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This is, IMHO, the ultimate counter-point to the Hans Rosling / Bill Gates school of optimism and progress. There were roughly a billion people on earth prior
by cagenut 7y ago
This is, IMHO, the ultimate counter-point to the Hans Rosling / Bill Gates school of optimism and progress.
There were roughly a billion people on earth prior to the industrial revolution. Through growth we have raised the average quality of life, but what does that matter to the nearly constant number of people living lives of hunger and poverty?
It's like trying to fix a web performance problem where 80% of your requests time out by adding so much other traffic that your failure rate is now only 8%. You fixed nothing.
- korantu 7y agoWhat do you mean _other traffic_? These are different people. Probability that you suffer from hunger in your life reduced from 0.8 to 0.08, an order of magnitude. If one had choice, one would certainly choose to be born now. Yes, there is still lots of suffering, but as Rosling says, things can be bad and getting better at the same time
- cagenut 7y agoBut the point is "things" did not and are not getting better. It's literally right there in the title of the shared article you don't even need to click or read it.
- korantu 7y agoJust to conclude, before industrial revolution civilisation could only provide hunger-less life to 0.1B people. Now, civilisation provided hunger-free life to 7B people. If this is not 'getting better', I don't know what is, even if same _number_ of people go hungry. At least now the food to feed them actually exists, which was not the case before
- cagenut 7y agoI'm sorry I don't want to turn this into a back and forth internet debate but I feel like you're very deliberately missing the point. Averages are an abstraction. People are real. "getting better" for those people means ... actually getting better. Its that simple. You're overthinking this and trying to apply mathematical models and abstractions, which don't get me wrong, are very valuable tools. But don't lose your anchor in material reality.
- bluGill 7y agoWe have raised world standards for the vast majority of people. It doesn't matter to those who we haven't raised it for, but for the rest it matters.