How is your part of the world doing (both current and future prospects) compared to how it was 30/40 years ago? Please say where you are in the world.
Edit- Thank you everyone for commenting. It has been very interesting for me and hopefully for others. If you are just coming to this post please still comment I am still reading them.
A bit late but I was reading the comments and thought I share too.
Overall we are doing good, as far as I can tell, if not a little better than 20 or so years ago. But we also have problems that seem to getting bigger but not many seem to be concerned about them, as mentioned in an other comment people seem to be more disconnected and just follow their bubble interests.
For one, there is the global opinion the world has of us, the war in Ukraine really shook us and how we see our identity as a neutral nation. Our neutrality is now a big topic in discussions, especially the youth is very divided about it. Neutrality is something we all grow up with and see (or saw) it as a big part of our nations strength, how this will play out will show the referendums and initiatives that are planned for the next years, votes will decide.
Then there is the looming finance crisis that seems to come closer. Overall we are still doing good, as our inflation is very low in comparison to other EU countries (we even managed to lower inflation to a new low since a few years). Some now start to get financial problems, rents get raised yearly, public transport prices too and overall living gets even more expensive.
A new kind of crack floods the illegal drug market, and you can see junkies (sorry I do not know a better word) more and more. They not really bother others at the moment but you can sense a coming pandemic of this substance. Together with the financial problems I see a big danger in that.
There are other problems too, but those are the ones I see most present at the moment.
There are also good things of course, wages are high and steady when you work in specialized industries, going to university costs at most 700.- per semester, our government does not follow surveillance trends like the UK or EU. Overall I would still say, Switzerland is a good country to live and work in, I especially like our approach of direct democracy and our culture of privacy.
I guess I might be a bit late, but I’ll write a few lines anyway.
I’m in Sweden. There is a lot of shootings, bombings and arsons in Stockholm and the areas around it. We’ve honestly never seen anything like it, at this point I’m just surprised it hasn’t really been happening in the other major cities.
The city where I live has a fucked budget, the municipality is cutting the budget of schools, health care and in other sectors.
For me personally it’s okay. I live in a calm area, I can work from home when I want to. Economically I’m not super solid, but I can put away a little bit of cash every month.
Not late at all. I find everyone’s response very interesting. I am curious, the nordic counties seems to be often held up and the proof of socialists democracy. Do you feel the fundamental system is still working? Is this just a moment of difficulty or is it larger?
Thanks for a great question, really made me think.
So, I am a firm believer in social democracy. The problem as I see it is that there’s been a mix of social democracy and libertarianism. We have in many cases sold public companies and spaces to private actors, but we still maintain our high tax rates. We have used the “new public management” for quite a while now, maybe since the 90s, which seems to limit our ability to plan ahead and only look to the next quarter.
I also believe we have dropped the ball on integration. We have received many refugees and migrants, but without a plan. This has led to increased segregation and less trust towards government and agencies.
I do think it’s fixable, in most ways Sweden is great and I’m proud to be a part of it. But we have a lot of challenges both national and international. The EU for example looks weaker when we need to be stronger and working together. We also obviously need to get a handle on this recent wave of shootings and murder. After that integration really needs to be the focus.
And thanks for your great reply. I really find this fascinating. I am glad you think it is fixable, hopefully it will turn around here soon without too much pain. If you will permit me one more question. What does integration mean to you? Like do they need to become more Swedish, do the Swedes need to just their culture to accommodate the immigrants. Or more of a live and let live thing where you can be neighbors but not really integrate. As far as I know immigration is always a net positive for a society, but that doesn’t make it easy.
I think the major failings have been that we have allowed a large part of the immigrants to move into neighborhoods with exclusively other immigrants, thus not being exposed to Swedish culture or values. This ties in with learning Swedish, which obviously is central to integration. This has become a vicious circle where entire suburbs can consist of immigrants. An example is where teachers in kindergarten speak poor Swedish and the kids also have poor Swedish. In many cases they don’t share a mother tounge and the result isn’t great. I get that you want to live with other people who speak your language, but the divide is too big in my opinion.
Then there’s the discussion about cultural values which I don’t think I know enough about to speak much about. But we can see that there are several groups that don’t want to be a real part of society, and that’s clearly a problem.
Thank you so much for your thoughtful replies. I could ask your questions about this till you run away, but I will leave it for now.
Let me just leave you with this though. Looking at other counties that have a longer history of large immigration. It seems to take 2 to 3 generations for immigrants to feel native. Maybe a little unconditional acceptance and patience will help this along.
How come nobody’s talking about climate change? This will be the biggest thing throughout the world in the coming century and beyond. No interest or what?
Well I couldn’t say for sure but would suggest that it is a hierarchy of problems. If you are having a hard time with the basics then no matter how real and dangerous an upcoming crisis is it doesn’t matter.
South Africa. Clusterfuck best describes the situation. Daily Rolling blackouts. Political uncertainty. Higher cost of living. Massive corruption. Brain drain as those who can are emigrating. But at least we have no war.
All of our country. We have 1 official electricity producer, but it has been run I to the ground. Google “eskom South africa” for more info. Short version is they cannot produce enough power so we have scheduled times pretty.much daily with no power. Here we call it load shedding. The power issues and lack of maintenence on infrastructure is affecting other things like water supply.The government has so much corruption we have actually seen the government protesting itself about service delivery. Google “Gupta state capture South africa” for an idea of this. Politics is very much like the US where minorities are scapegoats. The leader of the EFF , a populist radical opposition was for example quoted as saying “we are not calling for the killing of white people… at least not yet”. There are other issues, but I still think clusterfuck is the appropriate description. We are resilient though.
I make around 60k and I barely can afford to survive. And I have a decent rent (1000$), but car payments, insurance, phone, internet and food all got more expensive. I can’t even afford a vacation anymore ! I barely make it and I think of those single parents trying to get by with less and it breaks my heart. If I a single man with no kids have to skip meals once in a while I can only imagine what those poor kids have to go through.
Kremlin politicians, mass russian and communist propaganda and mass migration out of the country… And somehow there is a huge job market, inflation isn’t out of control and we’ve got one of the better 5G coverages in the EU… Bulgaria’s a weird country.
It’s hard to say where the country is headed, but unfortunately a big part of the population seems to believe the Kremlin politicians and that communism will somehow magically fix the country and remove inflation and that somehow we’ll be better off without NATO, which according to them forced us to give all or military equipment to Ukraine (ignoring the fact that literally all the military equipment Bulgaria has given to Ukraine is USSR era stuff that won’t stand a chance against modern militaries, that NATO conveniently protects it’s from)… That being said the kremlins haven’t won the elections yet, so we’ll see what happens in the future…
My life is pretty great all things considered. But in about an hour I’m walking down to the local primary school to cast my ‘yes’ vote for the referendum.
So, later this evening I’ll get confirmation that nothing has changed in my country. We’re still a backwards, racist society who doesn’t give a fuck about our indigenous population.
For me, as an indigenous person who is also upper middle class and in one of the most affluent cities in the country, life is pretty good. But the same can’t be said for many others who don’t share my privilege. And my country is about to tell them, loud and clear, that they don’t care. Didn’t care 40 years ago, don’t care now.
Everyone’s struggling. I can only speak for shy of 30 years ago (30 years old). But people can’t stay afloat or get started.
Jobs are fucked. They’re either entry level/service/retail jobs that pay nothing. Qualified or technical jobs that are paid less than 25k (I saw jobs requesting experience in coding languages and complex IT functions for around 23k) Then anything that pays more than 28k (still not enough to live on) has “senior” or “managing” in the title, requires experienced or qualifications that could single handedly run a business.
It feels like places are forcing more work onto individual people rather than hiring more people and spreading the work around.
I’m only at 24k and doing administrative work, Web dev, marketing, data management and some more technical stuff relating to the industry. But look at what’s available and I’m not suitably equipped to get anything with a higher salary. Even when I am, the response tends to be a negative despite being quite strong at applying. Presumably the competition is that strong.
Otherwise, collectively with my partner, we have nearly 60k income. We could secure a mortgage, but we can’t scrape together a house deposit. Even then the monthly repayments would be crazy high and inflation would screw us.
Both firm adults and living with parents despite having secure and intensive jobs. Can’t get anywhere even with budgeting so tightly that enjoyment money is very limited. My savings have started being eaten into for the first time as of this past month, so I’m walking into living off negative money.
When I look around I’m actually not in that bad a situation compared to some. But then others are living the dream.
Feels like the lows and the highs are so wide here right now. Where when I was growing up, my dad was a postman then a private courier and my mum a cleaner and we were fine, not well off, but didn’t live that differently to our middle class friends.
Moving on my mum took three menial jobs when we left my dad, but still paid rent and we never went without.
Don’t really understand it all, but it seems that its all going to shit.
We don’t have wars, famine, US-level political crazy news and very few poor people. We have fairly good social services/welfare, free/paid education, good equality and freedom. On paper it’s kind of a fairytale country.
And yet people complain a lot. Mostly about 1st world problems like expensive cars, increasing mental health issues and too many immigrants though.
But despite things looking pretty ideal compared to many other countries I have noticed that many people seem sort of disconnected from themselves and people around them. I would say there’s a sense of impending doom and an existential crisis lurking just beneeth the surface. I did not see that 30 years ago.
This seems like almost an example of a population in a behavioral sink. I don’t know if this as been shown to be true in humans but it definitely has some of the characteristics of one…
Interesting, maybe it shows that welbeing is not sufficient for a good life. People strive for struggle and progress. Even in hardship, in war, they may feel uninited, fulfilled, and motivated. It just would be better if this drive was not expressed in physical violence.
Florida, US. We’re facing multiple crises at once; an affordability crisis, an environmental crisis, and a political crisis. Homeowners insurance rates are going up with many companies leaving the state. Car insurance rates are increasing. Rent prices, housing prices, and mortgage rates are increasing. Our state is facing multiple environmental issues such as deforestation, pollution, and invasive species. Climate change will greatly impact our state, but our governor thinks it’s woke.
I’m pretty sure most people would agree USA now is a worse place than USA in the 80s/90s, but austerity measures that hurt almost everyone now but helped the economy in the short term are a big reason why the 80s and 90s were prosperous for many. We’re finally starting to turn away from austerity and unions are growing in strength, but that’s not to say that (relatively speaking) the economy is good here, inflation is hitting hard, and who knows if Republicans win 2024.
The biggest existential threat to the country is the attempted hostile takeover by theocrats, which has been well over 40 years in the making, is nothing short of conspiracy, and quite frankly I think secession talks should get serious if Trump wins in 2024, even moreso if Rs get a majority in Congress. Maybe this comes off as panicky, but there’s a reason women, LGBT people, and non-whites are the biggest buyers of guns now. I can’t afford one.
At this point whether Republicans or Democrats will win 2024 feels like a coin flip. Biden’s polling worse than Trump (neither is polling great) but also Democrats are winning most special elections (usually special elections go to Republicans) and a slue of anti-gerrymandering court decisions are taking effect, not to mention Trump could be in jail (and a bunch of other politicians from both parties are getting sued.)
US, my home state just sent a woman to prison for helping her daughter get an abortion. So, you know, living under a shitty theocracy that believes being poor or a woman is the worst sin imaginable.
My wife had a D&C after a miscarriage earlier this year. Luckily, our state isn’t as shitty as others, but the surgery was still labeled an abortion, and they made her answer a bunch of questions like it was a choice and not that our baby was dead for a month before the 12 week ultrasound. And the shitheel front desk woman lied to us and said that no one could be back there with her (obviously not in surgery, but I wasn’t even able to be back in the waiting area with her pre or post op), because that woman was a religious fruitcake and “didn’t agree with the procedure”
We raised some serious hell after finding that out and took it up through their patient advocate. It went up to the hospitals board and they issued an apology, which meant fuck all, and I think that woman was fired.
I don’t understand why people want to be involved in anyone else’s lives. I get it if you personally don’t agree with abortions, but that’s your choice. You don’t get the right to decide what someone else does with their own fucking body. The kicker is that most people don’t even realize that a D&C after a miscarriage is the same exact procedure and is classified the same. Excuse the fuck out of me if I don’t want my wife to die from sepsis or have to sit around for another 1-2 months with a dead fetus inside of her waiting for it to possibly discharge naturally. That whole experience was awful enough and she wanted it to be over as soon as possible.
Fuck your religious beliefs. Apply them to yourself, no one else should bend over to appease your stupid sky fairy bullshit.
That’s awful. So heartless when your wife is going through physical terrors and both of you through emotional. And thank you for sharing, I can only hope the shitheels pushing these laws finally start listening to them.
30 years ago people were still living the dream which was all a house of cards called loans. Then the market crisis happened and we got fucked unable to get new ones and pay off the old ones.
After that, we kept getting blackmailed by the Eurozone and the IMF so that we would get the loans we needed to fix our country, but under harsh conditions that basically sustain our poverty instead of fixing it in any way. We signed away the people’s livelihoods so that we could be Europe’s economic lab rat and slave, all to their benefit.
Our current government is as liberal capitalist as it gets, privatizing everything and making life crap for the poor (who are becoming more and more as time passes). Fascism is also on the rise, following the theme of Europe and the US.
The government owns almost all the media and most other parties in the parliament are also aligned with the ruling one. Climate change is beggining to hit hard, every time revealing the cheap infrastructure and postponed plans by contractors.
Instead of hiring more firemen, our government continues to allocate way too much money on cops, riot control, and the media it bribes.
Maybe the EU’s fucking around ends up with a communist revolution, I bet they won’t be too happy about it then.
I actually wish you would say more. I only know generally how turkey is doing now and I know almost nothing about how it was in the 90s. Please feel free to educate us.
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