Recently, Time magazine had a cover story that claimed the past 10 years have been " the worst decade ever." Seriously. I guess the headline writers at Time must have missed the Black Death, the 1930s, etc. Granted, there's some hedging involved. "Bookended by 9/11 at the start and a financial wipeout at the end," writes Andy Serwer, "the first 10 years of this century will very likely go down as the most dispiriting and disillusioning decade Americans have lived through in the post-World War II era." Worse than the seventies, in other words. Don't fret, though. "The next decade should be a helluva lot better than the last one," mainly because a Democrat lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The whole exercise is exhausting. I chose to read the essay as if it were an article in The Onion, which made the experience more enjoyable. Luckily, Tyler Cowen is here to offer an excellent rebuttal:
In the U.S., a lot of social indicators improved. Elsewhere Chinese growth continued, Indian growth moved into the big time (in the gross reckoning we're already at well over two billion people), a lot of Eastern Europe was successfully absorbed into the EU, Indonesia made slow but steady progress. Brazil may have turned a corner, and Africa had a better-than-lately decade in terms of economic growth. Communism didn't really come back. Admittedly the Middle East is a tougher call. Canada did strikingly well, as did Australia. There was lots of progress on public health, including in the war against AIDS. The internet truly blossomed and human creativity continued. For a lot of you it feels bad, but it's not obvious that the naughties have been such a terrible decade overall. By the way, that home prices fell was overall a good thing; the roofs on those homes still keep out the rain.
I'd add to Cowen's list the facts that America no longer has to worry about Saddam Hussein, and al Qaeda has been denied safe haven in Iraq and Afghanistan. The last decade hasn't been pretty. But it's by no means the worst.