Vox reader Dov Stein asks: Why do people think the past was so much better when so many things have drastically improved?
That’s an excellent question, one I think about a lot as someone who runs a section at Vox dedicated in part to covering how meaningful economic and scientific and social progress can and is being made.
There’s nothing new about yearning for a supposed golden age, or feeling as if the present doesn’t measure up to an imagined past. But you’re right that a hatred of the present seems particularly acute these days — and you’re right that hatred ignores all the many, many ways in which today is better than yesterday.
Much of the world is gripped by a politics of nostalgia, one grounded in the assumption that we have to turn back time to a moment when everything was better. After all, what is “Make America Great Again” but a slogan that implicitly argues that the US was great, once; is no longer great, now; and can be made great, again, by turning back the clock. It’s not just a right-wing thing — the politics of climate change is grounded in the idea that the climate of the past is the best one.
I share your frustration that so many people miss the ways in which the present has improved on the past. It’s not really our fault: Humans have memories that are both short and bad, which leads us to forget just how bad many things used to be in even 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 Pew Research Center found that nearly six in ten respondents in the US said that life was better for people like them 50 years ago. While certain groups, like Republicans and older adults, were more likely to say the past was better than the present, these feelings were fairly widespread. And that nostalgia is deepening — the share of Americans who said life today is worse than life in the past was up 15 percent in 2023 from two years before.
Nor is this just an American phenomenon. Another Pew poll, this one from 2018, surveyed people from 27 countries. In 15 of them, a plurality of respondents reported that the financial situation of average people in their country was better 20 years ago than it is today. A poll by YouGov of people in the UK found that 70 percent of respondents felt the world was getting worse, compared to less than 10 percent who felt it was getting better. (Although to be honest, the UK has had a rough 21st century.)
Beyond polls, there’s evidence that popular culture is stuck in a nostalgia loop around the past. According to MRC Data, a music analytics firm, old songs represent some 70 percent of the US music market, while the market for new music is actually shrinking. Movies and TV programs turn overwhelmingly to sequels and reboots, continually mining the same old stories. (In 2024, nine of the top 10 highest-grossing movies were sequels — and the one exception, Wicked, was an adaptation of a 21-year-old Broadway musical that was an adaptation of a 29-year-old novel that was a prequel of a 85-year-old movie that was, itself, an adaptation of a 124-year-old novel. Whew.)
You see a lot of 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 when you were 15 to 25 years old represents the zenith of human progress, the answer is: no, definitely not, almost entirely.
Take the meme above. As Matthew Yglesias writes, the argument implicit in nostalgia politics memes is that “material living standards of the typical American family have gotten worse since the post-WWII era. This is completely wrong.”
Is it ever! Beyond the fact that we have access to all kinds of technology that did not exist 70 years ago even for the richest people on the planet, Americans are much, much wealthier now than they were back then. You can see that in everything from car ownership — which is twice as high now as it was in 1960 — to the size of our houses, which are roughly 25 percent bigger on average than they were in 1960. One standout statistic from Yglesias’s piece: In 1950, just having running water was about as common then as having air conditioning is now.
That’s just economics. Educational attainment — the percentage of Americans who graduate from high school or above — is far greater now than it was then. While it’s true that college was less expensive in the past, it was also much rarer; a tiny proportion of the US population had a bachelor’s degree in 1960, while today more than a third of adults have such degrees.
Perhaps most importantly of all is social progress. The 1950s might have been an okay place if you looked like the family in the meme above — provided you were fine with much diminished living standards. But that’s not true if you were a woman who wanted to work, or a person of color, or LGBTQ, or disabled, or just about anyone other than a straight white man. In the 1950s, interracial marriage could still be banned, anti-sodomy laws would still be on the books for decades, and the Civil Rights Act was still a decade away. Oh, and we were living under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation far greater than what we face today.
And that’s just America. In 1950, more than half the world lived in extreme poverty, meaning they lacked enough money to afford a tiny space to live, heat and enough food to stave off malnutrition. As of 2018, it was just about 10 percent, even though the global population has more than tripled over that time period. Nearly 30 years has been added to average global life expectancy since 1950 — that’s almost the equivalent of adding an extra life for people. While the world has experienced a democratic backsliding in recent years, don’t forget that in 1950 three-quarters of the global population lived in 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, saying the past is better than the present means making a judgement of what we mean when we say “the past.” Not everything has improved, and sometimes periods of progress are followed by periods of decline. The arc of history doesn’t only go up and to the right. But if you step back a bit, although you’ll see some dips, the trend lines are quite clear.
So why do so many people think that?
One reason, I think, is the reality of progress itself.
As I wrote late last year, as the world improves politically and materially, so do our expectations. There’s a term for this in climate science: “shifting baselines.” When things improve — by, say, coming up with a vaccine that essentially eliminates polio — we don’t remain in a constant state of gratitude that we don’t live with the same limitations and threats that our grandparents did. We reset our expectations, and forget how things used to be. When progress does stumble — like the major recession in 2008 — we don’t remain grateful that we’re still much better off than we were in the distant past. Instead, we get angry that we’re somewhat worse off than we were a few years ago, even though it’s almost certain that we’ll be better off a few years from now.
Our brains help deceive us. Thanks to “selective memory,” humans have a tendency to forget negative events from the past, and reinforce positive memories. It’s one reason why our feelings and memories about the past can be so inaccurate — we literally forget the bad things and give the good things a nice, pleasant glow. The further back the memory goes, the stronger that tendency can be.
We’re also wary of change. Psychologists call it “loss aversion” — we fear the sting of losing something will hurt much more than the benefit of gaining something. As a result, change can feel fundamentally scary, which also makes us feel more warmly about the era before change: the past.
Then there’s nostalgia’s ineffable pull. I was serious when I said that for most people, whatever movies or music was popular when they were young is the “best” pop culture. What many of us are yearning for when we think the past was better isn’t the past itself, but our past selves — when we were younger. Because while things really have been getting better over time, we really have been getting older, with everything that comes along with that experience. And no amount of progress — at least not yet — can reverse that.
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