We're healthier. When my grandfather was my age, 53, he had been dead for four years. And he was lucky. Ten of his 13 siblings died in childhood, leaving his mother unbearably bitter. Who could blame her? For my wife and me, losing one of our two kids is unthinkable. For our grandparents, it was expected.
As Nicholas Eberstadt writes, "population did not boom because people suddenly started breeding like rabbits, but rather because they finally stopped dying like flies: the 'population explosion' was in reality a 'health explosion.'" While my lucky grandfather died of cancer at 49, my dad beat cancer and heart disease, living to 74 in mostly good health. I should last longer still. Worldwide, life expectancy at birth more than doubled from 31 to 67 over the past century. In the United States it approaches 79.
Of course longer lives threaten (there's that word again) the finances of Social Security and Medicare, but it's worth the higher taxes and program cuts. After all, you can't take it with you.
We're better off. People complain that the rich get richer, forgetting that everyone gets richer. The New York Times recently reported that while the top 1 percent of Americans increased their real incomes by 275 percent from 1979 to 2007, average Americans increased their real incomes by 40 percent, and even the poor got 20 percent more. In short, while the rich got way richer, the poor got richer too, just more slowly. This says nothing of food stamps, Medicaid, housing aid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and progressive taxation - all of which help the poor.
