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........

© Vox