18 ms·

Global living conditions are getting better

144 points by diogofranco 10y ago

epalmer 10y ago
This is interesting and give me hope but is it accurate? This article suggests that vox does not get it right all the time: https://www.quora.com/Media-Business-in-2015-How-credible-are-articles-on-vox-com https://www.quora.com/Media-Business-in-2015-How-credible-ar...
- mjohn 10y ago
  The author is Max Roser, the economist behind the Our World in Data website (https://ourworldindata.org/ 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.
  - neon_electro 10y ago
    Adam Johnson at FAIR (http://fair.org http://fair.org) criticized the Our World in Data website's standard for Democracy in this article: http://fair.org/home/voxs-cia-backed-democracy-standard-is-ok-with-slavery-and-women-not-voting/ http://fair.org/home/voxs-cia-backed-democracy-standard-is-o... I need to read more about the website and where its data is sourced to make a judgement myself, but the above link was informative to me.
louisswiss 10y ago
The article should be retitled 'proof that life became net better between 1800 and today'. No evidence is given that life at any point in the future will be better than it is currently. Disappointing and misleading.
- otalp 10y ago
  >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."
  - louisswiss 10y ago
    I think you misunderstand my criticism. 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'.
    - epistasis 10y ago
      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.
Retric 10y ago
There is for example less land per person now than ever before. So, it's more a question of what you value than objectively better.
- kingmanaz 10y ago
  Correct. As well as thermonuclear warheads which weren't present in the era of our great grandparents. Progress is eagerly believed fiction.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - orangecat 10y ago
    As well as thermonuclear warheads which weren't present in the era of our great grandparents. Your great grandparents might have had some comments on the weapons used in WW1. Assuming they survived. Progress is eagerly believed fiction. True or false: you would prefer to have been born in 1900 rather than 2000.
    - Retric 10y ago
      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.
      - alehul 10y ago
        What would lead you to choose 1800 over 1900?
        Retric 10y ago
        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.
AnsemWise 10y ago
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.
- karmelapple 10y ago
  > I can't trust it any more than I can trust other media sources Do you consider absolutely every single media source the same as every other one? There are most definitely organizations that have proven to report more accurately than others, and have ethical standards.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Keeping track of them, unfortunately, seems like a full-time occupation.
  - ctdonath 10y ago
    "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".
    - yladiz 10y ago
      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.
return0 10y ago
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!
- stephancoral 10y ago
  > 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.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    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...
    - kudokatz 10y ago
      > having to slave away 10-12 hours a day 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. The FIRE community is all about the alternatives.
leurfete 10y ago
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.
- lmm 10y ago
  > 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?
  - ctdonath 10y ago
    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). Punishing productivity doesn't work.
- pyrale 10y ago
  Why make a dichotomy between these two definitions of getting better ? It might aswell mean both.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ommunist 10y ago
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.
- kazagistar 10y ago
  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?
  - ommunist 10y ago
    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?
prakashrj 10y ago
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.
- ommunist 10y ago
  Most of them in fact will die before giving birth to the 5th.
- epistasis 10y ago
  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.)
  - epistasis 10y ago
    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. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1633559/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1633559/ [2] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.STA.MMRT http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.STA.MMRT [3] http://patient.info/doctor/maternal-mortality http://patient.info/doctor/maternal-mortality [4] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/health/maternal-mortality.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/health/maternal-mortality.... [5] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_longevity/2013/09/death_in_childbirth_doctors_increased_maternal_mortality_in_the_20th_century.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_...
danharaj 10y ago
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.
- witty_username 10y ago
  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.
losteverything 10y ago
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 Edit. He lived in the US in the mid 1800s
hamoid 10y ago
What's heavier, the linked web page as provided (html, css, js and image files) or as ONE large image? I tested it: the whole page rendered as one high quality 1918 x 17591 JPEG file weighs 3.58 MB. As loaded by the browser, without ad blocking, it does +280 http requests to dozens of servers and downloads 6.9 MB. If pages were provided as images, we might burn less CPU cycles and produce less CO2. Not so good for clicking ads though ;)
- tornadoboy55 10y ago
  Opera does (did?) this for its Opera Turbo browser.
- joe_the_user 10y ago
  Half the charts came back "secure connection failed" so the page is loading multiple certificates for multiple frames just for laughs too. I assume that another ten years of hardware progress will allow web pages to install and boot multiple OSes to display charts and graphs as well.
- RodericDay 10y ago
  what if you make it monochrome?
  - hamoid 10y ago
    As a 16 color grayscale png it's 870KB.
kenforthewin 10y ago
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
- epistasis 10y ago
  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.
  - kenforthewin 10y ago
    Everyone defines "better" slightly differently. No definition is scientifically plausible. the problem is all definitions are arbitrary.
    - kenforthewin 10y ago
      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.
      - epistasis 10y ago
        That is a hugely callous and offensive way to view the death of children.
- mjohn 10y ago
  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?
tabeth 10y ago
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.
mjohn 10y ago
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.
- epistasis 10y ago
  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.
  - ahartman00 10y ago
    "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.
3nki 10y ago
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.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Chronic2h 10y ago
  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.
  - 3nki 10y ago
    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?
yladiz 10y ago
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.

144 points by diogofranco 10y ago

This is interesting and give me hope but is it accurate? This article suggests that vox does not get it right all the time: https://www.quora.com/Media-Business-in-2015-How-credible-are-articles-on-vox-com https://www.quora.com/Media-Business-in-2015-How-credible-ar...

mjohn 10y ago
The author is Max Roser, the economist behind the Our World in Data website (https://ourworldindata.org/ 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.
- neon_electro 10y ago
  Adam Johnson at FAIR (http://fair.org http://fair.org) criticized the Our World in Data website's standard for Democracy in this article: http://fair.org/home/voxs-cia-backed-democracy-standard-is-ok-with-slavery-and-women-not-voting/ http://fair.org/home/voxs-cia-backed-democracy-standard-is-o... I need to read more about the website and where its data is sourced to make a judgement myself, but the above link was informative to me.

louisswiss 10y ago

The article should be retitled 'proof that life became net better between 1800 and today'. No evidence is given that life at any point in the future will be better than it is currently. Disappointing and misleading.

otalp 10y ago
>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."
- louisswiss 10y ago
  I think you misunderstand my criticism. 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'.
  - epistasis 10y ago
    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.

Retric 10y ago

There is for example less land per person now than ever before. So, it's more a question of what you value than objectively better.

kingmanaz 10y ago
Correct. As well as thermonuclear warheads which weren't present in the era of our great grandparents. Progress is eagerly believed fiction.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- orangecat 10y ago
  As well as thermonuclear warheads which weren't present in the era of our great grandparents. Your great grandparents might have had some comments on the weapons used in WW1. Assuming they survived. Progress is eagerly believed fiction. True or false: you would prefer to have been born in 1900 rather than 2000.
  - Retric 10y ago
    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.
    - alehul 10y ago
      What would lead you to choose 1800 over 1900?
      - Retric 10y ago
        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.

AnsemWise 10y ago

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.

karmelapple 10y ago
> I can't trust it any more than I can trust other media sources Do you consider absolutely every single media source the same as every other one? There are most definitely organizations that have proven to report more accurately than others, and have ethical standards.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Keeping track of them, unfortunately, seems like a full-time occupation.
- ctdonath 10y ago
  "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".
  - yladiz 10y ago
    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.

return0 10y ago

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!

stephancoral 10y ago
> 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.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  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...
  - kudokatz 10y ago
    > having to slave away 10-12 hours a day 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. The FIRE community is all about the alternatives.

leurfete 10y ago

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.

lmm 10y ago
> 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?
- ctdonath 10y ago
  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). Punishing productivity doesn't work.
pyrale 10y ago
Why make a dichotomy between these two definitions of getting better ? It might aswell mean both.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

ommunist 10y ago

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.

kazagistar 10y ago
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?
- ommunist 10y ago
  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?

prakashrj 10y ago

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.

ommunist 10y ago
Most of them in fact will die before giving birth to the 5th.
epistasis 10y ago
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.)
- epistasis 10y ago
  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. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1633559/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1633559/ [2] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.STA.MMRT http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.STA.MMRT [3] http://patient.info/doctor/maternal-mortality http://patient.info/doctor/maternal-mortality [4] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/health/maternal-mortality.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/health/maternal-mortality.... [5] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_longevity/2013/09/death_in_childbirth_doctors_increased_maternal_mortality_in_the_20th_century.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_...

danharaj 10y ago

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.

witty_username 10y ago
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.

losteverything 10y ago

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 Edit. He lived in the US in the mid 1800s

hamoid 10y ago

What's heavier, the linked web page as provided (html, css, js and image files) or as ONE large image? I tested it: the whole page rendered as one high quality 1918 x 17591 JPEG file weighs 3.58 MB. As loaded by the browser, without ad blocking, it does +280 http requests to dozens of servers and downloads 6.9 MB. If pages were provided as images, we might burn less CPU cycles and produce less CO2. Not so good for clicking ads though ;)

tornadoboy55 10y ago
Opera does (did?) this for its Opera Turbo browser.
joe_the_user 10y ago
Half the charts came back "secure connection failed" so the page is loading multiple certificates for multiple frames just for laughs too. I assume that another ten years of hardware progress will allow web pages to install and boot multiple OSes to display charts and graphs as well.
RodericDay 10y ago
what if you make it monochrome?
- hamoid 10y ago
  As a 16 color grayscale png it's 870KB.

kenforthewin 10y ago

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

epistasis 10y ago
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.
- kenforthewin 10y ago
  Everyone defines "better" slightly differently. No definition is scientifically plausible. the problem is all definitions are arbitrary.
  - kenforthewin 10y ago
    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.
    - epistasis 10y ago
      That is a hugely callous and offensive way to view the death of children.
mjohn 10y ago
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?

tabeth 10y ago

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.

mjohn 10y ago

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.

epistasis 10y ago
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.
- ahartman00 10y ago
  "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.

3nki 10y ago

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.

deleted 10y ago
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Chronic2h 10y ago
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.
- 3nki 10y ago
  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?

yladiz 10y ago

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.