> I would offer that I think we are more worried about dystopia because we are so much more aware of all of the ways the world can turn into a dystopia, but I don't think that necessarily tracks with the actual likelihood of dystopia.

Unless you live in part of the world that became dystopian in the last 30 years, any optimism you had in the '90s that dystopia was far away was not false confidence. It was borne out by the facts.

If you feel less optimistic now, that might be due to valid concerns, and it might also be borne out by the facts. We'll see.

I also don't think people in the '90s were poorly informed compared to now. Sure they didn't have much of Wikipedia, but on the other hand, nonfiction journalism was in a better state and the internet (although less widespread) was also not as finely tuned to create information bubbles.

I think in the 90’s, people were just a single digit number of years removed from the end of the Cold War, just a few decades removed from the Great Leap Forward, another few decades from the holocaust and gulags, not to mention WW2, which had a combat death toll that is just utterly unimaginable today, but which was comparable to WW1, just a few decades before that. Then there was the Spanish Flu in there. That just barely covers the past hundred years, but there were a ton of people alive in the 90’s who had lived through all of that. Anyone born since the late 80’s has lived through basically nothing like that.

Certainly, lots of bad stuff has happened in the meanwhile, but in my opinion, nothing that remotely approaches WW2 or the Great Leap Forward as far as death and destruction, and I think it’s hard to argue that anything like that is more likely to happen in the future than it was in the 90’s (which also gave us attempted genocide in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda). I think people in the 90’s were informed, but they weren’t bombarded with negativity the way people are today. That’s not because there wasn’t negativity around.

I don’t remember where I saw it, but someone had a post about how far the Overton window has shifted in politics, and compared quotes from Bill Clinton on immigration in the 90’s to quotes from modern day Republicans (if I recall, they sound almost identical) to emphasize just how much our sensibilities have changed, which was another illustration for me of how our perception of the nearness of dystopia is not necessarily very accurate.

Ok the contrary, I feel we are not aware enough. Recently the atomic bulletin of scientists put the doomsday clock to 100 seconds, even closer than the Cuban missile crisis. The reason they gave were tensions with Russia. That’s a huge threat, and it’s not getting much attention.

Really you would think today we shouldn’t have to be worried about wars with Russia or China, and having endless, escalating conflicts in the Middle East. Not to mention the environmental crisis.

Runaway oligarchism in another concern, ever since the 70’s income inequality has gotten significantly worse.

This is perhaps interesting as a meta-example, because I’m confident that I would trust in the institution behind the Doomsday Clock during the Cold War.

In today’s climate, I don’t. It becomes just another menacing signal where I don’t have the time, energy, or even ability, to untangle whatever web of alliances is motivating them to scare me.

The "Doomsday Clock" is a biased and meaningless political statement. There are no objective criteria for measuring our proximity to Armageddon. Relations with Russia are poor but we're nowhere near nuking each other.

We could set up a prediction market.

(How to design a contract to evaluate the possibility that the world and thus the economy will be blown up is a bit of a puzzle. But it's totally doable.)

I’ve read that while inequality within countries increased, inequality between countries has decreased dramatically (and is arguably much more important as it records the huge reduction in poverty in Asia in the past 50 years).

And I’m not worried at all about war with China or Russia, or at least not more worried than I would have been in the 90’s. I don’t think the events of the past 20 years are evidence that war is more likely now than it was then.

The environmental crisis I think rises to the level of something that has gotten worse, but I think we also should at least consider that environmentalism in the 90’s was mostly about pollution, which basically doesn’t exist in the West anymore the way it did for most of the 20th century. So like, mission accomplished! (/s)

Now we’re dealing with climate change, which a lot of people in the 90’s thought was going to be a giant problem, but which wasn’t the subject of huge media panic the way it is now. That’s not to say the panic isn’t appropriate, just that if it is, the sense of peace that everyone is saying pervaded the 90’s was definitely unwarranted.