and people seem to accept the lower quality as the trade off. Plus in other respects tools are much better. Still, if you were to say your grand father had a better adjustable wrench than you could buy today, you would largely be correct.
I would say that in many ways people today accept a lot of lower quality things (and behaviors) because of the lower costs and effort. They may or might not like the outcome on average, but those with higher expectations are not as able to get what they want from the market that caters to and relies on the lower expectation people. In some sense we as a society have buyer’s remorse, on average.
They go hand in hand to a certain extent too...when stuff is cheaper, that means losing it to theft or breakage or whatever is less of a big deal, and thus it's that little bit harder to get mad about "mere" stealing, shoddy quality, etc. Like I'm glad my workplace can get a set of shitty Ryobi tools on the cheap, and because they're cheap it doesn't hurt us as much when some fent zombie steals them to pay for his next hit (I'd like to say this only ever happened once, alas)...but maybe it was a better overall equilibrium when we had the nice stuff from Milwaukee and people didn't break into our backroom. Or shoplift, for that matter, which is definitely a moral slippage from 2012. Ah, for those halcyon days of yesteryear when there weren't armed private security guards posted in grocery stores and you could buy deodorant without needing a case unlocked...
I think you are largely correct. I would add that one nice thing about cheap stuff is that if it breaks you care less, and if you are going to only use it once or twice for a particular project it’s all fine. On the other hand, I rather prefer things that last a really long time with a little bit of care, and generally will pay more for that if I can, but the option isn’t often on the table.
What really gets my goat though is when things are crappy but prices up market. Seems to be a lot of that, although having good testing reviews can help there.
Also also, I think the general soft on crime attitude of government, that criminals need help rather than capture and punishment is a major negative. It used to be that politicians were scared to be called soft on crime, but now it is crap like the police not responding if it is less than $1000 stolen.
Oh for sure - like to extend the example, it's cool that everyone can easily have their own set of (shitty, cheap) basic tools now, which realistically for most people spend 99% of their life accumulating dust. When you really really need a Phillips or claw hammer or whatever though, it's a godsend to have such things readily available, or delivered in <24hr, rather than need to sheepishly call a mechanic or knock on Teddy's garage door to borrow his McClecklan. Sometimes cheap is better! Lots of "tools" besides literal tools scale helpfully this way.
(One could of course make a galaxy-brain take that it was "better" to have to rely on borrowing the expensive grandfather axe of your neighbors, because that was part of Building Community or something, but...I don't know...I'd rather everyone be rich enough to afford their own cup of flour rather than need to borrow one, you know? Which is part of Zvi's point about the strictures of tight-because-of-poverty communities, too. Tradeoffs rule everything around me...)
Absolutely agree. Reading your comment is helping distill what bothers me: the lack of range of options with regards to quality. I would say the ideal is to have the eg Harbor Freight stuff that is cheap and not terribly good along side the high end stuff that you can pass down to your kids but cost a good bit, and then everyone can have cheap stuff and the specific things someone wants a really nice version of they can have.
The current state seems to be more that there is a bottom end of that distribution on quality, but the full distribution on price, so that great quality doesn’t really exist, just pretty good quality but with a premium price.
I think part of the problem is that people want to take advantage of a quality brand name reputation by reducing quality and so cost while relying on the name to drive price. Customers catch on slowly, so there are quick gains to be made by cheapening production costs, at the long term cost of losing the brand value. For whatever reason corporate executives cannot avoid that siren song, and so what was X years ago a great brand becomes just another throw away and replace item. I suppose it would require executives and share holders to accept lower short term profits in exchange for long term continual profit.
If we’re making arguments on the basis of vibes, then I am pretty skeptical of the claims on music and movies. I would buy an argument that the median movie/song may be at an all time high now. But it seems like you’re using a pretty generic definition of media as entertainment, which I think itself is indicative of how media as “high brow” entertainment (culture) has significantly declined in my opinion. I don’t like the elitist connotations, but I think we’ve seen a great blah-ification of a lot of media. Understood that looking backwards we see the highlight better than all the cruft, but I think it’s really odd to disregard the entire Western canon of music from the 18th to early 20th century and then boldly claim either the present or the 60s/70s was the height of music. Big bias toward today’s popular tastes. If you expand outwards to other “art” forms (writing, visual media), I would similarly question whether we could name the present moment as superior. The heavy hitters of the past can be hard to match! Writing probably peaked in the late 19th century. Culture today is very accessible (great!), but less developed (IMO). Plenty of exceptions and won’t knock anyone just for liking popular artists
For Best TV what are we counting as TV? If we're including Youtube and YouTube adjacent content, I'd say now is best, but considering just core TV (studio-produced content on network/cable/major streaming) Peak TV era has to take it.
I'm going to be controversial and say the best music is, by far, ~today. We have all-timers like "Cry for Judas" and "Achilles Come Down" from the 2010s, and songs like "Enchanté" today, plus actively excellent bands putting out incredible new albums (The Arcadian Wild & Mother Mother) today. Plus "Penny's Theme" from pokemon scarlet & violet is the audio equivalent of heroin. In my opinion, the fact that (I expect) nobody who reads this comment will know these songs doesn't detract from the fact that today's music is incredibly excellent, especially for non-pop tastes, as well as much easier to find than occasionally getting gifted a CD like when I was younger. I have a good number of '80s tracks in my most listened to, but they're heavily outnumbered by recent songs.
Being currently in the middle of reorganizing my giant back catalogue of VGM, your comment made me go listen to Penny's Theme, and...I don't know, man, that's just painful. Like if Touhou and Pokemon had a baby, and both parents were ashamed. Give me the old Champion Lance theme from gen1, the Gym Leader theme from gen2, the Team Aqua theme from gen3...non-battle music? Silph Co! The Divine Olivine remix! Mt. Chimney! 8m+ views certainly tells you many people like it, but whether that represents excellence in today's music...
Have to confess I've never liked The Mountain Goats. Cry for Judas is...fine though? Store radio quality inoffensive. Couldn't finish Achilles Come Down, neither lyrics nor acoustics were good enough hooks to justify 7 minutes. Enchante is good at least...but I think it's rather noteworthy that they're apeing the sound and feel of 20s/30s swing! (Of which I have two whole playlists. They just don't make 'em like Cab Calloway anymore.) Like I can probably listen to incredible 2025 interpretations of Tchiakovsky by a modern philharmonic too, but that wouldn't be an example of "today's music".
Of course, the fact that I could trivially access these songs at ~epsilon cost is certainly a big argument in favour of the modern music experience. And discovery via Substack comment certainly didn't exist in the 90s. Not sold on the taste part though, at least with these exemplars. But that's fine! As FdB says, half the fun with music is disagreeing with others about what constitutes good taste. A lot of people would dislike death jazz and Christian-themed metal too, to name some of the weirder stuff I think is Quality.
Even though it absolutely is personal taste, I have to defend my favorites here: I think Pennys Theme is the best of the franchise since Cynthia's theme in gen 4, Achilles Come Down was the first song in a long time to genuinely give me chills the first time I listened to it, and Cry For Judas would be my personal pick if I could only listen to a single song for the rest of my life.
Any chance I could get death jazz and/or Christian metal recs? The only related genre I listen to frequently is bluegrass Christian, but I'd be interested in checking out groups I've never heard of...
Oh, I remember that one - yeah, I think Cynthia is a useful point of comparison. It's superficially similar, but I feel a few key differences elevate it: not quite so frenetic (it's less about the actual tempo than about beats feeling measured, in control); sound quality less tinny (this could admittedly be due to differences in upload quality); better buildup of "dramatic tension"; and the "bassline" is a bit firmer, helps anchor the fast-paced melodies.
Sign of the times in some ways, I guess...the world moves a lot faster now than *checks notes* wow, Diamond was a decade ago, geez. So maybe it's appropriate to have things a bit more manic-paced, with a more forceful initial grab in this attention-starved age. Sort of like punk vs metal...take the same basic instruments, play the same volume, scream just as much, but mostly go for raw elemental energy and nevermind the technical frills so much.
Mm, check out: Soil & Pimp Sessions, Jazztronik, Indigo Jam Unit, Jabberloop, fox capture plan, Quasimode, toconoma, Pia-no-jaC. Obviously The Seatbelts too, but that feels like a cheap rec cause they're inextricably twined with Cowboy Bebop.
Metalwise: Powerwolf, Therion (albums Beloved Antichrist, Leviathan, Vovin, maybe Theli or Gothic Kabbalah but they're more pagan-ish). Temperance I'm not sure if they're actually inspired similarly, but the sound/feel is right. Nightwish dabbles in the subject matter often (hard not to with operatic metal genre), I'm not sure I could name one particular album or song that really emphasizes it though. The End of an Era concert is a good enough sampler, I guess.
Zvi, I am enjoting reading this series, and I look forward to the treatment of rising expectations and requirements (which I agree are real and important).
That said, I definitely dispute the moral claim. Today or 2012 is likely best by today's prevailing moral standards. But I disagree with (not all but many) of today's prevailing moral standards.
A lot of this really feels like debate over (1) what really matters in life, and (2) what counts as "best" or "highest quality." Paging Robert Pirsig...
Anyways, I think the conservative case is wrong on merits in some categories, but directionally or almost right in others (even though we'd disagree on the specifics): yes, good food, entertaining TV, etc are all nice things to have, but abstract things like the integrity of democracy, respect for human rights, public corruption, ethical standards for politicians, etc., seem enormously worse than circa 2012 or 1992, and those things matter in a way that's importantly different than great TV or exciting sports matches. Ditto "The Economy" -- income inequality is much worse, and it's difficult to weigh that fairly against the real and important increase in real wages, stocks, GDP, etc. Paging Isaiah Berlin...
shows a local minimum in inequality in 1980 (at 35), after a linear-ish decrease since 1965, then a linear-ish increase from 1980 to about 2005 (at 41) then bouncing around 41-ish since then.
It saddens me to drop references to Pirsig/Zen and Motorcycles and mostly no one gets them anymore. I'm not saying it was even a *good* book - wouldn't have bothered finishing if it wasn't assigned for school - but it was a Quality cultural touchstone for a reason. It's like waking up one day to find that no one remembers Office Space or Fight Club.
Feel like a big part of the "human rights" case rides on LGBT progress. Not sure how to fairly weight that piece, while admitting it'd be unfair to calculate without it.
Great article! One interesting datapoint is that 1992 or 1993 was the year with most DALYs (absolute), that is where most healthy human life was lost.. so I think there is an argument that those were the worst years
Yeah, that's possible, but I used the data from IHME.. however, I was wrong in two important aspects: (a) 1994 was actually the worst in that period (Rwandan genocide) https://ibb.co/xtw3v33K (b) COVID is worse.. so maybe things have indeed been bad lately. But as Scott Alexander pointed out, we have collectively memory-holed all that dying: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-other-covid-reckoning
"Best Medical Care" NOW??? When the well-being of US children continues to worsen, with 45.7% of teens having at least one chronic condition , when US is Ranked 33rd for infant mortality of the 38 OECD countries, when those under age 20 now 80% more likely to die, and when the US has the lowest life expectancy of any rich country... this "now"????
On your life expectancy questions - are you comparing the US now to the US of the past, or the US now to other countries now?
the latter
Okay, but couldn't that just mean that medical care is really spectacular in other OECD countries, which would be reinforcing the idea that the present has better medical care than the past?
Why not. You can turn it any way that suits your POV.
No, you really can't. The US largely has lower life expectancy than other countries due to lifestyle factors like car accidents, not healthcare. Life expectancy has continually gone up in the US, and child mortality has gone down. If you want to feel bad about the situation, you're certainly entitled to, but the facts are pretty clear.
child mortality has gone down???
"from 2007 to 2022, infants born in the US were 78 percent more likely to die when compared with those in other high-income countries. Similarly, American children from age 1 to 19 were 80 percent more likely to die."
And the overall health span is much lower
These outcomes are largely determined by factors other than medical care, though?
A better question is, would you rather have heart surgery now or 50 years ago — the answer is “now”, and it’s not close.
"largely determined" Are they? Is access to care not a factor?
"now or 50 years ago" depends where, no?
Agreed, and important for people to remember. On infrastructure, one important aspect that you don't refer to is cycling infrastructure, which has shown insane improvements in many places and certainly hasn't gotten worse anywhere that I've been. It has never been safer or more pleasant to travel by bike in any major US city that I've been to than it is today. I live in Cambridge, and have biked extensively also in NYC, Chicago, and done many longer trips around the Northeast. There's no question that things have never been better.
I must have had a rough childhood, because I'm completely immune to this effect. Life is better now.
I seem to be missing this part of my brain too. Maybe we should call our condition a-nostalgia?
I do think nostalgia can be a bit of a toxic emotion / psychological disorder. When you pursue nostalgia hedonically it becomes a kind of irrationally conservatism.
> Regardless of how old they are, people tend to think that things were better when they were young.
Yes, because things have constantly been getting worse (in the developed world) for as long as anyone surveyed have been alive.
Works Cited:
Industrial Revolution and its Consequences.
P.S. Yglesias deleted that tweet. Do we know why?
Did you read any of the rest of this article? Like it's fine to say some things are worse, but would you at least agree that medicine is better? Dentistry? Food delivery?
Naturally some things have gotten better, but not at the expense of the overall experience getting worse.
Loss of meaning trumps everything else. It doesn't matter how long you live or how many teeth you have when you're a slave to a global coordination problem or up against a future ruled by AI slop.
This is exactly what Ted K spoke of: "A further reason why industrial society cannot be reformed in favor of freedom is that modern technology is a unified system in which all parts are dependent on one another. You can’t get rid of the ‘bad’ parts of technology and retain only the *‘good’ parts."
Food delivery is simply banal and depressing, by the way. As is every step that removed us from hunting and gathering our own food, really.
Ted K is full of it though, so there's that.
I actually think we had the best radio in 2015 or so.
Podcasts now are all focusing on YouTube and making clips for shortform video. And people are constantly working to exploit Spotify's recommender system, including to some extent Spotify themselves. It still mostly works but it's slightly degraded.
Whereas 2015-2017, podcasts were still an audio medium. And Spotify had just put out Discover Weekly which made fantastic recommendations every week.
Podcast episode for this post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwatvpodcast/p/when-were-things-the-best
Best time to play outside: basically monotonically better the further back you go until 1930, possibly earlier.
Between less snow each year (Calvin and Hobbes's snow adventures were meant to be evocative, not aspirational) in favor of shitty New Jersey-like winter conditions (immiserating rain and bare trees and dead grass with none of the splendor of snow or the joy of playing in it or of skating on a lake or even an outdoor ice rink) and the insect apocalypse, the world is a substantially less wondrous place for my kids to play outside than it was for me, and it's worse every year.
Don't forget the fact that today, in way too many places, you've got no choice but be a helicopter parent, lest you get sicced for child neglect or worse.
Shortly after WWII my father and his older brother got sent off to the countryside. So my grandparents put them on a train to wherever, then the two of them walked two miles to their summer home, on country roads. On their own. They were short of nine and seven years old.
I think Zvi acknowledges this with his allusion to lacking the best child freedoms, which is a topic he has written on extensively. I am arguing that the physical experience and affordances of being outside are substantially worse (hotter summers, snowless winters) than they were in living memory.
Yeah, I agree.
Has to vary by location right? Weather is probably better in Seattle
Anecdotally, Seattle gets worse heat waves in the summer than it used to
Is it warmer? Yes. Better? Not in my opinion. Setting aside my personal preference against the heat, wildfire smoke has become a regular feature of late summer, and this is a massive downgrade.
Air pollution was significantly, sometimes dramatically, worse in certain past times and places.
"Plurebis". *gg* Pluribus
If I were to suggest a few things that are worse:
1- parenting/childcare requirements
2- many car features past “connects to my phone, power windows and back up cameras “. Honesty many of the smart features are a pain.
3- Smart appliances- they break way too easily
4- I heartily disagree that tv and movies are better now than they were up till maybe 2016. Having the old options is good and it is often easier to see them, but new cinema and television is worse on average, without the high points as suggested.
5- I think medical procedures are better, but medical care and processing seems a lot worse. More hoops and seeming traps to get the better procedures, and seemingly endless attempts to get you to do unnecessary things. I might be wrong, but I never had dentists suggest needless fillings every six months until ~2014 or so. Now you have to be able to read X-rays. (Probably file that under coarsening morals.)
6- to an extent tools are worse than they used to be, being less well built and durable. However I am loathe to say that is worse necessarily because prices are often a bit lower and people seem to accept the lower quality as the trade off. Plus in other respects tools are much better. Still, if you were to say your grand father had a better adjustable wrench than you could buy today, you would largely be correct.
I would say that in many ways people today accept a lot of lower quality things (and behaviors) because of the lower costs and effort. They may or might not like the outcome on average, but those with higher expectations are not as able to get what they want from the market that caters to and relies on the lower expectation people. In some sense we as a society have buyer’s remorse, on average.
They go hand in hand to a certain extent too...when stuff is cheaper, that means losing it to theft or breakage or whatever is less of a big deal, and thus it's that little bit harder to get mad about "mere" stealing, shoddy quality, etc. Like I'm glad my workplace can get a set of shitty Ryobi tools on the cheap, and because they're cheap it doesn't hurt us as much when some fent zombie steals them to pay for his next hit (I'd like to say this only ever happened once, alas)...but maybe it was a better overall equilibrium when we had the nice stuff from Milwaukee and people didn't break into our backroom. Or shoplift, for that matter, which is definitely a moral slippage from 2012. Ah, for those halcyon days of yesteryear when there weren't armed private security guards posted in grocery stores and you could buy deodorant without needing a case unlocked...
I think you are largely correct. I would add that one nice thing about cheap stuff is that if it breaks you care less, and if you are going to only use it once or twice for a particular project it’s all fine. On the other hand, I rather prefer things that last a really long time with a little bit of care, and generally will pay more for that if I can, but the option isn’t often on the table.
What really gets my goat though is when things are crappy but prices up market. Seems to be a lot of that, although having good testing reviews can help there.
Also also, I think the general soft on crime attitude of government, that criminals need help rather than capture and punishment is a major negative. It used to be that politicians were scared to be called soft on crime, but now it is crap like the police not responding if it is less than $1000 stolen.
Oh for sure - like to extend the example, it's cool that everyone can easily have their own set of (shitty, cheap) basic tools now, which realistically for most people spend 99% of their life accumulating dust. When you really really need a Phillips or claw hammer or whatever though, it's a godsend to have such things readily available, or delivered in <24hr, rather than need to sheepishly call a mechanic or knock on Teddy's garage door to borrow his McClecklan. Sometimes cheap is better! Lots of "tools" besides literal tools scale helpfully this way.
(One could of course make a galaxy-brain take that it was "better" to have to rely on borrowing the expensive grandfather axe of your neighbors, because that was part of Building Community or something, but...I don't know...I'd rather everyone be rich enough to afford their own cup of flour rather than need to borrow one, you know? Which is part of Zvi's point about the strictures of tight-because-of-poverty communities, too. Tradeoffs rule everything around me...)
Absolutely agree. Reading your comment is helping distill what bothers me: the lack of range of options with regards to quality. I would say the ideal is to have the eg Harbor Freight stuff that is cheap and not terribly good along side the high end stuff that you can pass down to your kids but cost a good bit, and then everyone can have cheap stuff and the specific things someone wants a really nice version of they can have.
The current state seems to be more that there is a bottom end of that distribution on quality, but the full distribution on price, so that great quality doesn’t really exist, just pretty good quality but with a premium price.
I think part of the problem is that people want to take advantage of a quality brand name reputation by reducing quality and so cost while relying on the name to drive price. Customers catch on slowly, so there are quick gains to be made by cheapening production costs, at the long term cost of losing the brand value. For whatever reason corporate executives cannot avoid that siren song, and so what was X years ago a great brand becomes just another throw away and replace item. I suppose it would require executives and share holders to accept lower short term profits in exchange for long term continual profit.
If we’re making arguments on the basis of vibes, then I am pretty skeptical of the claims on music and movies. I would buy an argument that the median movie/song may be at an all time high now. But it seems like you’re using a pretty generic definition of media as entertainment, which I think itself is indicative of how media as “high brow” entertainment (culture) has significantly declined in my opinion. I don’t like the elitist connotations, but I think we’ve seen a great blah-ification of a lot of media. Understood that looking backwards we see the highlight better than all the cruft, but I think it’s really odd to disregard the entire Western canon of music from the 18th to early 20th century and then boldly claim either the present or the 60s/70s was the height of music. Big bias toward today’s popular tastes. If you expand outwards to other “art” forms (writing, visual media), I would similarly question whether we could name the present moment as superior. The heavy hitters of the past can be hard to match! Writing probably peaked in the late 19th century. Culture today is very accessible (great!), but less developed (IMO). Plenty of exceptions and won’t knock anyone just for liking popular artists
For Best TV what are we counting as TV? If we're including Youtube and YouTube adjacent content, I'd say now is best, but considering just core TV (studio-produced content on network/cable/major streaming) Peak TV era has to take it.
I'm going to be controversial and say the best music is, by far, ~today. We have all-timers like "Cry for Judas" and "Achilles Come Down" from the 2010s, and songs like "Enchanté" today, plus actively excellent bands putting out incredible new albums (The Arcadian Wild & Mother Mother) today. Plus "Penny's Theme" from pokemon scarlet & violet is the audio equivalent of heroin. In my opinion, the fact that (I expect) nobody who reads this comment will know these songs doesn't detract from the fact that today's music is incredibly excellent, especially for non-pop tastes, as well as much easier to find than occasionally getting gifted a CD like when I was younger. I have a good number of '80s tracks in my most listened to, but they're heavily outnumbered by recent songs.
Being currently in the middle of reorganizing my giant back catalogue of VGM, your comment made me go listen to Penny's Theme, and...I don't know, man, that's just painful. Like if Touhou and Pokemon had a baby, and both parents were ashamed. Give me the old Champion Lance theme from gen1, the Gym Leader theme from gen2, the Team Aqua theme from gen3...non-battle music? Silph Co! The Divine Olivine remix! Mt. Chimney! 8m+ views certainly tells you many people like it, but whether that represents excellence in today's music...
Have to confess I've never liked The Mountain Goats. Cry for Judas is...fine though? Store radio quality inoffensive. Couldn't finish Achilles Come Down, neither lyrics nor acoustics were good enough hooks to justify 7 minutes. Enchante is good at least...but I think it's rather noteworthy that they're apeing the sound and feel of 20s/30s swing! (Of which I have two whole playlists. They just don't make 'em like Cab Calloway anymore.) Like I can probably listen to incredible 2025 interpretations of Tchiakovsky by a modern philharmonic too, but that wouldn't be an example of "today's music".
Of course, the fact that I could trivially access these songs at ~epsilon cost is certainly a big argument in favour of the modern music experience. And discovery via Substack comment certainly didn't exist in the 90s. Not sold on the taste part though, at least with these exemplars. But that's fine! As FdB says, half the fun with music is disagreeing with others about what constitutes good taste. A lot of people would dislike death jazz and Christian-themed metal too, to name some of the weirder stuff I think is Quality.
Even though it absolutely is personal taste, I have to defend my favorites here: I think Pennys Theme is the best of the franchise since Cynthia's theme in gen 4, Achilles Come Down was the first song in a long time to genuinely give me chills the first time I listened to it, and Cry For Judas would be my personal pick if I could only listen to a single song for the rest of my life.
Any chance I could get death jazz and/or Christian metal recs? The only related genre I listen to frequently is bluegrass Christian, but I'd be interested in checking out groups I've never heard of...
Oh, I remember that one - yeah, I think Cynthia is a useful point of comparison. It's superficially similar, but I feel a few key differences elevate it: not quite so frenetic (it's less about the actual tempo than about beats feeling measured, in control); sound quality less tinny (this could admittedly be due to differences in upload quality); better buildup of "dramatic tension"; and the "bassline" is a bit firmer, helps anchor the fast-paced melodies.
Sign of the times in some ways, I guess...the world moves a lot faster now than *checks notes* wow, Diamond was a decade ago, geez. So maybe it's appropriate to have things a bit more manic-paced, with a more forceful initial grab in this attention-starved age. Sort of like punk vs metal...take the same basic instruments, play the same volume, scream just as much, but mostly go for raw elemental energy and nevermind the technical frills so much.
Mm, check out: Soil & Pimp Sessions, Jazztronik, Indigo Jam Unit, Jabberloop, fox capture plan, Quasimode, toconoma, Pia-no-jaC. Obviously The Seatbelts too, but that feels like a cheap rec cause they're inextricably twined with Cowboy Bebop.
Metalwise: Powerwolf, Therion (albums Beloved Antichrist, Leviathan, Vovin, maybe Theli or Gothic Kabbalah but they're more pagan-ish). Temperance I'm not sure if they're actually inspired similarly, but the sound/feel is right. Nightwish dabbles in the subject matter often (hard not to with operatic metal genre), I'm not sure I could name one particular album or song that really emphasizes it though. The End of an Era concert is a good enough sampler, I guess.
Zvi, I am enjoting reading this series, and I look forward to the treatment of rising expectations and requirements (which I agree are real and important).
That said, I definitely dispute the moral claim. Today or 2012 is likely best by today's prevailing moral standards. But I disagree with (not all but many) of today's prevailing moral standards.
Indeed. I think an argument could be made that the "meaning crisis" is symptomatic of modern "morality"'s focus on self-actualization and tolerance.
late 80s and all the 90s.
After 9/11 and the dot com crash /Iraq debacle, we fell hard.
A lot of this really feels like debate over (1) what really matters in life, and (2) what counts as "best" or "highest quality." Paging Robert Pirsig...
Anyways, I think the conservative case is wrong on merits in some categories, but directionally or almost right in others (even though we'd disagree on the specifics): yes, good food, entertaining TV, etc are all nice things to have, but abstract things like the integrity of democracy, respect for human rights, public corruption, ethical standards for politicians, etc., seem enormously worse than circa 2012 or 1992, and those things matter in a way that's importantly different than great TV or exciting sports matches. Ditto "The Economy" -- income inequality is much worse, and it's difficult to weigh that fairly against the real and important increase in real wages, stocks, GDP, etc. Paging Isaiah Berlin...
Lastly: Freddie deBoer makes a very eloquent qualitative case (for the 90s) here: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/its-so-sad-when-old-people-romanticize
"Ditto "The Economy" -- income inequality is much worse"
Over the period it has been measured, the gini inequality index has had a weird trend,
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA
shows a local minimum in inequality in 1980 (at 35), after a linear-ish decrease since 1965, then a linear-ish increase from 1980 to about 2005 (at 41) then bouncing around 41-ish since then.
It saddens me to drop references to Pirsig/Zen and Motorcycles and mostly no one gets them anymore. I'm not saying it was even a *good* book - wouldn't have bothered finishing if it wasn't assigned for school - but it was a Quality cultural touchstone for a reason. It's like waking up one day to find that no one remembers Office Space or Fight Club.
Feel like a big part of the "human rights" case rides on LGBT progress. Not sure how to fairly weight that piece, while admitting it'd be unfair to calculate without it.