Comparing yourself to other people

2026-01-16

There’s a thought that I sometimes hear, and it goes something like this: “We live in the best X of all possible Xs”.

For example:

Whatever criticism one might have towards modern society, we’re still living in the safest and richest time of human history.
However poor one may be, if you’re living in the West, you’re still richer than 99.99% of all humans in history.

One variant (or rather, conclusion) that I have heard is:

It is not for material reasons that people are not having kids; a family can easily achieve a 90s-level standard even today, and people in the 90s did have kids.

In these examples, one is supposed to calibrate for the “normal” or “default” circumstances, and therefore see oneself as incredibly privileged.

My objection is that, while it’s technically correct, this argument misses the point of comparison itself.

Comparison is a local activity.

People compare things that are close together in some way. You compare yourself to your neighbors or family, or to your colleagues at work, or to people that do similar work as you do in other companies.

People compare like categories because local comparisons incite action. The point of comparison is not to calibrate for defaults, it is to improve something in one’s life.

Therefore, saying some variant of “compare yourself with someone much poorer who lived 300 years ago” will do nothing because people form their reference class not by learning history and economy, but by looking around and observing what’s there.

Alice and Bob want to have kids. They live in a tiny apartment and they don’t earn much – enough not to be called poor, but below the median. This is every working-class couple from the 90s, at least to my remembrance, and they all had kids (I’m one of those kids).

But Alice and Bob see that their friends who have kids all have at least a two or three-bedroom apartment, or an even larger house; they see that they take their kids on summer vacations, whereas they know they couldn’t swing vacations with their salaries.

And so, a 30-year-old living standard perfectly suited to bringing up a family, or at least starting up one, now has them thinking that they should wait a bit more.

I think that:

This is a mistake.
Telling them that this is a mistake will fail, more likely than not.

There’s something inside us that just doesn’t care about objective standards, and the only thing that is important is a local comparison.

And so, I believe that the way to make the Alices and Bobs have kids must in some way take into account that local comparison. I don’t know yet how that would work.

Maybe we should start popularizing TV shows and movies showing modern working class people who have kids? (I feel like a lot of media presents a “struggling mother” kind of dynamic; where working class parenthood is shown as something challenging, almost like an affliction.)

And that’s only for the problem of Alice and Bob! Local comparisons are everywhere else, not only in the choice of having kids.

Again, I don’t have a solution, but I think that this argument (compare yourself to someone outside your reference class) isn’t particularly effective.

Society needs to allow people to do more easily what was completely normal a generation or two ago, and this needs to be done by influencing the current reference class that people compare themselves to.