I swing between viewing the world today as being a worse, more dangerous place, or the pretty-much-the-same place of my youth. If I look closely at the 1970's, for example, I note that there was a continuing war in Vietnam, a number of proxy wars in Asia and Africa, a massive number of nuclear weapons, wars in the Middle East, as well as high inflation and unemployment in the West. Military juntas had seized power in Chile and a number of African states. There was actually a lot of bad stuff (did I mention Pol Pot?) going around, to coin an academic phrase.

Today we know much more about climate and how we might prevent making it unbearable in the future, there are fewer nuclear weapons though more nuclear powers and there are wars but not as many as before. Living standards across the globe are higher, medicine is better - in fact there is much to like about how things have improved, by certain metrics.

On the other hand, public behaviour and discourse has declined, crazy conspiracy theories are believed and a new form of extreme thinking has emerged on both the left and the right, heedless of the historical record. Mental illness seems to have exploded and there is little doubt that mainstream popular music is poorer melodically and lyrically. I just threw that last one in.

I'd like to get a set of old fashioned scales and set them up to see which era has the worst (heaviest) record. But this is all too subjective anyway and tomorrow I might come back with a different list altogether.