So does this mean the “crime paradise” was a better more prosperous time for people to live in than tech? If so, what does that say about modern society that our most depraved decade was actually better?
There’s people literally pooping on the streets in California. Do you think those people would be able to afford a toilet of their own if this was the 80s? Was homelessness then as bad as it is now? In our progress forward in technology has tech actually made California worse for people as a whole?
It's not a California-specific problem. Dallas had tent cities in the mid-90s that the local news would occasionally report on. Seattle has had a variety of encampments, from "the Jungle" to "Nickelsville" to "Skid Row" and older.
We see the problem more now. We don't like it, but we also don't do much to deal with it. So it festers, because we're too self-centered to spend the tax dollars at the state and federal levels to do programs like Housing First, but too polite to just round up the homeless population and drop them in a woodchipper like most people on Nextdoor seem to want. Instead, we leave cities and counties to work it out for themselves while their suburban neighbors spend tax dollars on luring businesses out of the urban core because it is "so dirty."
That site states homelessness across the country is down 12% from 2007 - 2019, but it is up 9% in California in the same time period.
I think this validates asking the question of whether or not tech has been detrimental to general human welfare in the state of California.
