The clear expectation of cultural betterment in the face of rising living standards

Abstract

Rising Real Gross Domestic Product Per Capita data indicates rises in living standards. Nonetheless, cultural pessimism is the received view. This paper makes a series of arguments that we should expect our cultural products (e.g. art or cuisine) to be on an upwards trajectory, just as RGDP per capita is. To do so, I expand on Bill James’s “Peripheral Quality Indicia” in order to argue that analogous indicators for our cultural products strongly suggest that they have improved. I also claim that RGDP per capita is itself a peripheral quality indicium for essentially any good in the economy. I then sketch the conditions under which cultural products are actually lower in quality today than they were in previous periods in order to demonstrate the general unlikelihood of quality declining.