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Things getting better in the average doesn't mean they're getting better for you. It does mean that they're improving though. Imagine how hard you'd have it had

Things getting better in the average doesn't mean they're getting better for you. It does mean that they're improving though. Imagine how hard you'd have it had the average fallen on all these metrics instead of getting better. None of that means its all great and well. Which I assume is your point? Would be interesting to see a plot of this graph at the p0 and p100 (min/max) to get an idea of the baselines.

pdimitar 8y ago
I am saying that this claimed economical well-being is still largely clustered by countries or even regions. That I am struggling means nothing in the global scale, that is true -- but when you see almost everybody around you struggle then you have a very hard time believing these articles. My mother got a slightly bigger pension -- which changed it from 55 to 60 EUR a month. That's not a typo. Hooray for 10% improvement? I feel these stats would be much more credible if they gave you your actual % more direct buying power in terms of food, tech or leisure time based on your country -- not on a world-wide average which is non-informative. The way these stats articles are currently framed though, they are all but useless.
- didibus 8y ago
  I totally agree, some countries and regions could very well be on the decline, while the average is still going up. And that's a big problem. And if you're looking for insight into your own area, ya this is not really trying to be an article to allow you to make data driven decisions about your local politics and laws. It would have been nice of them to put all these into a tableau dashboard with many more dimensions so we could have played with the data some more and gathered better insight. That said, I disagree about these averages being useless. They're still a valid indicator of the world average in some specific metrics. And for those, they're showing a good trend for the better. If we were to monitor them, and discover a drastic change in one of them, it would be cause for concern. Similarly, seeing them continue to improve is cause for consolation.
  - pdimitar 8y ago
    I would like even these condensed stats much more if they told us where do these average improvements come from -- and whom they benefit. I mean, it could just be 20_000 founders in SV getting rich because of the blockchain hype, and 50_000 Chinese businessmen making a lucky break, and 100_000 agriculture businesses going past $10M annual profits, etc. Add some more such data points and I still can't see how the world on average is better off -- it would still show a 5-figure number of businessmen being better off (less than 0.01% of world population), but not how an average single mother of two is. ...I guess I ended up trying to paraphrase another sibling comment of mine -- don't you think that if we see these stats without the extreme ends of the bell curve included, it would give us a better insight on how is the average folk doing?

pdimitar 8y ago

I am saying that this claimed economical well-being is still largely clustered by countries or even regions. That I am struggling means nothing in the global scale, that is true -- but when you see almost everybody around you struggle then you have a very hard time believing these articles. My mother got a slightly bigger pension -- which changed it from 55 to 60 EUR a month. That's not a typo. Hooray for 10% improvement? I feel these stats would be much more credible if they gave you your actual % more direct buying power in terms of food, tech or leisure time based on your country -- not on a world-wide average which is non-informative. The way these stats articles are currently framed though, they are all but useless.

didibus 8y ago
I totally agree, some countries and regions could very well be on the decline, while the average is still going up. And that's a big problem. And if you're looking for insight into your own area, ya this is not really trying to be an article to allow you to make data driven decisions about your local politics and laws. It would have been nice of them to put all these into a tableau dashboard with many more dimensions so we could have played with the data some more and gathered better insight. That said, I disagree about these averages being useless. They're still a valid indicator of the world average in some specific metrics. And for those, they're showing a good trend for the better. If we were to monitor them, and discover a drastic change in one of them, it would be cause for concern. Similarly, seeing them continue to improve is cause for consolation.
- pdimitar 8y ago
  I would like even these condensed stats much more if they told us where do these average improvements come from -- and whom they benefit. I mean, it could just be 20_000 founders in SV getting rich because of the blockchain hype, and 50_000 Chinese businessmen making a lucky break, and 100_000 agriculture businesses going past $10M annual profits, etc. Add some more such data points and I still can't see how the world on average is better off -- it would still show a 5-figure number of businessmen being better off (less than 0.01% of world population), but not how an average single mother of two is. ...I guess I ended up trying to paraphrase another sibling comment of mine -- don't you think that if we see these stats without the extreme ends of the bell curve included, it would give us a better insight on how is the average folk doing?