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Historians don’t talk about “good” or “bad” unless there’s some unambiguous metric within the historical context.
Santa should publish previous years’ nice and naughty lists for historical reference
Nah—see Goodhart’s law (“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”).
As soon as Santa published his lists, people would start figuring out ways to game it.
This is so true.
When I worked at a cell phone store, we had an accessory take rate (ATR) target. The goal was to sell 3-5 accessories for every phone sold. (The accessories had much more profit. Compared to the phones that were sold at a loss with a contract) We would sling cheap screen protectors and clearance items that were only a few bucks to crank that number up without actually getting the customers to spend more money.
They caught on and changed it to Accessory revenue per phone, and suddenly the cheap junk quit moving and we’d only have to get one person per day to buy a Bluetooth speaker to hit target.
What gets rewarded gets done
Doesn’t this apply to most religions?
There isn’t one single concrete list of good/bad deeds and how many points each one is tbf.
Anyone with a baseline education in history knows “good old days” is proponganda used by almost every bad actor that ever existed
Until you hear them talk about golden eras.
I’m Dutch, so we are tough about the Dutch golden age, which spans about the seventeenth century. Trade science and art were at a high point back then, but looking deeper it turns out the life expectancy for common people was lower than in the surrounding countries. The wealth was all concentrated in the Holland province(s), which explains why the Netherlands is commonly referred as Holland in other countries. Another thing was the schism between catholics and Calvinists, which meant Catholic cities didn’t benefit at all from the golden age. It also wasn’t benificial to the 1.7 million people who were enslaved by the Dutch.
So all in all, the Dutch golden age was very much golden for the merchants and aristocrats of cities like Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Leiden or Haarlem, and for the protestant ministers. For the rest, of you didn’t live near these cities you probably were dirt poor.
yeah “golden age” is similar to “great empire” - “great” maybe for the emperor but for basically nobody else.
But it’s always about something specific, they know too much to ever say an “era” was objectively good.
It’s because they’re way more aware of the drawbacks of certain eras.
Slavery, racism, inequality, lack of resources, lack of education, lack of clean water, how many of your children will make it to adulthood, famine, floods, lack of roads…
Every “good old day” was worse in some aspects.
