The good old days

Megan McArdle has an uncanny knack for saying what I'm thinking:

Pretty much everything one can think of is better than ever. Wars are fewer, and kill fewer people. Everyone's richer. Racism and xenophobia are bad, but not as bad as they used to be. Women have more freedom and opportunity than at any other moment in world history. Health care is better. Our teeth are cleaner, straighter, and less cavity-filled. We know more, do more, and enjoy more than human beings ever have before. I mean, things may look pretty grim compared to the three years at the end of the last millenium, but that's life: you have good years, then you have less good years, then you have better years again.

But of course, people now in their early twenties don't really remember anything before the late Clinton administration; no wonder everything seems like it's going to hell in a handbasket. Their baseline is an unsustainable economic bubble in an unprecedented peacetime lull following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

We're living in the best times this world has ever known, but a lot of people are convinced that America is on its last legs economically and socially. Part of me believes that a big part of the problem is the horrible state of education today--children just aren't learning history in any meaningful sense. It would be really nice if we could fix education by going back to the good old days when history was taught properly. But a bigger part of me suspects that there never were any good old days when history was taught properly. I've said before that some problems have no feasible solutions--this is probably one of those cases.