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2017 was probably the best year in the history of humanity
- TheAdamAndChe 9y agoYes, things are improving on a global scale, but that doesn't mean that the sense of unease within the United States is baseless. Quality of life for the lower and lower-middle classes has been declining, particularly in rural areas. Medical, educational, and housing costs have been increasing far faster than inflation. Social media combined with legalized bribery and gerrymandering threaten or have destroyed our democracy, with social media in particular amplifying everyone's us-vs-them mentality to the point that everyone feels persecuted. Anxiety, depression, and suicide rates are up. Economic growth is mostly limited to a handful of large cities with high costs of living that complain of labor shortages, yet more affordable rural areas continue to suffer from work shortages. Global growth and improvement is great, but if pockets of instability don't get addressed and corrected, those trends may change.
- diggan 9y agoNow I'm writing this comment on a website hosted in the US, about a article from a US newspaper, to a person who probably live in the US. And I'm not from the US. But I think the point of the article is to point out: sure, the US is getting worse and worse (maybe) but you can't just throw up your hands in the air and say "the world is going to shit!" as the world isn't going to shit. Most of the world is improving, but it's hard for the US media to present that view (maybe because good news doesn't sell? I don't know). The author points out that news focuses on bad news, and in the US, probably on US news. But there are other places in this world too. I frequently see people from the US claim that the world improvements will end, because the US is getting worse. But the good news is, the world is in fact getting better, even though the US might not be improving a lot currently. > Global growth and improvement is great, but if pockets of instability [in the US] don't get addressed and corrected, those trends may change. I've added the text in the brackets. If I understand your message correct, you're saying that if for example housing costs in the US doesn't improve, global growth and improvement might slow down? I'm sorry but that seems small-sighted and exactly what I'm writing about above. Edit: fun thing to do, search for "world worse" on Twitter or social media of your choice, and see how many people are writing about how the world/everything is getting worse, on a article about something US specific that won't impact anything outside the US borders.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago> I frequently see people from the US claim that the world improvements will end, because the US is getting worse... But the good news is, the world is in fact getting better, even though the US might not be improving a lot currently. > If I understand your message correct, you're saying that if for example housing costs in the US doesn't improve, global growth and improvement might slow down? I believe that if the US doesn't improve, global growth would slow, yes. In the US, our "economy" is growing because globalization has lowered operating costs while spreading wealth to poorer nations. This is the absolutely largest reason that global poverty has declined. However, because the US has such a high quality of life, our lower class cannot compete. I believe that if this trend continues, the US will reach a tipping point where people revolt. Because the US is the largest economy in the world, globalization would slow down or reverse for a bit, reversing the positive global trend. I'm not saying that the world wouldn't adapt and overcome. The world doesn't need the US in the long-term. But it would be rough for a while. If you disagree, I would love to know why.
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoI suppose the ultimate conclusion of globalisation is a levelling out of living standards around the world. Whether this means Western nations becoming less well off is an interesting question. I'm not sure the US is as important as you think now, there is an inertia in developing nations that might slow but is probably quite hard to stop.
- ataturk 9y agoThe US Media is total shit from top to bottom. They are not in the business of being objective or reporting events dispassionately. They serve their corporate and institutional masters or are mere infotainment noise.
- ekianjo 9y ago> that doesn't mean that the sense of unease within the United States is baseless Nothing prevents from moving to a different country. Just like the immigrants fled the UK in the first place for various reasons.
- klez 9y agoA number of things prevents from moving to different countries. Immigration laws for that other country, language barriers, the fact the your professionality/education won't be valued in another country, the fact that you may not even have the money to move in the first place...
- cobbzilla 9y agoNone of these are problems that a sufficient amount of desperation will not overcome. See: refugees, illegal immigration. When life sucks enough where you are, lots of people decide to get the heck out, and figure out the plan as they go.
- watwut 9y agoEven Nazi Germany had some Jews stay, often because wanting something does not always makes it feasible. People die while attempting to become refugees. They might have plan, but they don't get to live to see it successful. And once they are in refugee camps and their children unhappy due to no future available to them, will you tell them they should have stayed at home? Illegal immigrants are getting deported, like today.
- cobbzilla 9y agoagreed, different people reach the tipping point of desperation at the different times, and sometimes not at all, and sometimes the decision to (or not to) migrate is a bad one, or even a fatal one. History is replete with stories of refugees who have succeeded in their quest for a better life. Yes, survivorship bias says that for every success there are many failures. I'm not judging but merely observing facts: lots of people do in fact migrate despite the many daunting problems they face in doing so, because they believe it is the best possible option for themselves and their families. No one can presume to judge what is best for them but themselves.
- bryananderson 9y agoI cannot understand for the life of me why this is being downvoted. We all agree that the macro trends are positive, but you don’t have to look that far back in history to find times that were really good but clearly (in hindsight) contained the seeds of their own demise. Inequality and polarization are completely reasonable things to worry about. We are fools if we think that nothing could upset this wonderful apple cart.
- croon 9y agoThe graph may still have gone up during 2017, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't worry about the derivative.
- HugoDaniel 9y agoNevermind the global warming
- smt88 9y ago> "Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychology professor, explores the gains in a terrific book due out next month, “Enlightenment Now,” in which he recounts the progress across a broad array of metrics, from health to wars, the environment to happiness, equal rights to quality of life." No one is going to agree on assigning value to each category, but peace, health, and quality of life (despite the threat and effects of global warming) are on an upward trend.
- lotsofpulp 9y agoJust like spending your savings, it's very easy to sacrifice tomorrow's resources to make today's quality of life better. I believe the other posters are simply pointing out the uselessness of celebrating this when the consequences are easily foreseen and highly undesired.
- ZeroGravitas 9y agoFor global warming, the correct analogy is probably sacrificing tomorrow's resources in order to make today's quality of life worse, which is doubly dumb. Many of the scare stories of "solar PV can't support a modern civilization" are just lies put about by the people who can benefit themselves (not society as a whole) in the short term.
- jcbrand 9y agoor the species collapse, ocean acidification, disappearing coral reefs or ocean gyres full of plastic
- Clubber 9y agoWay better than 1917, and much, much better than 1918. History is pretty horrible.
- zerostar07 9y agoI presume there is a very large proportion of years in the history of humanity which were record best, so not sure how newsworthy this is.
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoIt's a bit like all time highs in the markets, not that surprising really.
- RickJWagner 9y agoI really believe these will be considered great days. Ignore the political hyperbole, see the actual good being done.
- bryanlarsen 9y agoquote from the article: "The world is registering important progress, but it also faces mortal threats."
- spodek 9y agoJust looking at the pictures of Lebanon's shores after a regular storm https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/world/middleeast/trash-lebanon-beach.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/world/middleeast/trash-le..., the amount of garbage is shocking, even after seeing tons of pictures of garbage. Maybe nature destroyed affects me more than others, but they're pictures of regular, ordinary life these days. People didn't hunt for them. For those who remember the 1970s "Crying Indian" public service announcement, the chart in this article https://www.inc.com/joshua-spodek/remember-single-tear-anti-litter-ads-from-70s-youll-cry-too-at-our-pollution-levels-today.html https://www.inc.com/joshua-spodek/remember-single-tear-anti-... shows its place in the context of global plastic production. When past generations considered garbage levels a crying shame, the global amount plastic produced ever looks something like what we produce in a week today. That's just plastic. There's also CO2, mercury, etc, plus depletion of topsoil, fish, rain forests, species diversity... I should add my point isn't to bring people down first thing in the morning but to call to action to reduce our consumption. We can act on these things.
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- tw1010 9y ago"on average" could be added to the headline. There will always be outliers.
- tfha 9y agoGoing to need internationally enforced regulation to make a difference. Penalties heavy enough to kill companies that dump, and enforcement policies for other countries that have real teeth to them. People will always consume as many resources as they can, it's how you get ahead. Especially at a macro scale (corporations and nations). This will get worse in any region where there are not severe penalties for destroying the environment
- locopati 9y agono they will not - people do self-regulate and are capable of living sustainably - to say always is to make it an unstoppable fate rather than to create systems that allow people to take greater responsibility
- anovikov 9y agoWhat's even more important, this progress is happening without, or with limited amount of, its downsides. Like, fewer and fewer children dying does not result in uncontrollable, Malthusian population explosion: number of children in the world remains constant, population grows just because of growth of life expectancy. More and more people getting electricity does not mean we are using more and more non-renewable resources: consumption of coal and oil remains nearly constant and only natural gas is on the rise (while this is the cleanest fuel and there is a lot of it left). Same can't be said about clean water, though.
- sharemywin 9y agoThere's a lot of desalinization projects going on in the middle east and Africa.
- fblnd 9y agoThis is what I call "Fake News"
- TheAdamAndChe 9y agoWelcome to HN. You may want to read up on the guidelines[1], particularly the portion that says "Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- CalRobert 9y ago2017 was good. So was 2016. If I take my mortgage money and blow it all at the casino, that's probably fun too. We've been taking out loans from the atmosphere and the oceans for a hundred years and spending like mad. In the end, nature will prove to be a more cruel lender than any human.
- sudhirj 9y agoThis just made me think of an interesting point. We’re basically running humanity as a whole like a startup. We’re consuming resources like crazy, just running full speed ahead to a future where the loans taken in the present will be offset by some kind of technological revolution - fusion power, weather control, large scale desalination, drone reforestation and ocean cleanup, underground builds, clean energy and space elevators. People do actually like nature. When technology advances far enough, humans will use it to restore nature again, not necessarily because we feel obligated to, but because it sells houses.
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- hobochili 9y agoIt seems a strange notion to restore nature with advancements in technology. Restore it to what, how it was before technology? It is a nice thought, I guess, but it won't be Nature. It will be Nature: Restored. That is, something else.
- CalRobert 9y ago"When technology advances far enough, " This is not a given. It presupposes the continued existence of modern civilization. Who spends time researching carbon sequestration when their flooded neighbors from the next city over are trying to take your resources by force? Also,the atmosphere is the ultimate tragedy of the commons problem, and we haven't fixed it in decades of trying. The planet will return to a sustainable state. Sadly the loss of nearly all vertebrates and billions of dead is sustainable. Hell, so is Venus. Saying how great things are while dancing on top of the landmine, as this article is doing in a sense, seems foolhardy.
- nickthemagicman 9y ago2017 had a few metrics that were better than other years. That's all. Also, there's a difference between 'thriving' and 'surviving'. Less people starving is good, but, less people around the world are 'thriving'. Fascism is on the rise, nuclear war, environmental devastation, Inequality is massive. This article picks a few metrics but they're not the full picture.
- ForRealsies 9y ago>Less people starving is good, but, less people around the world are 'thriving'. Do you have a source for this, along with a clear definition of your 'thriving' metric?
- dpweb 9y agoHow would serious historians weigh in? Im skeptical because the tendency to assume we are always think, THIS is the greatest moment in human history. The last few centuries built up an amazing amount, but also tore alot apart.
- oblio 9y agoNot really. During the peaks of economic cycles, yes, we believe that we're on top of the world. But for most of the time, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age You can't get stuff like MAGA without this psychological factor.
- danso 9y agoI wouldn't presume to question Nicholas Kristof's awareness of world and humanitarian affairs, given that his career is so focused on it. And I applaud what I perceive to be his intent, to remind all the folks (mostly east coast media folks) that there is a world beyond Trump's tweets, and that it is not all crisis. But I'm unclear how he can say 2017 is the best year in human history. Is it merely an argument of numbers? That since hundreds of thousands more people every day have electricity and water, that the net amount of suffering has surely decreased? To put it another way, what kind of disaster would have to happen in 2017 for us to say that 2017 was worse than 2016? According to his numbers, nearly 100 million people get access to water and electricity every year (300K per day). If we had got into a nuclear war that wiped out 1M people, could we still see stay that 2017 was, all things considered, a better year? Last year, the UN said the Yemen/Africa crisis was the worst humanitarian crisis since WW2. That sounds like something that would disqualify 2017 from being considered as "probably the very best year in the long history of humanity." Unless it is the case that we had far fewer wars and crises elsewhere in 2017? Is that the case? Edit: forgot the link https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/11/world-faces-worst-humanitarian-crisis-since-1945-says-un-official https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/11/world-faces-wo...
- oconnor663 9y ago> Last year, the UN said the Yemen/Africa crisis was the worst humanitarian crisis since WW2. Looking that up real quick, it sounds like it's put 20 million people at risk of starvation, which is very bad. But the Great Leap Forward in China had an actual death toll (not just a risk estimate) that was even larger than that, 1958-62.
- danso 9y agoSure, but the OP isn't saying that 2017 was better than the 1950s, he says he believes it to be "probably the very best year in the long history of humanity". Which means it's better than 2016, 2015, 2012, etc. Is it possible all those other years had similar continent-level crises that make them less bad than 2017? I get that his larger point that Western suffering is a small part of the equation. But it seems to me there was a lot of suffering elsewhere too. Not Holocaust or Spanish Flu levels of suffering, just maybe enough to make it less great of a year than others this decade.
- sneilan 9y agoI love articles like this because when the world is getting better, at no point is the United States described as getting better. It is always countries other than the United States and rightly so as we are on a decline.