Canadian quality of life falling fast
The Canadian index of well-being finds that our quality of life has fallen fast since the crash of 2008.
Whoever it is that writes as Occupy Montreal on Facebook added this: Everybody knows that the 1% is getting richer, everybody understands that the big banks and corporations are colluding with governments in order to make more profit, destroy our environment and consolidate their power, everybody is angry about the fact that the quality of our life is hammered more and more by these neoliberal policies but very very few react to this reality.
…and when these few react and try to protest or build solutions for the society, they are called brats, hippies, lazy and stupid.
Anto 22:26 on 2012/10/23 Permalink
…Where’s the upvote button when you need it?
Kevin 09:57 on 2012/10/24 Permalink
If ‘everybody is angry’ — then who is calling people brats and hippies?
Kate 11:22 on 2012/10/24 Permalink
Show me the people that are happy because the quality of life in Canada has fallen objectively since 2008. You’re being disingenuous here, but you know perfectly well that while many of us are unsettled by the decline in our conditions it is not everyone who submits the problem to the kind of analysis that produces that particular set of conclusions.
I chatted with a neighbour a few days ago, an older man who emigrated here from Italy in the 1960s. Nice guy and had complimentary things to say to me about Irish-Canadians and their work ethic. Then he started grumbling about, you guessed it, immigrants! How he’d had to work really hard and make his own way, but immigrants who come here now are handed everything on a platter. It’s easy to feel this sort of impulse when “I’ve got mine!” – that’s the folks who tend to call brats and hippies. (His wife kept catching my eye and shaking her head – she knew his views were not necessarily popular ones!)
Kevin 09:58 on 2012/10/26 Permalink
I’m just being snarky because I hate people mis-using the blanket term ‘everybody’ while at the same time acknowledging that people disagree with them. It strikes me as the same type of woolly-headed thinking that the person who wrote that diatribe is objecting to.
The difficult part about evaluating quality of life is coming up with objective terms of comparison, and dealing with people’s own nostalgia about the past. How do you put a price on the value (as opposed to the cost) of being able to make videocalls with relatives in another country? Flush toilets? Life-saving emergency surgery that didn’t exist 10,20,30 years ago?
Individual adults, unless they find themselves unemployed, are going to find that their lives today are better off than they were 20 years ago. But how to accurately compare to what their parents and grandparents went through at the same age in a radically different world?
And do it all without cherry-picking data. According to the Wellbeing study, the reason the index increase is dragged down because of global warming. According to almost every other measure (education, Standard of Living, Community Vitality, Democratic engagement, health, use of time — everything except leisure time) Wellbeing has improved.
In other words, this is a bullshit study designed to tap into fears that the world is going to hell. If it came from The Fraser Institute it would be automatically dismissed by the blogosphere as ignoring its own results.