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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 tha

• 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.
• return0 10y ago
  I don't think the people that are pessimistic about the future (The premise of the article) dispute or are ignorant of the fact that we are better than a century ago or even a decade ago. I think the article is attacking a straw man: they were not asked if things got better in the past, but about the future. People don't see an optimistic narrative that they subscribe to anymore. The mantra "we 'll keep doing what we are doing and things will improve because it worked in the past" doesn't seem to catch on anymore. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
  • epistasis 10y ago
    Most of the comments that I find odd here are the ones that dispute that we are better than a century ago. If they are saying one thing, but mean another (or another way of phrasing this, if I'm completely misinterpreting what their words mean), then that may explain what I find so odd. If its just that they don't see an optimistic narrative, that this trend will stop and no longer continue, then I would ask why they see it that way. What evidence do they have, and where does it come from? And if it's not evidence, and just ideology, what ideology is that and why do they subscribe to it? I'm genuinely curious.
  • mjohn 10y ago
    Without knowing the future, I think the best we can do is look at historic trends to give us an idea of what is going to happen in the future. I agree 1800 is an interesting datapoint but probably not that relevant for the present day. Nonetheless, there appear to have been consistent improvements even in the past few decades, and there is still plenty of scope for improvement given almost 10% of the world population are in extreme poverty (about 700 million people). I think a lot of people answering the survey question: “All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither getting better nor worse?” focus on whether their world is getting better or worse, and not the whole world. Most of the improvements in the past few decades have been in developing countries, which have experienced dramatic improvements in standards of living (and developing countries are also home to the majority of the global population). Meanwhile standards may well have been relatively stagnant or declining for many people in developed countries. If we are talking about whether the world is getting better or worse, expectations based on experiences in India and China are far more pertinent than the recent history of the USA.
• JauntTrooper 10y ago
  My son was born with a health condition that would have killed him 75 years ago. He's now perfectly healthy. Those numbers on childhood mortality are staggering. Hundreds of millions of people have been spared the life-altering grief of losing a child. Let's hope we can drive that number down to 0.
• ianai 10y ago
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  • AnimalMuppet 10y ago
    How about we talk about the actual article, rather than play "gotcha" games with the wording of the title? Look, there's an actual point to be made, that this progress is coming at too high a price to the ecosystem, and the bill will come due (even in human terms) in the not-too-distant future. But the way you tried to get to that point makes you look like a demagogue with an axe to grind, who is looking for any excuse to hijack the conversation to your pet topic.
• anigbrowl 10y ago
  While reduced mortality is good I'm much more cautious about interpreting poverty statistics, which draw elaborate inferences from very limited datapoints. For example, this definition of poverty as living on $2/day, while useful, is predicated on the idea of private property that flows from one person to another. We don't have a way to measure things like the quality of someone's social relations (people that would share their food with you, for example) so that never even shows up in the data, and we end up trying to describe the contents of the room by shining a flashlight through a keyhole. One way I often think about it - not because it's more correct, but just in order to shift my perspective, is to consider that in 1820 the world population was just over 1 billion, so you had, say, 950m people worldwide living in extreme poverty. Today world population is 7.5 billion, so you have about 750 million people in extreme poverty. Now, the percentage fall is great...but that assumes that the incidence of poverty would normally stay constant. But another way to think about it is that we've only reduced the incidence of extreme poverty by about 20% even though we've managed to grow overall population by a factor of ~7. Could it be that our economic system depends on the maintenance of a desperately poor underclass from whom wealth can be indirectly extracted and then more efficiently multiplied? This is an unconventional approach, but bear with me for a moment. It's certainly true that if you're born right now, your probability of being born into extreme poverty is far lower than 2 centuries ago - great. But suppose you're in extreme poverty anyway - are you that much better off today than you were then? It's not as if being in extreme poverty now sucks ~10x less than it did 2 centuries ago - while it is happening to a somewhat smaller number of people in absolute terms, qualitatively you're just as badly off on the individual level - perhaps even worse off, because as part of a smaller minority people have less and less sympathy for your impoverished condition due to simple lack of common experience. What if, instead of setting a goal to reduce extreme poverty as a proportion of the overall population, we had a goal to reduce the absolute number of people in extreme poverty to almost zero? We would still have people who were poorer than their peers but we might be able to reduce the incidence of poverty as a threat to survival. Currently we take the approach of growing the whole economy, and thus shrinking the percentage of people who are in poverty. but I argue that this is equivalent to growing the part of the economy that's not in extreme poverty and leaving the part of the economy that is essentially unchanged. Suppose, for example, that the lower a person's wealth/income, the shorter the time horizon on which returns were channeled to them? Thus, the benefits of an increase in GDP would be felt (albeit modestly) by the extremely poor first, and that the well-off received their rewards last? It strikes me that an under-appreciated feature of capitalism is that size of income is strongly correlated with seniority, ie getting paid first, and that this is a Bad Thing. The most basic example of this - so 'normal' that it's rarely questioned - is that rent is generally payable in advance but wages are paid in arrears. Even if the worker's earned output exactly matches the cost of living, the worker is condemned to carry a debt of one calendar unit + interest - a small difference, but little different from a casino that offers 'generous' odds, which just means they'll take your money away more slowly. The worker doesn't enjoy an economic surplus until this additional overhead is paid off (not to mention the additional cost of thing slike rental deposits that are refundable in theory but rarely in practice). But why should the size of a debt be correlated with seniority? Arguably, the more you can lend out, the greater the level of surplusage you enjoy. A millionaire may lend a friend $1000 without anxiety, whereas someone worth only $1000 would need to think cautiously before lending $100 - the millionaire is risking 0.1% of her wealth, while the poorer person would be risking 10%, 100x as much in relative terms. IF you had borrowed $1000 from a millionaire, and $100 from your poor neighbor, and your investment had paid off, should not the poor neighbor be paid first, to reflect the considerably greater risk undertaken on your behalf? Of course, economics tells us that one way to handle this is through interest - the lender who is taking on a high risk should demand a high rate of interest for the loan. But having limited ability to supply capital in a competitive market, such lenders would have to be price takers. So if the going rate is 1%/day, the millionaire makes $10 while the poor lender makes $1 - his risk is 100x greater, but his payoff is 10x smaller. Naturally, one lesson of this is to nor lend more than you can afford, but if you ever work for wages you're basically lending the employer the value of your labor for 2 weeks or a month or whatever the standard pay period is where you live. You're showing up and putting in the time, but you get paid after the work is performed while you are expected to pay in advance for all the things you consume. Anyone who isn't able to accumulate a capital surplus of a calendar period's living expenses is thus doomed to penury. I suggest that if smaller debts had default seniority over larger ones, to reflect the relatively higher risks taken on by smaller creditors, we would reduce the incidence of poverty significantly faster than we are doing now, at minimal damage to overall growth.
• eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  >I cannot see how such statistics can be interpreted as anything other than extraordinarily positive, and I just hope the trend continues. I hope I live to see the trend continue. The long-term trend, after all, continued towards improvement throughout, for instance, the 1930s and 1940s, which many of us would think of as the worst nightmare humanity ever lived through. And of which, coincidentally, historians and other scholars are warning us that we're lurching into a repeat, like zombies who somehow can't do what everyone agrees would have avoided the last world war, the last Holocaust, the last nuclear bombing.
• lacampbell 10y ago
  Certain political ideologies - that seem to prosper in the most influential and wealthy areas of the United States - need to maintain a 19th century narrative that the plight of poor people is getting worse with time, not better. Such philosophies are healthily represented here on hacker news, and all manner of fact twisting and double-think takes place in order to fit facts to the narrative. If your narrative is that you need drastic change and increased state powers to commandeer an economy and the individuals in it to reduce poverty, the statistics are not extraordinarily positive at all. They strike at the heart of your ideals. The fact that people are becoming wealthier despite most of the worlds economies tending towards a free market must be vigorously opposed.
  • nitrogen 10y ago
    I think what we are missing in some discussions of the "plight of [the] poor" is some measure of sovereignty and opportunity. Class mobility statistics don't capture all of this idea. Sure, the US poor may have cheap giant TVs from Walmart, but they may or may not have any reliable means of becoming something other than poor, and they may or may not have much control over their own lives. Earlier in my life I spent a little bit of time in a very poor community in inland California as a volunteer, and nothing I saw convinced me that society is working for those people, and especially their children. The expectations were low, opportunities almost nonexistent. The message I'd like us to take away from these discussions isn't, "Let's ignore all the improvements that have been made," but rather, "Let's not stop now, there's much more to be done."
    • devoply 10y ago
      Humans don't perceive their reality on absolute terms. They perceive them on relative terms. Though the stats may be correct in absolute terms, the experience that individuals have are significantly different and shared by perceptions of how they are doing vs. how other people in their social group or country are doing... and what hopes they have for the future. From that perspective people in the West are very cynical/pessimistic and miserable because of it. So relative poverty is what matters and also the ability to look into the future and see greener pastures. People in the West don't see this happening. Instead they see more competition for ever dwindling jobs. See corporations that do not want to treat them fairly. See governments which are not on their side... etc. etc. This is distressing. So they dismiss findings that things are getting better for poor people as propaganda. Because those people are not in their social group and the information does not apply to their experience of reality.
• aphextron 10y ago
  "- 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" Surely the definition of "extreme poverty" has changed drastically in that time period. How can you even compare these numbers?
  • snrplfth 10y ago
    Extreme poverty is defined as total consumption of goods and services of less than $1.90 per day per person, adjusted for inflation and local purchasing power. Not terribly difficult to compare.