I looked up a couple of sources for the facts I was interested in.
Extreme Poverty:
“Progress is within our reach. Since 2000, extreme poverty has been halved. This proves that with political will and the joint commitment of States, outcomes can be achieved. To succeed, we must redouble our efforts to combat new forms of poverty and social exclusion. We must also understand all aspects of poverty in order to tailor our response appropriately.” [1]
Life expectancy in Africa (2009):
"... the increasing availability of antiretroviral therapy has reduced the spread of the epidemic, and the mortality due to HIV/AIDS has been decreasing since about 2005, allowing life expectancy at birth to increase again: average life expectancy at birth, in Africa, was 51 years in 2000, whereas it was almost 54 years in 2009." [2]
"The doom-mongers will tell you that we cannot sustain worldwide economic growth without ruining our environment. But while the rich world’s economies grew by 6 per cent over the last seven years, fossil fuel consumption in those countries fell by 4 per cent. This remarkable (and, again, unreported) achievement has nothing to do with green taxes or wind-farms. It is down to consumer demand for more efficient cars and factories."
Statement is made that it's all because of capitalism - yet no evidence is cited or even presented. The chinese reference is amazing too, because we all know the Chinese government has had nothing to do with the economic boom they have undergone in the past decade.
Let alone how nearly 2 generations have been raised to "reduce, reuse and recycle" through educational programs promoted by Government initiatives.
But no... it's all consumer demand that fixed emissions issues. Simple arguments for simple minds.
Simple arguments and lack of citations cut both ways... where is your evidence that "reduce, reuse and recycle" initiatives have had a non-negligible effect on fossil fuel consumption? Here's a factor I bet was bigger: US emissions hitting a 20-year-low this year due largely to electricity generation switching from coal to natural gas[1] due to record low prices of abundant natural gas.
Not to mention: "According to China’s 12th Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development (2011-2015), the country will spend $473.1 billion on clean energy investments over the next five years. China’s goal is to have 20 percent of its total energy demand sourced from renewable energy by 2020." (http://www.forbes.com/sites/jackperkowski/2012/07/27/china-l...).
Nope, government had nothing to do with this at all.
I don't see any reason to reinterpret this as an anti-government pamphlet. It's just pointing out that economic conditions and mentality are changing around the world, but that this is often overlooked in the news cycle because politicians don't report on it when it is not their personal achievement.
I agree entirely with the sentiments about politicians - but this article confuses "government" with "politics" and assumes the market solved problems without any influence from prior sources.
There is zero analysis or even allusion to what factors might have influenced the demand that ultimately caused the market to react. Just a blanket statement about how the governments of the world aren't doing anything useful.
What part of "consumer demand" excludes the source of that demand being educational programs? Your inference of a political motive here seems like projection.
The part that doesn't explicitly spell out the possibility of this, to make it seem like consumer demand can rise out of the mere market itself, without educational programs and the like...
It isn't responsibility of people reading your comment to research why you're correct. If you make a claim, you need to be prepared to back it up if you want it to carry weight.
For starters, the Chinese government has artificially tied the Yuan to the US Dollar in a way that the exchange rate favors the rest of the world out-sourcing their manufacturing to China (i.e. cheap labor).
Measuring in GDP is ridiculous (assuming that is how the comparisons are made), given that any person who researches the topic can rather quickly realize the numbers are heavily manipulated.
Prior to Deng Xiaopeng's reforms in the early 80's, the Chinese economy was mired in central planning and excessive bureaucracy. People were literally starving and had been for decades; there was no hope for anything better in life.
And then China opened its doors to foreign direct investment, the government relaxed its grip on the economy and declared the quest for riches to be a glorious endeavor rather than a shameful one, and almost instantaneously, the Chinese economy began growing. Thirty years later, China has gone from an economic disaster to being the second largest economy in the world, and despite its burgeoning size, it is still growing rapidly today. In the process, literally hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of abject poverty, and the Chinese people are hopeful of the future again.
It was not the government that did this; it was globalization, it was capitalism, it was the desire to make a profit. And of course, there were naysayers the entire way whining about sweatshops and the loss of American jobs, but meanwhile, poor Chinese people were happily migrating from the farms to work for what we considered a pittance, but for them, it was a godsend, and over the years, their wages have risen along with China's per capita income. Today, they are among the highest paid workers in the third world, and that trend continues.
The same cycle has played out in numerous countries around the world: abandon communism, embrace capitalism, experience rapid economic growth.
If you cannot see for yourself that capitalism is what has driven this explosion of economic activity around the globe, then you, well... Perhaps the problem is not that our argument is too simplistic, but that yours is too complex.
Come on you incorrigible pessimists, lighten up. There is obviously some tongue-in-cheek and inaccuracies in the article, but also some profound truth. This is the greatest time in history to be alive as a human and we might as well recognize that.
Thanks as well digeridoo! There is a Western pessimism in our economic slump, but come on (!) we live in this crazy world of internet in your pocket in the West while most of the world is getting better. Yes, there are a ton of problems, but it's at least recognize that we've got it better than ever - and it's okay to want to improve it - that's how we got here!
BTW - if you're pessimistic/angry, but you're still working on a social-mobile-gamified-deals-app - please become part of the solution [1] if you really think things are going down.
[1] Not saying you're part of the problem, just neutral.
Thank you. Please never forget about the problems going on in the world, but take the time to appreciate what you got, and what we indeed have accomplished, during the last couple of years. We're doing good, but we can do even better. I don't see any harm in celebrating that.
Well, that's only true when the world is progressing towards a better tomorrow. There are plenty of times when it hasn't been true -- say, during the Late Bronze Age Collapse.
Something that seems counter-intuitive given the usual headlines is that, since the end of the Great African War, we now live in the most peaceful time in all of human history. There are no major wars in the entire world. That is pretty remarkable.
This article is light on criticial thinking and evidence, and heavy on bullshit.
> "This remarkable (and, again, unreported) achievement has nothing to do with green taxes or wind-farms. It is down to consumer demand for more efficient cars and factories."
It has to do with tax rebates for more efficient cars, ever increasing EPA fuel efficiency standards, ever increasing EPA factory emissions standards, heavy subsidization of renewable energy not just by the West, but by China, etc.
> The number of people dying from Aids has been in decline for the last eight years.
The last eight years? You mean the time period encompassing 2003-2008, when GWB committed $15 billion to addressing HIV/AIDS in Africa?
> It has to do with tax rebates for more efficient cars, ever increasing EPA fuel efficiency standards, ever increasing EPA factory emissions standards, heavy subsidization of renewable energy not just by the West, but by China, etc.
All of that, and the effects mentioned by the author, are a blip compared to the effect of nat gas becoming cheaper than coal in North America. In fact, the reduction of CO2 output caused by natural gas replacing coal is actually larger than the total reduction of CO2 output -- that is, without fracking, US CO2 output would have grown.
So what happens if the price of natural gas goes up again? Isn't this just another example of a lucky break that won't last forever (much like the history of cheap oil)?
Granted, it doesn't at all take away from this being a good year, but the original article seems to imply that things are getting better and will always get better.
It's during the good times that you're supposed to think about and prepare for the bad times. But too often, it seems like people just want to sit back and congratulate themselves. Ant vs grasshopper, I guess.
For context the Spectator is the British weekly magazine for the political right (relatively smart and definitely NOT far right) but that is important context for this article.
As others are pointing out in various comments there seems to be a mix of facts, errors and potentially spurious causal links in the article. Though I think it is important to remember how good most of the world has things right now (wouldn't want to be in Syria at the moment or Gaza for the last 40 years) although we shouldn't be blind to the risks ahead.
What I didn't like this article was that it was so full of self-congratulation and completely bereft of any mention of serious problems visible on the horizon. Unbounded self-assurance is the doorway to destructive optimism.
There are many things to be concerned about, ecologically and economically. But if excessive optimism leads people to believe that these problems are only being made up by "doom-sayers" and "chicken littles" (like, say, the few who predicted serious fallout from the real estate derivatives market), then nothing will be done about them. Causing pain and suffering which could otherwise have been avoided or reduced.
Fortunately, there are serious people doing serious work to address potential risks. Articles like this one are primarily aimed at simple-minded people who can't really understand the hard questions, and need a certain amount of fluffy encouragement to keep them getting up in the morning.
> Unbounded self-assurance is the doorway to destructive optimism.
That's a bit melodramatic. The author points out that media as a whole has the "serious problems visible on the horizon" stuff well covered. It's probably over-covered to an extreme degree such that we never hear about any good accomplishments at all. So he wrote one article listing out the good. All you have to say is that the article was vapid because it ignored what is already over-covered?
The article has a good number of statistics that should be relatively easy to verify. That puts it a step above just about anything else you read in a newspaper.
Sure it would be nice if they linked to sources, but that's not the standard for articles like this in newspapers like this.
Agreed. I really wanted to agree with it because it has a nice sentiment, but when the author claims that war has historically been mankind's biggest killer, I completely gave up hope.
Sorry, I should've been more clear on that. I was figured disease might be the biggest killer, certainly more than war anyway. Whatever it may be, I'm pretty sure it's not war.
Several of the claims, such as the success of the UN's Millennium Development Goals project and the fact that we are currently living in a world free of war, are pretty easy to check for yourself.
Viewed in terms of what really are some of humanity's big goals - reducing poverty, warfare and disease - we are living in a wonderful time. Unfortunately, the article soft-pedals the environmental stuff a bit.
Nearly all of humanity. If you think those are "wars", you should get some perspective. The Battle of Passchendaele alone killed roughly 600,000 men. Compare that to the total number of casualties in every one of the conflicts above.
I'm not trying to minimise things, and I understand that those who face state violence have a rough time of it. But taken as a proportion of humanity as a whole, war is at an all-time low. That is something to celebrate.
Yes we haven't had a "World war" and your intention isn't to minimise things but you've just minimised things - those wars are not simple conflicts. The second Congo war alone took more than 5 million lives. Although officially over, lives are still being lost everyday from its aftermath. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Congo_War - more recently, not even a month ago, there was another fight that saw a city fall in rebel arms and thousands of people flee from their homes.
I do not support wars. That said, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that the Iraq war killed less people than the Vietnam War, which in turn killed less people than WW2.
A mere 70 years ago, my country was occupied by some of the most brutal oppressors in the world. Now, our biggest problem is that we eat too much food. Most of my fellow countrymen will never have to know what it's like to be starving, to have our homes destroyed, our family members enslaved or worse.
It's probably less bad than burning massive amounts of coal. In the same way that moderate poverty is less bad than extreme poverty and dying from cancer is less bad than dying from childhood AIDS, this represents a form of progress.
I think that it is more valuable to spend one's time focusing on problems and how they can be solved rather than celebrating the fact that things are better than they used to be in many, many ways.
That being said, it is important to periodically remind one's self that things are generally getting better around the world. Failing to keep problems in perspective can not only be discouraging, but can skew your perception of how sever those problems are. Don't let yourself fall for the "Good Old Days" myth.
"celebrating the fact that things are better than they used to be in many, many ways."
Yes, that's certainly an invitation to regression of all battles won for the better, with civil rights and other gains. We're not moving in any particular vector, necessarily, we have to actively ensure we're pushing to build on these victories and the victories of our predecessors.
According to Adam Smith, the basis of prosperity is the division of labour. When people specialise, they get better at whatever they do, because they practice it, spend more time thinking about how to improve it, and don't spend time adjusting to different tasks.
But specialisation is limited by the size of the market: if you are too specialised, then there aren't enough people who want what you do for you to make a living. But within a larger population, maybe there will be.
Therefore, prosperity is driven by increased market size, including: globalization; increased human population; more people being raised out of poverty (and so can buy more).
From a producer's point of view, these factors enable you to make a living by specialising in exactly what work you really want to do, that you find most satisfying and rewarding, that best suits your talents and ways of working.
The amazing breakthroughs in ‘fracking’ technology mean that, in spite of the world’s escalating population from one billion to seven billion over the last two centuries we live in an age of energy abundance.
Well hell let's all go buy Hummers and crank up the heat!
"Never has there been less hunger, less disease or more prosperity."
That seems unlikely to me, given the recent growth of the world's population. I would guess there are now more people hungry than there were people alive some centuries (or couple of thousand years?) ago. Wasn't there an article recently about human population being down to a couple of thousands individuals at some point?
Maybe he is talking about percentages, or just the 20th century, or something like that?
"Germany was perhaps the most civilised nation in the world in the 1920s."
Hmmm... define civilised. In the 1920s Germany was devastated after losing WWI, on the hook for gazillions of war repayments under the Versailles treaty, and experiencing some of the worst inflation ever seen in a developed country. It took something like a wheelbarrow full of Deutschemarks back then to buy a loaf of bread.
Actually Weimar Germany is a lot more complex than usually presented. To adress your points:
1.) Germany was not devastated by WWI, in fact the fighting did take place outside of Germany.
2.) The Versailles treaty was large enough to serve as a nazi-propaganda tool, but not large enough to stifle the economy.
3.) The hyperinflation was in 1923, in the other years Germany had generally high, but not that high inflation. ( Something like 5 - 8 % )
In addition the Weimar republic worked culturally quite well, it won about half of the nobel prices in physics and chemistry between 1918 and 1933 [1], had the Bauhaus [2] a very influential school of design and represents with Authors like Thomas Mann and Berthold Brecht an important period of German literature.
On the other hand, the political system was never widely accepted, the judicial system was completely dysfunctional and the entire thing was never far away from a coup or a civil war. ( Not to mention that it ended catastrophically. )
> the same UN extrapolations that predict such threatening sea-level rises for Bangladesh also say that, in two or three generations’ time, it will be as rich as Britain.
Can anyone find a reference for this one? Seems a bit outlandish considering the current situation on the ground in Bangladesh.
Greatest year in the history of the world!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
HN tends to reward responses that clearly point things out in a non-silly manner, and punish purely silly responses, even if those responses were pointing out how silly something else was.
Extreme Poverty:
“Progress is within our reach. Since 2000, extreme poverty has been halved. This proves that with political will and the joint commitment of States, outcomes can be achieved. To succeed, we must redouble our efforts to combat new forms of poverty and social exclusion. We must also understand all aspects of poverty in order to tailor our response appropriately.” [1]
Life expectancy in Africa (2009):
"... the increasing availability of antiretroviral therapy has reduced the spread of the epidemic, and the mortality due to HIV/AIDS has been decreasing since about 2005, allowing life expectancy at birth to increase again: average life expectancy at birth, in Africa, was 51 years in 2000, whereas it was almost 54 years in 2009." [2]
[1]: http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=43307&Cr=po...
[2]: http://www.who.int/gho/mortality_burden_disease/life_tables/...