Well being loopy isn't too good for economic success so that's a factor? Though for sure I've met some incredibly loopy people that had some great dice roll streaks.
But there are a lot of other factors in the problem and making it an economic issue really obscures some of the more important factors.
Intellectual laziness, idle brains, idle hands, toxic memes and bad actors making bad use of them.
schizophrenia has been proven to be stress triggered and im just not interested to listen to humanity idealization by engineers any more, with the endless utopias and perfect characters, and the blame on everyone not fitting into that template under duress. What good is a construction plan for a machine with all parts carved from diamond? If you cant integrate a real humanity in your perception , your plans and interests, why even waste public bandwidth on your ideas and the terrors they will become ?
Actually, I think our quality of life is going downhill. Things are very expensive and the taxes are still high. I think that the reasons the far right is winning everywhere is because people feel they have lost something. I agree. We have. We bought into the neoliberale thought mill and simultaneously lost our belief in social democratic welfare state. We are in short, becoming more like the states. But without the things that make the states so great. The states can basically print money and then other countries will begrudgingly buy dollars to keep it from inflating top much. So its basically global nation state socialism.