The parenthetical space between Christmas and the new year is the closest thing many of us get to Jubilee, the ancient biblical holiday in which debts were forgiven and indentured servants were released from bondage. Instead of relief from the $1.2 trillion Americans hold in credit card debt or the $1.8 trillion of student debt helping Nelnet staff some of America’s least helpful customer service teams, the 2024 version of Jubilee more or less means we’re not expected to reply to emails or attend meetings. Not so at The Washington Post, where some of America’s highfalutin-est bloggers used the end-of-year break to turn their sage gazes toward the preceding 51 weeks and contemplate soberly what 2025 means for the United States of America.
The Washington Post editorial board was unanimous: the world sure is wacky, but Americans need to chill the hell out about it. Sure, things might seem bad — astute followers of American politics might be aware that we’re about to endure a second Trump term — but in some ways, things have never been better!
“There’s a fascinating interplay between alarmism and complacency, between catastrophizing about the future and idealizing the past,” wrote the Post. “A little fear is necessary to spur action; too much becomes paralyzing. […] It’s easy to lose sight of the reality that there has never been a better time to be alive. The poorest Americans have access to better medical care than the richest royals did a century ago.”
On one hand, this is a throwaway line in a self-indulgent op-ed I’m sure its own writers have already forgotten; a tear lost in the unceasing rain of content. On the other, this is grossly disrespectful of the very real indignities dumped upon normal Americans. Homelessness skyrocketed last year (even as a likely undercount); food pantries are busier than ever since the expanded Child Tax Credit expired; 26 million people don’t have health insurance; and our doddering president, when he isn’t rolling out the red carpet for a man he calls a “genuine threat to democracy,” continues to send endless money to a satellite state that has killed more Gazans than there are residents in my hometown (to say nothing of the yet-unmeasured tolls of disease and starvation).
Would the Post urge us to take comfort in the knowledge that a century ago a lot more people were dying of tuberculosis? Big fucking whoop! A third of Americans avoid health care altogether because they can’t pay for it. It’s hard to be overjoyed about advances in health care if you can’t afford to touch those advances in the first place.
This type of claim typically protrudes from the tactically annoying and professionally sycophantic: the past is a grotesque animal, and things are better on this end of the arc of time than the other, so disdain at the state of the world is hysterical and myopic. It is a brain-smoothing, self-soothing refrain which minimizes concern with the present by smiling contentedly at the great “line go up” of world history — and which, by no coincidence, validates the work of the rich and powerful people who got us here. The Post’s reminder that “there has never been a better time to be alive” is a request for calm from a group of people who have never found themselves or those they love on the grindstone. “Three cheers for progress” is something you can say when that progress has benefited you most of all.
It should be obvious that I reject this claim. It is, of course, true in a very literal sense. I would prefer to be born in 1988 than 1888. There is no question that the world contains more material wealth now than it did a century ago, and that advancements in production mean America today would be unrecognizable to someone born during the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century. (Perhaps not entirely so: they might feel right at home in a country where 1 percent of Americans own a third of the nation’s wealth, a distribution even more skewed than the robber barons’ slice of the pie.) But the machine of capitalism does not distribute progress evenly, and if we wish to maintain our integrity we should assess its performance as a function of its capacity. We must envision the world as it could be and measure the distance to the real. An uncritical celebration of history is a lazy one.
The Post is right about health care in one sense. In general, people don’t die as soon as they used to. Take infant mortality, for example: how many children die within a year of birth. These rates have plummeted — from around 70 per 1,000 births in 1925 to 5.6 in 2022. This improvement was largely led by the development of public health infrastructure rather than advancements in medical technology like the Post might imply, but it’s obviously outstanding (if still 20 percent higher than peer countries). But these gains are not shared equally.
In 2022, 10.9 out of 1,000 Black children died before their first birthday. That’s more than twice the rate of white children — 4.5 per 1,000. Like nearly everything in American health care, health outcome disparity is distributed along the lines of race. Or, more accurately, racism. There is no inherent propensity toward dying during infancy which explains the discrepancy between Black and white infant mortality; there is no natural law compelling Black babies to die at twice the rate of white babies. We are offered a benchmark: if it is possible for white infant mortality to hit 4.5 per 1,000, it must also be possible for Black infant mortality to hit 4.5 per 1,000 in parallel. It has not.
This gap has exploded over the past century. Black infant mortality was 1.5 times white infant mortality in the early 1920s, and now it’s 2.4 times as high — a 60 percent increase. Black infants die at a relative rate higher than what we saw before the Civil Rights Act, even when the education levels and income of their mothers are controlled. Within this great wave of progress is countervailing destructive force to which only some Americans are victims. Should they be reassured by a reminder that things were worse in the past?
Singh GK, Yu SM. “Infant Mortality in the United States, 1915-2017: Large Social Inequalities have Persisted for Over a Century.” International Journal of MCH and AIDS 2019.
On the other end of the stick, we have life expectancy. Let’s give it up for the status quo: life expectancy has increased from 58 a hundred years ago to around 78 today. Which, generally, is good news! But here too the gains are concentrated among the powerful, who only sometimes drag the rest of us up with them.
Before Covid, rich men lived 15 years longer than poor men and rich women lived 10 years longer than poor women. (A study of life expectancy in California during 2020–2021 saw the gap widen by two additional years.) As in infant mortality, that gap has increased. The Brookings Institution found that among people born in the 1970s the life expectancy difference between rich and poor women was about 3.5 years — which means the gap has almost tripled in the 50 years since. This was not a rising tide lifting all boats; this change was driven primarily by an extension of rich lives, while the lengths of poor lives stayed flat.
The causes of early death among low-income people — heart disease, gun violence, overdoses, coronavirus — are associated with the economic deprivation of poor and rural areas when extractive industries dominate regional economies, consolidating wealth and natural resources among a small number of wealthy corporations and their shareholders, who use their political and economic power to preserve their predatory status until they either leave or are outmaneuvered by even more powerful movements of industry. The gains of the wealthy come from the labor of the poor. This life expectancy difference represents an aggregate theft of millions of years of life.
Does this not warrant cynicism? Is it so short-sighted to disdain the uncritical celebration of modernity? The well-founded perception of being fucked over reasonably asterisks the celebration of progress. Am I meant to celebrate that millions of Americans may exist near medical treatments that will ruin their lives? Ought I take the Post’s advice and say “Wahoo!” for advances in health care when 20 percent of Americans have medical debt they believe they’ll never pay off — debt which prevents them from seeking further care they need? I might interrogate the value in turning to a man dying bankrupt from heart disease and saying, “Cheer up! It could have been tuberculosis!”
The Washington Post ends its paean to letting the good times roll with a resolution. “Rather than assume the worst,” it says, “let’s resolve to do everything we can to help engineer the best possible outcome for the world.” I maintain that this feat of engineering requires understanding thoroughly the blueprint by which the current world was constructed. Even sweatshop sweetheart Nicholas Kristof understands that suffering on this level is a policy choice — a political construct which must be met with political power. It is something between cynical and self-indulgent to look out at the world, wave one’s hands, and declare, “Sure hope this gets better soon!” and yet this is precisely what the authors of “progress” fanfiction urge us to do.
It is possible to hold two thoughts at once. One, a century of technological, medical, and social developments have been tremendously good for millions and millions of people and should be celebrated; and two, that these benefits have not fallen upon all God’s children alike, and that this gap constitutes a hideous moral failure: that there was the potential to do more, and that we in this great and celebrated wave of progress refused to do it. Sitting on our hands and fantasizing about inevitable progress will do nothing to relieve those who suffer now, in the real world. This failure will continue unabated, the gap ever stretching, until we muster the political force required to abolish it.
