Polls consistently show that most people today believe the next generation will be worse off than their parents. Beneath this pessimism lies a deeper unease—not just about the economy, but about fairness. A growing awareness of injustice—economic inequality, racial bias, environmental degradation, political dysfunction—leaves many people with the sense that our institutions are no longer improving the world, and may be making it worse.
But what if this pessimism is backward? What if we’re misreading the world—not because today’s problems aren’t real, but because we’ve forgotten how much worse things used to be? If modern institutions are, on balance, better at solving injustices than creating them, that’s a powerful reason for optimism. And if the injustices of today are smaller, more visible, and more fixable than the ones we’ve left behind, the future may hold more promise than we think.
For most of human history, injustice wasn’t an anomaly—it was the structure of everyday life. To live free of violence, or even the threat of violence, was an extraordinary privilege. People lived under the constant coercion of lords, warlords, emperors, tribal chiefs, and religious hierarchies. Power flowed through violence and submission, not through law or consent. Even the elites who benefited from these systems lived in fear of betrayal or defeat. Kings were assassinated, emperors overthrown, generals executed by their own rulers. What we now call freedom was simply not part of the imagination.
This is the great inversion of modern history: we now see many injustices more clearly not because there are more of them, but because we finally have the moral and institutional tools to notice, name, and challenge them. Injustice hasn’t disappeared—but it has shrunk, fragmented, and become more vulnerable to resistance.
Nowhere was historical injustice more entrenched than in the world of labor. For most people across history, labor wasn’t a career choice—it was a condition imposed by necessity, birth, or force1. Before industrialization, the vast majority of people worked as subsistence farmers, producing just enough to survive, often under obligations to landlords, local rulers, or tribute systems. In many cases, their labor was tied to the land or extracted through coercive arrangements like serfdom or corvée. Slavery, too, was widespread across ancient and colonial societies, stripping millions of autonomy, mobility, and rights. In every form, labor was something done to stay alive, not a path to fulfillment or advancement.
With the rise of industrialization, coercion changed shape but remained a defining feature of labor. The early 19th century brought factories, not freedom. In England and the United States, children worked 12- to 16-hour days in coal mines and textile mills. They slept beside dangerous machinery and died from preventable disease and exhaustion. Adults fared little better. Safety regulations were nonexistent. Workers were routinely maimed or killed. Those who protested risked being fired, jailed, or worse. This was not considered an injustice by most elites of the time—it was business as usual.
Writers like Rebecca Harding Davis captured the bleakness of this world in stories like Life in the Iron Mills, portraying factory workers as trapped in a grim machinery of exploitation. Historian E.P. Thompson, in The Making of the English Working Class, documented how industrial workers were crushed between production quotas and institutional indifference. They had no options, no protections, and no meaningful voice.
Eventually, the idea of labor rights emerged—not because society became more virtuous, but because new systems made it possible to challenge injustice more effectively. The early labor movement was marked by violent clashes. Strikes were crushed by police and militias. Organizers were beaten, jailed, or killed. But out of this conflict came institutions that could absorb and mediate disputes without descending into chaos: unions, regulatory agencies, courts, and legislatures that recognized workers not just as tools, but as citizens.
This shift wasn’t purely moral—it was structural. Rising productivity created economic surplus, which made humane conditions more affordable. The growth of the middle class created new political leverage. Journalism and civic organizations helped expose abuses. Governments and markets, under pressure, began to respond.
The injustice of coerced labor didn’t vanish. It still exists today in pockets of the global economy—modern slavery, sweatshops, informal labor. But these abuses are smaller in scale, more visible, and more widely condemned than ever before. And critically, they are contested.
Today’s injustices are real. They include algorithmic bias, mass incarceration, systemic racism, income inequality, and labor exploitation in global supply chains. But they differ from historical injustices in several crucial ways.
First, they tend to be smaller in scale. These are no longer totalizing systems like chattel slavery or hereditary serfdom—legally sanctioned, socially normalized, and violently enforced. While today’s injustices are serious, they are often contested and constrained by laws, public norms, and institutional checks.
Second, they are increasingly visible. Injustices that once operated in silence are now far more likely to be documented, debated, and protested. Body cameras, investigative journalism, and social media expose abuse in real time. Even more complex forms of injustice—such as algorithmic discrimination or executive overreach—are now subject to public scrutiny and legal challenge.
Third, they are reversible. In past centuries, injustice was a permanent condition. A serf could not sue a lord. A slave could not appeal to a constitution. But today, even flawed institutions offer mechanisms for redress. Laws can be changed. Leaders can be voted out. Public pressure can shift norms and force reform. We are more equipped than ever to undo bad decisions—even if we don't always act fast enough.
We see this redress in action across a wide range of issues. Wrongful convictions have been overturned through DNA evidence and the advocacy of groups like the Innocence Project and the Marshall Project (see my essay and interview with Neil Barsky, the founder). Discriminatory laws—from redlining to same-sex marriage bans—have been challenged in court and often struck down, sometimes within a single generation. Labor violations, though still present, are now subject to workplace inspections, whistleblower protections, and online review platforms that publicly pressure employers. Even digital injustices like algorithmic bias in hiring or policing are drawing regulatory attention and spurring new laws. These systems are far from perfect, but they stand in stark contrast to a past where no such mechanisms existed at all.
Of course, not every modern problem is easily solved. Some, like the century-long expansion of executive power in the United States, resist clear institutional control. As Bruce Ackerman (my essay and interview) outlines in The Rise and Fall of the American Republic, the presidency has accumulated vast authority—through war powers, emergency declarations, and broad administrative discretion—often without meaningful pushback from Congress or the courts.
Whether this concentration of power constitutes an injustice depends on what it enables. If executive authority begins to insulate itself from accountability or allows new forms of systemic harm to persist unchecked, then it becomes not just a constitutional concern, but a moral one. So far, however, the expansion of executive power—while real—has not clearly produced widespread, durable injustices that society cannot contest or contain. In many cases, the very presence of legal and civic resistance to presidential overreach is evidence that the system remains responsive, if imperfectly so.
This distinction matters. It reminds us that not all institutional problems are sources of active injustice. Some are latent risks—structural imbalances that could enable harm in the future if left unchallenged. Recognizing the difference is part of a mature understanding of progress: we should remain vigilant about the concentration of power, but also acknowledge the resilience of the systems that still constrain it.
As Stephen Pinker argues in Enlightenment Now, “progress is not a miracle; it is a fact,” and part of what makes it hard to see is that “our standards of what counts as injustice rise faster than injustices are removed.”
The fact that some problems remain unresolved doesn’t undermine the larger arc. It confirms that justice is always partial, always evolving. But if we know that past generations once accepted slavery, child labor, and systemic repression as permanent fixtures of life—and yet those systems eventually crumbled—then we should be slow to assume that today’s hardest problems are immune to change.
The lesson isn’t to ignore what’s wrong; it’s to see injustice not as proof that progress has failed, but as an invitation to keep building the institutions, norms, and coalitions that make reform possible. We are not the first generation to live with what seems intolerable. But we might be among the first with the capacity—and the responsibility—to respond before it calcifies into permanence.
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