We would usually expect that a 12-year-old kid would be taller than a 6-year-old kid. However, if a 12-year-old had only grown one inch over their last six years, we would probably be somewhat worried.
David Brooks devotes his most recent
column, "the virtue of radical honesty" to presenting data from Steven Pinker's new book,
Enlightenment Now, which purports to show that things are better than ever. Most of the data has the character of boasting over our 12-year-old's one inch of growth over the last six years.
Brooks tells us:
"For example, we’re all aware of the gloomy statistics around wage stagnation and income inequality, but Pinker contends that we should not be nostalgic for the economy of the 1950s, when jobs were plentiful and unions strong. A third of American children lived in poverty. Sixty percent of seniors had incomes below $1,000 a year. Only half the population had any savings in the bank at all.
"Between 1979 and 2014, meanwhile, the percentage of poor Americans dropped to 20 percent from 24 percent. The percentage of lower-middle-class Americans dropped to 17 from 24. The percentage of Americans who were upper middle class (earning $100,000 to $350,000) shot upward to 30 percent from 13 percent."
The problem with the Brooks–Pinker story is that we expect the economy/people to get richer through time. After all, technology and education improve. In the fifties, we didn't have the Internet, cell phones, and all sorts of other goodies. In fact, at the start of the fifties, we didn't even have the polio vaccine.
The question is not whether we are better off today than we were sixty years ago. It would be incredible if we were not better off. The question is by how much. In the fifties, wages and incomes for ordinary families were rising at a rate of close to two percent annually. In the last forty-five years, they have barely risen at all.