Your generation, possibly your parents generation and your grand children's generation will be worse off than your grandparents generation. Welcome to late stage capitalism.

We are in the middle of a huge transformation. Everything we knew about the economy is fading and we welcome the neo-feudalistic era. The retreat of the state and privatising every public service to the private sector to make profit is slowly but surely making society worse.<br><br>Is the economy growing? Yes. Are people better off? No. The value of money is being diminished with low wage growth, and runaway inflation due to the rising cost of living. This is the era of 'lower quality, but more expensive'. It's getting impossible to be upper class if you are middle or lower class. The upper class and the business class are becoming the establishments that are becoming completely detached from ordinary people. GDP is going up, but the Gini coefficient is getting worse every year. The economy is growing, but the people are worse off.<br><br>The great inventions and huge leaps humanity took during the last 200 years are slowing down. We had more development and progress in the last 200 years than the whole of humanity from the dawn of time to 1800. But if you look under the hood, nothing major is happening. No huge leaps are being taken as humanity, and all the low hanging fruit has been picked. It's getting more expensive to advance science, and it is mostly incremental. Companies are not investing in R&D and are mostly buying up competitors to stifle competition as well as lobbying governments to protect their interests. SMEs are dying because of financialization and globalism.<br><br>The free market economy has huge benefits, but it also has huge negatives. I often hear on this sub that if everything was a free market, the economy would be better off, which is a complete lie. A complete free market can never work because it is an ideological dream that can never happen in the real world. <br><br>I think that globalisation was a net positive, but it also came with negatives, like the huge shift in inequality and depopulation of rural areas and the loss of manufacturing in many countries. <br><br>Monopolistic global corporations are becoming more and more free from state control and taxation. States are losing power to multinational corporations and their interests, and corporations are setting global agendas with governments powerless to stop them.<br><br>I have no hope for humanity, and I think we are in disarray and many of us are just trying to survive. I also think that we are heading towards another dark ages, and it won't end anytime soon.