Lydia Miljan: Why you shouldn't fear the future fpcomment
At FP Comment, we do our share of complaining. For the festive season, six wise Canadians tell us what not to complain about. What’s going well and shouldn’t be changed? Today, Lydia Miljan on why we shouldn’t fear the future.
“The End of the World as We Know It” has been the rallying cry for generations of young people, even though it took until 1987 for the rock group R.E.M. to make it into a hit song. Pop culture amplifies our concerns and projects them in many ways. For my generation, pivotal glimpses into the future were films such as the Terminator and Blade Runner, the latter released in 1982. Blade Runner has always stuck with me for its highly stylized vision of a dystopian future.
Sometimes the best way to appreciate our present condition is to contrast it with what others imagined it would be. In this case, everything Hollywood thought would get worse actually got better. Rather than being plagued by black markets and violent crimes, the Canada of 2019 enjoyed a crime rate half what it was in the 1980s. Both non-violent and violent crime have now been on the decline for decades.
Because the price of basic needs has gone down, the number of people living in absolute poverty has declined sharply, both domestically and around the world. There is still a divide between the very rich and the very poor, but the middle class is thriving — in Canada and around the world. Notwithstanding the federal government’s creation of a ministry of the middle class, this country’s middle-income earners are doing quite well, even better than their American counterparts.
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