Intergenerational tends  measure “what we want?”

-- toward blackness   or toward ever improving wellbeing

With all this miss perception of reality and misappropriated effort to fix problems that if fixed won't keep our civilization from collapsing how do we regain our focus? We need to find a variable that measures if the human experiment is getting closer or farther way from system collapse.

Let me propose the vitality of the earth's human experiment is improving, worsening or remaining constant. One way to measure this trend is to take each set of parents on earth and measure the percent that their kids will live better or worse than themselves. I call this variable the "intergenerational trend."

This percent would reflect changes in health, longevity, the ratio of labor to production. Changes in the enjoyment and participation in the arts. Changes in the ability to contribute to the advancement of science and technology. Changes in social conflict. Changes in benefits to future generations due to consumption of non renewable resources. And changes in the bio system's capacity to maintain its own bio diversity, waste recycling capacity, and other system balances.

Averaging these percentages for all families gives a net improvement or decay of wellbeing in the human experiment. A positive percent would mean every year wellbeing is better than the last. A negative percent would mean each year the human experiment is worse off.

Admittedly that is not the way most individuals have measured the improvement of wellbeing. Most individuals are more immediately and locally focused. Which explains why some people in some places think the world is a bowel of cherries ready to be picked. They think they are good pickers and cherry pie makers. The rest of the individuals don't see any available cherries to be picked and know it's getting harder just to maintain last year's wellbeing.

Anyone counting noses can see that the "cherry pickers" are a small group and the vast majority of the world's parents think their child will not achieve their current wellbeing. The average number indicates dismal negative numbers for the human experiment.

The model suggests that the most likely outcome of these negative numbers for our children will be a rapid rise in scarcity, an explosion of anarchy, collapse of civilization, major die off, leaving many orphans to scavenge in the ruins of mighty cities and destroyed country sides.