We’ve never had it as good as we do today – yet academics and social media relentless whine about everything and often compare life today to a fantasy view of the past.

By the mid-to-late 19th century, however, the hand of industrial modernity began feeding everyone at an ever-declining cost. This food surplus, in turn, created new opportunities for intellectuals to make a career out of biting it (the supply side again). One of the earliest and most famous examples was Karl Marx. While he railed against the evils of capitalism in hefty tomes, Marx survived on handouts from his wealthy comrade Friedrich Engels, who in turn got his money from his father’s cotton factories in Manchester. In other words, Marx was living off the profits of the very capitalist system he was denouncing. As historian Niall Ferguson put it in his 2011 book Civilization: The West and the Rest: “No man in history has bitten the hand that fed him with greater gusto than Marx bit the hand of King Cotton.”

The Ingratitude of the Well-Fed – Maarten Boudry’s Substack

Yet here we are – where well to do people spend their days on X telling us it is the worst of all possible times, everything is awful and it is getting worse. Even though the data do not support this at all.