In "Amusing Ourselves to Death," Neil Postman argued the opposite: In the 1800s, people would watch hours-long political debates for amusement and were much more politically literate (the book is more about the negative effects of telecommunication - most people know it as the inspiration for the famous Orwell vs. Huxley infographic).
In that same book, he also argued that the telegraph enabled news without context. That hit most of the US market by the 1850's. Yellow journalism and the general sensationalist nature of news writing in the late 19th and early 20th century also don't support his argument about the written word's innate superiority to oral argument and television.
Isn't that what YouTube is?
The thing he's experiencing which makes him say that we are growing more and more unfair, that's exactly what you're experiencing when you say that we've grown more unfair than 60's.
But let's really see how things are today, in the 60s, there was no Internet, so majority of the opinions were dominated by what was in the mass media, so that served as a Schelling point of opinions. Today because of free exchange of ideas on the Internet, people are just holding more precise and wider set of opinions.
Back in the day for a conservative to say that we should shut down the Dept of Education, would have met by resistance by most people around them and this opinion would be shut down. But now, you can just find people who believe exactly like you on the Internet. You can find a blogger who would talk about how eliminating DoE would work, and nurture this idea in your head, and once you have enough people, you can get politicians (who are playing a game of prisoner's dilemma) who are willing to represent your opinion in order to get an edge on their opponent.
Similarly, it would and should be unimaginable and unfeasible for someone in the 60s to hold an opinion like an average Tumblr SJW holds, but today it's perfectly feasible. But is society really more unfair than 1960s? What about 1980s? What about 1990s? When you look from the perspective of minorities, it clearly isn't.
However, a lot of young people have economic conditions in mind (which people on the left describe as 'rising economic inequality' and people on the right describe as "America losing it's place in the world"), but both these things are essentially the effect of increased globalization, observed differently, which has resulted in immense amount of prosperity for the poor people in the rest of the world. Now since the gates are open, an average American has to compete with a Chinese worker or an Indian software engineer, the true place of an American is being realized. Being the largest business in America is definitely worse than being the largest business in the world. If Facebook wasn't able to operate all over the world, then clearly Zuckerberg would be less richer than now.
But at the end of the day, the world is moving towards a more fair place. Is China more fair now? Yes, but if you believe that the role of Chinese party is to facilitate the arrival of Communism via maintenance of Socialism then you would obviously think that China is growing more unfair.
The federal Department of Education was created in 1980, so there was no DoE to eliminate in 1960. The growing centralization of education policy in the hands of ever-higher levels of government and ever more monopolistic public sectors has not worked.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-gates/bill-gates-school-p...
[2] https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/111/3/671/1839...
NASA, DARPA, and CERN would like a word with you.
Also most of the private sector innovation was due to public funding and tax code incentives (Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, etc).
So basically technology, science, medicine, and social programs must either not count as progress for your hypothesis to hold... or it's bunk.
And the public sector growth that I view as harmful is growth in social welfare programs and regulations restricting business activity.
>Especially as almost all the major innovation in that time started with tech developed from public funding.
Quite a bold statement..
Basically your idea of progress is “pure unrestrained corporatism” which is pretty horrific.
Thank god your reality doesn’t exist - we’ve seen what happens when it gets closer to that and the human cost is disgustingly high.
Progress my ass.
How are you measuring progress there? If you mean economic growth then now might be a good time to point out that correlation does now imply causation. Otherwise perhaps increasing life expectancy also causes a larger public sector? ;)
Do you have any evidence of that at all? Because I have evidence showing the opposite: eg China has an estimated public sector value of between 29% and 50%[1] and it is generally regarded as a high-growth economy (6.5%+ growth(, while somewhere like Greece (22% public sector, 0% growth) isn't.
In-fact, eyeballing that table doesn't show much apparent correlation at all. There are high-growth, high-public sector countries, high-growth, low public sector countries, low public sector, low growth AND low public sector high growth countries.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_se...
China has substantially lower levels of social welfare spending. Its healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP is 5.5% for example [2].
Labour regulations are also much less onerous. You can use IQ tests to filter candidates for example, which would be extremely illegal in the West.
[1] http://ime.bg/uploads/335309_OptimalSizeOfGovernment.pdf
[2] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.TOTL.ZS?locations...
Since when? Since the 60's? Perhaps. Since the rest of history? No. Every argument you make in the rest of your comment other than pure scope of surveillance doesn't apply if you aren't comparing in the short term, i.e. 1-2 generations.
In 1903, the average voter didn't know what the government was doing. Their understanding of economics was extremely limited, as well. I wouldn't argue that US society is much more unfair than it was in 1903 - would you?