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I've recently encountered a somewhat similar narrative, pointing to a similar stagnation and decline, but, rather than being purely "accounting tricks and rising real estate prices," it's, to put it succinctly, software isn't stuff.
The example given was to consider if you took every modern electronic screen out of your house. Get rid of your flatscreen TV, and maybe replace it with an old CRT set. Toss out the laptops, the tablets, the smartphones, the GPS and other "screen" electronics in your car, etc.
Now, how does your stuff, your surroundings, your life differ from someone of similar class, job, etc. back in the 70s or 80s? What has gotten better in terms of material stuff, rather than telecommunications, internet, and software, software, software? It's the whole "flying cars vs. cyberpunk dystopia" thing, the building of the virtual "layer" atop a stagnating, even declining material one.
(I'm reminded here again of the likes of Tyler Cowen's Average is Over and the future he projects, where ~80% of the population lives in third-world style favelas, concentrated in the narrow latitude/climate band that minimizes annual heating+AC costs, eating beans, making pennies on Amazon Turk; but most people will be fine with that because VR will have become so good they won't care about their conditions in the material world (and for those who don't, there will be better psych drugs and cops with omnipresent surveillance drones).)
My car is much nicer. My house is probably not that different, but it’s definitely not worse. My diet is probably mildly better; my parents remember eating liver, franks and beans, etc, and I certainly don’t have to do that. I have more options for vacationing within my price range even if I prefer to spend my money on things other than flights(and tradesmen in the 70’s or even 80’s did not get to fly places). Most of my minor chattels are mildly better or about the same.
And, for two new technologies- cell phones and the microwave are a massive improvement in the quality of life for ‘white van men’- the cell phone, because I’m no longer confined to my house when I’m on call, and microwaves because I can now eat a hot lunch at any gas station without having to either a) eat a 7/11 hot dog or b) go to McDonald’s. It seems fair to also note that the internet and Amazon are large improvements in QoL in middle class suburbs, even lower middle class ones.
Oh, and I get all that working fewer hours.
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Software is stuff, very much so. Or at least something worth caring about.
The boardgames I used to play as a kid? Replaced by videogames. Mail chess? Chess.com. TV? Streaming. Notebooks for planning, notes, recipes? An app. Physical maps? An app. The Encyclopedia? Replaced by Wikipedia, plus I can for the most part freely access scientific papers as they're published on pubmed, arxiv, etc.
How do I learn things like cooking, sewing, gardening, woodworking, chemistry, or look up information? Used to be a trip to a library, asking around, searching for experts in the phonebook, etc. Now I can google stuff, youtube is full of how tos and instructional videos, and LLMs can spit out semi accurate answers to common problems that are hard to find on google.
People complain how newer appliances are crappier, but the price to income ratio nosedived.
All that said, I agree that we lost things, and that some things got worse. Replacing physical buttons with touch controls in cars springs to mind. Architecture is another common example.
Architecture has certainly got worse in the last 100 years, but in the last 15, I'd say we've probably seen an improvement. New Traditional Architecture is picking up steam as a movement. Governments and developers are realising that building nice-looking buildings isn't an esoteric mystery lost to the sands of time. I predict in another century people will looking back on C20th architecture with embarrassment.
Okay, that first article calls out Beijing’s CCTV building, which is…actually really cool? Or insane, or futurist in a way that makes people think “we can do that?”
Something similar goes for the Guangzhou opera house. It’s not as physically impressive, but it does make me think of Halo: Reach’s vision of the future. Maybe the builders want to send a transhumanist or utopian message. Maybe nice cornices just aren’t the right tool for that.
I’m not offering a blanket defense of modernist slabs. The London National Theatre sucks, and there are plenty more where that came from. And when we consider the mass-produced architecture which trickles down to our houses and shops and parks, I expect the traditionalist language scales much better than exotic futurism. More ways to screw up a design which doesn’t fall back on the familiar. More ways to crawl up one’s own chimney.
I'm less sympathetic to modernism than most, but I can agree that I'd be basically fine with it if it was limited to a handful of high profile buildings in city centres. There's always the small chance that such a building becomes iconic, like the Sydney Opera House or the Eiffel Tower.
But building this when we could just as cheaply and easily build this is an affront to God.
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