Why Our "Amazing" Science Fiction Future Fizzled 499
An anonymous reader sends in a story at CNN about how our predictions for the future tend to be somewhat accurate (whether or not we can do a thing) yet often too optimistic (whether or not it's practical). Obvious example: jetpacks. Quoting:
"Joseph Corn, co-author of 'Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future,' found an inflated optimism about technology's impact on the future as far back as the 19th century, when writers like Jules Verne were creating wondrous versions of the future. Even then, people had a misplaced faith in the power of inventions to make life easier, Corn says. For example, the typical 19th-century American city was crowded and smelly. The problem was horses. They created traffic jams, filled the streets with their droppings and, when they died, their carcasses. But around the turn of the 20th century, Americans were predicting that another miraculous invention would deliver them from the burden of the horse and hurried urban life — the automobile, Corn says. 'There were a lot of predictions associated with early automobiles,' Corn says. 'They would help eliminate congestion in the city and the messy, unsanitary streets of the city.' Corn says Americans' faith in the power of technology to reshape the future is due in part to their history. Americans have never accepted a radical political transformation that would change their future. They prefer technology, not radical politics, to propel social change."
Ego (Score:5, Insightful)
Today's "exciting new technologies" are all based on exploiting people's egos. Twitter, Facebook, blogs, mobile devices allowing you to do all of these things on the move—this is what people would claim is revolutionary and liberating use of modern technology—but in reality it is a massive trap, and fantastically annoying for those of us who can shut the fuck up.
(The captcha required for posting this message was "contempt").
Um? (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
easy solution (Score:2, Insightful)
And? (Score:2, Insightful)
'There were a lot of predictions associated with early automobiles,' Corn says. 'They would help eliminate congestion in the city and the messy, unsanitary streets of the city.'
Okay, so how well has it done? Obviously we still have congestion (better than it was? worse? I don't know) and obviously we have pollution problems associated with cars but how does that compare to the problems we had before? Have they been a big step forwards or not? I don't see how the article can use this example to mock people's ability to forecast the effects of technology when it doesn't comment at all on whether cars have in fact resulted in more sanitary streets. I don't know how bad the horse shit and carcases problem was but by the sounds of things, the cars are an improvement and the prognosticators of the time were broadly right.
We're much less optimistic now! (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems to me these days (certainly here in the UK) we have almost no sense of optimism about progress. In the middle of the last century when so much SciFi was created, there was this grand humanistic notion, that one day technology would solve all the wrongs of the world, and we'd all live in peace and harmony e.g. Star Trek.
These days our optimism has shriveled and died, so that now we no longer dream of a utopia - we just dream of getting by without too much discomfort, and it seems to me like modern SciFi (where it exists) reflects this.
Re:I still prefer technology (Score:2, Insightful)
I think they were hoping for a change for the better, not the worse.
Pfft, give me a break (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, I didn't read this book, but if the capsule is even remotely accurate, I'm glad I didn't. The capsule claims that Corn tries to equate the cities of 100 years ago with today's and suggest that cars didn't _really_ change anything for the better, just changed which pile of crap we had.
I have lots of photographs of Toronto from the turn of the last century. For instance, the photos of people getting rid of their garbage by dropping it off at the dump - the end of a pier on Lake Ontario. Cities, in spite of being much smaller than they are and thus having to deal with a much smaller problem, were smelly, dirty, disease ridden dumps.
If anyone thinks the city of today, even with all of their very real problems, is anything even _remotely_ like the city of 100 years ago, they're idiots.
You get this all the time in anti-progress screeds, the "well we traded one problem for another", and then they just leave that hanging, like one problem is exactly the same as another. As Azimov noted, however, this ignores any change in quality. For instance, people used to think the world was flat like a pizza, then they thought it was a perfect sphere. They were wrong too, but, and this is the critical point, a sphere is "more right" than a pizza. THAT is how science works, approaching the asymptote.
And that's what technology is doing to. Yeah, cars running on gas suck, but only because we have three times the population and everyone's got one. If the world population was still only 1 billion and 99.9% of them could not afford one, then cars would be see as the miraculous inventions they said they were going to be. It took 50 years before anyone realized they might even have downsides, and another 50 before we've started getting seriously about fixing them. That's because of how amazingly great they are, not the other way around! And just for the record, I don't own a car, I bike to work or ride the subway.
Maury
I *am* living in the furture.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Amnesia (Score:5, Insightful)
See, the real issue here is that the guy doesn't actually remember, say, 1960. We may not have flying cars, but we have cross country plane trips for $14 (in 1960 dollars). We don't have videophones, but we've got Skype with video on computers -- and it's free. We're very rarely arrested for being queer, we're rarely getting arrested for voting while incorrectly complected, no one anywhere in the world has smallpox, and hardly anyone has polio. Famines are the result of political disruptions and the thuggery of Mugabe and his ilk, not lack of food.
Re:I still prefer technology (Score:5, Insightful)
Does the American Revolution not count as a radical political transformation? Federal republics were not common in 1776.
Re:An alternate theory (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly! Compared to 100 years ago, most people living in western nations are richer than their grand/parents. Standards of living have improved hugely. See issues like antibiotics, refridgeration, ubiquitous electricty, satellite television, long distance phone calls for pennies (or less), instant access to enourmous troves of information, lives that are decades longer, births that are far less fatal to mother and baby...
"Rich" is and always has been relative. Even lower-middle-class folks today enjoy personal amenities and creature comforts that some proverbial, rich, artistocratic Duke of Earl would have considered god-like magic only a few generations ago. The child of a wealthy industry magnate, only some years back, couldn't - for any ammount of money - have had a cochlear implant as now seen in plenty of average (but hearing impaired) kids today. It's absurd to compare one person's cash on hand with someone else's (as a measure of wealth) and to ignore comparisons to the vast reach of human history... compared to which billions of people live like kings.
Re:Um? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Flyin Cars (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know about you, but I don't ever want to see flying cars. Most people can barely figure out how to safely operate a wheeled car in two dimensions. Imagine how nuts it would be if we added a third.
Never? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry but I think Corn is dead wrong on this assertion. America was founded on a radical political transformation and the abolition of slavery and the end of segregation are both radical transformations that have arguably changed the future of all Americans more than any single technology.
Re:Amnesia (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:An alternate theory (Score:3, Insightful)
Today, even a poor man today can purchase strawberries in the dead of winter. And they are larger, sweeter strawberries than any that could be had at any other time in history. Magic.
It's not about prediction [Re:Flyin Cars] (Score:5, Insightful)
As a SF writer, let me point out that the "predictions" of SF are very often more about what makes interesting storytelling, and not accurate predictions of what real life is going to be a hundred years from now. If the choice is between putting a "gosh, wow" element in the story, or putting in a boring element-- well, it's a story. If you want predictions, you should be writing nonfiction.
Re:Vested interests (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The real reason. (Score:5, Insightful)
What? The streets are allot cleaner now than they were 100 years ago. We still suffer from congestion, but the streets have a hell of allot better throughput. I can eat almost any food all year round by walking down the street and buying it from the same supermarket that I buy a mortgage from. I have instant access to almost all publicly available knowledge and a reasonable chance of living over a century, and after I post this it's likely to be seem almost immediately by many people from all over the world.
When I'm bored I can go anywhere in the world by flying there, and when I'm sick my doctor can build an extremely accurate 3d model of my insides and probably help me. Culturally religious magical thinking is becoming a niche in much of the developed world.
Things may not live up to the wildest dreams of people from Jules Vernes day, but much of our world must seem pretty incredible.
Re:easy solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, have you ever used a search engine and tried to filter through the utter fucking tripe from morons who have no clue about anything but will happily talk about it as if an expert?
Re:easy solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Since he claims to be able to shut up, maybe he should. :-)
Never? (Score:3, Insightful)
"Americans have never accepted a radical political transformation that would change their future." Apparently Corn flunked American History in high school.
Greed (Score:5, Insightful)
Ego might be basis greed, so maybe we agree, but I'd say it was Greed that messed up our "future." Look at the example in TFS - motor vehicles cleaning up our cities. Well the thing is they could have done a lot. Why hasn't this happened? Because instead of moving from some people having horse-drawn carriages or draft horses and wagons, we've moved to every person having a car. Am I arguing that only a few people should have cars? No, of course not. I'm arguing that there should be more public transport. Buses are much faster than horse and carriages, they carry many more people. We could have moved from horse and carriage to a decent bus service and taxis as needed. And if we had done en masse, they'd both be much cheaper than what we pay for a journey today. But no - there was big money to be made in everyone having their own car and the public lapped it up. The invention of the tractor could have meant much more leisure time for a society that had a large agricultural base, but instead, due to unequal wealth distribution, it just meant one person working even longer hours and a lot of people desperately trying to find something else to do. That pattern has been seen again and again, resulting in increasingly pointless jobs as surplus labour attempts to justify an income. Am I arguing against progress? Of course not - I'm arguing that everybody should get some of the benefit of it so that they can direct their energies to something more profitable to all of us rather than becoming telemarketers.
Modern society should be directing its energies toward achieving better things and then we would see some of the promise of new technologies better realised. Instead, society directs much of its energy toward stopping progress by trying to keep as many people as possible as busy as possible whether that has a purpose or not.
Re:Ego (Score:5, Insightful)
Those are NOT exciting new technologies. NOTHING about Twiiter, facebook or blogs is a new technology but a different use for an old one.
NEW Technologies right now are being hindered by Greed and control. I should have a Box in my living room (well I do, but it's illegal) that I can turn on the TV and get all the info I want, wathc the TV show I want, or watch the new program I want. Listen to the new music, or old music, etc...
I can build this box, and have the future of media and news, but I'm breaking federal laws to have it work. Greeedy asshats want to keep their old business models so they fight the windows of change. My newspaper, last news broadcast, TV, music should all be 100% on demand on my TV. I'd even GLADLY pay for it. But I cant. The "free stuff" is either locked to being viewed on a PC, or so low resolution that it's not worth watching.
The Panacea of information that is seen in every star-trek tv show and movie CAN be a reality today. but rampant greed and control-mongers make it impossible.
TV channels are a stuipid idea now. I dont want to watch ABC, I want to watch Lost and the Office. I dont want to watch Sci-Fi I want to watch specific shows. The ONLY Television source that make any sense for the old tv channel model is CNBC news type channels and Sports channels. Everything else needs to be on demand files I can download and watch at my leisure. This is just for information access, Look at stem cell research, and many other technological advances being hampered or beaten down for no real reason.
This is not the future, this is the NOW. and we are not allowed it because of really really stupid reasons.
Human progress is not hampered by technological problems, it's hampered by stupidity and greed. This has ALWAYS been the case throughout history.
I am certain that OOgh was exiled over his wheel thingy because it would have hurt the drag sled industry and it was considered a heresy against he popular religion.
Today, we simply pass laws to limit technological advances and progress. And if that does not work, Uninformed masses afraid of the bogeyman will work just as well... Ooooh Nuclear energy OHHHHHH!
Technology is both a blessing and a curse (Score:5, Insightful)
As technology progresses some jobs are destroyed while others are created but need more education and training to qualify for.
Automobiles made the Buggy and Buggy Whip jobs go away. When robots replaced people on the assembly line, there was robot repair jobs.
Before the Word Processor and Laser Printer, companies used to hire a room full of a hundred typists to type up copies of memos and letters. But now one person can print out 100 copies with a Laser Printer. But there needs to be an IT staff on duty to fix the Laser Printer or Computer that the Word Processor is installed on.
All politics has done is limit what we can and cannot do with technology. Real change does not come from technology or politics, it comes from people deciding to change their ways for the better of the world. Technology was invented to make things easier to do, but it leads to sloth and greed and other negative things. You can get more things done with technology than you can without it, but people tend to get slothful or greedy. Technology companies have to keep coming up with new versions of technology in order to keep earning money, that is greed. Who says the 4.0 version isn't as good as the 7.0 version? Most likely the company that developed it. Meanwhile some people are satisfied with the 4.0 version and don't need to buy the 7.0 version, while others claim that even the 7.0 version isn't as good enough.
When I was young I loved calculators because they made doing Math easier. My father called it a crutch, claimed that if I did Math via the calculator I wouldn't be able to do Math in my head and I used the calculator as a crutch. Technology is a crutch, we use it and sometimes it causes us not to be able to do things on our own. We become dependent on technology to get things done. If there is a crisis and we can no longer have electricity due to a shortage of fossil fuels, how can we function without technology? Maybe the Amish have a point that technology is idleness?
Re:Flyin Cars (Score:5, Insightful)
We're already living the the future.
Re:political change is stopped via constitution (Score:3, Insightful)
it is that our Federal Constitution was designed by the rich aristocrats to STIFLE political change and to DISEMPOWER the voters
Yes, the constitution makes radical change either take a long time or take an overwhelming majority.
This is NOT a bad thing. nor does it "disempower" the voters.
Re:easy solution (Score:1, Insightful)
An expert is a moron with a crowd that wants to listen to him.
Re:Greed (Score:3, Insightful)
Look at the example in TFS - motor vehicles cleaning up our cities. Well the thing is they could have done a lot.
They have done a lot. You can argue about whether cars have done as much good as can possibly be done (nothing achieves that ideal), but cars have accomplished a huge amount for this country. Take any city (even small ones), look at the traffic, and imagine if it was entirely horse traffic. There would be more pollution (although it would take a different form), more traffic (because horses are slower), more maintenance, and it would take people longer to get where they are going.
So, cars have had an amazing positive impact. If you think they can do more, that's a separate argument.
Re:The real reason. (Score:3, Insightful)
I had detailed moving pictures of my son months before he was born and those in 'poverty' live better than kings and queens of 200 years ago.
Re:Flyin Cars (Score:2, Insightful)
Shit, I must be living in the past - I pay $Texas/MB for the same service!
Re:Greed (Score:4, Insightful)
Take any city (even small ones), look at the traffic, and imagine if it was entirely horse traffic. There would be more pollution (although it would take a different form), more traffic (because horses are slower), more maintenance, and it would take people longer to get where they are going.
You're neglecting the effects that the automobile has had on the growth of cities and even the entire human population as well as our perception of travel. I don't think we would have had such a growth explosion without the ability to move people and goods quickly and in bulk.
I have read (probably here, actually) that the average person with a car today spends more time in transit than did people of antiquity, and this fits in with the general rush of modern life. So you can say "if we replaced cars with horses now, it would be a mess," and you're be right, but it is a meaningless assertion.
Re:Flyin Cars (Score:3, Insightful)
See the other comment about the ice buildup.
You're essentially asking computers to be perfect, coping with weather hazards that experienced pilots simply avoid. A skilled, responsible pilot will choose to simply not fly when the weather starts to get dangerous. He could choose otherwise and probably avoid crashing because of the weather. Probably. But that's not nearly good enough, so he stays on the ground.
What do you want your computerized flying car to do when it's probably safe to fly? And what about when it's completely safe to fly and the weather turns bad halfway there? You'd have to land somewhere and wait.
Flying cars are not really analogous to cars because flying is not like driving. Piloting an aircraft can't be done casually.
And if you're going to be relying completely on a computerized autopilot, that thing will have to be designed to avoid risks like commercial airline pilots avoid risks. It couldn't ever take any chances.
Re:Greed (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a very important and widely ignored point. We have forgotten that the economy is supposed to serve the people, never the other way around.
It's truly amazing how much energy our current economic system obligates us to put in to entirely unproductive (or even anti-productive) activities such as convincing people they cannot live without products of dubious value that ultimately bring little satisfaction to their owners. We spend truly gigantic amounts of energy and cash moving people around every day simply because so many managers can't believe things are getting done if they don't see people hunched over a desk. I sometimes get the feeling that we've re-defined job satisfaction to mean anything better than praying for an early death for 8 hours a day.
Economists claim that capitalism is based on rational thinking, yet situations where perfectly good products are destroyed to save on shipping costs have become common. Apparently, giving them away or selling at a deep discount is out of the question.
Re:Greed (Score:5, Insightful)
As for why sci-fi of fifty years didn't come true, why would it? It was just made-up ideas. Science fiction is just that, not a guarantee of anything.
Re:Greed (Score:1, Insightful)
Look at the example in TFS - motor vehicles cleaning up our cities. Well the thing is they could have done a lot. Why hasn't this happened?
It did happen. Cities are so much cleaner and smell so much nicer than they used to that it is practically a miracle. You kids today have no idea how awful cities used to be. I still don't like them and they still smell bad, but they are nothing compared to the filthy hell-holes they used to be.
Re:Greed (Score:4, Insightful)
Go back a few centuries and show today's world to an average person. They'll beg to come back to the 21st century with you.
The geek in the rear view mirror (Score:5, Insightful)
I have read that the average person with a car today spends more time in transit than did people of antiquity
Well, of course he does.
There is an old saying - Indian, I believe - that language changes every twenty-five miles.
Unless you lived as a nomad - followed the herds of elk or buffalo - you lived and died within that fixed twenty-five circle through almost the whole of human history.
The average person of antiquity couldn't afford to keep a horse.
That put you in the Equine class. The minimum financial requirement for entry into the Senate.
The average person of antiquity didn't have the right to travel. He was bound to the land or to his craft.
The road is a military road. The rider an imperial courier.
Re:Ego (Score:5, Insightful)
'Maybe today's "exciting new technologies" will create programs capable of telling when a lazy ass reporter is lifting entire paragraphs straight from Robert Heinlein's Expanded Universe.'
Well, it makes a change from lazy ass reporters lifting entire articles straight from Wikipedia. Of course, anyone wanting to write a piece about 'Why Our "Amazing" Science Fiction Future Fizzled' would probably be better off stealing their material from William Gibson's 'The Gernsback Continuum':
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/it/1988/1/1988_1_34.shtml [americanheritage.com]
'The books on Thirties design were in the trunk; one of them contained sketches of an idealized city that drew on Metropolis and Things to Come, but squared everything, soaring up through an architect's perfect clouds to zeppelin docks and mad neon spires. That city was a scale model of the one that rose behind me. Spire stood on spire in gleaming ziggurat steps that climbed to a central golden temple tower ringed with the crazy radiator flanges of the Mongo gas stations. You could hide the Empire State Building in the smallest of those towers. Roads of crystal soared between the spires, crossed and recrossed by smooth silver shapes like beads of running mercury. The air was thick with ships: giant wing-liners, little darting silver things (sometimes one of the quicksilver shapes from the sky bridges rose gracefully into the air and flew up to join the dance), mile-long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were gyrocopters...the Future had come to America first, but had finally passed it by. But not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, we'd gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose.'
Re:The real reason. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Greed (Score:4, Insightful)
A+ for the logical fallacy.
The question is whether 1709 Bostonian would prefer 2009 Boston, or 1709 Somali would prefer 2009 Mogadishu.
Even then the latter question is moot, since the GP was referring to the progress born of technology. That modern technology has not taken root in Somalia rather makes the comparison irrelevant. As for war zones, I have no doubt that a veteran of a colonial war in 1709 would vastly prefer his odds of survival in a modern war zone. A Baghdad Iraqi civilian has a hell of a lot better chance of surviving than say, a Pequot civilian did.
Re:I *am* living in the furture.... (Score:3, Insightful)
The difference is that your Father wanted to know how things work because he was used to fixing things.
That really is not true. The teenager with an iPhone is just as much as an expert on the iPhone as your farther was with a car. You farther might have known how to replace various components, but dump him into a factory making engine parts and he is helpless. He certainly couldn't make a simple rubber gasket and wouldn't even be able to tell you where the raw materials to make it come from.
We tend to work on the surface of things because that is where we get the most rewards. Your farther doesn't know how to make a rubber gasket because even if he could make one, he would rarely use that knowledge. He is better off learning where to put a gasket and judge if one is damaged. The same is true for a teenager using an iPhone. She can't even begin to contemplate how to make a simple transistor. With some serious studying she might stand a rough chance of learning the phone on a component level such that she can determine after much pain if she has a leaky transistor and perhaps might be able to replace it. She could do that, or she could just learn how to crack and mod her iPhone to make it all manner of useful things.
Learning how to repair a car at a component level is useful because there is not much else to do beyond cosmetics other than to learn how to repair and upgrade it. Repairing an iPhone on the other hand is a waste. It is a skill you might use once ever two years and it will save you a trivial amount of money. Learning how to manipulate the software on the other hand is something that is always useful.
I think that people are just as curious as they always have been. We just like getting the most bang for our buck in terms of curiosity. With a car, that means knowing how to repair the car and save yourself a few thousand dollars. In an almost disposable iPhone, it means cracking the phone's software open and making it do things it was never meant to do.
Re:Ego (Score:4, Insightful)
What? (Score:3, Insightful)
Americans have never accepted a radical political transformation that would change their future.
But what about:
- The American Revolution
- The Civil War with respect to slavery (Dred Scott, Emancipation)
- The Civil War with respect to state's rights (or lack of them)
- The establishment of Selective Service
- The establishment of income tax and the IRS
- The trade union movement
- Prohibition
- The repeal of Prohibition
- The New Deal
- The Cuban embargo of 1962
- The civil rights movement of the 1960s
- The Vietnam anti-war movement
- The Reagan "Morning in America" movement of the 1980s
- The gay rights movement of the 1990s-2000s
Every one of these changed the future for vast numbers of Americans and arose through political means. So how can you say only technology has changed the future in America? Or are you saying something different from that?
Armchair Progress (Score:1, Insightful)
The problem with people & new technologies is that they want to use them just like the old technology. They don't want to change themselves when what they do and how they do it is often the fundamental problem. Horses are in fact a good example. Although they replaced horses they were used in the same way (in part because an infrastructure of roads etc already existed) and therefore the same problems persist. When a new technology comes along that could solve some of the problems they won't touch it becuase of the changes it would require. Take for example electric cars. A perfect technology, no, but people won't use it because they can't envision adapting. In reality the long "fill" time means not so much waiting around at a filling station for hours but never having tocall into a filling station again becuase you would take 1 minute if that to plug the car in when you got home. The range is fine for pretty much 98% of all trips you would ever make but if you can't tow your boat across the continent what good could it possibly be!
Renewable energy sources are treated the same way. Instead of looking at an alternative strategy to only a single or maybe two energy sources without any buffering wind, solar and other sources are dismissed because they cannot singly supply the current peak loads. What seems to be wanted is a single source of energy that allows us to waste as much as possible and doesn't have any impact at all - well at least in our own back yards.
The result? We are stuck without real progress. There are lots of ways in which various technologies can solve problems but we have to change ourselves. Sometimes the change is nothing more than allowing something to happen, Living in Western Australia I speak from some experience. Our problem? Huge population growth with limited (very) water. Solution. Use less. A lot less. And that's what we have done. We still have nice gardens and plenty to drink and in the time we have created our two new desalination plants have made life a lot easier. But believe it or not there are still people who say we need more water so we can go back to wasting it!
Most times we need to change either the way we are or the way we think about things to benefit from what we are being offered as improvements. But we still need to be careful of the miracle-mongers or the scare tacticians who just want to keep their entrenched position.
Re:I disagree! (Score:3, Insightful)
A teacher.
We'll ALWAYS be dissapointed (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think a person from the 1930s would be disappointed by 2009.
No, but a person from the 50's would. And maybe even the 40's. Look at the 39-40 World's Fair. Much of it actually came true in function... interstate highways, every home with a washer and dryer, etc... but humans are kind of funny when it comes to wanting things. Once we get them, we're bored. "Been there, done that" is human nature. But even more than that, we reached the future, and even though we got much of what was predicted, we didn't get it in nearly the kind of beautiful forms we imagined. Our buildings don't look majestic like the Chrysler Building or the Empire State Building. Now they're either plain, steel and glass boxes, or twisted grotesques like Frank Gehry's works.
We reached the future, and it was ugly and soulless and boring.
And the people of the 50's? Where are our moon bases? Where are our ships patrolling Saturn? The answer is, we got to the moon, and then said "been there, done that".
Humanity has a tendency to imagine either wonderful, Utopian futures, or horrible, hellish futures. And usually, neither are correct. We live somewhere in the boring middle, because that's what reality is.
Re:An alternate theory (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly! Thank you. That system isn't exactly a monument to liberty, is it?
OK, so you don't like the fact that some of the taxes you have to pay are used to support the unemployed.
Fine. So vote for someone who will get rid of Social Security.
Your problem seems to be that you don't like how your taxes get spent. Fair enough! But your problem is not that there isn't enough freedom where you live; your problem is that the politicians that got elected don't do what you want them to do. Tough shit, bro! But you're still able to vote for whomever you like in the next election, and until then, you're free to try to convince people to see things your way.
Being able to campaign for the policies you want: that's freedom.
Being able to vote for whomever you want to vote for: that's freedom.
Being able to run for public office yourself, if you don't like any of the other candidates: that's freedom.
Having to put up with policies you don't like, because the politicians you like lost the election: well, that's freedom, too. Deal with it.
"Dictatorship" isn't really the right word. "Totalitarianism" would be a better fit. Though the "benign" dictatorship of western European countries, which provide dubious cradle-to-grave "care" for their hugely taxed citizens is paternalistic and unavoidable if you're born there.
I was born there (Western Europe) and I've also lived here (United States) for 10 years. Call me brainwashed, but I don't think that either of those places is ruled by a dictatorship or a totalitarian government. When people get fed up, they vote for someone else. The fact that people in Europe tend to support slightly more "liberal" or "socialist" governments, compared to the U.S., is not because they are forced to... it's just a choice they make.
And it is a choice that they get to reconsider every four years. Free elections, you know?
Re:Shame on you (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do you want to define it that way?
Because "rich" and "poor" is relative, and "middle class" is defined as being between those two relative states. You know, "middle."
Suppose an omnipotent being offered to transform society as follows: all the inventions of the last 300 years would be erased, but you, personally, would be 1000 times richer than the average miserable sod. I would not take that deal -- I'd lose access to computers, modern medicine, and lots of other stuff that I love.
Are you being deliberately obtuse? Yes, we as a whole are better off. No, I don't want all of society to be worse off in exchange for being comparatively better off. Where was that implied?
I'd rather be an average shmoe in 2009 -- even if I'm not middle-class, by your definition -- than fabulously wealthy in 1709. I don't care if the gap between me and the "rich" increases exponentially, if it means things keep getting better for me.
Ok. Obviously. So would I. What the hell is your point? That 2009 is better than 1709? No shit. If you were living in 1709 you'd be happy being being middle class then because it was better than middle class from 1509. Would you be happy living in 2009 with a standard of living from the middle class of 1709? No? Why not? It's still an improvement over the middle class of 1509 and by your definition all that matters is that there is an improvement over time!
That's why you can't compare it to the past. You don't compare the standard of living of today directly with the standard of living of the past. It's simply not applicable. Nobody can have access to computers, cars, or modern medicine in 1709 because those things did not exist. It was impossible for even the stinking rich to have. You are therefore not making a comparison of wealth.
Wealth is what you can afford based on things that currently exist. So the only way to make a valid comparison is to examine how the richest of the rich live today. The define what is possible. Then you compare how far away you are from them. Then you compare how far away people in the equivalent class in 1709 were from their upper class. Now you're comparing wealth: what you can afford that actually exists in your time.
It seems like you would hurt the living standards of average people simply out of spite for the rich. Shame on you.
I never implied the rich getting poorer is an acceptable compromise to the expansion of the middle class. Obviously that implies we're all worse off. However, everyone's wealth should increase proportionally at the very least (assuming better technology but no social advances) and ideally, the gap between the classes should diminish by having the wealth in the lower and middle classes increase at a faster rate than the upper class (everyone has increased access to the resources of the time).