It's sad how many comments dismiss the remarkable data, e.g. by commenting that the article "only" shows that average living conditions have improved, as if that is an argument against the conclusion that global living conditions have been continuously improving (and likely to continue if the trend continues).
The data shows that for all the selected metrics global living standards have improved, regardless of wealth distribution etc. For example, fewer children are dying today than in 1800 or 1960:
- a child born in 1800 had a 43.3% probability of dying before their fifth birthday
- in 1960 the probability was 18.5%
- in 2015 the probability was 4.25%
The 1800 estimate is astonishing. Almost half the children born in 1800 would probably have died by 1805. To me even the 1960 mortality rate is astonishing. Almost a fifth of all children born in 1960 would probably have died by 1965.
An even bigger improvement can be seen in extreme poverty (defined as living on $1.9 a day adjusted for inflation and price differences between countries):
- in 1820 94% of the global population lived in extreme poverty
- in 1960 64% lived in extreme poverty
- in 2015 only 9.6% lived in extreme poverty
I cannot see how such statistics can be interpreted as anything other than extraordinarily positive, and I just hope the trend continues.
Certain political ideologies - that seem to prosper in the most influential and wealthy areas of the United States - need to maintain a 19th century narrative that the plight of poor people is getting worse with time, not better. Such philosophies are healthily represented here on hacker news, and all manner of fact twisting and double-think takes place in order to fit facts to the narrative.
If your narrative is that you need drastic change and increased state powers to commandeer an economy and the individuals in it to reduce poverty, the statistics are not extraordinarily positive at all. They strike at the heart of your ideals. The fact that people are becoming wealthier despite most of the worlds economies tending towards a free market must be vigorously opposed.
I think what we are missing in some discussions of the "plight of [the] poor" is some measure of sovereignty and opportunity. Class mobility statistics don't capture all of this idea.
Sure, the US poor may have cheap giant TVs from Walmart, but they may or may not have any reliable means of becoming something other than poor, and they may or may not have much control over their own lives.
Earlier in my life I spent a little bit of time in a very poor community in inland California as a volunteer, and nothing I saw convinced me that society is working for those people, and especially their children. The expectations were low, opportunities almost nonexistent.
The message I'd like us to take away from these discussions isn't, "Let's ignore all the improvements that have been made," but rather, "Let's not stop now, there's much more to be done."
Humans don't perceive their reality on absolute terms. They perceive them on relative terms. Though the stats may be correct in absolute terms, the experience that individuals have are significantly different and shared by perceptions of how they are doing vs. how other people in their social group or country are doing... and what hopes they have for the future. From that perspective people in the West are very cynical/pessimistic and miserable because of it.
So relative poverty is what matters and also the ability to look into the future and see greener pastures. People in the West don't see this happening. Instead they see more competition for ever dwindling jobs. See corporations that do not want to treat them fairly. See governments which are not on their side... etc. etc. This is distressing.
So they dismiss findings that things are getting better for poor people as propaganda. Because those people are not in their social group and the information does not apply to their experience of reality.
They both matter. Having a society of full economic and social equality (whatever that means) at circa 1700 living standards is arguably worse than what we have now, looking from the outside in. From the inside, people in such a society might indeed be happy enough because they are no worse off than anyone else...
My son was born with a health condition that would have killed him 75 years ago. He's now perfectly healthy.
Those numbers on childhood mortality are staggering. Hundreds of millions of people have been spared the life-altering grief of losing a child. Let's hope we can drive that number down to 0.
I've been struggling to understand the origin of these odd pessimistic comments too. It seems callous to dismiss this information as not important or incorrect, just because it doesn't fit ones' worldview.
I think that perhaps thats why the article starts with the fact that most people think the world is getting worse. For some individuals, it may be possible that had they been born 50 or 200 years ago, they might have been happier. But it seems much more likely that they don't know what the past was like, in terms of the distribution of lifestyles and life challenges.
I have a feeling that people forget just how difficult things were. We start to take all our modern comforts for granted, as we spend more time dealing with our daily struggles.
There's also the long trend of "The end is nigh! Repent, sinners!" in American culture, that seems to come out from both the religious and non-religious, as well as from all political backgrounds, in these discussions.
"I have a feeling that people forget just how difficult things were. We start to take all our modern comforts for granted, as we spend more time dealing with our daily struggles."
I have a feeling the amount of spare time we enjoy today actually plays a part in it. When you have to make your own clothes, butter, etc, you dont have time to stop and think. You just keep working.
I also feel like there is a pattern among pessimistic people. When something new comes out, they weigh the cons heavily, the pros less, and completely ignore the cons of the old way.
I also wonder if memetics and the ease of communication play a part. It seems like people like outrage, so some ideas spread faster. The idea that things are getting worse should cause some outrage, but a lot of people dont seem to think critically about incoming info. They just immediately pass it on.
I'd love to see an experiment addressing these points if anyone knows of anything. Solving these problems would eliminate a lot of suffering in the world.
I don't think the people that are pessimistic about the future (The premise of the article) dispute or are ignorant of the fact that we are better than a century ago or even a decade ago. I think the article is attacking a straw man: they were not asked if things got better in the past, but about the future. People don't see an optimistic narrative that they subscribe to anymore. The mantra "we 'll keep doing what we are doing and things will improve because it worked in the past" doesn't seem to catch on anymore. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
Without knowing the future, I think the best we can do is look at historic trends to give us an idea of what is going to happen in the future. I agree 1800 is an interesting datapoint but probably not that relevant for the present day. Nonetheless, there appear to have been consistent improvements even in the past few decades, and there is still plenty of scope for improvement given almost 10% of the world population are in extreme poverty (about 700 million people).
I think a lot of people answering the survey question:
“All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither getting better nor worse?”
focus on whether their world is getting better or worse, and not the whole world. Most of the improvements in the past few decades have been in developing countries, which have experienced dramatic improvements in standards of living (and developing countries are also home to the majority of the global population). Meanwhile standards may well have been relatively stagnant or declining for many people in developed countries.
If we are talking about whether the world is getting better or worse, expectations based on experiences in India and China are far more pertinent than the recent history of the USA.
The point of the article is that objectively the world, as a whole, is getting better, and in some cases improving quite dramatically. Personally, I don't think the survey quoted in the opening paragraph is really that interesting - it's not the least bit surprising that people replied subjectively rather than objectively.
My point about the Chinese experience being more pertinent was regarding these objective measures not how people replied subjectively to a survey question. It's not that the Chinese experience is pertinent to someone in US or France, but that recent Chinese economic development has been more pertinent to whether or not the world has objectively gotten better.
In the future we are also going to see far more reductions in poverty and child mortality in countries like India and China than in the USA, because the USA is so much wealthier. Additionally, if we want to understand how to improve the world in the future, I believe it's more important to look at countries that have recently improved standards of living, like China, rather than countries like the USA that experienced their most significant improvements in standards of living before the 1960s.
Most of the comments that I find odd here are the ones that dispute that we are better than a century ago. If they are saying one thing, but mean another (or another way of phrasing this, if I'm completely misinterpreting what their words mean), then that may explain what I find so odd.
If its just that they don't see an optimistic narrative, that this trend will stop and no longer continue, then I would ask why they see it that way. What evidence do they have, and where does it come from? And if it's not evidence, and just ideology, what ideology is that and why do they subscribe to it? I'm genuinely curious.
Past performance doesn't guarantee future results, but the results/output are a direct product of the input (cultural factors, economic ones, etc.). Couldn't we say that past performance is a great indicator of future results as long as there hasn't been a dramatic shift in input that we can identify?
If there's been such a change in a factor that would cause a substantial difference in the trend, what would you suggest it is?
>I cannot see how such statistics can be interpreted as anything other than extraordinarily positive, and I just hope the trend continues.
I hope I live to see the trend continue. The long-term trend, after all, continued towards improvement throughout, for instance, the 1930s and 1940s, which many of us would think of as the worst nightmare humanity ever lived through. And of which, coincidentally, historians and other scholars are warning us that we're lurching into a repeat, like zombies who somehow can't do what everyone agrees would have avoided the last world war, the last Holocaust, the last nuclear bombing.
While reduced mortality is good I'm much more cautious about interpreting poverty statistics, which draw elaborate inferences from very limited datapoints. For example, this definition of poverty as living on $2/day, while useful, is predicated on the idea of private property that flows from one person to another. We don't have a way to measure things like the quality of someone's social relations (people that would share their food with you, for example) so that never even shows up in the data, and we end up trying to describe the contents of the room by shining a flashlight through a keyhole.
One way I often think about it - not because it's more correct, but just in order to shift my perspective, is to consider that in 1820 the world population was just over 1 billion, so you had, say, 950m people worldwide living in extreme poverty. Today world population is 7.5 billion, so you have about 750 million people in extreme poverty.
Now, the percentage fall is great...but that assumes that the incidence of poverty would normally stay constant. But another way to think about it is that we've only reduced the incidence of extreme poverty by about 20% even though we've managed to grow overall population by a factor of ~7. Could it be that our economic system depends on the maintenance of a desperately poor underclass from whom wealth can be indirectly extracted and then more efficiently multiplied?
This is an unconventional approach, but bear with me for a moment. It's certainly true that if you're born right now, your probability of being born into extreme poverty is far lower than 2 centuries ago - great. But suppose you're in extreme poverty anyway - are you that much better off today than you were then? It's not as if being in extreme poverty now sucks ~10x less than it did 2 centuries ago - while it is happening to a somewhat smaller number of people in absolute terms, qualitatively you're just as badly off on the individual level - perhaps even worse off, because as part of a smaller minority people have less and less sympathy for your impoverished condition due to simple lack of common experience.
What if, instead of setting a goal to reduce extreme poverty as a proportion of the overall population, we had a goal to reduce the absolute number of people in extreme poverty to almost zero? We would still have people who were poorer than their peers but we might be able to reduce the incidence of poverty as a threat to survival. Currently we take the approach of growing the whole economy, and thus shrinking the percentage of people who are in poverty. but I argue that this is equivalent to growing the part of the economy that's not in extreme poverty and leaving the part of the economy that is essentially unchanged. Suppose, for example, that the lower a person's wealth/income, the shorter the time horizon on which returns were channeled to them? Thus, the benefits of an increase in GDP would be felt (albeit modestly) by the extremely poor first, and that the well-off received their rewards last?
It strikes me that an under-appreciated feature of capitalism is that size of income is strongly correlated with seniority, ie getting paid first, and that this is a Bad Thing. The most basic example of this - so 'normal' that it's rarely questioned - is that rent is generally payable in advance but wages are paid in arrears. Even if the worker's earned output exactly matches the cost of living, the worker is condemned to carry a debt of one calendar unit + interest - a small difference, but little different from a casino that offers 'generous' odds, which just means they'll take your money away more slowly. The worker doesn't enjoy an economic surplus until this additional overhead is paid off (not to mention the additional cost of thing slike rental deposits that are refundable in theory but rarely in practice).
But why should the size of a debt be correlated with seniority? Arguably, the more you can lend out, the greater the level of surplusage you enjoy. A millionaire may lend a friend $1000 without anxiety, whereas someone worth only $1000 would need to think cautiously before lending $100 - the millionaire is risking 0.1% of her wealth, while the poorer person would be risking 10%, 100x as much in relative terms. IF you had borrowed $1000 from a millionaire, and $100 from your poor neighbor, and your investment had paid off, should not the poor neighbor be paid first, to reflect the considerably greater risk undertaken on your behalf?
Of course, economics tells us that one way to handle this is through interest - the lender who is taking on a high risk should demand a high rate of interest for the loan. But having limited ability to supply capital in a competitive market, such lenders would have to be price takers. So if the going rate is 1%/day, the millionaire makes $10 while the poor lender makes $1 - his risk is 100x greater, but his payoff is 10x smaller.
Naturally, one lesson of this is to nor lend more than you can afford, but if you ever work for wages you're basically lending the employer the value of your labor for 2 weeks or a month or whatever the standard pay period is where you live. You're showing up and putting in the time, but you get paid after the work is performed while you are expected to pay in advance for all the things you consume. Anyone who isn't able to accumulate a capital surplus of a calendar period's living expenses is thus doomed to penury. I suggest that if smaller debts had default seniority over larger ones, to reflect the relatively higher risks taken on by smaller creditors, we would reduce the incidence of poverty significantly faster than we are doing now, at minimal damage to overall growth.
Extreme poverty is defined as total consumption of goods and services of less than $1.90 per day per person, adjusted for inflation and local purchasing power. Not terribly difficult to compare.
How about we talk about the actual article, rather than play "gotcha" games with the wording of the title?
Look, there's an actual point to be made, that this progress is coming at too high a price to the ecosystem, and the bill will come due (even in human terms) in the not-too-distant future. But the way you tried to get to that point makes you look like a demagogue with an axe to grind, who is looking for any excuse to hijack the conversation to your pet topic.
I would love to see a complement to this piece examining our "loss potential", which I basically define as the potential for us to undo all of the good we've done.
Sure, things are better, but I would argue that there's a greater loss potential. As technological potential grows that means more and more people have a target on their back, dooming them to inevitable irrelevance. Say our technological/societal progress results in us destroying ourselves with some weapon/technology in the year 3000. One would amortize the negative infinity loss through the preceding years. This would result in negative progress each year, right? Of course it's impossible to predict when such a thing would happen.
----
Also, it would be nice to compare things to what we could have achieved. For example, if western civilization really did stunt potential of certain places or people, and NOW they're finally catching up, is that impressive? The alternative could mean we would be where we're at now a few decades ago.
The author is Max Roser, the economist behind the Our World in Data website (https://ourworldindata.org/). The data is all sourced from that site and seems to be well researched when I have casually browsed the datasets.
I have a lot of respect for his work, but I can't really judge it's accuracy without diving more into the data.
I recall a dead-tree uncle writing his daughters (longhand perfect cursive) a summary of life. His life is "good" ( I forget his exact words) conclusion was very surprising.
The "humanity" question is really one thing to me. More or less live births.
The mindset of "better" had been passed down our generations and I am greatful for it
Regardless of my opinions on this, it's the comments from articles like this that make me wish there really was a longer reprieve from political discussions on Hacker News. I'd take no political discussion over really heated political discussion, because often in comments (from both sides) people get so heated that I can't even get through one or two paragraphs without losing understanding of whatever point they are getting across or refuting. I enjoy reading HN for the comments primarily, but it seems that when it comes to political discussions it seems worse off than Reddit.
there are also things that are worse now. half of animal species alive in 1970 are now extinct. we have created new diseases as we've removed the threat of old ones. things like sitting outside and looking at the stars are harder, or listening to birdsong. the family no longer spends much time together. our lives are more virtual and less based in reality, which leads to a lower quality life and less happiness.
Have you even talked to the elderly? They are much happier today than they were kids. The ability to communicate with old friends and family across the globe and purchase medicine easily.
Over half of your claims relate to the environment. Perhaps you are too attached to that? Or are you so firmly fixed to your narrative that quality of life is decreasing? I can easily cite many MORE animal species that are not extinct today, but would have been, if it were not for our technological advances and conservation efforts. But of course, this doesn't match your narrative, so you will deny it at all costs.
amazingly, i have spoken to some elderly people, and not all were happier today than as kids. although who's to say how much their current circumstances and memory affect their recollection. and how can there be many MORE species that would have been extinct if not for us humans and our "progress" and technology, which is what drives their extinction in the first place?
what good is it to live in a great techno-wonderland if we've traded much greater gifts to get there? i could say perhaps you are too attached to the idea of progress, the idea that because time passes things must get better?
I like the hope in this article. I can't trust it any more than I can trust other media sources but I'd rather believe this than some doomsday prophecy that was mostly designed to scare views into watching more.
"More accurately" is relative and not "perfect accuracy". The "ethical standards" depend on the institutionalized ethics, which you & others may or may not agree with. Alas, we have a generation of reporters who seem more interested in changing the world than objectively reporting on the state thereof; if they want to change it the way you want it changed, you tend to consider it "accurate" and "ethical".
Ethicality is subjective but accuracy is not. It's pretty much impossible to have perfect accuracy but there are some organizations that do provide more accurate news and data than others.
This is very true. I'm living in a big European city in a totally overpriced apartment that was originally a "worker's apartment" (according to the terminology of the time) around 1930.
Really, the amount of work one has to perform just to be able to have a couple of square meters is amazing.
I don't think on it's own that's enough, but it's a clear example of something significant and worse. Fewer species is obvious, but not something most people really care about.
Light pollution is on the other hand is something people are just used to. Having never known stars why would they care about never seeing them? Never mind the huge impacts of poor sleep that's just the way things are.
Air pollution is again something people downplay. Sure it kills millions but air seems fine where I am.
If you were raised in a self-sufficient rural mindset, owing property is a very important value - to the point that someone saying it's "objectively wrong" is offensive.
Is it a more important value than not having your children die by the age of five?
kmicklas said "more important". He/she is right. If you think available land is more important than your kids not dying, something's very wrong with you.
Consider that other people hold different axioms. For many of us, it's not that one is valued above the other, it's that one facilitates the other.
When much of your survival comes from the land, having sufficient (or more) land is a major factor in preventing your kids from dying, and in doing much better than "not dying". Food comes from land. Shelter (wood, brick, rocks) comes from land. Heat (wood, straw, dung) comes from land. Growing up, half my family's food came from our backyard, and most of our heat could have (easier to get firewood delivered, but the fallback was there).
You may look at a city and praise the wonders of modern upscale living. I look at a city and see a million people dead in a week if the water/gas/electricity gets shut off. You may look at a rural community and see sub-optimal living conditions. I look at a rural community and see a culture that will continue on thru major EMP/Y2K/etc technological disasters.
It's not that I think available land is more important than my kids not dying, it's that I think available land is a major component to ensuring my kids don't die.
But under actual existing conditions, why do children die? It's not starvation (at least in the US and Europe), or EMP. It's lack of medical care.
So, back to the question at hand. Isn't the availability of medical care more valuable than the insurance value of the land? Yes, the land lets your kids live if there's an EMP. But the medical care lets your kids live through all the years until there's an EMP, if there ever is. Isn't the actually-happening reality more important than the might-be?
Or, to put it in more brutal terms: How many of your kids would you be willing to have die due to lack of health care, in order to have the land to keep all your kids from dying if there ever is an EMP? For most people, I think the answer is "zero".
There was a lot of stuff in the 1930's that was not so great, but we don't know what the 2030's are going to be like. Making the question hard to judge. However, if you would have said 1900 vs 1800 that's a more interesting question and I would probably pick 1800. But, I would also pick 1950 over 1850.
More interestingly I would pick 10,000 BCE over 500CE if I was stuck in a random body, but 500CE if I got to chose my parents.
1900 WWI, WWII, Great Depression etc. Now, someone born in 1800 could have been born a slave in the US, but you could also be born into slavery in the 1900 or even 2000 in other places.
>No evidence is given that life at any point in the future will be better than it is currently.
Because you cannot say that with certainty. He in fact addresses this very point towards the end:
"Big problems remain. None of the above should give us reason to become complacent. On the contrary, it shows us that a lot of work still needs to be done — accomplishing the fastest reduction of poverty is a tremendous achievement, but the fact that one out of 10 people lives in extreme poverty today is unacceptable. We also must not accept the restrictions of our liberty that remain and that are put in place. It is also clear that humanity’s impact on the environment is at a level that is not sustainable and is endangering the biosphere and climate on which we depend. We urgently need to reduce our impact.
It is far from certain that we will make progress against these problems. There is no iron law that would ensure that the world continues this trend of improving living conditions."
On a very simplistic level, the article can be reduced to three statements:
1) A minority of people today believe that life is getting better for humanity
2) Between 18XX and today, life improved (at least as measured by the examples given)
3) There are challenges facing humanity for the future and there is no guarantee that life will continue getting better
I'm not disputing any of the points or data sets in the article, nor am I disagreeing with the author. I am simply disappointed that at an article which barely touches on the issue of whether life is currently improving or not is misleadingly titled 'Life is getting better for humanity'.
What you're saying, essentially, is that if you only have a one-sided derivative (change in conditions from past to present is known, but not from present to future), you shouldn't call it "the derivative" (i.e., you shouldn't say things "are getting" better). I can perhaps agree, as a technical matter, but I think your criticism is over-sensitive for a non-math paper.
What you're saying would seem to imply that there's a reason to believe that all the trends in the article have stopped or reversed.
Looking at the data provided, the trends are smooth and showing improvement at this moment in time, so I think that contention is reallt clearly false.
If you're saying something else, I would like to hear it! But I so far have not been able to divine a different meaning.
the point i think is that you cant use average living condition as a source for validating whether living conditions are getting better on average especially since we know that wealth and benefits of modern technology isnt actually getting evenly distributed.
compared to 1800 sure, compared to 1960's not so sure.
At the very least, evidence demonstrating a persistent, long-term trend would seem to be evidence in favor of the trend applying to the current day. Especially when the main thing driving people's perception that life is _not_ getting better seems to be media reporting that fails to focus on the big picture. In other words, the world could be improving while (of course) human lives are partly bad. Focusing on the bad --which can always be found -- and not on the overall general trend skews our perception about whether and how things are changing.
Of course, there could be countervailing reasons (and evidence) that the general trend does not hold currently, like the suggestion that (a) distribution of benefits has become more uneven and (b) this uneven distribution may make things worse overall than they were before the benefits existed in the first place.
There are lots of ways people could try to provide evidence that the general trend somehow no longer applies. But I think the linked article points out: this sort of evidence is not what media is giving. News media points out that something is bad, sure, but it fails to place it in broader context. The broader context is one of general slow improvement over long periods of time, which is something that we don't get from the news; news media likes to focus on today's bad things, long general trends are not "newsworthy".
Also, as the article suggests, even today's positive evidence for the general trend is not newsworthy, in part because it is so pervasive and boring (e.g., every day 130,000 fewer people are living in extreme poverty). Something that happens regularly every day is not "news". (Or maybe the 130k fewer people thing is not news mostly because it's a good thing. The rate of murders and/or car accidents can be fairly stable, but people seem to have an appetite for hearing about each of these bad things as it happens, so that's what news reports.)
I am not listening to media and I am not saying it can't get better (post-scarcity is not something I believe is impossible for instance) but you have to be very precise when you make these kind of statements as they are ignoring the reality for many people. Just a simple fact that children today are less likely to live a better life than their parents in the west is worth thinking about.
It might be an indication that yes life is improving globally but that does not mean it improving in a way that is proving this trend to continue.
But, the data is not arguing about averages... It's showing that the for the vast majority of people on Earth, life has been getting steadily better for a hundred years. If anything, it's showing that the benefits are getting unevenly distributed in favor of the world's poorest. It's just that there's so many of them that that's still spread pretty thin.
The amount of digging for "Sure... but... I can still think up problems in the world!" in these comments is pretty incredible. Try to be happy for the vast majority of people on Earth --even if we are not living in a universal idealized utopia.
Thats not the point though. I am well aware that primarily the developing world are doing better, that is true but it is also trivial. The real question is what we do with those in the developed world.
You are of course welcome to not find the issues we are talking about important but Trump and Brexit happened because of exactly that.
The article says life has improved dramatically for the majority of the Earth. Louisswiss is disappointed it doesn't prove the improvements will continue. Epistasis says they only show signs of increasing. You say you shouldn't use global averages to judge the condition of average people. I'm going to assume you meant median people, because otherwise your argument is nonsensical. Even so, the data in the article directly addresses your concern and demonstrates that the median person's situation on Earth is improving dramatically. That was my point.
After all that, Trump? What? The world's middle-rich (median Americans) are not getting richer on the schedule we all expected. That's an issue. But, it's not the current topic.
The point being discussed is that people have such a short-sighted view of the world. And, that view is distorted by fear-mongering media (TV's click bait). This leads people to a strong belief that the world is getting worse in contradiction to all data.
It seems that some people cannot be happy without bad news. 5 billion people doing so much better. And, much of that affects the other 4 billion as well. But, in the face of good news, you always see a people climbing over each other to declare "Sure... Maybe that's good. But, give me a second and I'll find something that's still bad somewhere!"
Yes thats what the article says. What I am others are saying is that that's not the whole story. The living conditions are not getting better for everyone in some important ways that means something for whether this can continue.
There is nothing new in the fact that globally the world is getting better but that primarily means the developing countries are getting better not the developed ones where the trend is either stagnating or seem to be reversing.
> I am well aware that primarily the developing world are doing better, that is true but it is also trivial. The real question is what we do with those in the developed world.
As someone who came from the developing world and still have a lot of family there, I find these statements pretty offensive.
For me, it comes off as tremendously callous. Many billions of people still face issues of food, health, safety, security that even poor Americans/Europeans trivially avoid. But, "The real question is what do we do with the richest half billion?"
So I can't complain that the train is late because somewhere in the world other people don't even have trains?
I think you missed the point I was trying to make.
My point was simply that it's a not very controversial that the living conditions around the world are getting better, thats great.
But it does not mean that it's getting better for everyone and especially in the developed countries it's actually going the other way which is relevant to discuss as this might mean that things can't continue getting better.
Saying it's trivial that the developing world is improving could be interpreted as the developing world lacking importance in comparison to the developed world.
Did you mean it was easy to achieve (not that I would agree with that either).
I was saying the fact that the living conditions are increasing in the developing world (which is a good thing) is a trivial fact. I.e. it's true and not really disputed.
What is more disputed is that it's also increasing for the developed world.
This article is not about averages where outliers drive up the metric (like wealth or income), it is about defined cut points.
I'm still not seeing how that would relate to what he is saying, though. We are talking about the world, and the world getting better, which the data shows it clearly is.
And the "is" is important there, that's the current trend we have.
The world is getting better for some. For others all hope of a future where they ex. have a job is increasingly common. It all really depends on how you measure it.
Wrong. The average of all lives is getting better. I think people feel disgruntled because life in the upper end is not improving. Its all good and nice that humanity is dragging its tail forward, but that kinda happens by default, all the time, even without effort. Somehow people feel that the head is not moving forward fast enough , though. We want our flying cars!
> Its all good and nice that humanity is dragging its tail forward, but that kinda happens by default, all the time, even without effort.
No, it doesn't. This isn't some intrinsic element of humanity, positive societal change requires dedicated effort, will, and resources.
Your point about flying cars is a joke right?Flying cars would kill thousands more and be a huge liability. Maybe the problem in the developed world isn't that things aren't growing or improving, but that people don't appreciate the standard of living they have.
I think there are two big things contributing to the lack of appreciation of the living standard:
- anything you experience daily becomes a baseline, so people keep complaining about relative differences within their wealth bracket instead of comparing to less wealthy societies
- a typical person in the West doesn't have that much time to enjoy their standard of living, having to slave away 10-12 hours a day (commute included), being burdened with mortgage and possibly other credits, and being one workplace fuckup from serious economic trouble...
Well, part of that is a choice to consume at a rate that requires such work. It's somewhat easy to have a nice financial position by delaying kids and not pouring money into cars and shopping ... but not many people choose that lifestyle.
I feel this argument is taking things to extremes. There are many intermediate states between living in a vehicle without heat and insisting on eating out, buying nice things, having vacations, expensive phones and plans, etc.
I dunno. I can easily give up on ever eating out, buying new things (I rarely do anyway, other than books), going on vacations (I only get a couple of weeks' vacation every year anyway), or purchasing new phones for un-cheap prices (I already keep mine until it breaks each time). Those are actually pretty negligible expenses. If I really want to speed up the trip towards financial independence, I have to reduce my housing and health-insurance premiums.
That's the only place the money can really come from to invest more than I already do.
Do you ever get tired of pushing the trope of "expensive phones and 4k TVs and eating out" ? I'm just curious.
Because the necessities have been going up at a far faster pace than the digital pseudo-luxuries.
Just as an example, my projected health care costs for 2017 went up by an amount that is larger than a nice phone + eating out every other week combined.
That's just the increase, with no appreciable benefit to me in the services provided.
I'm sure many people could provide similar examples with rent or other necessary services.
Everybody in the community has a different view of things, but for many "retire early" simply means "work on what you want to" rather than "bum around the beach all day for the rest of your life".
There are large subsections that focus on travel, giving up office jobs for being outdoors, and those that are truly much too frugal for my personal tastes.
- Political effort may accelerate it (as in the case of china), but barring war or disease, people with sufficient resources will just copy technology and improve their lives. And even large dedicated effort may be only partially successful, as in Africa [1,2,3].
- I was joking about flying cars but i don't understand your objection to them. Cars are a lot more dangerous; i 've never seen 2 birds collide.
- It's a good thing that people "don't appreciate" that what they have is all they could have; that's what generally drives things forward.
> "Maybe the problem in the developed world isn't that things aren't growing or improving, but that people don't appreciate the standard of living they have."
You can appreciate what you have and still be cognizant of all the problems affecting you and your surroundings. They aren't mutually exclusive. Improvement and change often bring new or novel sets of problems or may have unintended consequences. I don't believe that enumerating those should necessarily imply ingratitude. That's a slippery slope.
If you ignore gadgets, things have gotten worse for the working and middle classes of most developed nations in the past 30 years. Wages are stagnant yet housing and other essential costs have exploded... largely due to asset price inflation driven by financial attempts to reinflate. The problem is that without wage inflation QE only makes housing more expensive.
People in the developed world would be happier with what they had 30 years ago: stable jobs, pensions, a house, infrastructure that is not crumbling.
Exactly! The average may be improving but for too many in the middle class in the US, progress has reversed. Work and earnings opportunity has been reduced, and the millennial generation onwards does not seem to have it better then the generation before.
The best description of what's happening that I've heard is "in-deflation." That's inflation in everything you need (housing, health care, education, etc.) and deflation in everything else including wages. It's basically a result of QE in a very soft labor market.
If you have a fried chicken and some guy in Indonesia does not, on average you have half a chicken. If you have a roasted turkey, and that guy in Indonesia does not, life on average just became a whole lot better for both of you, right?
Let me rephrase that somehow. If you have a remedy that fixes the symptoms but not real cure for cancer, and the guy in indonesia does not, on average you have half a remedy. If you have a cure for cancer and the guy in indonesia does not, life on average is a whole lot better because the guy in indonesia can hope to get the cure himself in a few years.
Strictly speaking true, but wantonly missing the point.
We're at a world economic point where it is literally cheaper to send chickens from USA to China, process them there, and send the product back to USA than to process them near the originating farm. It's not that hard (with suitable supply chain management, and accounting for economy of scale) to just send that half of my chicken to some guy in Indonesia.
Contraception is not improvement in health. Around 1800's women used to have atleast 10 children. Women now cannot even imagine having 10 children. Most of them will die before giving birth to 10th one.
Contraception is a huge improvement in quality of life as well as human freedom.
Women in the past would very frequently die in childbirth. Do you have data to show that childbirth is as dangerous as it was in the path? Or that it was safer in the past? (That would be truly shocking and counterintuitive.)
To answer some of my own questions, child birth is becoming tremendously safer:
Year Deaths per 1000 live births
------------ ----------------------------
1700 to 1750 10.5 (British [1])
1750 to 1800 7.5 (British [1])
1800 to 1850 5.0 (British [1])
1990 3.8 (Global [2])
2013 2.0 (Global [2])
2013 <0.09 (UK [3])
2013 <0.28 (US [4])
Though I can't find a source, some articles claim a 1% maternal mortality rate in the 1600s! [5]
From that same Slate article, child birth is still one of the most dangerous things for young women, despite it being far safer than ever in the past. This means that contraception is actually a health benefit. It makes it much safer to be a young woman.
It's actually the opposite: Humans are not very good at giving birth. And that is surprising.
Child birth is hugely dangerous for humans, and the speculation in the scientific field is that it's an evolutionary interplay between the size of an infant's skull at birth, constraints on hip sizes, and the amount of brain development that can happen as a fetus or as an infant.
Tens of thousands of years is pretty short in terms of morphological development of humans. Evolution on time scales shorter than that is limited to extremely simple mutations, usually, such as lactose tolerance by adults (which has arisen multiple times independently in the past 10k years).
I do agree that contraception has little impact on maternal mortality during child birth.
My comment was satirical. I think women should have choice. I believe that improvement in child mortality was because of contraception and not advances made in health.
Showing a graph with improvements in child mortality rate and alluding us to believe in the following is wrong.
1. It happened because of living conditions. 2. Healthier diet — made possible through higher productivity in the agricultural sector and overseas trade. 3. age-old war against infectious disease 4. discovery of the germ theory of disease 5. development of antibiotics and vaccines
While I believe that contraception has improved child mortality rate. We should compare child mortality rate of first 2 children over the past 200 years. Child mortality will obviously be high when women have no choice.
I have no idea what you're trying to say. Even without introducing the twist that your previous comment was "satirical," and therefore that some or all of this comment may be satirical, it's unclear what point you're trying to communicate.
If you are saying "child mortality is going down only because women are having fewer children and not because of improvements in healthcare," then that statement is obviously wrong and would appear to be satire in itself. If its satire, I'm not sure what the point is. If it's not satire, then I'm not sure how you're going to convince people without at least a fig leaf of a citation.
You understood what I am saying and have also summarized it.
"child mortality is going down only because women are having fewer children and not because of improvements in healthcare"
There might be improvements in healthcare, antibiotics and vaccinations. But I believe that contraception is a major factor in improving child mortality rate. Obviously I cannot cite anything, as it's my belief.
So I started looking for examples to see if I am correct. Looks like my belief is wrong.
Despite a higher prevalence of several risk factors for perinatal and infant death among the Amish, neonatal and infant death rates for Geauga Settlement Amish have been very similar to the corresponding rates for white children in rural Ohio and the state as a whole.
--Perinatal, Infant, and Child Death Rates among the Old Order Amish
My comment was satirical. I think women should have choice. I believe that improvement in child mortality was because of contraception and not advances made in health.
Showing a graph with improvements in child mortality rate and alluding us to believe that:
1. It happened because of living conditions.
2. Healthier diet — made possible through higher productivity in the agricultural sector and overseas trade.
3. age-old war against infectious disease
4. discovery of the germ theory of disease
5. development of antibiotics and vaccines
While I believe that contraception has improved child mortality rate. We should compare child mortality rate of first 2 children over the past 200 years. Child mortality will obviously be high when women have no choice.
I believe that we are being mislead about improvements in health, while in reality people have become weaker, less healthier. There are more diseases now than before. We couldn't really find cure for diseases. Discovery of Antibiotics was helpful for a while. Now bacteria is winning that battle with some superbugs among us.
Any rate of reproduction over replacement level is probably irresponsible, at this point, from a global perspective. We could probably stand to reduce the population down by a couple billion.
It's also easier to have ten children when you start having them at 15 or sixteen, like my grandmother did, rather than at 30, as many are doing now.
My comment was satirical. I think women should have choice. I believe that improvement in child mortality was because of contraception and not advances made in health.
Showing a graph with improvements in child mortality rate and alluding us to believe in the following is wrong.
1. It happened because of living conditions.
2. Healthier diet — made possible through higher productivity in the agricultural sector and overseas trade.
3. age-old war against infectious disease
4. discovery of the germ theory of disease
5. development of antibiotics and vaccines
While I believe that contraception has improved child mortality rate. We should compare child mortality rate of first 2 children over the past 200 years. Child mortality will obviously be high when women have no choice.
Unless you can prove that humans are becoming more content or happier, then I don't think this proves anything. If we have massive advancements in technology but we're all still angry, xenophobic, selfish, etc, nothing is getting better
You're arbitrarily choosing the axes of "angry, xenophobic, selfish" as the only ones that have meaning.
Even if we're exactly the same amounts of angry, xenophobic, and selfish, it's still a better world if my (hypothetical) child has a much greater chance of surviving into adulthood, and not having to deal with that loss. I would challenge you to somehow defend the notion that it isn't.
Or how about the axis of freedom? Even if we're the same amount of angry, xenophobic, and selfish, but are more free, that's still a better world.
If you're going to prioritize just a few very narrow aspects of life, you need to at least explain why these other measurable things have no significance.
by the way, I'm not implying things are getting worse for humanity... imo things stay pretty constant for the human condition. They just get better toys.
So you don't think the humans are better off if there is declining child mortality? And you don't think people now earning $2 a day are happier than when they were earning $1?
I really don't think people are happier. Money isn't a basic need. People want their fears affirmed and addressed. People want to feel meaningful. etc etc
I meet a lot of people whose idea of "getting better" is wealth being more evenly diffused across humanity. If that really is our aim the easiest way to achieve it would be to halt, or even reverse, quality of life improvements for the top x percent of people.
If "getting better" means raising the maximum possible quality of life inequality seems unavoidable, since people need an incentive to pursue and propagate technological advances.
> I meet a lot of people whose idea of "getting better" is wealth being more evenly diffused across humanity. If that really is our aim the easiest way to achieve it would be to halt, or even reverse, quality of life improvements for the top x percent of people.
What if doing that really would make more people happier on average?
It won't. It has been tried many times, and failed with spectacularly deadly results (upwards of 100,000,000 dead in the 20th century from such governance).
As a species we need more stress to get evolution to shape us harder. We are cheating! And there is a price to pay to evolution, as a species. From a single specimen perspective, yes, life is fantastic these days.
Evolution is too slow to care about anyways. If we artificially added heavy evolutionary pressure, we might see results in ten thousand years or so. Do you really think it will take that long to figure out how to do it better and more precisely manually?
You would not believe how fast speciation become under stress. And right now humanity has power to create new species quite literally. Question is, will it use these tools to speed up its own evolution or not?
This is neoliberal propaganda. It argues from average lives that no one actually lives. For example: The share of people living in extreme poverty has decreased immensely. However, your life can be absolutely miserable in a place like the United States while technically not living in extreme poverty. Reducing the dynamics of the entire world and the experiences of each human being to a single number is preposterous.
An example particularly in the United States: Poverty levels have decreased in the US. However, cost of living has exploded in certain areas, meaning that people who technically don't meet the official definition of poverty in, say, San Francisco can have their lives completely upended by the fact that they can no longer afford housing.
A related example not in exactly the same vein is neoliberal identity politics: It is ok for people to be oppressed my structurally racist institutions so long as the oppressor class is sufficiently racially diverse. s/race/{gender, orientation}/g Hide the fact that identities are tied to material relationships of economics and power behind a statistic about """diversity""".
Reducing people to statistics is a technocrat's wet dream and a fundamental ideological goal of neoliberalism: Reduce everyone to rational market actors, measure everything with statistics which abstract away actual reality and allow governments and corporations to justify any action they want because they set the definitions, dissimulate coercive power relationships by refusing to measure them.
Vox is faux-progressive propaganda for the worst kind of capitalism.
You forget what extreme poverty is. It is lacking three square meals a day and being stunted (like being a couple inches shorter).
The poor of the US live better than the median person in India.
Isn't neoliberalism all about being free to be racist (or not racist)? Feel free to correct me about this.
> fundamental ideological goal of neoliberalism: Reduce everyone to rational market actors, measure everything with statistics which abstract away actual reality and allow governments and corporations to justify any action they want because they set the definitions, dissimulate coercive power relationships by refusing to measure them.
I'm biased as a supporter of neoliberalism; but isn't the fundamental ideological goal of neoliberalism maximization of human freedom?
Statistics don't abstract away actual reality; it's the best way to analyze a large number of people. I can't interview all 1.2 billion people in India; instead I can look at the statistics to understand that population.
Neoliberalism is all about minimizing the coercive power relationship between the people and the government.
> justify any action they want because they set the definitions
I wouldn't call it definitions (they're normative); but yes, neoliberalism uses moral justifications.
I recall someone from, IIRC, Africa, being asked why they wanted to move to the USA. They said, "I want to go somewhere where the poor people are fat."
Yes, life stinks if you're poor in the US. Yes, it's been getting worse. But also yes, life stinks much worse if you're poor in many other places, and for many of the poor in those places, life has been getting better.
> You forget what extreme poverty is. It is lacking three square meals a day and being stunted (like being a couple inches shorter).
The definition of extreme poverty is living under $1.25/day (2005 dollars). You'll note that the chart cited in the article is backfilled to 1820. What does it mean to be living in extreme poverty in 1820? Was 95% of the world starving every day? It's an extraordinary claim that would require extraordinarily good analysis to make, but hey, it's a statistic so it must be true! One way in which this statistic is almost completely likely to be bullshit is that most of the world was no where near industrialized in 1820 and comparing means of living under an industrial mode of production versus a subsistence mode of production is suspect.
Furthermore, much of the misery associated with unindustrialized parts of the world in the time period the chart measures was directly introduced by industrialized nations. One looks at unindustrialized areas of the world today and sees constant conflict, famine, and systemic societal dysfunction and extrapolates it backwards under the assumption that it is the absence of capitalist industrialization that sustains these conditions when in fact these conditions were created in the process of capitalist expansion that largely benefited a few hegemonic nations. Neoliberal ideology rewrites human history so that it can blame preindustrial societies for the misery capitalism and imperialism visited upon them.
> Isn't neoliberalism all about being free to be racist (or not racist)? Feel free to correct me about this.
Neoliberalism is specifically a reprogramming of the elements of liberalism to reduce all human activity to the actions of rational, atomized economic actors in a private market. The erasure of the commons, the marketization of social structures such as education, family structures, personal beliefs, cultural expression, the erasure of power relationships (because everyone is voluntarily participating as a rational economically minded being in everything they do), and the depoliticization of human interactions (there is no political, only the economic) are all hallmarks of neoliberalism. Another aspect of neoliberalism is a technocratic view of government which is antithetical to enlightenment ideals: The point of government is to manage and regulate markets and nothing more. Neoliberalism also paints its mechanisms, which are often driven by heavy regulation, police actions, and military invention as inevitable natural outcomes of human nature: in particular globalization is seen as an organic growth of human economics when in fact it has been fostered and directed by deliberate government actions, not laissez-faire economic development.
I don't know what you think neoliberalism is.
> I'm biased as a supporter of neoliberalism; but isn't the fundamental ideological goal of neoliberalism maximization of human freedom?
Sure, and the Party in 1984's ideological goal was to maximize freedom too. The material goals of neoliberalism are ultimately the class interests of the capitalist and owning class. The ideological goal of neoliberalism is to frame the world so that those who control most of its resources are naturally and inevitably the ruling class and that any objection to the sacred, natural law of the market is invalid. So, freedom is framed not as a political concept, but a purely economic one, and ultimately "I want the liberty to grow rich and you can have the liberty to starve" (Isaac Asimov). Because the market is natural and inevitable, any structure it may have that disadvantages anyone to the benefit of another is natural and thus not an impingement of freedom.
> Neoliberalism is all about minimizing the coercive power relationship between the people and the government.
Somehow it does this by increasing the power of the police state, increasing military intervention in weaker countries, staging coups for violent neoliberal dictators in nations that reject it (e.g. Pinochet), increasing regulations to the benefit of the largest corporations, consolidating industries into fewer and fewer independent entities and creating a close relationship between politician, bureaucrat, security officer, and businessman.
>Sure, and the Party in 1984's ideological goal was to maximize freedom too.
Pretty much every paragraph has terrible stinkers like this, but I'll focus on it because it's probably the least political and most open to direct academic interpretation rather than viewed through highly ideological lenses.
The second slogan of the Party in 1984 was "Freedom is slavery." Their explicit goal is to prevent individuals from having freedom. And asserting that everbody must make themselves subservient to the Party (otherwise, bad stuff).
I can't find a single example anywhere in the book of the Party stating that they want to maximize freedom.
Oh goodness gracious, I misremembered it as "Slavery is freedom" from when I read the book 10 years ago. My, oh my, how careless of me.
I'm skeptical you can actually engage with any of my more substantials """stinkers""" and that's why you resorted to nitpicking. In any case, that line can be replaced with the general idea of the party's newspeak and doublethink in the book. In particular, the line "war is peace" from the slogan fits the bill. Instead of saying the party wants to maximize freedom, let's say it wanted to maximize peace. The party loves peace, in fact! There. I clarified the minor point you snagged on.
And for the more substantial points I described in the post, the most accessible scholarly source I've read is Undoing the Demos by Wendy Brown [1]. Unfortunately, it's impossible reduce any lengthy political analysis to the point where it can be fit inside of an Internet comment.
Why should I accept one person's opinion that a theoretical "absolutely miserable" life in the US is worse than living in extreme poverty over, you know, actual data? We all have the agency to allocate our resources as we wish; not being in extreme poverty means that you have more resources to allocate to improving your condition.
Also, is neoliberalism about dividing people up by minority status and then ensuring diversity in our oppressorship? Or is it about reducing everyone to rational market actors and abstracting away everything else? I can't quite tell.
You can use lots of fancy thought-piece buzzwords but I don't see how it makes the content itself thought-provoking.
Most of the recent improvements have been in developing countries, because for a long time there have been a minuscule number of people in the US living on less that $1.9 a day.
For some sub-populations of the US things have gotten significantly worse in the past few decades and we should do something to help. Nonetheless, I think it's worth celebrating a reduction in the global rate of extreme poverty from 64% in 1960 to 9.6% in 2015.
It's also worth noting that the estimates are adjusted for inflation and price differences between countries, so changes in cost of living should not be a significant factor (even though adjusting historic data for inflation is imperfect).
The data shows that for all the selected metrics global living standards have improved, regardless of wealth distribution etc. For example, fewer children are dying today than in 1800 or 1960:
- a child born in 1800 had a 43.3% probability of dying before their fifth birthday
- in 1960 the probability was 18.5%
- in 2015 the probability was 4.25%
The 1800 estimate is astonishing. Almost half the children born in 1800 would probably have died by 1805. To me even the 1960 mortality rate is astonishing. Almost a fifth of all children born in 1960 would probably have died by 1965.
An even bigger improvement can be seen in extreme poverty (defined as living on $1.9 a day adjusted for inflation and price differences between countries):
- in 1820 94% of the global population lived in extreme poverty
- in 1960 64% lived in extreme poverty
- in 2015 only 9.6% lived in extreme poverty
I cannot see how such statistics can be interpreted as anything other than extraordinarily positive, and I just hope the trend continues.