No, we don't. We live in a local minimum based on what we're actually well equipped to define and measure, and what people in positions of power are willing to treat as actionable information.
Politics is swinging to the extremes, violence is changing it's clothes, taking on other less familiar forms. Trust in the system is at a low.
Economic inequality is rife; infrastructure and the environment is approaching levels of instability previously unheard of.
These aren't media bubbles. These are failures to maintain or achieve higher order awareness. All of these things are feeding into each other in myriad ways; they can't be reasoned in individual contexts for solutions. That's the thinking that got us where we are. They need to be reasoned about as a whole.
Problems cannot be solved with the same level of thinking that created them in the first place.
If you are suggesting that we aren’t able to say we’re at all time lows due to a lack of good long term historical information, then you also can’t draw the opposite conclusion that we _aren’t_ at at an all time low. We simply don’t know. But I’d bet it’s highly unlikely that a lack of measurement and/or recording led to better results.
I do agree that trust is probably at pretty low levels — exactly because communication is more accessible than any time in history and therefore people have more opportunity to question authority.
But a lack in trust doesn’t translate directly to violence. I think that people are becoming very complacent with distrust. The daily media barrage of reasons to distrust so many things has reached the point where it doesn’t cause outrage anymore. It has convinced some people that distrust is normal.
every issue salawat mentioned wasn't something that would result in violence and deaths today so its not refuted by citing current statistic.
They're warnings for the future, because while its true that we're currently living in a pretty safe environment and are overall pretty well off, our children won't have that luxury.
Once these issues actually start getting reflected in global statics, its going to be way too late to actually realistically pull this proverbial ship around.
And he didn't even mention half of the things on the horizon with the potential to seriously harm society such as global warming and the evermore increasing amount of automation destroying the livelihood of a lot of people. (automation isn't bad, its just going to cause a lot of problems and unrest very soon)
What's clear is the data about the recent past, and the trends are very good, both for accidental and deliberate death (among other things) on a time-scale of decades to centuries.
There are indeed some reversals (in the last few years: some kinds of crime, pedestrian deaths, opioids) which the optimists hope will be short-lived.
It's incredibly easy to lay a lot of skepticism around your idea that things might have been better before we had our recent ability to define and record various safety metrics.
This can be accomplished by pointing out just a few recent innovations that have extended the global expected lifespan.
- The S bend flushing toilet and access to improved sanitation
- The era of vaccination
- The discovery of penicillin and other antibiotics
- The invention of the movable type printing and subsequent information technologies accelerating knowledge transfer
- Precision medical equipment: MRIs, CT Scans, surgical scopes, ultrasounds, X-Rays, and minimally invasive surgery
- Mechanized agriculture and the era of food surplus
All of the above along with quite a few other innovations cement the idea that anyone wishing to go back to any time period before something like the 19th century is basically out of their mind.
Say what you want about politics, I'm not sure it's anything we haven't seen before. Nationalist right-wing politics isn't new. Political disunity isn't new. Overall, "Trust in the system" doesn't have anything to do with how likely I am to make it to 80 years old.
Our era may have some turbulence, but it's got nothing on dying young because you ate your own shit and didn't even realize it.
Those stats don't really mean anything to the statement that was made. Yes, due to technological, scientific, and social advancements many rates of death are decreasing. However, that does not at all invalidate that profits still trump safety in many industries and decisions worldwide
The original statement implied that profits always trump safety. The reply points out that, over time, safety has generally become more regarded. Of course there is still progress to be made, but it's silly to think that train crashes as dangerous as those in the article we be allowed in most of today's developed countries.
>The original statement implied that profits always trump safety.
While that may be how you interpreted it, that isn't what he stated.
Death rates of various causes have been decreasing primarily due to technological and medical advancements, not because people are more conscious of others safety or less focused on profits. Companies time and time again still choose the cheaper options over peoples safety. If you need evidence look at the oil/gas industry, the pharmaceutical industry, politicians, companies that manufacture products over seas for pennies on the dollar while employees kill themselves from stress, and countless others.
You can even further apply this to tech companies such as Facebook, because while they may not be directly causing peoples deaths, they are having a major negative impact on society and constantly make declensions to maximize profits rather than look out for user safety and well being
It's certainly easy to find examples of profit trumping safety, if that's what you're after.
But GP is correct that the overall balance is much more towards safety today than (say) 100 years ago. It's not really technological advances that sets how many people die to build a skyscraper (and medicine is equally helpless now as then). How many people die in factory fires etc. isn't about the owners being more or less greedy now, it's about whether the fire safety inspector has teeth, which is a political choice.
And in a way a rational choice, too. Every such choice amounts in some way to putting a value on a life, and now that we are much wealthier, this implicit value is much higher.
Public perception of suicide is highly skewed, particularly because many journalists refuse to report cases to deter imitators, unless it cannot be avoided.
While I understand the noble reasons behind it, I do raise an eyebrow considering the fact it can be convenient for a malfunctioning society to sweep it failings under the rug that way.
On the other hand, I do feel slightly patronized, as if I weren't able to handle the "truth"...
What about things like the pharmaceutical industry pumping out insane quantities of opiates?
Or the gun lobbying industry trying to block regulations on registration and background checks?
Or the crazy number of petrol-refinery incidents in recent years (which could probably be prevented with stricter regulations or monitoring but that would cut back on profits)?
Or the links between social media and suicide rates?
Or every industry lobbying against climate change related regulations?
Or the Boeing 737 MAX incidents that could have probably been prevented with more training and stricter regulations (but, you know, those pesky profits)?
Or the entire tobacco industry and links to cancer or other deadly conditions?
I think it's pretty easy to make the case -for many companies- that "profits trump safety and any reason that stands in the way is ignored". The only things that stop this are regulations which make those dangerous practices less profitable or consumer backlash which make them less profitable. Either way, it's still always all about the profits.
Despite all this, the world is safer and healthier than ever before. It's slow going at times, and occasionally reverses temporarily, but there's steady progress.
The potential damage of climate change and rise in mental health issues and gun violence stick out to me, but on average I do agree with you that we live longer and probably have higher quality of life now.
Out of curiosity, do you think that's more a result of companies willfully choosing to reduce profits to be more ethical or because things are generally more regulated these days?
Also note that the small uptick the last couple of years is closely aligned with the opioid epidemic, and even then is still basically flat since the turn of the century and down significantly from the peak in the early 1990s.
Still possibly an example of companies choosing profits over lives, but the companies in this case are the drug companies.
Those statistics compare it to a time when it was absurdly high though in the midst of massive lobbying efforts to prevent gun control regulations (but also significant increases due to the war on drugs and generally elevated crime rates). There still has been a noticeable recent uptick [1]. And there would be better studies regarding the nature of these crimes if there weren't corporate lobbying being done to block that research. [2]
Maybe it is all just related to opiates but I've yet to see any significant study there and the numbers on a per-state basis don't seem to align with opiate-related deaths.
PS: I'm not on the "ban all the guns" side of the debate or anything. My point was just that corporations most certainly do profit from death or violence even today and the main thing stopping them is regulation or consumer backlash. Otherwise their sole existence is to maximize profit.
> Those statistics compare it to a time when it was absurdly high though
That "absurdly high" time was three decades long, not a one-time blip. Prior to that (i.e in the 1950s) the rate was lower, but going back so long ago the country had a much lower population density.
> Maybe it is all just related to opiates but I've yet to see any significant study there and the numbers on a per-state basis don't seem to align with opiate-related deaths.
It's not surprising that those aren't strongly correlated. You get more overdose deaths in rural areas and more drug-related crime in urban areas, because rural areas have longer emergency response times and worse medical services in general, while the higher density of urban areas increases the propensity for robberies by addicts and territorial disputes between dealers.
> And there would be better studies regarding the nature of these crimes if there weren't corporate lobbying being done to block that research.
Meh. The problem is the entire frame is political.
Suppose you have a wife who kills her husband with a gun, a wife who kills her husband with a kitchen knife, a drug dealer who kills a rival with a gun and a drug dealer who kills a rival with a machete. There are two natural categories of homicide there, but it's domestic disputes and gang violence, not guns and knives.
But the CDC will measure what you ask them to, and what you ask them to measure is begging the question. If you ban red cars and then measure accidents involving red cars, they go down, but only because you're purposely trying to manufacture evidence for banning red cars, and purposely trying to frame things in a way where "ban red cars" is the default solution to motor vehicle fatalities. You can't really blame gun owners for objecting to research that uses that type of framing.
The specific example they used is a good one. Someone had the CDC study whether having a gun in the house net improves safety. The frame is explicitly set up so that if the answer is no, the presumptive solution is to not have a gun in the house. But it's a false dichotomy -- it ignores every other possible solution.
Suppose that it goes the other way if you keep the gun in a gun safe. Then we get a net safety benefit if people have guns in gun safes, so what we really need is more gun safes rather than fewer guns and maybe we should provide subsidies for gun safes.
Or the problem is really teenagers gaining access to firearms without adequate safety training, so we would save lives to add firearms safety training to the public school curriculum.
But the framing determines all of that from the beginning. If the only point of the study is to provide government authority to a predetermined narrative, you're doing politics rather than science.
We would benefit from having the science without the politics, but that isn't what has happened, so without some way to separate the science from the politics that is more effective than what we've used in the past, we can't actually get that. And politically-framed studies are worse than nothing, because they're partisanship masquerading as facts.
> And politically-framed studies are worse than nothing, because they're partisanship masquerading as facts.
You had me until the very end. You made a very persuasive argument regarding the framing of research questions. The problem is that it's too persuasive. Clearly almost all studies are heavily biased by their framing, and it stands to reason politically-based framing biases abound in science generally.
IMO, we'd be better to err on the side of more empirical data and empirically informed policies, however flawed. And we should be prepared to mitigate biases with more data at least as much as we're prepared to shutdown research altogether, which as I understand was the outcome of the CDC research--they're prohibited from studying gun-related issues altogether.
Yeah, the entire argument was "there might be some bias from the scientific approach so we should just avoid it entirely" which itself is a biased approach in the opposite direction.
I agree with you that more research would be better, but the problem remains how to get the politics out of it.
> which as I understand was the outcome of the CDC research--they're prohibited from studying gun-related issues altogether.
The text of the Dickey amendment was: "none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control".
That's not actually a research ban, but under a Clinton Whitehouse it had been their motivation for doing the research. And at the same time Congress reduced the CDC's funding, so even though they could have potentially still done research on e.g. methods to reduce firearms deaths without gun control, they didn't actually do that and the research was cut out entirely.
We then had some Democrats calling the text a "research ban" because it banned politically-motivated research they wanted, but the larger barrier was really the reduced funding combined with a Democratic executive that didn't really want to do gun research that wasn't directed toward promoting gun control.
Both of those have actually changed as of this year, because Trump signed an appropriations bill last year providing more CDC funding.
The risk now is that because the shoe is on the other foot, if a Trump CDC produces research to the effect that e.g. not prohibiting upstanding adult citizens from carrying a gun in a school zone would help to deter or mitigate school shootings, or showing that a large proportion of shootings are drug/gang related and proposing solutions to address homicides related to that, you may see Democrats decrying bias the other way. Or just ignoring the results entirely and pretending they don't exist.
And that's really the problem. You need people acting in good faith who are willing to take solutions that address the problem without scoring political points against the other team. That isn't a research problem, and more research doesn't fix it if whichever side the outcome of the research disfavors will only dismiss it for not supporting their existing policies.
But if you want more research, it looks like we may be getting it. Which isn't necessarily bad, but it also may not do any good, unless we can get past the partisanship -- because there almost certainly are ways to reduce "gun violence" other than gun control. Which should make everybody happy, other than the people who would rather score political points than actually solve the problem. And those people are themselves the bigger problem in general.
You might want to hold off on that prediction until Anthropomorphic Global Warming, nuclear war, runaway artificial intelligence, and a few other existential threats are resolved.
This is definitely looking like a local minimum and good trend for ordinary violence, but it won't be easy to say that the world is safer & healthier after we've broken the food web...
Really? :)
While accidents do happen, the rate of accidents is going down. Injuries in general: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-number-of-deaths-by...
Fire: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fire-deaths-by-age
Drowning: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/drowning-deaths-by-age-gr...
And even motor vehicle deaths, could plausibly have topped: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/road-deaths-by-type
(this is world wide, in the developed world these peek many decades ago)