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Things have gotten better and progress has been made from times past, it just seems worse now because we have more access to information. We've come far, and have further to go!
The poverty rate stuff is pure bs. The world bank just lowered the stated official poverty line without actually improving living conditions.
https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-poverty
As well as the average life span being skewed by those same infant mortality rates. People have been living long and now they're forced to retire later.
Plus, while we have extended life, we haven't made progress with extended life care. So you might live 20 years longer, but those 20 years will be spent in your bed waiting for your nurse to clean your diaper.
besides this, China did a huge job on getting people out of poverty - if you like or not
Mass producing shit at inhuman factories with deaths by the millions. I guess you're not poor if you're just dead.
Technically correct. A dead person is neither rich nor poor.
So that's what happened to the middle class.
Look at the statistics. I am not lying. You can complain, but that are facts.
If you look at the history of western countries industrializing it didn't look much better.
This writeup is a great argument, here's some highlights I thought were good:
I simply pointed out that we cannot ignore the fact that the period 1820 to circa 1950 was one of violent dispossession across much of the global South. If you have read colonial history, you will know colonizers had immense difficulty getting people to work on their mines and plantations. As it turns out, people tended to prefer their subsistence lifestyles, and wages were not high enough to induce them to leave. Colonizers had to coerce people into the labour market: imposing taxes, enclosing commons and constraining access to food, or just outright forcing people off their land.
Remember: $1.90 [chosen poverty line] is the equivalent of what that amount of money could buy in the US in 2011. The economist David Woodward once calculated that to live at this level (in an earlier base year) would be like 35 people trying to survive in Britain “on a single minimum wage, with no benefits of any kind, no gifts, borrowing, scavenging, begging or savings to draw on (since these are all included as ‘income’ in poverty calculations).” That goes beyond any definition of “extreme”. It is absurd. It is an insult to humanity.
From 1980 to 2000, the IMF and World Bank imposed structural adjustment programs that did exactly the opposite: slashing tariffs, subsidies, social spending and capital controls while reversing land reforms and privatizing public assets – all in the face of massive popular resistance. During this period, the number of people in poverty outside China increased by 1.3 billion. In fact, even the proportion of people living in poverty increased, from 62% to 68%.
But there is something else that needs to be said here. You and Gates like to invoke the poverty numbers to make claims about the legitimacy of the existing global economic system. You say the system is working for the poor, so people should stop complaining about it.
When it comes to assessing such a claim, it’s really neither absolute numbers nor proportions that matter. What matters, rather, is the extent of poverty vis-à-vis our capacity to end it. As I have pointed out before, our capacity to end poverty (e.g., the cost of ending poverty as a proportion of the income of the non-poor) has increased many times faster than the proportional poverty rate has decreased (to use your preferred measure). By this metric we are doing worse than ever before. Indeed, our civilization is regressing. Why? Because the vast majority of the yields of our global economy are being captured by the world’s rich.
the last two are easily debunked. I hate shit like this because it reinforces an idea that time = progress. There are influential and powerful people alive today who would reverse any of these trends if it meant money in their pocket.
It's bewildering why they decided to restate the 1st point as the 3rd point when they could've just said the average retirement age is 10 years lower than it was 100 years ago https://www.statista.com/statistics/319983/average-retirement-age-in-the-us/
I don't get why they are comparing things to the depression rather than after ww2. 50 years would be a better measure. Also retirement wise people can't always choose to so income and home ownership in retirment would be more practical.
Well that's easy, because the statistics wouldn't paint the view they're trying to convey. Saying things are better now than they were 100 years ago is as useful as saying things are better than they were 3000 years ago, aka completely useless to say since when you compare to more recent times like 40 years ago you can point to how many things have gotten objectively worse.
We've made a lot of strides on social issues, but everything else? Lmao.
Jesus Christ this thread. The technicalities aren't the point. You are allowed to find happiness where you can in an imperfect world that contains suffering. It doesn't mean you'll be complacent to injustice. Fighting against injustice can be done without thinking the world is hopeless dogshit. There's satisfaction that can be justifiably had, through means other than smug superiority at knowing all the depressing truths of the world, or the sympathy of others for your problems. We feed ourselves so much rage and sadness via the internet, can we not have a palate-cleanser like this without chewing it up and spitting it out, and then going back to gorging on more?
The thingeis: the world is getting less free and inequality has been constantly rising in the last decades.
This Steven Pinker BS is advertising complacency, while we should agitate people to fight for a better world.
If you want to be optimistic, look around for the average kindness of everyday live inside communities. The FOSS community, unions, mutual aid in neighborhoods etc. This would lift you up and point in the direction where things could get better.
Holy shit, I thought you were kidding but this whole thread is just full of sad people.
Wealth inequality is possibly the highest it's ever been in history.
I wouldn't be surprised if food wasted (food that goes straight to the trash) nowadays is also at peak numbers, or close to.
During the Bolsonaro years (2019-2022), Brazil saw a drastic increase in extreme poverty, made worse by the pandemic. Poor people were literally scavenging carcasses for anything that could still be eaten. We're still trying to recover.
Do not take any of those good things for granted, they can be very easily reverted by a small number of psychopath assholes.
While "technically" true. We all know the average lifespan was brought down by a high infant mortality. So comparingbthat to when peopke retired is meaningless. That said, it dies seem worse because with more information we realize how much better it could be. 100 years ago, the average american had no idea how common slums were outside the US. And those that knew considered those slum people less than human. So what we have really done is expanded who is considered human, and who matters. That certainly does make it look worse.
Yeah, mean lifespan is meaningless if the distribution is bimodal. Median would be a more useful average.
100 years ago, the average american had no idea how common slums were outside the US.
This was and still is very true. The level of the poverty in places like that is astounding and beyond the experience of most anyone in a 1st world country. I grew up in America, in poverty of the level that my single mother was only eating what she could scrounge at work some years so she'd have enough to feed us kids. Yet when I deployed to Panama in the mid 90's for a 2 month military operation, and had to operate in many of the rural areas of Panama during those missions, I had my eyes opened to what real 3rd world poverty looks like. The way I grew up would have been a huge improvement for many of the people I saw there. You can't really understand it until you've seen it with your own eyes.
Also, significantly less dead babies increasing average lifespan is a very happy way to boost that number
Every one of which we are backsliding on. We should be alarmed.
This meme effectively expired in 2019. COVID reversed out the direction on all of it. About the only thing we haven't stopped backsliding on is "shareholder value".
The average American didn't die at age 51. And, while the average life expectancy might have been 51 years, that's a Spiders Georg moment.
The life expectancy was thrown off by all the child mortality. If you lived past 10 years, you were likely to live to 70.
Yep, and now there's not a deluge of dead children dragging the average down, which is objectively pretty great
Look, I feel like "children dead before 10" is a pretty upsetting and relevant statistic.
What's the opposite of doom-posting? Because this is refreshing as hell.
Hope-posting?
Posting a bunch of context-free statistics without any citations is not what I'd call hope-posting.
There are hopeful trends in the world: the resurgence of unions, successful environmental protest, public opinion changing against police, etc. They inspire hope because they point to the possibility of a better world. Statistics like these just point to how bad the world used to be, and in contrast, how good the current world is. It's a way of saying "be thankful for what you have", a sentiment easily weaponized against progress and protest.
If you like this post maybe read The Progress Paradox. It goes in much more detail than this meme, it then poses the question but then why aren't we happy. Without giving answers it does point to possible paths. It's a good book.
The environmental problems are critical, though. And it's what ultimately will decide the fate of our species. There is room for optimism in some aspects of our society, but that is not an indication that in the end everything will be alright.
Conservatives are trying to roll it back, don't worry.
And the climate change will help them. They are basically a team just that one of them doesn't know about the partnership and the other didn't choose it...
The extreme poverty one is laughable especially when criteria to define extreme poverty is ridiculous. Extreme poverty in places where you earn less than $1.90 but can still have subsistence farming and community doesn't make sense - also if living in San Francisco and earning $2/day isn't extreme poverty... I don't know what is.
Poverty shouldn't be tied to capital but to standards of living - that would be a completely different story.
More of this is needed.
If the only positive things you can come up with are lies and half-truths, maybe keep it to yourself.
You know what? I did like this post, thanks.