“We’re really bad at looking back in time,” Hampton said, speaking of his fellow sociologists. “You overly idealize the past. It happens today when we talk about technology. We say: ‘Oh, technology, making us isolated. We’re disengaged.’http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/magazine/technology-is-not-driving-us-apart-after-all.html?hpw&rref=magazine&_r=0
Compared to what? You know, this kind of idealized notion of what community and social interactions were like.”
Although this researcher has maybe never taken an econ
class, he is a great economist because he asks the question "Compared to
What?"
Then when we make the comparison, we have to make sure we
are comparing apples to apples as opposed to comparing our imperfect lives with
some romanticized, unreal version of the past that never existed.
It does not matter the issue, we do this all the time. It’s nostalgia.
Whether it is issues like community involvement, crime,
college access, the supposed shrinking middle class, and many others, when you
make comparisons, make sure you are making a comparison to some something that
really existed, not an idealized, embellished version of it.
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