A quick look at some recent headlines shows that we have problems. The nation sharply and angrily divided along political lines. Rioters in the streets of Los Angeles. A destructive trade war. Debt and deficits at unsustainable levels.
Those are real and serious problems (and not close to an exhaustive list). But the tenor of the public debate—from elected officials to pundits, journalists to public intellectuals—implies that we are living in something approaching the apocalypse. To them, the game is rigged, the system is broken, everything is awful, and life was better decades ago.
That’s mostly bullshit.
Yes, we have real problems. But widen the aperture, and you’ll see that there has never been a better time to be alive than the present day.
If that doesn’t sound like what you’re reading in the newspaper, remember that the news business relies on outraging you.
How many viral social media posts essentially say “all is pretty, pretty good, so let’s just move along”? Of course, just saying “pretty, pretty good” quotes a man who thinks dinner with Hitler and dinner with Trump are six of one half, a sieg heil of another. That kind of poor reality testing is kind of the theme of this essay.
The incentives of the press fuel the narrative of despair and doom. So do the incentives facing politicians, who don’t get gigs by telling you: “Things are mostly okay, but hey, there are some things we really need to work on.”
All of this doomsaying feeds into the populist moment we are living in. And it comes from both sides.
Horseshoe theory is the idea that the far left and the far right converge toward each other, even if they’d both vigorously deny it. Populism, as practiced by both the left and right ends of the horseshoe, has never just been about telling people popular things, such as “ice cream is delicious.” Rather, it’s telling people: “Ice cream is delicious, and you aren’t getting your fair share of the ice cream because you are a helpless victim living in a rigged ice-cream system, and here are the people responsible that we will take to task for you, and by doing so restore your rightful ice cream.”
That was more or less the sales pitch of the populist of the moment: socialist Zohram Mamdani, who clinched the Democratic nomination in the New York City mayor’s race by arguing the city needed revolutionary change. And, with some names changed, it’s a huge part of the MAGA pitch, too.
Populism pits “the people” against “the elites.” It requires the finger-point and the class conflict. And it requires things to be very bad, or else there’s not much for the populist leader to fix.
It is also about zero-sum grievance. It’s about telling people they are getting the shaft and our side is the one to unshaft you, extracting vengeance for you along the way. It’s inherently anti-republican (small r), replacing constitutional, individual, and minority protections and rights with the will of the 51 percent (often fewer are needed) who you can convince about your “populist” revanchist policies that will undo all real or imagined past wrongs done to them.
Now, there is nothing wrong with a good grievance—that is, if the grievance is justified and the solution to the grievance reasonable. The left can justifiably point to Americans without health insurance. The right can justifiably point to a border that was consciously left open for many years. Examples abound.
But today, both the progressive left and the MAGA right seem to run on imaginary—or at best, horribly exaggerated—grievance. The uniting theme is that the average American has it terrible these days, and only their chosen end of the horseshoe can fix it. People will go to extremes only when they are convinced things are terrible—and there’s a cottage industry, again both press and politicians, working on selling that story.
The left blames rich people and corporations. (We have to redistribute your ice cream from them back to you.) The right blames free trade, immigrants —including legal ones, who came here just to take your ice cream—and, uh, also rich people and corporations. Actually, the populist, progressive left and the populist, MAGA right agree on a lot (straight from the horseshoe’s mouth). Both are hostile to big business, tech companies (with the exception of crypto for MAGA, at least for now), fiscal responsibility and entitlement reform, global supply chains, experts, free trade, taxing tipped income, non-organized labor, and free markets. At the extremes, they both scapegoat Jews, the far right often using placeholder words like globalist, the far left preferring words like Zionist, though increasingly just going to full-on Jew-blaming (stay classy, James).
Both ends of the horseshoe advocate intrusive, autocratic socialistic government, either de facto (the MAGA right who won’t use the word socialist but nonetheless push for more government control of the economy) or de jure (the progressive left, definitely including Mamdani, often will use the s-word, usually but not always prefaced with the adjective democratic)—such unchecked state power being the necessary tool to fix what is broken and even the score.
The thing that unites them is their claim that the average American is living through a catastrophe that only they can fix. Despite the popularity of this view, it just isn’t true. But, sadly, telling people they’re being screwed by some remote “other” seems to be a winning strategy—at least for a while.
Put simply, it’s just the opposite. We are living in the best world ever for the most people ever. Lots of things are bad; lots of things can be made better. “Best world ever” does not mean “perfect world.” But if the progressive left tells you the 1950s were better, as labor unions were stronger and tax rates were over 90 percent, and the MAGA right tells you the 1950s were better, as labor unions were stronger and Harriet was still a tradwife to Ozzie, both are just wrong.
Our politics today would look a lot different and a lot better if we started from the undeniable reality of today’s extreme broad-based prosperity and human flourishing—and then tried to make it even broader and even better.
So let’s start with the facts:
There has never been a better time and place to be alive than in the United States today. We will focus on economics below, as that is our expertise, and easily the single biggest category of populist grievance.
Wages for typical American workers have never been higher. According to our calculations, after adjusting for inflation, the wages of nonsupervisory workers—roughly the bottom 80 percent of workers by pay, including manufacturing workers and service-sector workers who are not managers—have grown by around 60 percent over the past two generations. Over the past three decades, inflation-adjusted wages for typical workers have grown by 44 percent.
Wages are the most important component of the flow of financial resources households can use for consumption and savings. But households receive resources from other sources as well, including government transfer payments, social insurance receipts, and businesses. Overall household income tells the same story as wages: Real household income has never been higher than it is today.
And not just for families at the very top. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), families in the 51st to 90th percentiles of the wealth distribution had an average wealth of $1.3 million in 2022, the most recent year data are available. That’s up from around $500,000 in 1990, after adjusting for inflation.
Consumption is an even better indicator of prosperity than income or wealth. It’s how much we all actually get to enjoy life (economically speaking). Spending on personal consumption is at a record level. Now, it might be fair to argue that this consumption is a big part of the looming debt problem America must eventually reckon with, but that would be a howler of an argument from either end of the populist horseshoe, as both the progressive left and MAGA right seem to be big fans of ignoring this issue.
When assessing the best time to be alive, it’s important to give special attention to low-income Americans. The CBO’s income data show that inflation-adjusted post-tax-and-transfer income for the bottom 20 percent of households more than doubled from 1990 to 2021. Real income grew more for low-income households than for the median household. The inflation-adjusted wealth of families in the bottom 25 percent was also at an all-time high in 2022. These families saw their average real wealth triple from 1990 to 2022.
Again, you can always claim it should have been even better. I mean, we’d claim that, as we have our own preferred policies and political philosophy that we think would have worked better. But you cannot claim things are much worse now than in some mythical past.
In the 1960s, the poverty rate was above 20 percent. Using the government’s official poverty measure, poverty has fallen to 11.1 percent as of 2023, the most recent year data are available. This measures poverty on a relative basis. Of course, a relative standard will always find relative poverty. But using an absolute standard finds that income poverty is below 6 percent. On a consumption basis, well over 20 percent of households were in poverty in the 1960s, and 11 percent were in poverty in 1990. Today, the consumption poverty rate is around 1 percent.
Man does not live by bread alone. But broader measures of quality of life support the claim that there has never been a better time to be alive than the present. For instance, horrific news stories aside, the rate of violent crime in the United States has been cut in half in the past three decades. Yes, life expectancy dipped in 2020 and 2021. But after that two-year dip, life expectancy is rising again. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, life expectancy at birth increased by 1.1 years in 2022 and increased an additional 0.9 year in 2023. Life expectancy at birth is still 0.4 year lower than in 2019, prior to the pandemic. But the trend is positive, and life expectancy at birth was higher in 2023 than, for example, in 1990. Life expectancy at birth is higher in the U.S. than it is in Europe, the Americas, Asia, or Africa (higher than the continents as a whole, though some of the highest income countries do exceed the U.S., but then again the U.S. doesn’t get to exclude its poorest-performing states).
More examples of massive improvements in broader quality of life abound. By 2021, 95 percent of U.S. households had a computer and nine in 10 had a broadband internet subscription, providing historically unparalleled access to information and entertainment (and, yes, doomscrolling; we did not say everything was perfect!). The average American worker with five years of experience receives 22 days of paid time off per year compared with 16 days in 1970. From 1980 to 2013, air passenger fatalities fell from 100 per 100 billion passenger-miles to less than one fatality. The mortality rate from heart disease fell from 500 people per 100,000 in 1970 to 211 per 100,000 in 2022.
The future is even brighter. The United States today is the home of astonishing advances in healthcare and pharmaceutical innovation. We are on the verge of witnessing marvels that we cannot imagine thanks to AI and other technological breakthroughs. And even if some of these marvels start out expensive and the province of few—that passes relatively briefly. It also compares incredibly well with never getting these advances and innovations at all—the sad result that is usually brought by both far left-wing and far right-wing big government. Hint: If we all pay 85 percent less for drugs as some populists claim is coming, we might in fact get fewer new miracle cures.
Our focus has been on the United States, because we are U.S. citizens and we are writing about what’s happening in our country. But it is not a small thing that global inequality continues to fall due to huge declines in the incidence of crushing, abject poverty. One does not have to be a nefarious “globalist” to feel great joy at this amazing development. One just has to have a heart. One does not have to be a genius to recognize it as a triumph of free-market capitalism, not of autocratic government. One just has to have a brain.
We know that populists, on the right and the left, will say we miss the point as consuming a lot less—say two instead of 30 dolls—is fine if you get compensated with the joy and fulfillment of assembling very, very expensive domestically manufactured dolls all day, every day. That’s nonsense. First, the issue isn’t just two versus 30 dolls for the reasonably well-off—rather, it’s two versus zero dolls for kids in need. Second, the rose-colored remembrance of the joy and fulfillment from doing the equivalent of assembling 1950s automobiles all day is mostly a collective delusion.
Material prosperity is good. In fact, it’s first order—not something to be dismissed by zealots drunk on the moral purity of deprivation and physical labor. It’s interesting that populist politicians and opinion leaders are so excited for others—not for themselves—to leave service-sector jobs in order to stand in front of 4,000-degree blast furnaces.
In reality, two dolls are actually way better than zero, and 30 are still better than two if that is your joy (why that’s your joy is your issue). And, non-rote, non–physically draining, non–body aging labor is still better for most of us. Populists claim it is the so-called globalist elites who condescend to ordinary people. But in fact, it is populist leaders who look down on American workers and households by behaving as if everyday people don’t benefit from material prosperity, low prices, or relatively safe and comfortable jobs.
We can already hear the chorus: “Fat-cat billionaire money manager and cloistered ivory tower egghead economist think everything is just hunky dory—elites like them always do.” But to actually strengthen the American dream, we need to start from truth and hard statistical facts, not selectively chosen problems, demagogue mendacity, and convenient scapegoats designed to inflame people against each other. Despite many very real problems that we should absolutely address, the truth is pretty, pretty good.