Things just aren’t as good as they used to be, allegedly

ASK the citizen next to you: ‘‘If youth’s pimpled splendour could be given back, what would be the best year to be alive and making your mistakes?’’

You can bet Jerusalem to a ham sandwich nobody will say: ‘‘Heck, I’d like to move forward have my second go in 2060.’’ No, we’ll choose the past — and probably a period during our second and third decade of living.

Some brain trick called ‘‘The Reminiscence Bump’’ has us remember 10 to 30 as the best of the good old days. They were the vibrant, learning times, before experience shoved in its snout.

Woody Allen’s 2013 film Midnight in Paris dealt with the past always seeming richer to us. He invented Gil Pender, an American writer visiting Paris, who resents that he can’t be there back in the 1920s, chatting with Ernest Hemingway and the other luminaries of Left Bank legend.

At midnight a cab ride pours Pender back through time to a boozeup with Pablo Picasso, the Fitzgeralds — and Hemingway. But this wank of malcontents is busy bitching that they all missed the Parisian Belle Epoque of the 1890s.

Poof! Voila! It’s the 1890s. Pender is in the Moulin Rouge, along with Toulouse Lautrec, the tarts, Edgar Degas and Paul Gauguin. These masters opine that 1890 is rubbish, and Mon Dieu, it’s heartbreaking this is not the Renaissance.

Most statistics suggest the times areachanging to make us fatter, healthier, and richer. But obstinately we think all is going to the dogs. I bumped into a nice term for this popular negativity — declinism.

Declinism gets it all in one word — the belief that a country or institution is in decline, and probably permanently.

The Victorians thought themselves unread if they hadn’t waded through Edward Gibbon’s 1776 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. To reduce (or traduce) six volumes to a sentence, Gibbon blamed Rome’s decline on a degenerate loss of civic virtue.

In 1918 Oswald Spengler wrote The Decline of the West which, in predicting Western downfall, saw a pattern of great civilisations rising and then spluttering out over periods of one millennium. The Egyptians, the Classical age, China, and MesoAmerica — all one thousand year civilisations.

Spengler thought that once a civilisation succeeds, it begins to devour itself because a culture of sensibility and intellect first becomes ascendant, and then overwhelms the basic wisdoms of life. Spengler would be chortling at today’s snowflake culture of invented grievances, and our slavery to the observance of mad ‘‘correctnesses’’ which fly direct in the face of instinctual sense.

The Americans have of course, improved declinism, reducing it to decades rather than dull millennia. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Americans thought they were losing their industrial edge to the steamrolling efficiency of totalitarian Germany. (Boy, those guys got things done!)

When the Soviet’s Sputnik beat the US into space in 1957, communism became the new threat to American superiority.

Next, the 1970s — Japan’s work ethic and industrial efficiency would fly them past America. Now it’s China.

For all that, America still leads comfortably, but has ramped matters up by electing Donald Trump as its first declinist president.

Perhaps declinists can’t see that rock ’n’ roll beat the pants off a Sputnik. That an old Cadillac’s gargantuan excess may be more cultured than a Honda productivity chart.

Declinism works in all sorts of ways. When The Bay City

Rollers were small boys from Scotland, I interviewed them and asked a good solid declinist question. Did they think that British rock had gone into decline with the breakup of The Beatles? The Rollers looked at me perplexed, as if I was some gargoyle from their childhood. ‘‘But the Beatles only recorded on eighttrack,’’ they explained. (Most boats rise on technology?)

During New Zealand’s 1950s boom years, it was still an article of faith that agriculture provided lucky old us with one of the world’s highest living standards. We felt blessed and optimistic. But not any more. Things started going south around the time Perfidious Albion tried teaming up with the Europeans.

You need rosetinted specs to start a decline in declinism, and Princess Jacinda is the badge wearer for beaming optimism.

I suggest she starts a Royal Commission to lift us back to the happy, agricultural ’50s. Symbolism is powerful, so why not start with releasing a pension couple from receiving their $32,000 a year in dollars, and pay them in lambs instead? The couple’s super would come out at 189 lambs per year, indexed. That’s sixteen lambs a month.

One couldn’t complain.