I don’t think that the world got worse so much as the brief period of extreme wealth in the west seems to be coming to an end.

Post-WW2 USA was an outlier, and the countries it funded with countless dollars to make them stay on side in the cold war were funded by that. Every economic power except for the US was destroyed by two world wars. China, an economic powerhouse for millenia, was reduced to a poor and powerless country decades behind the West. Large parts of the middle east, once the center of science and trade, were under European control.

For America, and to some extend America’s allies, the second half of the 20th century was unmaintainable (barring a third world war). The peak of this wealth and peace seems to have been around the late 80s and 90s.

The wealth collected by people wasn’t retained well, though. In a quest for ever bigger profits, regulations and taxes were abolished all over the place. Neoliberalism has become the standard in the west, no matter if you’re voting left wing or right wing. This started happening sixty or fifty years ago.

More and more, wealth is rising to the top and not trickling down. Back when corporate taxes were high and inflation rose less steeply than wages, things were only getting better. That all slowly disappeared.

The dot com bubble, combined with the economic impact of the twin towers attack, caused a minor crisis that was a warning for things to come. In 2008 the worldwide economy, all built on bubbles that had been building for decades, took a huge hit. Countries went bankrupt, pensions vaporised, and entire industries were put on hold for a while. Very few people were building houses for a few years, because suddenly mortgages were out of reach for a lot of people.

That in turn caused a spike in the (ever present) housing shortage. Some smart but unethical people with money saw that as an opportunity to invest, because where there’s a shortage, there are prices to be raised and profits to be made.

The truth is that the 2008 crisis never really went away. Countries all around the world were slowly recovering, but in many countries the impact of the 2008 collapse is still directly visible today.

Covid is the latest nail in the coffin. The economic system we have is built on global, continuous delivery of goods and services all around the world. Things are cheap because there are very few buffers and many industries are at risk of falling behind on demand the moment a single factory shuts down, because additional production capacity would drop the price and make additional capacity economically unviable.

Well, it turns out that if China, the country that produces most of the world’s everything, shuts down its docks for a few months, everything goes to shit. At first we didn’t notice because there was still stuff in the pipelines. But then things started becoming worse.

Around the world, people stopped being able to go to work. Some because of government mandates, some because of a lack thereof and the subsequent deaths of millions. Prices of just about everything started going up all at once.

To combat this, countries borrowed money, or printed money. Healthcare costs needed funding and people needed income. Stimulus packages and loans were thought up everywhere. That kept the people from starving because of a lack of economic fluidity, but it also caused inflation to rise. Luckily, Covid was soon dealt with, as vaccines helped people return to work while the virus evolved into a much less deadly variant. Inflation was high, but it was coming down.

Then Russia decided to fuck everything up. Russia had already started its war against Ukraine in 2014, but they went through rebels and separatists in a proxy war and then held a vote. Not great, but not impossible to overcome. However, Putin decided Crimea wasn’t enough and invaded the whole of Ukraine.

Every ex-Soviet country knew what was coming for them, and so did NATO. All around the world sanctions went up in an attempt to bleed dry Russian’s war chest and to push the cronies surrounding Putin to pressure him into letting go. These sanctions hurt Russia, but also the countries that put those sanctions up.

Fuel prices rose, especially in Europe. Sunflower oil, a common basic oil for cooking, is produced in basically two countries: Ukraine and Russia. Large parts of Africa and Asia imported their grain from Ukraine as well, which now could no longer leave the harbours. This caused global food prices to increase even more, while fuel prices rose as well. It didn’t help that many oil producing countries (basically all the big ones but the USA) decided to limit production to keep prices “steady”.

While all this is happening, people are demanding higher wages. In industries where the profit margins aren’t high (i.e. European supermarkets), those increased wages translate to higher prices. In other places there is more than enough buffer to dig into, but as everybody is raising prices, the cost of higher wages may as well be compensated with higher prices to keep a “healthy” profit.

A completely unrelated problem is healthcare costs. The USA is an outlier here, but many countries are suffering from a shortage of replacements as boomers and Gen X are retiring. The boomers were with too many to reasonably support the way they supported their parents, and the systems benefiting them need to be changed in order for pensions and healthcare to remain affordable. For countries lacking workforce to compensate for the burden of the elderly, there are two options: treat the elderly worse to save money, or supplement the workforce through immigration. Neither are very popular. This isn’t a problem everywhere, but it’s having a crushing effect on a few countries or even industries.

How bad things are, depend on where you live. The housing market is fucked up worldwide, but how much so depends on how high the housing shortage and housing costs are. These prices are driven by corporate greed, but also the aftermath of the 2008 crisis and the spikes in transport and resource cost for building materials during the covid pandemic.

Things aren’t universally bad, though. Sure, my parents had it better than me, but take a look at the difference between China in the 1950s and China now. India, too; the periodic famines that the Indian subcontinent has suffered for hundreds of years (yes, even before the British made things worse) seem to be mostly gone now. Electricity and education is producing opportunities for literally hundreds of millions. In a few decades, these Asian countries have gone from “backwater nobody pays attention to” to “economic powerhouse”. The same can be seen in parts of Africa.

Even within the west, things weren’t all that hunky-dory for everyone. Racism is still around everywhere, but it’s no longer codified in laws. Woman can vote now. In my country, companies were legally obligated to fire women when they married. Up till the 70s many women had to have their husband with them to consent to them opening a bank account. This had a lasting impact even to today, with women in their sixties or younger weren’t allowed to get any higher education, leaving them stuck in dead-end jobs today.

The perfect world, as the media depicts it, never existed. It was great for the in group, but only for a short while. We can cut down on the exorbitant profits modern economies let rise to the top, but we won’t ever bring things back to the way they were before. And for billions of people, that’s an amazing thing.