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I feel that if you honestly believe the world is unambiguously better now than it was 20-30 years ago this reflects either your youth or privilege more so than

I feel that if you honestly believe the world is unambiguously better now than it was 20-30 years ago this reflects either your youth or privilege more so than any objective truth. I'll just leave this here: http://thebulletin.org/timeline http://thebulletin.org/timeline

akiselev 10y ago
If you honestly don't believe the world is unambiguously better now than it was 20-30 years ago, you've been living under a continental plate the entire time. The world has gotten better in almost every way including the rapid fall in poverty rates, more reliable sources of food and medicine, and better access to technology for even the poorest folk. All the problems that seem so overwhelming now like the threat of nuclear war, growing confrontationalism between and within countries, or extreme nationalism were way worse before the 90s (unless, of course, you honestly believe that the United States is the only nation on the planet and you have a nostalgic predilection for the "good ol' days"). Not to mention that the majority of the world has finally recognized and united around solving the single greatest threat to our civilization, a threat that pretty much irreversibly changed our climate by the time we identified it and became completely unavoidable by the 1990s. If all you're going to do is provide a link to an arbitrary countdown with scary words like "nuclear" and "catastrophe" as your evidence, might as well skip the sciency sounding fluff and just link one of Nostradamus's books. Until then, I'll fondly remember just how priveleged I was growing up in the Soviet Union and reconstruction-era Russia. /s
- pmyjavec 10y ago
  "and better access to technology for even the poorest folk" I hear this one a lot, I don't think it matters or is relevant. I've spent time in third world countries I met people sleeping, working and eating in rubish dumps, and they're not even considered the poorest! I didn't see them running around with technology, nor do I see how that would change there situation much.
  - akiselev 10y ago
    > I hear this one a lot, do you have a source to prove this? What kinds of source would be most convincing for such a broad question such as this? How about the fact that as many people have escaped extreme poverty since 1990 as there are human beings alive in Europe [1]? Average global purchasing power more than doubling [2]? Or maybe global agricultural output growing more than twice as fast as the world population since 2000 [3]? Life expectancy at birth increasing by more than 10% [4]? The massive decline in fatalities from armed conflicts [5]? Growths in industrial productivity that dwarfs even the industrial revolution [6]? How about access to technology that can instantly connect you to half of the world [7]? Price of renewable energy finally at parity with fossil fuels even in the face of the Republican party [8]? The number of people living under elected representatives instead of authoritarian regimes nearly doubling [9]? Better yet, what evidence do you have that invalidates all of the above? Even if you're the world's ultimate nit-picker, the data is overwhelmingly positive. > I've spent time in third world countries and not even the poorest people were working and eating in rubish dumps and guess there slept? I didn't see them running around with technology. The only region in the world where less than half the population has access to at least mobile broadband is Subsaharan Africa. Even now the wealthiest nations have citizens that fall through cracks in the system and live in destitution but the big picture is clear: the world is better off now than it ever has been. [1] http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/report-2013/mdg-report-2013-english.pdf http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/report-2013/mdg-report... [2] http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?c=xx&v=67 http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?c=xx&v=67 [3] http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/MannUsda/viewDocumentInfo.do?documentID=1860 http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/MannUsda/viewDocumentInfo.do... [4] https://www.clio-infra.eu/datasets/search https://www.clio-infra.eu/datasets/search [5] http://www.hsrgroup.org/docs/Publications/HSR2013/HSRP_Report_2013_140226_Web.pdf http://www.hsrgroup.org/docs/Publications/HSR2013/HSRP_Repor... [6] http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/global-economic-monitor http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/global-economic-monit... [7] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.P2 http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.P2 [8] http://sunmetrix.com/sunmetrix-grid-parity-map-for-residential-solar-energy-in-the-united-states/ http://sunmetrix.com/sunmetrix-grid-parity-map-for-residenti... [9] https://ourworldindata.org/democracy/ https://ourworldindata.org/democracy/
- ifdefdebug 10y ago
  > the world has finally recognized and united around solving the single greatest threat to our civilization If it's CO2 you are talking about, Trump already said he doesn't give a shit. EDIT: sorry for citing wrong ("world" instead of "majority of the world", wasn't intentional), but even then, you don't get a majority without the USA.
  - tempestn 10y ago
    Well, technically you can easily get the majority of the world without the US, but I do agree with you that this does appear to be a step backwards. A huge problem with climate change is that the CO2 we add to the atmosphere today doesn't have an immediate impact on the climate. It just adjust the balance between energy being added to the earth (mostly visible sunlight and UV) and the energy being radiated away (mostly heat). It takes time - decades potentially - to reach a new steady state. That's why you hear that even if we stopped ALL CO2 release today (which is obviously impossible), warming would continue for a period of time. The end result is, even let alone the difficulty in perceiving global shifts in average temperature amidst the significant noise, we shouldn't even expect to see the majority of the shift immediately. But it appears that isn't fully understood, so many people take the lack of an obvious difference year to year as evidence against climate change.
  - akiselev 10y ago
    > EDIT: sorry for citing wrong ("world" instead of "majority of the world", wasn't intentional), but even then, you don't get a majority without the USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di... The United States isn't even in the top five for CO2 production per capita and it's completely dwarfed in absolute terms by China which contributes 30% of the world's CO2 compared to the US's 15%. The United States is the last major holdout so yes, there is a very clear majority and American anti-intellectualism is the last major political obstacle. Regardless, all of the worst polluters on that list are rapidly adopting renewable energy and even profit-at-all-costs capitalism can't stop demonstrably cheaper and more sustainable energy sources from taking over.
    - 10y ago
- qball 10y ago
  >The world has gotten better in almost every way including the rapid fall in poverty rates, more reliable sources of food and medicine, and better access to technology for even the poorest folk Cool story. Have your own people seen equal (or equal-enough) growth in their respective living standards? Better yet, has the brand of politician your particular subculture supports done enough to make sure that everyone in your Union has benefited enough to see your version (right or wrong) of the bigger picture? You know, where the solution to their job-loss problems isn't simply "abandon your own subculture, move to the city where there's work"? Where the solution to unemployment isn't simply "here's some unemployment benefits, now go try to find self-worth in a society that doesn't need you any more"? Because the results of that failure are pretty clear. Something is happening where most places not in the Northeast or Southwest urban sprawl are getting hit hard economically- the absence of a similar pinch in those urban areas is striking, to say the least. Turns out that eliminating jobs that the people there used to be doing is only really good policy in places that can sustain themselves with another industry, which the service industry does quite handily but only in dense enough areas. Combine that with a lack of (misplaced?) social responsibility from industry leaders (and union management), and these cities that are still doing well start to accumulate political debt simply as a result of that inequality. Remember, every time you need to pull the country in a given direction, you need to spend some political capital. Compromises must be made when a given problem affects one side more than it does the other (as you have to convince those who aren't in agreement for whatever reason- thinking that being objectively right has ever mattered is mistake #1, which is why "alternate fact" is even a valid turn of phrase). And currently the side of Progress(tm) has no capital left- it was spent on creating the above inequality and frivolities like social justice. Even though climate change is really the priority the Left claims it is, the Left will first have to actually deal with the inequality in the country it claims to despise before the Right will even bother listening. This is going to be the real challenge. And until that time, telling your jobless neighbor that his life has no more worth than someone in a third-world country might be technically true, but telling him that, or that third-world countries come first, is not doing your cause any favors.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    >Better yet, has the brand of politician your particular subculture supports done enough to make sure that everyone in your Union has benefited enough to see your version (right or wrong) of the bigger picture? You know, where the solution to their job-loss problems isn't simply "abandon your own subculture, move to the city where there's work"? Where the solution to unemployment isn't simply "here's some unemployment benefits, now go try to find self-worth in a society that doesn't need you any more"? Hypocritical nonsense, considering it's your political faction who've made a religious fetish of the Free Market Uber Alles. You can have a managed industrial policy aimed at full employment, or you can have unregulated capitalism. The former is a socialist policy, the latter a capitalist one.
- 081231931 10y ago
  Sorry this is blatant nonsense. Anything but stupid "smart" phones existed 20 years ago. The important things (housing, health care, ...) have gotten more expensive. Pensions are increasingly insecure. Surveillance is at a far higher level than 20 years ago. The ultra-right might get close to 40% in some European countries. Western Europe was definitely a nicer place to live around 2000 than it is now.
  - CWuestefeld 10y ago
    The important things (housing, health care, ...) have gotten more expensive. Housing cost per square foot hasn't changed significantly for most of the country overall [1]. What has changed is our demand for greater square footage. Home sizes have steadily and drastically risen. And that relative consistency has held while the quality of the housing - better energy efficiency, safer construction, etc. - has steadily increased. We get more quality for our money today, but we complain because our demand for greater quantity comes with a higher price tag. [1] The situation in metro areas having extreme regulations interfering with new construction, e.g., San Francisco, differs because of the regulation that putatively protects the residents, but in fact sends costs through the roof.
- knieveltech 10y ago
  First off you don't get to just handwave away the conclusions of a group with a 72 year track record of engaging some of the best minds in the world to reach their conclusions. I urge you to take a little bit more time and familiarize yourself with the organization, it's goals, and it's methodologies before making baseless assertions that their conclusions are equivalent to astrology. Your claims regarding the reliability of food and medicine sources are questionable. They are predicated on a fragile system of international logistics that if disrupted would result in mass starvation worldwide. Geopolitical instability raises the odds of just such a disruption. Your assertion that existential threats like the threat of nuclear war were worse in the 90s is objectively false. All three of the world nuclear superpowers have active military operations with theater overlap. With these militaries operating in close proximity and occasionally bumping into each other the odds of an accidental escalation are greatly increased. The fact that the majority of the world has identified global warming as an existential threat is heartening but as other commenters have pointed out the world industrial superpowers have to get on board and start pursuing aggressive policy changes for meaningful change to take place. Unless or until that happens what the rest of the world chooses is largely irrelevant. TL;DR: I'm glad things are better for you now. It's not about you.
- Arizhel 10y ago
  >If you honestly don't believe the world is unambiguously better now than it was 20-30 years ago, you've been living under a continental plate the entire time. This is factually wrong. You're looking at things worldwide, and while it may be true that on average, things are better than 20 years ago, in the US this is simply not the case for the majority. The 90s were an economic boom time in the US, and there was almost no military action going on at all, the Cold War was over with the Soviet Union collapsed, and people were making money hand over fist in the internet bubble (which didn't collapse until the early 2000s). >Not to mention that the majority of the world has finally recognized and united around solving the single greatest threat to our civilization, a threat that pretty much irreversibly changed our climate by the time we identified it and became completely unavoidable by the 1990s. This is factually wrong as well, if you accept that you're not going to get very far when the US completely disagrees with you, and this is important since the US is one of the biggest energy consumers and carbon polluters. In case you haven't noticed, the Trump administration, and the half of the nation that voted for him, does not believe in global warming, and wants to massively increase coal production and usage.

akiselev 10y ago

If you honestly don't believe the world is unambiguously better now than it was 20-30 years ago, you've been living under a continental plate the entire time. The world has gotten better in almost every way including the rapid fall in poverty rates, more reliable sources of food and medicine, and better access to technology for even the poorest folk. All the problems that seem so overwhelming now like the threat of nuclear war, growing confrontationalism between and within countries, or extreme nationalism were way worse before the 90s (unless, of course, you honestly believe that the United States is the only nation on the planet and you have a nostalgic predilection for the "good ol' days"). Not to mention that the majority of the world has finally recognized and united around solving the single greatest threat to our civilization, a threat that pretty much irreversibly changed our climate by the time we identified it and became completely unavoidable by the 1990s. If all you're going to do is provide a link to an arbitrary countdown with scary words like "nuclear" and "catastrophe" as your evidence, might as well skip the sciency sounding fluff and just link one of Nostradamus's books. Until then, I'll fondly remember just how priveleged I was growing up in the Soviet Union and reconstruction-era Russia. /s

pmyjavec 10y ago
"and better access to technology for even the poorest folk" I hear this one a lot, I don't think it matters or is relevant. I've spent time in third world countries I met people sleeping, working and eating in rubish dumps, and they're not even considered the poorest! I didn't see them running around with technology, nor do I see how that would change there situation much.
- akiselev 10y ago
  > I hear this one a lot, do you have a source to prove this? What kinds of source would be most convincing for such a broad question such as this? How about the fact that as many people have escaped extreme poverty since 1990 as there are human beings alive in Europe [1]? Average global purchasing power more than doubling [2]? Or maybe global agricultural output growing more than twice as fast as the world population since 2000 [3]? Life expectancy at birth increasing by more than 10% [4]? The massive decline in fatalities from armed conflicts [5]? Growths in industrial productivity that dwarfs even the industrial revolution [6]? How about access to technology that can instantly connect you to half of the world [7]? Price of renewable energy finally at parity with fossil fuels even in the face of the Republican party [8]? The number of people living under elected representatives instead of authoritarian regimes nearly doubling [9]? Better yet, what evidence do you have that invalidates all of the above? Even if you're the world's ultimate nit-picker, the data is overwhelmingly positive. > I've spent time in third world countries and not even the poorest people were working and eating in rubish dumps and guess there slept? I didn't see them running around with technology. The only region in the world where less than half the population has access to at least mobile broadband is Subsaharan Africa. Even now the wealthiest nations have citizens that fall through cracks in the system and live in destitution but the big picture is clear: the world is better off now than it ever has been. [1] http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/report-2013/mdg-report-2013-english.pdf http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/report-2013/mdg-report... [2] http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?c=xx&v=67 http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?c=xx&v=67 [3] http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/MannUsda/viewDocumentInfo.do?documentID=1860 http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/MannUsda/viewDocumentInfo.do... [4] https://www.clio-infra.eu/datasets/search https://www.clio-infra.eu/datasets/search [5] http://www.hsrgroup.org/docs/Publications/HSR2013/HSRP_Report_2013_140226_Web.pdf http://www.hsrgroup.org/docs/Publications/HSR2013/HSRP_Repor... [6] http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/global-economic-monitor http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/global-economic-monit... [7] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.P2 http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.P2 [8] http://sunmetrix.com/sunmetrix-grid-parity-map-for-residential-solar-energy-in-the-united-states/ http://sunmetrix.com/sunmetrix-grid-parity-map-for-residenti... [9] https://ourworldindata.org/democracy/ https://ourworldindata.org/democracy/
ifdefdebug 10y ago
> the world has finally recognized and united around solving the single greatest threat to our civilization If it's CO2 you are talking about, Trump already said he doesn't give a shit. EDIT: sorry for citing wrong ("world" instead of "majority of the world", wasn't intentional), but even then, you don't get a majority without the USA.
- tempestn 10y ago
  Well, technically you can easily get the majority of the world without the US, but I do agree with you that this does appear to be a step backwards. A huge problem with climate change is that the CO2 we add to the atmosphere today doesn't have an immediate impact on the climate. It just adjust the balance between energy being added to the earth (mostly visible sunlight and UV) and the energy being radiated away (mostly heat). It takes time - decades potentially - to reach a new steady state. That's why you hear that even if we stopped ALL CO2 release today (which is obviously impossible), warming would continue for a period of time. The end result is, even let alone the difficulty in perceiving global shifts in average temperature amidst the significant noise, we shouldn't even expect to see the majority of the shift immediately. But it appears that isn't fully understood, so many people take the lack of an obvious difference year to year as evidence against climate change.
- akiselev 10y ago
  > EDIT: sorry for citing wrong ("world" instead of "majority of the world", wasn't intentional), but even then, you don't get a majority without the USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di... The United States isn't even in the top five for CO2 production per capita and it's completely dwarfed in absolute terms by China which contributes 30% of the world's CO2 compared to the US's 15%. The United States is the last major holdout so yes, there is a very clear majority and American anti-intellectualism is the last major political obstacle. Regardless, all of the worst polluters on that list are rapidly adopting renewable energy and even profit-at-all-costs capitalism can't stop demonstrably cheaper and more sustainable energy sources from taking over.
  - 10y ago
qball 10y ago
>The world has gotten better in almost every way including the rapid fall in poverty rates, more reliable sources of food and medicine, and better access to technology for even the poorest folk Cool story. Have your own people seen equal (or equal-enough) growth in their respective living standards? Better yet, has the brand of politician your particular subculture supports done enough to make sure that everyone in your Union has benefited enough to see your version (right or wrong) of the bigger picture? You know, where the solution to their job-loss problems isn't simply "abandon your own subculture, move to the city where there's work"? Where the solution to unemployment isn't simply "here's some unemployment benefits, now go try to find self-worth in a society that doesn't need you any more"? Because the results of that failure are pretty clear. Something is happening where most places not in the Northeast or Southwest urban sprawl are getting hit hard economically- the absence of a similar pinch in those urban areas is striking, to say the least. Turns out that eliminating jobs that the people there used to be doing is only really good policy in places that can sustain themselves with another industry, which the service industry does quite handily but only in dense enough areas. Combine that with a lack of (misplaced?) social responsibility from industry leaders (and union management), and these cities that are still doing well start to accumulate political debt simply as a result of that inequality. Remember, every time you need to pull the country in a given direction, you need to spend some political capital. Compromises must be made when a given problem affects one side more than it does the other (as you have to convince those who aren't in agreement for whatever reason- thinking that being objectively right has ever mattered is mistake #1, which is why "alternate fact" is even a valid turn of phrase). And currently the side of Progress(tm) has no capital left- it was spent on creating the above inequality and frivolities like social justice. Even though climate change is really the priority the Left claims it is, the Left will first have to actually deal with the inequality in the country it claims to despise before the Right will even bother listening. This is going to be the real challenge. And until that time, telling your jobless neighbor that his life has no more worth than someone in a third-world country might be technically true, but telling him that, or that third-world countries come first, is not doing your cause any favors.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  >Better yet, has the brand of politician your particular subculture supports done enough to make sure that everyone in your Union has benefited enough to see your version (right or wrong) of the bigger picture? You know, where the solution to their job-loss problems isn't simply "abandon your own subculture, move to the city where there's work"? Where the solution to unemployment isn't simply "here's some unemployment benefits, now go try to find self-worth in a society that doesn't need you any more"? Hypocritical nonsense, considering it's your political faction who've made a religious fetish of the Free Market Uber Alles. You can have a managed industrial policy aimed at full employment, or you can have unregulated capitalism. The former is a socialist policy, the latter a capitalist one.
081231931 10y ago
Sorry this is blatant nonsense. Anything but stupid "smart" phones existed 20 years ago. The important things (housing, health care, ...) have gotten more expensive. Pensions are increasingly insecure. Surveillance is at a far higher level than 20 years ago. The ultra-right might get close to 40% in some European countries. Western Europe was definitely a nicer place to live around 2000 than it is now.
- CWuestefeld 10y ago
  The important things (housing, health care, ...) have gotten more expensive. Housing cost per square foot hasn't changed significantly for most of the country overall [1]. What has changed is our demand for greater square footage. Home sizes have steadily and drastically risen. And that relative consistency has held while the quality of the housing - better energy efficiency, safer construction, etc. - has steadily increased. We get more quality for our money today, but we complain because our demand for greater quantity comes with a higher price tag. [1] The situation in metro areas having extreme regulations interfering with new construction, e.g., San Francisco, differs because of the regulation that putatively protects the residents, but in fact sends costs through the roof.
knieveltech 10y ago
First off you don't get to just handwave away the conclusions of a group with a 72 year track record of engaging some of the best minds in the world to reach their conclusions. I urge you to take a little bit more time and familiarize yourself with the organization, it's goals, and it's methodologies before making baseless assertions that their conclusions are equivalent to astrology. Your claims regarding the reliability of food and medicine sources are questionable. They are predicated on a fragile system of international logistics that if disrupted would result in mass starvation worldwide. Geopolitical instability raises the odds of just such a disruption. Your assertion that existential threats like the threat of nuclear war were worse in the 90s is objectively false. All three of the world nuclear superpowers have active military operations with theater overlap. With these militaries operating in close proximity and occasionally bumping into each other the odds of an accidental escalation are greatly increased. The fact that the majority of the world has identified global warming as an existential threat is heartening but as other commenters have pointed out the world industrial superpowers have to get on board and start pursuing aggressive policy changes for meaningful change to take place. Unless or until that happens what the rest of the world chooses is largely irrelevant. TL;DR: I'm glad things are better for you now. It's not about you.
Arizhel 10y ago
>If you honestly don't believe the world is unambiguously better now than it was 20-30 years ago, you've been living under a continental plate the entire time. This is factually wrong. You're looking at things worldwide, and while it may be true that on average, things are better than 20 years ago, in the US this is simply not the case for the majority. The 90s were an economic boom time in the US, and there was almost no military action going on at all, the Cold War was over with the Soviet Union collapsed, and people were making money hand over fist in the internet bubble (which didn't collapse until the early 2000s). >Not to mention that the majority of the world has finally recognized and united around solving the single greatest threat to our civilization, a threat that pretty much irreversibly changed our climate by the time we identified it and became completely unavoidable by the 1990s. This is factually wrong as well, if you accept that you're not going to get very far when the US completely disagrees with you, and this is important since the US is one of the biggest energy consumers and carbon polluters. In case you haven't noticed, the Trump administration, and the half of the nation that voted for him, does not believe in global warming, and wants to massively increase coal production and usage.