It’s important to note that the main dispute over these unmeasured gains is whether they have been bigger in recent decades than in the past; the reality of such gains isn’t in dispute. [...] In that case, however, why do so many people believe that things were better in the past? Why we think too well of the past Imagining that the past was better, especially compared with the present, than it actually was has been common throughout history. [...] Whole books were written—John Kenneth Galbraith’s The New Industrial State comes to mind—largely based on the premise that GM represented the essence of the U. [...] The hype over gig work is, arguably, part of my third point: There has been a big change in what we might call the ideology of business that glamorizes what business leaders do but may simultaneously create negative perceptions about the state of workers. [...] But to the extent that commentators buy into the vision of modern business as a wild world of constant struggle in which only the paranoid survive, they may also buy into a vision of highly unstable work—a world that is very stressful and insecure for workers—which turns out not to be true.
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- United States of America
