In conclusion, life today is definitely easier than life in the past. Though it is easy to read stories of nobles and kings of history and romanticize them, their lives were almost certainly more uncomfortable than our lives are. Nevertheless, there are many places in the world where laptops, modern conveniences, and vaccines are rarely found To get hired at Walmart you need to be confident. Learn about salary, employee reviews, interviews, benefits, and work-life balance. It's easy to sell online with Walmart. What is Walmart Upfront App Byod. 3# You can now find the job that interests you and apply to that job offer. (CAN) Ecommerce Store Associate. Target is an early winner of the U. We live better? It is widely known there have been changes in our quality life. But sometimes people can ask if these changes are enough relevant to consider it we live better today than many years ago. First of all, the health system has improved respect to the past. For example, the diseases which caused the death a lot of people have a treatment nowadays. III. Complete the passage with the comparative form of the adjectives in brackets. Is life better now than it was in the past? Of course in many ways life is (1)_________ (easy) now. We live in the world which is (2)_________ (clean) and safer. It is generally (3)_________ (healthy) as well, and because of improvements […] Life today is better than it was a 100 years ago. Nowadays life is more comfortable, convenient and better than it was a century before. Modern facilities for health, education, communication and transport have added a lot in bringing betterment to the life of people. Advances in technology have provided people with many ways to spend their Flirt. Ayo mulai. Hinweis: Damit Sie Nachrichten von einer externen E-Mail-Adresse, z. Now, take a look at seven of the best free email service providers (and five of the best email accounts for privacy) you can get your hands on today — both webmail and email clients included. allowing you to create better experiences for prospects huiC. A roll in the hay might keep you from tossing and turning at night. That’s the takeaway from a new survey presented at the SLEEP 2023 annual meeting this week in Indianapolis. In the survey, 53 adults were questioned about their sleep habits. The questions covered issues like sleep quality, sex and orgasms and the use of sleep medications. “Little scientific data exists around the impact of sex and orgasm on sleep quality,” lead author Dr. Douglas Kirsch, medical director at Atrium Health in Charlotte, North Carolina, said in a news release. The study authors noted that sex is often portrayed in the media as conducive to a good night’s rest, but the link hasn’t been examined by scientists. Most of the survey participants were fairly young 89% were between 25 and 49. And 66% of the participants reported using sleep medication at some point in their lives to get better rest. Sleep medication doesn’t help as much as sex, say a majority of survey Images/iStockphoto Sex has many health benefits, including a good night’s Images/iStockphoto Other research backs up that high-usage figure In January, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report revealing that in 2020, more than 8% of people had used sleep medication within the previous 30 days. Women in the CDC report were slightly more likely to use sleeping pills than men versus respectively, and medication use increased with age. And had used sleep medication daily for the past 30 days, a figure many experts find alarming. Sleep medication should not be used for an extended period of time, experts Images/iStockphoto “Sleeping pills have a lot of side effects,” Nishi Bhopal, a psychiatrist and sleep expert, told CNN, while also noting that insomnia also has a serious impact on health. “It’s really important that we support patients in the best way that we can because insomnia can lead to depression and anxiety,” Bhopal said. “So sleeping pills can be really useful in that context, but it’s not recommended to use them for more than two In the SLEEP 2023 survey, 75% of the participants reported sleeping better after sex/orgasm, and 64% felt that a sleeping pill had a similar or worse effect on their sleep. “While this data is quite preliminary, it was interesting how often sex was used to aid in sleep,” said study co-author Seema Khosla, medical director of the North Dakota Center for Sleep in Fargo. In my last article about how life was so much better 40 years ago, I promised I would even things out and talk about how things have actually improved in the past few decades since I was a kid. I don’t want anyone thinking I’m a crotchety old guy. So here goes — seven things that make life better now than “back in the good old days” 1. Healthier choices in food. Health food has become mainstream. You don’t have to go to some out of the way “health food shop” run by “hippies” to get what you need. All the main grocery chains now have entire sections dedicated just to non-GMO, organic food. “Free-range” is now part of our vocabulary. There are entire grocery chains that are dedicated only to offering food that is not loaded up with pesticides and hormones. Even some restaurant chains like Panera and Chipotle make the effort to serve food that is entirely free of preservatives and other harmful additives. Businesses are doing this to respond to popular demand. More and more Americans desire natural foods that are a major part of the answer to the diseases they are constantly fighting. Sadly, not enough Americans are ditching toxic fast food, but at least there is a good trend toward healthier options. Seven Ways Life Was Better 40 Years Ago 2. Online shopping. This can cut either way, I know. I feel very sorry for businesses like Sears, Penney, and Kmart. I grew up with those brands. “Sears has everything!” went the commercial. My father was a Sears manager for almost 20 years. And who can forget the ubiquitous K-Mart “blue light specials” and “thank for shopping at Kmart”? However, these companies have not kept up with the new phenomenon of online shopping. I did not think I would like it at first, but this old buzzard now knows how to navigate the Internet and get some great deals as well as any teenager with a credit card well, almost. I don’t have to fight through traffic, I don’t have to fight for a spot in the parking lot, I don’t have to stand in line. I just click and buy and wait a few days and my package of goodies is at my door. Magic. I still go shopping in malls, but not as much. Walmart Takes the Fight to Amazon for Online Shopping Customers 3. Advances in medical science. I had quintuple bypass heart surgery almost six years ago. Medical science has continued to progress … to the point that my surgery was pretty much routine. Thank God! When they announced I would have to have it, we were all stunned, of course. No one thought for a second, however, that I would die. Such surgery has become commonplace, and in most cases about as close to “guaranteed success” as you can get. Think about all the advances we’ve had in the past 40 years. In that time, the MRI was invented and it has been used all around the world. What an amazing machine! We have improvements in organ transplants and bionic limbs. We have seen advances in cancer treatment — so much so that if some cancers are discovered early enough the patient has great odds at surviving and beating it entirely. What a breakthrough laparoscopic surgery is! Just 25 years ago, the standard surgery for something like appendicitis required quite a cut across the lower right quadrant of the torso and a recovery of two or three days in the hospital. Now, with laparoscopic surgery, they just poke two holes in you, yank that old appendix out, and you go home that afternoon! You can tell I am not a medical doctor, but I have seen many patients go home the day of the surgery because of this wonderful treatment. These articles from the Cleveland Clinic, CNN, and Health24 detail the advances in medical science over the past few decades, and what we can expect in the years to come. 4. Computer-generated graphics. Remember the original Star Trek? I do. I loved it! I thought the coolest thing about the show was the opening scene when the Enterprise whooshed across the screen in one second! Remember that scene in the original Star Wars 1977 when Han Solo put the Millennial Falcon in hyperdrive and all those stars just stretched and everyone in the audience just leaned back in their seats like gravity was actually sucking them backwards? Man, that stuff just blew us away. However, all those special effects are kid stuff compared to what computer graphics can do today. In movies today you can see ancient cities like Rome or Athens look like they have been brought back to life, or entirely fictitious civilizations as in Avatar look like you could reach out and touch them. What do you do when you don’t have enough soldiers in costumes to reenact a Napoleonic battle? You just use computer graphics and create a whole army of realistic soldiers to stand behind your actors. Pretty soon maybe we won’t even need Hollywood actors! Gone are the days when we saw Captain Kirk wrestling a guy dressed up in a dragon suit. 5. More media. We used to have ONLY CBS, NBC, and ABC. That was it. Take it or leave it. The “big three” had a monopoly on the news and how they could mold it or manufacture it and serve it up to us. CNN entered the picture in the 1980s. Today, we not only have Fox News and MSNBC joining the mainstream media, but we also have talk radio most notably Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Through the Internet, we also have outlets such as CRTV, Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire, The Daily Beast, PJ Media hooray!!!!, Steven Crowder’s website, POLITICO, The Hill, the whole span of social media, and pretty much every kind of journalistic outlet you can imagine unless Google and Facebook censor you. There are YouTube channels galore, and you can go to any kind of news source you want instantly. Tired of getting the same fake news every day from the same sources? There is an alternative media nowadays that did not exist 40 years ago. Even with certain tech giants pulling the plug on news outlets they deem unworthy, we still have a greater variety in media than we did a generation or two ago. 6. The Soviet Union is gone! Think about that. If you’re having a really bad day, just remember how one of the most evil, murderous regimes in history collapsed on itself and bit the dust. That will make you smile. One of the happiest days of my life was December 25, 1991. On the day that millions of Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, the blood-soaked hammer and sickle of the USSR was hauled down over the Kremlin. I never … ever … thought I would live to see that day. Man, when I was growing up, we were honestly scared to death of the Soviet Union. We thought they were going to win! Throughout the 1970s we saw the fall of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia. We saw nations in Africa taken over by Soviet allies Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola. Nicaragua was ruled by Soviet-backed communists. Then they invaded Afghanistan. It looked pretty grim forty years ago, didn’t it? But the Soviet Union caved in on itself. I know, I know … plenty of people will tell me that communism is making a comeback here in the and we have plenty of Leftist criminals in our government seemingly “getting away with it.” We also have other challenges from jihadists in our midst and narco-terrorists coming here from Latin America. Yes, these are some mighty serious things. Just remember how the USSR was defeated, though. The way things are now, they won’t be this way forever. Just like the Soviet communists were swept away, so will the modern version be swept away in due time. I believe that right will prevail. Keep looking up, folks. 7. Instant communication. Instant communication could go both ways too, couldn’t it? Sometimes I wonder if I’m too attached to my phone or iPad. I remember the olden days of rotary dial phones and long phone cords. Now I see rotary dial phones in museums and my kids ask, “How do you dial on that thing, Daddy?” If you dialed and no one was there to answer, all you got was a busy signal. There were no answering machines, no voicemail. Today, however, I can call … and leave a message, or send a text! How convenient! I know that the text has been sent, and the person I sent it to will get back to me soon hopefully. With my phone, I have GPS. This has been such a help when navigating through unfamiliar cities. In the ancient world, we had to get out the big Rand McNally map and try to find the major roads in the cities. The GPS in my phone is so much easier. Plus, I can call anybody I want whenever I want. I save so much time while driving now by making my calls on the way to or from work. If I have a question about some issue of the day, or if I just want to know the five-day forecast, I just type or speak into my phone and instantly there’s the answer! I love it! The days of the Dick Tracy “two-way wrist TV” or the Star Trek “flip phone” are here! In fact, technology today has far surpassed what science fiction thought we would have by now. Here’s a great article about Star Trek gadgets that are no longer science fiction now. Of course, there are plenty of problems with all this advancement in communication technology. People get too absorbed in their phones, people forget how to socialize, there are tracking devices in your phone — all those are legitimate concerns. I just thank God, however, that when there is an emergency, and I need to call the police or an ambulance, I can instantly get them on the phone I am carrying in my pocket. Even with all this, I have barely scratched the surface. I could have talked about the great advances in automobiles or energy exploration or space exploration or the great abilities of the military. I could have given details on how crime has actually gone DOWN over the past few decades and we are actually safer across the board, believe it or not. Maybe all that is for a future article. Just look around and think about some of these great things that have happened, smile, and be grateful. 70 per cent of people think the world is getting worse They are suffering from the psychology of declinism Loss aversion and the status quo bias affect our recollection of the past Human memory has a tendency to filter out bad experiences Things aren’t what they used to be’ because we are suffering from psychological biases, according to scientists. Nick Chater, Professor of Behavioural Science, reveals in the first part of The Human Zoo on BBC Radio 4 that our belief things were better in the past is because of loss aversion and our rose-tinted’ memory. A poll of UK citizens conducted by YouGov for the programme found that 70 per cent feel the world is getting worse, with less than 10 per cent believing it is getting better. It also found that 55 per cent feel their own lives are getting worse, with only 11 per cent thinking their life is getting better. Professor Chater said “But can this really be right? After all, if we really think that things were better then we should imagine that if we can roll back time’ we should see life as getting steadily better. "But going back in time would lead us through, among other things, 9/11, global nuclear confrontation, two world wars, increases in infant mortality, shortening life expectancy, and the loss of all the technological inventions that have made our lives easier like washing machines, ovens, electricity and so on. “The idea that everything is getting worse - declinism - is an old one. Even ancient Athens saw itself as having declined from a former, mythical golden age. So perhaps our minds are tricking us into thinking things are getting worse. “In particular our memory tends to forget about the bad events in our past and we have a tendency to rehearse and dwell on the good things that happened in the past, we retell them a lot more often, so we reinforce the good memories. We tend to remember the great songs or cars or football players from the old days’ and forget all the bad ones.” In an experiment that recorded people's anticipation of, actual experiences in, and subsequent recollection of meaningful life events - a trip to Europe, a Thanksgiving vacation, and a three-week bicycle trip in California - scientists found that people’s recollection of the event was far more positive than their experience of it while doing it. Why we yearn for the good old days? “The key point is that people rate past holidays - and other experiences - as much more positive in retrospect than they do at the time,” said Professor Chater, who is part of Warwick Business School's Behavioural Science Group. “This is an illustration of the general idea that my life now doesn’t seem as good as it will look in retrospect.” Professor Chater also revealed that people’s judgement of the past is also affected by loss aversion and the status quo bias. “Loss aversion is when we tend to focus much more on losses instead of gains,” said Professor Chater. “So losing £10 is much more negative than gaining £10 is positive. "As our lives progress, while some things change for the better and some change for the worse, loss aversion means that we pay much more attention to the bad things. So overall, we think life is getting worse. “This leads to status quo bias, which asserts that whatever the situation is now, things in the future will get worse. “This plus loss aversion, combined with our memory’s tendency to filter out bad experiences from the past, can leave us seeing the world, and our lives, as getting worse.” Was life really better in the good old days? So the good news, if you think things are getting worse, is that you may be suffering from the psychology of declinism, rather than actual decline. To listen to the first episode of the new series of The Human Zoo click here. To take part in The Human Zoo's online experiment click here. Read Nick Chater's new book The Mind is Flat - The Illusion of Mental Depth and The Improvised Mind published by Penguin. Nick Chater lectures on the DBA and teaches Behavioural Sciences for the Manager on the Executive MBA and Executive MBA London. He also teaches Principles of Cognition on the suite of MSc Business courses and Emotions in Business on the Undergraduate programme. Follow Nick Chater on Twitter NickJChater. For more articles on Decision Making & Analytics sign up to Core Insights here. Is Life Better Now Than In The Past?Does it depend on your country’s economy?Does it depend on you having mental health problems, like depression?Does it depend on having more and cheaper gigabytes of storage in a smaller space? Anthony J James, CEO Innovation & Growth at Trinity Consulting, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia showed a photo of a 10 Megabyte computer disc from 1970 on Linkedin in prompted someone to ask, Is life better now?’.Compared to 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago, etc?Comparing life now with 100 years ago in following links, followed by 50 years life getting better, in next life better now than 50 years ago? The question asked in the next The next link goes back to 1800 the next links go back 1,000 years or Denne artikkelen er over ti år gammel og kan inneholde utdatert informasjon. A reader has asked a simple yet important question was everything better in the past? We’ve passed the question on to a doctor, a historian, a social researcher, a biologist and a philosopher. Better health now Stig Slørdahl is a medical professor and the head of faculty at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology NTNU. He gives an unequivocal no to the question of whether the old days were better. “We don’t need to use much imagination as far as health is concerned. There are countries in the world right now where millions of people experience the old days’ every single day of the year,” says Slørdahl. Physician Stig Slørdahl. Photo NTNU Historian Ola H. Grytten Photo NHH “In the beginning of the 1800s the life expectancy in Norway was 40. That’s the current life expectancy in for instance Botswana.” Slørdahl isn’t nostalgic about times passed, referring to a high infant mortality. Ditto with regard to when currently curable infections were still taking lives. “Think about living without simple preventive measures such as vaccines or when women had to plan their lives without access to birth control. “Of course all eras have had their advantages, but when it comes to health nearly everyone would prefer today’s realities,” he says. Richer than ever Childhood and adolescence researcher Mona-Iren Hauge Photo NKVTS People in the richer countries have better health. But what about our standard of living and our work life? For an answer to that we contacted Ola H. Grytten, a professor in economic history at the Norwegian School of Economics NHH in Bergen. “Materialistically speaking, things were worse before," he says. "In Norway, we have never been richer than today. Since 1900 economic growth BNP per person in Norway has increased 16-fold. Real income has risen nearly tenfold. And working hours have been cut by nearly a third.” With this new prosperity we can spend more on health, leisure and travelling. Grytten says that right after WWII Norwegians spent a third of their income on food. But now the share of our household budgets has dropped to about a tenth. Biologist Dag Olav Hessen. “But the job market has become tougher in the past decades, with demands for more productivity, independence and creativity. Many find this hard to cope with,” he says. “We have also to a larger degree become dependent on two incomes per household to keep up with the increased standards of living we've seen in the past 40 years,” says Grytten. The economy, work life and social life have also become more complicated in many ways. “Whether we are better off on the whole is a completely different matter than our material gains. We're no more satisfied than we were 100 years ago, perhaps less so,” argues the historian. More choices Religious philosopher Marius Timmann Mjaaland. It’s common for older persons to shake their heads over today’s youth, and recall their own childhood days as better – fewer problems, better manners and more conservative dress codes. We ask researcher Mona Iren Hauge if teenagers were better before. As it happens she is in the process of writing up a lecture about young people growing up in a globalised world. Hauge answers both yes and no to the question of whether we’re seeing progress or not. “Lots of people today think that boys are falling behind in school because there’s too much focus on theory. There used to be lots of jobs for boys who didn’t do well in school. In that regard, things were better for some boys – but not all,” she says. “On the other hand there are lots of kids who like learning and enjoy school. We have a completely different focus on education compared to fifty years ago. Education is an opportunity for a good life. In that respect we’ve seen improvements for those who are happy with the type of education schools provide. For most people who grew up before the Second World War, a higher education wasn’t even an option.” Hauge is a researcher at the Norwegian Centre for Violence and Traumatic Stress Studies NKVTS at Ullevål University Hospital in Oslo, and recently received her doctorate in psychology on the theme of how children become adolescents. Young people of the past were more involved in physical labour. They contributed to the family’s survival through their work. She says that we’ve gone from being a nation that works with its hands to a nation where youths are becoming better educated and more knowledgeable. "We gauge their aptitude and proficiency with standard national exams and are concerned about whether they are getting a good enough education. Are they on the same level as their peers in Sweden, Italy and Germany? “In the old days adolescents had fewer opportunities. Their lives were mapped out for them and for lots of people this sounds fine. But many other appreciate having the choices we see today. We have so much more educational variation and so many alternative ways of living,” says Hauge. No and yes to the environment Dag Olav Hessen is a professor of biology at the University of Oslo. He thinks the answer depends on what kind of environmental issues we are referring to, and no less importantly, on what time scale. So his anwer is initially no, but there's a yes in there too. “If someone claims the environment has improved this is of course incorrect if we’re comparing it to pre-industrial times," says Hessen. "There was little pollution back then, much fewer people on the planet and plenty of nature. But the complaint could be right if for instance we compare it to the 1970s,” he adds. Pollution troubles and the ozone holes are major environmental problems that have generally taken a turn for the better thanks to cleaning technologies and new products. The same can be said about many of the old’ toxins and pesticides, such as dioxins and DDT, he explains. New ones have turned up, but on the whole this situation is better than it was 30 years ago,” “Improved technology has also made cars less polluting. At the same time the number of cars in he world has multiplied, so the net effect is still an increase in pollution. “Environmental consciousness is also more predominant now. The environment has become a key political issue nationally and internationally, not just an appendix. However, that doesn’t mean the effects have been very impressive,” he says. And now we know that the human ecological footprint is too big. “We know that the rainforests are being cut down, that species are becoming extinct and the CO2 in the atmosphere is mounting and we haven’t been able to do much about it. As regards these enormous environmental problems linked to our behaviour, we can clearly conclude that things were better before,” argues Hessen. Belief in progress So far we’ve received one emphatic no, two nos with reservations and one no/yes. So we pass the baton to a Marius Timmann Mjaaland, who holds a PhD in the philosophy of religion, and let him run the last leg. He thinks quite a few things were better before. “More precisely, I don’t think everything is so much better now, even though many of us are better off materialistically than before, at least here in Norway. “One of the most common things in our society is an extreme trust in the future, an irrepressible expectation of the world becoming better and better with mounting progress,” says Mjaaland, who is works as a researcher at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oslo. He says there has been no denying that we’ve made certain strides of progress, for example in technological aids, medicines, cancer treatment, economic levels and access to a stream of information. And in many ways these strides have made life simpler, more comfortable and perhaps less painful. “But many mix all these small elements of progress up with a belief that humankind is actually moving forward, evolving toward something better, that we can soon eliminate the pain, the discomfort and the problems that we still struggle with,” says the philosopher. He views this thought as potentially dangerous; it’s one of the great illusions in our society. “The belief in progress has had a strong grip in our culture, particularly during some of the previous century. But just when this belief was at its peak and people started thinking they were superhuman, they revealed themselves from their darkest side, as demonstrated by experiences from the WWII and the great empires. “If everything wasn’t better before, I maintain that some things were. If for nothing else, to puncture some of the naive faith in the future which most of all resembles a secular apocalypse, and which is much more dangerous than the religious kind,” concludes Mjaaland. - So now the question is was life better before? Or not? The answer is probably yes in some areas, no in others. This is a typical answer you would get from researchers. It's not easy, but it could perhaps make us a tiny bit wiser. Translated by Glenn Ostling People eat at a noodle stall at the Han Market in the central Vietnamese city of Danang in November. Vietnamese respondents to the Pew Research Center survey overwhelmingly said life is better than it was 50 years ago. Ye Aung Thu/AFP/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Ye Aung Thu/AFP/Getty Images People eat at a noodle stall at the Han Market in the central Vietnamese city of Danang in November. Vietnamese respondents to the Pew Research Center survey overwhelmingly said life is better than it was 50 years ago. Ye Aung Thu/AFP/Getty Images The way people perceive their country's economic conditions plays a big role in whether they view their lives more positively now compared with the past, according to a study released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center. Of the nearly 43,000 people surveyed in 38 countries in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and North and South America, Vietnam had the most positive self-assessment Eighty-eight percent of respondents said life is better today in their country than it was a half-century ago. Other Asian countries round out the top five, including India 69 percent, South Korea 68 percent and Japan 65 percent. At the opposite end of the survey, with the least positive assessment of their lives today, 72 percent of respondents in Venezuela said they are worse off. Bleak assessments were also reported by Mexico 68 percent and Argentina 51 percent. "Latin Americans stand out for their widespread negative assessment of progress over the past half-century," the report says. The findings reported in "Worldwide, People Divided on Whether Life Today Is Better Than in the Past" are part of Pew's annual global attitudes survey. But this is the first time the organization has asked whether life in a person's country is generally better, worse or the same as it was five decades ago, says senior researcher Jacob Poushter. "We're interested in how people see sort of the changing nature of the world and how that affects their lives," he says. Thirty-eight countries were included in the Pew Research Center survey. Pew Research Center hide caption toggle caption Pew Research Center Thirty-eight countries were included in the Pew Research Center survey. Pew Research Center While the results are subjective and depend on the historical events and politics of each country, Poushter says the biggest takeaway from this survey is that economic outlook is an important factor. "Exceptions aside about where actual countries were 50 years ago and what the history has been, it generally finds that economic satisfaction ... tends to be one of the strongest in terms of pushing people to say life is better or worse," says Poushter. For example, in Vietnam, 91 percent of respondents said economic conditions are good. According to the World Bank, Vietnam has become among the world's fastest-growing economies and is projected to continue that upward swing. In Venezuela, with the highest percentage of people saying life is worse, only 20 percent of respondents said the economy was good. A collapse of international oil prices has greatly affected Venezuela's economy, which is almost solely reliant on fossil fuels. Things have become so dire that the Venezuelan government announced this month it would create a cryptocurrency to combat high inflation and replace its virtually worthless currency, the bolivar. While the correlation between economic outlook and positive responses about life today was strong for most countries surveyed, it was not true in all cases — including the United States. "There are countries which, if you look at objectively, are doing well economically but [respondents] still said that life was worse today than it was 50 years ago," says Poushter. "Oftentimes, you see ... more issues with politics, issues with relatively more recent history, in terms of people more upset about where they are compared to 50 years ago." Among respondents, 37 percent said their lives are better and 41 percent said they are worse. Anti-government looters attacked a supermarket in Venezuela's Carabobo state in May. Seventy-two percent of Venezuelans told the Pew Research Center they were worse off than 50 years ago. Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP/Getty Images Anti-government looters attacked a supermarket in Venezuela's Carabobo state in May. Seventy-two percent of Venezuelans told the Pew Research Center they were worse off than 50 years ago. Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP/Getty Images A lot of that comes down to political divisions, says Poushter. "It's just that in the last year, Republicans have become more likely to say life is better off, and Democrats have become less likely to say their lives are better off," he says. Political divides also were apparent in Europe, where those supporting populist parties such as the Alternative for Germany or France's National Front were more likely to say "life is worse off for people like them," the report says. The report finds education level is also a factor affecting whether people see their lives as better now than five decades ago. In more than half the countries polled, respondents with a higher level of education said that for people like themselves, life was better. The greatest educational divide can be seen in Poland, where 76 percent of more educated people said life was better than in the past. Fifty-seven percent of the less educated felt that way. The only two countries where the less educated saw their lives as better today were Nigeria and Turkey. Further, in some countries surveyed, the perceived gains and losses by certain religious and ethnic groups over the last 50 years played a factor in respondents' answers. For example, the survey found that black respondents in South Africa are "much more likely" to say life is better 52 percent than it was 50 years ago, when the country was living under an apartheid system. Just 27 percent of white South Africans said the same.

is life better now than it was in the past