13 ms·

Barack Obama: Now Is the Greatest Time to Be Alive

62 points by dpc59 10y ago

williamle8300 10y ago
Ok. Obama. Thanks as always.
jganetsk 10y ago
"That’s one reason why I’m so optimistic about the future: the constant churn of scientific progress. Think about the changes we’ve seen just during my presidency. When I came into office, I broke new ground by pecking away at a BlackBerry. Today I read my briefings on an iPad and explore national parks through a virtual-reality headset." Those changes are relatively minor.
- aswanson 10y ago
  Which raises the question: What _was_ the most significant scientific discovery during the Obama era? Can we even quantify it yet?
  - whenwillitstop 10y ago
    Deep learning
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - threeseed 10y ago
    CRISPR most likely followed up by the Higgs Boson.
  - pavlov 10y ago
    CRISPR?
  - cypherpunks01 10y ago
    I'd say it's likely that the most significant discovery of the past 8 years hasn't gone too far past the initial discovery phases. CRISPR is a good example of a discovery that has just come into the public consciousness in recent years, but history for that dates back 20 years! LIGO & Higgs boson too, decades upon decades of research have gone into these.
  - return0 10y ago
    snapchat & blockchain(?) the rest (crispr, higgs, deep learning) are not even american, let alone obama-age
- rdtsc 10y ago
  Yeah that shows that he is out of touch with most Americans. He is in touch with the HN crowd, perhaps but someone who is out of job because the factory was moved to Mexico doesn't a give a shit about VR headsets and Blackberries.
- return0 10y ago
  > the constant churn of scientific progress. That is a relatively silly remark. Science and technology never go back, by definition. Not even after world wars. Economies can go back, or cultures.
- DefaultUserHN 10y ago
  Obama: "Look at me and my rich friends. We upgraded from BlackBerry to iPad." Meanwhile, normal Americans are finding it hard to find any normal jobs, because they've all moved overseas. Silicon Valley is also out of touch with the common Americans, because STEM jobs are plenty, so people on Hacker News do not understand the struggle of the average American who can not find a normal job (that is not in the STEM field).
  - yread 10y ago
    They still somehow scrape money to get an iPhone though
sien 10y ago
Can he be please be President for the next 4 years as well? regards the rest of the world
- Mikeb85 10y ago
  Because we need more Libyas and Syrias...
  - pavlov 10y ago
    The Libyan intervention was probably a mistake (though it's important to note it was a NATO operation with full support from European partners, unlike the invasion of Iraq). But what should he have done about Syria?
    - postcarnival 10y ago
      stayed in iraq longer, stop supporting the saudis, stop selling arms to saudi/rebel/others
      - threeseed 10y ago
        Might want to brush up on your world affairs. Iraq is a sovereign country. They asked the US to leave and quite rightly they did. And all of this happened under GWB's watch.
      - pavlov 10y ago
        A permanent occupation of Iraq in a situation where you've intentionally broken relations with Iraq's large and powerful neighbor Saudi Arabia sounds like a recipe for much larger trouble than even current Syria!
    - meric 10y ago
      Stop defending Aleppo.
      - pavlov 10y ago
Clubber 10y ago
It sure beats being in Europe 100 years ago.
- ryan-allen 10y ago
  Or Syria now.
  - _delirium 10y ago
    Or Libya now, to name another country improved by our esteemed Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
- douche 10y ago
  If you're cherry-picking 1916, almost any year would be a better year to be alive than then. WW1 is close in the running for the greatest display of collective human stupidity.
danharaj 10y ago
...unless the military of the USA has decided that you need to be annihilated via drone strike. The man commands more violence than most of us can comprehend. It feels out of place for such a person to tell the rest of us how great things are going. The cost of progress of the United States is measured in human lives and the ones doing the killing are the ones deciding it is justified. That's some nasty accounting.
- robbrown451 10y ago
  I wonder how those drone strikes, and other violence commanded by Obama, would register on a graph like this: http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2015/05/29/heres-how-many-people-have-died-in-war-in-the-last-600-years/ http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2015/05/29/heres-how-many... or this http://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ourworldindata_wars-after-1946-state-based-battle-death-rate-by-type.png http://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ourworl...
  - danharaj 10y ago
    Yeah, I forgot, justice is statistical.
    - robbrown451 10y ago
      The real world kind of is. I'd prefer a president to have the good sense to use military approaches that cause the least amount of deaths. Statistics is a good way of making rational decisions rather than basing them purely on emotion.
      - danharaj 10y ago
        Like most people, you've found a way to rationalize the violence of your government away as necessary, realistic, justified, pragmatic, etc. Everyone has their own words that magically make killing OK. Entire families of civilians have been destroyed by drone strikes. There is no evidence for the efficacy of drone strikes. There is no evidence that the military actions the USA has taken in recent decades has been at all worthwhile. The people who decide it is justified are the same people who commit the violence. If it were American families being destroyed all of a sudden out of the sky with no justice or recourse, I think, perhaps you would sing a different tune. Or, perhaps, the death of a few Americans is easily rationalized away. After all, you can just look at the statistics. http://engl210-deykute.wikispaces.umb.edu/file/view/omelas.pdf http://engl210-deykute.wikispaces.umb.edu/file/view/omelas.p...
rottencupcakes 10y ago
This sentiment coming from Barack Obama plays directly into Peter Thiel's claims that the liberal elite are ignoring the plight of so many Americans. The fact that nearly 50% of the population support Donald Trump and his message "Make American Great Again" should make that clear. See Thiel's pro Trump speech from this afternoon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfYLEPRiIyE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfYLEPRiIyE
- tunesmith 10y ago
  Nearly 50% of the population also would have supported Vogon Jeltz and his message "I shall rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon!" if he were a Republican. I don't think that proves much about Thiel.
  - ebfe 10y ago
    Sure, but there's a reason Trump was picked over the other Republicans in the primaries.
    - tzs 10y ago
      The Republicans spent the entirety of the Obama presidency trying to make sure Obama did not get any credit for anything good that happened, and would get blame for anything that wasn't good. For instance, when we started recovering from the recession and would get good news on something like jobs or growth, the Republican message would be that the numbers were too low. The standard they held Obama to was that of boom times, ignoring that we were still recovering from the recession, and that much of the rest of the first world was still in that recession. When health care costs would rise, the Republican message would be that it was due to Obamacare, completely ignoring that the increases were about the same or even slightly less than they had been before Obamacare. Nope...if your health care costs had been rising 5% a year for the last 10 years before Obama, and then rose 5% a year under Obamacare, the Republican message was that Obamacare made your health care costs go up 5%. Republicans seemed to think that if they spent nearly 8 years telling people that things sucked, people would turn against Obama and the Democrats, and sweep Republicans into complete control. Of course, that's not what happened. They successfully convinced people that things sucked, but the blame fell on all politicians, not just Obama and Democrats, making the GOP primary voters receptive to the idea of an outsider. Several of the major GOP contenders ran as outsiders (even Jeb Bush claimed to be an outsider...), but they all had extensive political careers and so Trump trumped them on the outsider thing.
bluedino 10y ago
>> Once-quiet factories are alive again, with assembly lines churning out the components of a clean-energy age. Has he been to the rust belt? How can he say that with a straight face?
- erikpukinskis 10y ago
  There needs to only be two examples for the statement to be true. I know of Tesla's Fremont factory, I'm assuming there is another?
  - adammunich 10y ago
    Buffalo theoretically.
  - RandomInteger4 10y ago
    Some examples here: http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/why-donald-trump-is-wrong-about-manufacturing-jobs-and-china http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/why-donald-trump-...
- threeseed 10y ago
  Who said they were going to be the same factories ? Those factories were never and are never going to return.
  - DefaultUserHN 10y ago
    But these new factories are all located in Mexico. So that's a huge problem for these American people who are not in Mexico. Shouldn't these new factories replace the old factories in the same town? Otherwise, Obama is just talking bullshit again.
- pnathan 10y ago
  China is outsourcing to the US certain factories now.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
throwaway420 10y ago
"If you like your health care plan, you can keep it" What a time to be a lie, sorry, alive.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
albertTJames 10y ago
People do not respond to authenticity. Obama was the greatest president of my generation, and from the looks of it, that is not going to change anytime soon.
yanilkr 10y ago
Is president taking credit for successes of private enterprise?
CodeWriter23 10y ago
Bullshit. The 90's were much greater. People had money to spend their way into economic growth that was measureable at the street level. And "asset based recovery" was a term yet to be coined.
erikpukinskis 10y ago
This is basically the thesis of Hans Rosling's 2006 Ted talk* . Things, on average are better. What bothers me about this way of measuring progress is that for some, e.g. drug addicted or abusive families, people living in war torn regions, things are not better. For some, things are bad and have been for generations. For this reason I try to refrain from "things are better" rhetoric, because it feels cruel to those people. Like I'm saying "I know it's bad for you, but I don't really care because it's better for many". And personally I think from a moral standpoint we have the same responsibility to lift up the bottom as we do to lift the average. The trouble is people at the bottom are often at the intersection of multiple intergenerational disadvantages, which makes helping extremely difficult. It's exactly this reason that I think it's so important not to say "things are better" without qualifications. If we can't help these people, the least we can do is acknowledge their situation. * https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_...
- kzrdude 10y ago
  On the other hand, something must be done to push back against those opposite sentiments that, “the whole world is on fire”, “everything is getting worse” or “the world has never been more violent”, all of which are notions that are spread in media and on social media.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- refurb 10y ago
  I think the better approach is to highlight progress. Sure, many people still live in difficult situations, but overall, we've made a lot of progress over time.
  - threeseed 10y ago
    The single, biggest problem is that the progress isn't being shared. In all first world countries wages are stagnant, housing is completely unaffordable, education is a luxury rather than a right and the rich are getting richer and worst of all more brazen e.g. Rich Kids of Instagram.
zelon88 10y ago
Wow, lots of bitter conservatives in here. I thought HN was smarter than that.
- ziroshima 10y ago
  values != intelligence
- postcarnival 10y ago
  lots of emotional liberals as well
tekni5 10y ago
I agree that more funding in science and technology is what we need. But Barack Obama had more in common with the status quo than with what his commentary is suggesting. There also seems to be a disconnect between what is being said in this article versus the reality. Yes there have been improvements in crime and poverty perhaps, but the quality of employment, the quality of general life for the average person in the West seems to have only degraded in the last decade or two. I would also argue that the pace of technological advancement has decreased. Despite on-going advances in computer science, we have stalled in many other fields since the end of the cold war, in particular space.
- pnathan 10y ago
  > quality of employment, the quality of general life for the average person in the West seems to have only degraded in the last decade or two. can you cite some data sources for that claim?
  - tekni5 10y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Unite... http://www.usnews.com/news/the-report/articles/2015/05/01/income-inequality-is-the-new-economic-issue http://www.usnews.com/news/the-report/articles/2015/05/01/in... http://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/working-paper-domestic-outsourcing-2016-03.pdf http://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/working-paper-domesti... https://www.amazon.com/When-Good-Jobs-Globalization--unionization-ebook/dp/B01KL4HYDK https://www.amazon.com/When-Good-Jobs-Globalization--unioniz... http://www.ledevoir.com/documents/pdf/CIBC-eqi_20150305.pdf http://www.ledevoir.com/documents/pdf/CIBC-eqi_20150305.pdf http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/twec.12238/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/twec.12238/full https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-016-3358-5 https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s... https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/cesptp/halshs-01301803.html https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/cesptp/halshs-01301803.html https://www.technologyreview.com/s/515926/how-technology-is-destroying-jobs/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/515926/how-technology-is-... https://www.kansascityfed.org/publicat/econrev/pdf/13q1tuzemen-willis.pdf https://www.kansascityfed.org/publicat/econrev/pdf/13q1tuzem... https://www.princeton.edu/ceps/workingpapers/172farber.pdf https://www.princeton.edu/ceps/workingpapers/172farber.pdf
meira 10y ago
Poverty is down absolutely, but never have it been so high relatively. Rich people never lived so well and poor people never struggled so hard to try to live 1/10 of what money provides today. People don't feel less poor when they have a 2000' car and everyone in Instagram has a brand new.
return0 10y ago
I guess this article is part of the democratic campaign, in which the obamas are the shining beacons. The US president may know better than anyone if his country is in its best state ever, but the rest of the world is not. My country greece has not seen bodies of drowned refugees being washed in our shores since 1922. It's a shocking reality that we never expected we 'd see. The US campaigns in the surrounding region have been failing so abysmally and for so long that we, as a globe, have acquired learned helplessness with regards to wars. War is not the only possible answer to everything, and when its used, it must be used wisely. For that reason alone, i hope trump's inward-looking, anti-inverventionist agenda wins.
jondubois 10y ago
All these advances in medicine are great; It's so wonderful to know that rich and powerful people like Obama and Hillary Clinton will live to be 150 - I'm so happy for them - With all the stress I'm under, I'd be surprised if I make it to 50. Maybe the elites can harvest my organs when I'm gone; it's nice to give back to this wonderful society that the elites have created for us. Yes, social media is great; I have lots of friends on Facebook! Except that in real life I can't even see them because I had to move to a different country to escape the high property prices and high cost of living... And I'm actually one of the lucky ones - Most people don't have the option to work remotely and are stuck paying half their income in rent. I can't even buy a house because some reserve bank somewhere will mess with the interest rates and cause another housing crash (at the most inconvenient time possible) and I'll have to declare bankruptcy and watch the big banks reprocess my home. Regarding global warming - I don't care about it at all! With the way things are going, AI will probably destroy us before global warming ever becomes a problem (and by 'us', I mean 'those who are not elites').
- pavlov 10y ago
  50 years ago, the notion of moving to a different country and still being able to work remotely was science fiction. Now it's not only possible, but it's not a crazy luxury -- you're saving money by doing it! And you can still keep up with your friends using a free global network and all sorts of options for video conferencing. (Remember when international phone calls cost many dollars a minute?) This all sounds like amazing progress to me. You complain that you "can't" buy a house because something might happen to interest rates at some point. Guess what -- it's always been like that. Housing loans come with risks, and renting has always been relatively expensive for low-income workers. Nothing new under the sun. I challenge you to point out an era in human history when the élite was less powerful than it is today. The primary reason why it seems that they're gaining in wealth is increased visibility and transparency brought on by the global network -- again, progress.
  - jondubois 10y ago
    My point is that happiness is not about material things; it's about doing what you want to do - Not what you have to do. There is a difference between doing something because you want to versus doing it because you have to. I'm not saying that I'm not responsible for my own decisions, but I certainly feel like my hand was forced to some extent. When I think about people who are less fortunate than me, I think the feeling of powerlessness must be 100 times stronger - Most of these people aren't even aware of what's happening to them.
pramit 10y ago
I get the uplifting idea, and without coming off as a 'killjoy', I feel 'greatest' for whom must be clearly articulated.

62 points by dpc59 10y ago

Ok. Obama. Thanks as always.

"That’s one reason why I’m so optimistic about the future: the constant churn of scientific progress. Think about the changes we’ve seen just during my presidency. When I came into office, I broke new ground by pecking away at a BlackBerry. Today I read my briefings on an iPad and explore national parks through a virtual-reality headset." Those changes are relatively minor.

aswanson 10y ago
Which raises the question: What _was_ the most significant scientific discovery during the Obama era? Can we even quantify it yet?
- whenwillitstop 10y ago
  Deep learning
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- threeseed 10y ago
  CRISPR most likely followed up by the Higgs Boson.
- pavlov 10y ago
  CRISPR?
- cypherpunks01 10y ago
  I'd say it's likely that the most significant discovery of the past 8 years hasn't gone too far past the initial discovery phases. CRISPR is a good example of a discovery that has just come into the public consciousness in recent years, but history for that dates back 20 years! LIGO & Higgs boson too, decades upon decades of research have gone into these.
- return0 10y ago
  snapchat & blockchain(?) the rest (crispr, higgs, deep learning) are not even american, let alone obama-age
rdtsc 10y ago
Yeah that shows that he is out of touch with most Americans. He is in touch with the HN crowd, perhaps but someone who is out of job because the factory was moved to Mexico doesn't a give a shit about VR headsets and Blackberries.
return0 10y ago
> the constant churn of scientific progress. That is a relatively silly remark. Science and technology never go back, by definition. Not even after world wars. Economies can go back, or cultures.
DefaultUserHN 10y ago
Obama: "Look at me and my rich friends. We upgraded from BlackBerry to iPad." Meanwhile, normal Americans are finding it hard to find any normal jobs, because they've all moved overseas. Silicon Valley is also out of touch with the common Americans, because STEM jobs are plenty, so people on Hacker News do not understand the struggle of the average American who can not find a normal job (that is not in the STEM field).
- yread 10y ago
  They still somehow scrape money to get an iPhone though

sien 10y ago

Can he be please be President for the next 4 years as well? regards the rest of the world

Mikeb85 10y ago
Because we need more Libyas and Syrias...
- pavlov 10y ago
  The Libyan intervention was probably a mistake (though it's important to note it was a NATO operation with full support from European partners, unlike the invasion of Iraq). But what should he have done about Syria?
  - postcarnival 10y ago
    stayed in iraq longer, stop supporting the saudis, stop selling arms to saudi/rebel/others
    - threeseed 10y ago
      Might want to brush up on your world affairs. Iraq is a sovereign country. They asked the US to leave and quite rightly they did. And all of this happened under GWB's watch.
    - pavlov 10y ago
      A permanent occupation of Iraq in a situation where you've intentionally broken relations with Iraq's large and powerful neighbor Saudi Arabia sounds like a recipe for much larger trouble than even current Syria!
  - meric 10y ago
    Stop defending Aleppo.
    - pavlov 10y ago

Clubber 10y ago

It sure beats being in Europe 100 years ago.

ryan-allen 10y ago
Or Syria now.
- _delirium 10y ago
  Or Libya now, to name another country improved by our esteemed Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
douche 10y ago
If you're cherry-picking 1916, almost any year would be a better year to be alive than then. WW1 is close in the running for the greatest display of collective human stupidity.

danharaj 10y ago

...unless the military of the USA has decided that you need to be annihilated via drone strike. The man commands more violence than most of us can comprehend. It feels out of place for such a person to tell the rest of us how great things are going. The cost of progress of the United States is measured in human lives and the ones doing the killing are the ones deciding it is justified. That's some nasty accounting.

robbrown451 10y ago
I wonder how those drone strikes, and other violence commanded by Obama, would register on a graph like this: http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2015/05/29/heres-how-many-people-have-died-in-war-in-the-last-600-years/ http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2015/05/29/heres-how-many... or this http://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ourworldindata_wars-after-1946-state-based-battle-death-rate-by-type.png http://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ourworl...
- danharaj 10y ago
  Yeah, I forgot, justice is statistical.
  - robbrown451 10y ago
    The real world kind of is. I'd prefer a president to have the good sense to use military approaches that cause the least amount of deaths. Statistics is a good way of making rational decisions rather than basing them purely on emotion.
    - danharaj 10y ago
      Like most people, you've found a way to rationalize the violence of your government away as necessary, realistic, justified, pragmatic, etc. Everyone has their own words that magically make killing OK. Entire families of civilians have been destroyed by drone strikes. There is no evidence for the efficacy of drone strikes. There is no evidence that the military actions the USA has taken in recent decades has been at all worthwhile. The people who decide it is justified are the same people who commit the violence. If it were American families being destroyed all of a sudden out of the sky with no justice or recourse, I think, perhaps you would sing a different tune. Or, perhaps, the death of a few Americans is easily rationalized away. After all, you can just look at the statistics. http://engl210-deykute.wikispaces.umb.edu/file/view/omelas.pdf http://engl210-deykute.wikispaces.umb.edu/file/view/omelas.p...

rottencupcakes 10y ago

This sentiment coming from Barack Obama plays directly into Peter Thiel's claims that the liberal elite are ignoring the plight of so many Americans. The fact that nearly 50% of the population support Donald Trump and his message "Make American Great Again" should make that clear. See Thiel's pro Trump speech from this afternoon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfYLEPRiIyE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfYLEPRiIyE

tunesmith 10y ago
Nearly 50% of the population also would have supported Vogon Jeltz and his message "I shall rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon!" if he were a Republican. I don't think that proves much about Thiel.
- ebfe 10y ago
  Sure, but there's a reason Trump was picked over the other Republicans in the primaries.
  - tzs 10y ago
    The Republicans spent the entirety of the Obama presidency trying to make sure Obama did not get any credit for anything good that happened, and would get blame for anything that wasn't good. For instance, when we started recovering from the recession and would get good news on something like jobs or growth, the Republican message would be that the numbers were too low. The standard they held Obama to was that of boom times, ignoring that we were still recovering from the recession, and that much of the rest of the first world was still in that recession. When health care costs would rise, the Republican message would be that it was due to Obamacare, completely ignoring that the increases were about the same or even slightly less than they had been before Obamacare. Nope...if your health care costs had been rising 5% a year for the last 10 years before Obama, and then rose 5% a year under Obamacare, the Republican message was that Obamacare made your health care costs go up 5%. Republicans seemed to think that if they spent nearly 8 years telling people that things sucked, people would turn against Obama and the Democrats, and sweep Republicans into complete control. Of course, that's not what happened. They successfully convinced people that things sucked, but the blame fell on all politicians, not just Obama and Democrats, making the GOP primary voters receptive to the idea of an outsider. Several of the major GOP contenders ran as outsiders (even Jeb Bush claimed to be an outsider...), but they all had extensive political careers and so Trump trumped them on the outsider thing.

bluedino 10y ago

>> Once-quiet factories are alive again, with assembly lines churning out the components of a clean-energy age. Has he been to the rust belt? How can he say that with a straight face?

erikpukinskis 10y ago
There needs to only be two examples for the statement to be true. I know of Tesla's Fremont factory, I'm assuming there is another?
- adammunich 10y ago
  Buffalo theoretically.
- RandomInteger4 10y ago
  Some examples here: http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/why-donald-trump-is-wrong-about-manufacturing-jobs-and-china http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/why-donald-trump-...
threeseed 10y ago
Who said they were going to be the same factories ? Those factories were never and are never going to return.
- DefaultUserHN 10y ago
  But these new factories are all located in Mexico. So that's a huge problem for these American people who are not in Mexico. Shouldn't these new factories replace the old factories in the same town? Otherwise, Obama is just talking bullshit again.
pnathan 10y ago
China is outsourcing to the US certain factories now.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

throwaway420 10y ago

"If you like your health care plan, you can keep it" What a time to be a lie, sorry, alive.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

albertTJames 10y ago

People do not respond to authenticity. Obama was the greatest president of my generation, and from the looks of it, that is not going to change anytime soon.

yanilkr 10y ago

Is president taking credit for successes of private enterprise?

CodeWriter23 10y ago

Bullshit. The 90's were much greater. People had money to spend their way into economic growth that was measureable at the street level. And "asset based recovery" was a term yet to be coined.

erikpukinskis 10y ago

This is basically the thesis of Hans Rosling's 2006 Ted talk* . Things, on average are better. What bothers me about this way of measuring progress is that for some, e.g. drug addicted or abusive families, people living in war torn regions, things are not better. For some, things are bad and have been for generations. For this reason I try to refrain from "things are better" rhetoric, because it feels cruel to those people. Like I'm saying "I know it's bad for you, but I don't really care because it's better for many". And personally I think from a moral standpoint we have the same responsibility to lift up the bottom as we do to lift the average. The trouble is people at the bottom are often at the intersection of multiple intergenerational disadvantages, which makes helping extremely difficult. It's exactly this reason that I think it's so important not to say "things are better" without qualifications. If we can't help these people, the least we can do is acknowledge their situation. * https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_...

kzrdude 10y ago
On the other hand, something must be done to push back against those opposite sentiments that, “the whole world is on fire”, “everything is getting worse” or “the world has never been more violent”, all of which are notions that are spread in media and on social media.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
refurb 10y ago
I think the better approach is to highlight progress. Sure, many people still live in difficult situations, but overall, we've made a lot of progress over time.
- threeseed 10y ago
  The single, biggest problem is that the progress isn't being shared. In all first world countries wages are stagnant, housing is completely unaffordable, education is a luxury rather than a right and the rich are getting richer and worst of all more brazen e.g. Rich Kids of Instagram.

zelon88 10y ago

Wow, lots of bitter conservatives in here. I thought HN was smarter than that.

ziroshima 10y ago
values != intelligence
postcarnival 10y ago
lots of emotional liberals as well

tekni5 10y ago

I agree that more funding in science and technology is what we need. But Barack Obama had more in common with the status quo than with what his commentary is suggesting. There also seems to be a disconnect between what is being said in this article versus the reality. Yes there have been improvements in crime and poverty perhaps, but the quality of employment, the quality of general life for the average person in the West seems to have only degraded in the last decade or two. I would also argue that the pace of technological advancement has decreased. Despite on-going advances in computer science, we have stalled in many other fields since the end of the cold war, in particular space.

pnathan 10y ago
> quality of employment, the quality of general life for the average person in the West seems to have only degraded in the last decade or two. can you cite some data sources for that claim?
- tekni5 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Unite... http://www.usnews.com/news/the-report/articles/2015/05/01/income-inequality-is-the-new-economic-issue http://www.usnews.com/news/the-report/articles/2015/05/01/in... http://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/working-paper-domestic-outsourcing-2016-03.pdf http://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/working-paper-domesti... https://www.amazon.com/When-Good-Jobs-Globalization--unionization-ebook/dp/B01KL4HYDK https://www.amazon.com/When-Good-Jobs-Globalization--unioniz... http://www.ledevoir.com/documents/pdf/CIBC-eqi_20150305.pdf http://www.ledevoir.com/documents/pdf/CIBC-eqi_20150305.pdf http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/twec.12238/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/twec.12238/full https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-016-3358-5 https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s... https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/cesptp/halshs-01301803.html https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/cesptp/halshs-01301803.html https://www.technologyreview.com/s/515926/how-technology-is-destroying-jobs/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/515926/how-technology-is-... https://www.kansascityfed.org/publicat/econrev/pdf/13q1tuzemen-willis.pdf https://www.kansascityfed.org/publicat/econrev/pdf/13q1tuzem... https://www.princeton.edu/ceps/workingpapers/172farber.pdf https://www.princeton.edu/ceps/workingpapers/172farber.pdf

meira 10y ago

Poverty is down absolutely, but never have it been so high relatively. Rich people never lived so well and poor people never struggled so hard to try to live 1/10 of what money provides today. People don't feel less poor when they have a 2000' car and everyone in Instagram has a brand new.

return0 10y ago

I guess this article is part of the democratic campaign, in which the obamas are the shining beacons. The US president may know better than anyone if his country is in its best state ever, but the rest of the world is not. My country greece has not seen bodies of drowned refugees being washed in our shores since 1922. It's a shocking reality that we never expected we 'd see. The US campaigns in the surrounding region have been failing so abysmally and for so long that we, as a globe, have acquired learned helplessness with regards to wars. War is not the only possible answer to everything, and when its used, it must be used wisely. For that reason alone, i hope trump's inward-looking, anti-inverventionist agenda wins.

jondubois 10y ago

All these advances in medicine are great; It's so wonderful to know that rich and powerful people like Obama and Hillary Clinton will live to be 150 - I'm so happy for them - With all the stress I'm under, I'd be surprised if I make it to 50. Maybe the elites can harvest my organs when I'm gone; it's nice to give back to this wonderful society that the elites have created for us. Yes, social media is great; I have lots of friends on Facebook! Except that in real life I can't even see them because I had to move to a different country to escape the high property prices and high cost of living... And I'm actually one of the lucky ones - Most people don't have the option to work remotely and are stuck paying half their income in rent. I can't even buy a house because some reserve bank somewhere will mess with the interest rates and cause another housing crash (at the most inconvenient time possible) and I'll have to declare bankruptcy and watch the big banks reprocess my home. Regarding global warming - I don't care about it at all! With the way things are going, AI will probably destroy us before global warming ever becomes a problem (and by 'us', I mean 'those who are not elites').

pavlov 10y ago
50 years ago, the notion of moving to a different country and still being able to work remotely was science fiction. Now it's not only possible, but it's not a crazy luxury -- you're saving money by doing it! And you can still keep up with your friends using a free global network and all sorts of options for video conferencing. (Remember when international phone calls cost many dollars a minute?) This all sounds like amazing progress to me. You complain that you "can't" buy a house because something might happen to interest rates at some point. Guess what -- it's always been like that. Housing loans come with risks, and renting has always been relatively expensive for low-income workers. Nothing new under the sun. I challenge you to point out an era in human history when the élite was less powerful than it is today. The primary reason why it seems that they're gaining in wealth is increased visibility and transparency brought on by the global network -- again, progress.
- jondubois 10y ago
  My point is that happiness is not about material things; it's about doing what you want to do - Not what you have to do. There is a difference between doing something because you want to versus doing it because you have to. I'm not saying that I'm not responsible for my own decisions, but I certainly feel like my hand was forced to some extent. When I think about people who are less fortunate than me, I think the feeling of powerlessness must be 100 times stronger - Most of these people aren't even aware of what's happening to them.

pramit 10y ago

I get the uplifting idea, and without coming off as a 'killjoy', I feel 'greatest' for whom must be clearly articulated.