Welcome back to the Ten Blocks Podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is Chelsea Foll is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. Joining me on the show

today is Chelsea Follett. She's the author of the recent book, Centers of Progress, 40 Cities

that Change the World, Managing Editor of Human Progress.org, which is a project of the Cato Institute,

that looks at global improvements in well-being.

And on the subject of improving well-being, she's here to discuss her recent

city journal story, Think the Present is Tough, Try the Past.

So, Chelsea, thanks so much for coming on 10 blocks.

Thank you so much for having me.

Your essay, it offers what you could call a corrective

to a powerful mood in politics these days, which is a sense that things are uniquely awful.

Human beings do often feel nostalgia. This was already true. You know, you go back to ancient

Greece, but they can romanticize what the past was actually like.

Yet in one 2023 poll, almost 20% of Americans said they believed it would have been easier to have a thriving and fulfilling life hundreds of years ago.

So why do you think that in an age of what has to be described as widespread

material abundance, people seem to feel so overwhelmed and unhappy with their quality of life?

I think it's because humanity has not only overcome many of the problems that our ancestors face, but also lost the memory that

those problems existed in the first place. We've come so far that we have lost that historical

perspective. And so sometimes it's nice to zoom out and take a broader historical view of

things to put today's very real challenges

into perspective and remind ourselves just how far we've come. And that humanity is actually

amazing at solving problems and improving our standard of living over time when given the

...