ICT resolves a lot of puzzling findings in the literature on life satisfaction and economic development. It explains why historically wealthier countries have higher life satisfaction than poorer countries, even though rapid increases in national wealth do not make citizens more satisfied with their lives. That is, if everyone gets rich all of a sudden at the same time, then nobody is satisfied, because everybody still has the same wealth and status as their rivals. But if the economy grows gradually over multiple generations, with each generation getting richer and higher status than the previous generation, then people get satisfied, and society becomes more peaceful and stable.[1] Declining respect for elders, it seems, goes hand in hand with declining violence, corruption, and societal decay.
ICT might also explain why working-class white people, around a decade ago, suffered a huge increase in “deaths of despair” and later embraced a “burn it all down” Trumpian populism. It’s not that they were poor or disadvantaged per se. Nonwhite people were (and still are) significantly poorer and more disadvantaged, yet they weren’t dying of despair. Why the difference? Nonwhite people thought they were better off than their parents’ generation, likely because prior generations were more overtly discriminatory. Working class white people, on the other hand, thought they were worse off than their parents’ generation, likely due to rising urbanization, educational credentialism, and declining low-skilled manufacturing work. Some working-class white people even thought they were worse off than African Americans, due to the zero-sum nature of social status: as one group rises, another must fall. The result was a white populist backlash that nearly destroyed American democracy (and still might).[2]
There is an important lesson here. In order to collectively satisfy our icky, competitive desires, we must ensure that everybody outcompetes their parents and grandparents in the game of life. Old people must never be cool. This ongoing upstaging of the elderly is crucial to the long-term wellbeing of our species, and it must continue for all demographic groups—or else we’re fucked. The moment any segment of society stops outcompeting their elders is the moment society starts to unravel. We must keep trouncing our elders, generation after generation, or else the fundamental tragedy of the human condition will catch up to us, and we will literally die of sadness.
