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We've Just Had the Best Decade in Human History
- tomrod 7y agoSoft paywall
- q3k 7y agoSounds about right.
- trevyn 7y agoSadly, it hasn’t really been a great decade for human dignity.
- Matticus_Rex 7y agoCompared to which one?
- birdyrooster 7y agoYour definition of what is great for humanity doesn’t necessarily need to be relative. You can have absolute criteria for what you consider a great decade for human dignity. Perhaps there has not yet been a great decade for human dignity.
- solveit 7y agoSure, but then you're playing semantics to grandstand and detract from real achievements.
- hliyan 7y agoStrangely enough, I was just compiling a list of "good things that happened this decade" in an adjoining window for a different purpose. Here's what I got so far: Cheap solar energy Electric cars CRISPR gene editing Real world machine learning applications Commercial space vehicles Ebola vaccine Heightened public awareness of: plastics, climate change, inequality, sexual harrassment We fixed the Ozone hole Extreme poverty down by half Higgs boson and gravitational waves discovered
- wallace_f 7y agoEverything has to do with science and innovation. What about mass surveilance, rising suicides and homelessness, or never-ending wars, among other things?
- IshKebab 7y agoThose aren't good things?
- wallace_f 7y agoI know that, but the topic we are discussing is that this is the greatest decade. My response is in that context.
- nyolfen 7y agoto be fair to gp, i probably wouldn't include those in a list of the best parts of the last decade either
- mbostleman 7y agoSince they aren't good things they don't belong on the list.
- sbuk 7y agoI was just compiling a list of "good things that happened this decade"...
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoSuicide rates have been falling around the world: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/suicide-death-rates-by-sex https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/suicide-death-rates-by-se...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cagenut 7y agoI didn't make it past the first paragraph because I really can't stand the worst logic flaw in web performance being turned into a worldview. Hiding glaring flaws behind averages by just trying to overwhelm the average with a much higher volume of "good" traffic. If poverty is an error, then a 60% error rate on 1 billion requests and a 10% error rate on 6 billion requests is the exact same thing for those people.
- solveit 7y ago> If poverty is an error, then a 60% error rate on 1 billion requests and a 10% error rate on 6 billion requests is the exact same thing. I can't conceive of the mental contortions you must have forced yourself into to conclude that a world of 600 million people, all in abject poverty, is just as good the world we live in now.
- datashow 7y ago> If poverty is an error, then a 60% error rate on 1 billion requests and a 10% error rate on 6 billion requests is the exact same thing. No. They are not the same thing. Error rate does not automatically drop when requests grow. The number of errors remains the same, but the number of "good" increases, how is that "the exact same thing"? Also, 1 billion world population was in 1800s, at that time poverty rate was 80%.
- Isinlor 7y agoYou should look at the data and not invent some silly comparisons to error rates. Poverty is declining both in absolute and relative terms. There is less poor people now than there was 10 years ago. https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty
- pier25 7y agoAll of this is great but it doesn't change the fact that our emissions are ridiculously high and we are entering the most perilous time for humanity.
- wallace_f 7y agoI know, people are stupid. There is no way to give our children their childhoods back, in this era of Trump, and when a child from Sweden asks him how he can do that for her he starts a cyber bullying war with her. The world is literally dying right now.
- Chris_Chambers 7y agoTake your meds and go back to reddit.
- throwno 7y agoThe sea level rising by two centimeters is not more perilous than nuclear annihilation.
- radicalbyte 7y agoThe wars caused by crop failures precipitated by climate inaction increase the risks of nuclear annihilation exponentially.
- solveit 7y agoYeah, but they said "most perilous time". It's hard to argue that nuclear annihilation is more likely now than in 1950~1990.
- pier25 7y agoHumans didn't launch any global nuclear offensive but they have "launched" climate change. Even if a miracle happened and we reached zero emissions today there are still 40 years of warming from current emissions in the atmosphere plus unstoppable feedbacks that have already been triggered (Arctic ice, methane in the permafrost, etc). Nobody really knows how much warming these feedbacks will add or for how long. And even in the best case scenario we won't get to zero emissions in at least a couple of decades.
- matthewmacleod 7y agoAlthough it would be silly to expect much better from The Spectator, this is an shockingly bad article which does little more than say “some metrics are better therefore green policies are shit”.
- sametmax 7y agoI like positivism. And I think given what we see in the news all the time it's important to promote good things. But stating "best decade in human" history is really tongue in cheek. You could has well hand pick other indicators and state "end of the world signs were clear starting from 2010": - The biggest economical power in the world, China, is now turning into 1984 - 60 % of the insect species considered extinct, and because of us - Micro plastics everywhere - USA general opioid addiction - For the first time literacy, IQ and lifespan decrease in some occidental countries - Obesity and diabetes epidemics - Highest difference between rich and poor in centuries, while the former never paid such low taxes. - Mass surveillance and black torture sites are now considered standard practice - Extremism rising - Mega corporations now have more economical power than some small countries - Ads, ads everywhere. Comments are ads. Articles are ads. The entire internet has been sold to PR companies. - Huge revealed scandals (panama papers, PRISM, Epstein, snowden, equifax...) ended up with no consequences for the criminals, screaming to the world that the powerful can actually do whatever they want - Health care and justice systems in rich countries are saturated - Jails are businesses, filled mostly with males from a few minorities. - The population is violently divided on major political issues: Trump in the US, Brexit in the UK, Gilets Jaunes in France, Hong Kong in China... - Privacy is at a all time low with the rise of IoT and smart speakers/cameras to complement the already omnipresent internet trackers and ubiquitous phones - Star Wars 9
- seibelj 7y agoHonestly the world is awesome and there is no time I’d rather live than the present. The endless complaining and “sky is falling” stories made me unplug from the media, when I do read the news I skim over anything like that (which is usually most of it). My wife has a coworker who has to go to therapy to deal with her generalized anxiety about the world’s issue, which went into overdrive after the Trump election. She is constantly on top of the latest NYT disaster article. Her hair has started to fall out and she’s only in her mid-30s. It’s really, really sad.
- throwno 7y agoWhile not Fake News, sites like the NY Times should probably be categorized as Toxic News.
- rboyd 7y agoOr my two unemployed Facebook friends that spend every waking hour on their endless political crusade. I want to shake them and tell them: maybe your world view is tainted by your local environment. It's convenient to attack political leaders for your problems, but maybe you need to spend all that time and energy focusing on finding an income instead of adding another useless voice to the chorus.
- crazygringo 7y agoThe best decade technologically and economically? Yes, no question. But the best decade politically? Not even close. Nobody saw the resurgence of right-wing populism coming, of anti-immigrant vitriol, of rejecting the international institutions safeguarding peace, or breakdown of constitutional norms. And with climate change on its way, I wouldn't count our chickens before they're hatched.
- shrubble 7y agoHow many miles of rightwing, anti-immigrant wall have been actually constructed, though? Seems to me that a lot of people are conflating rhetoric with actual reality.
- solveit 7y agoName a better decade. Seriously. Starting from 1900, every one up to the '40s is out because two world wars, then all of the ones until the '90s is out because we were literally a paranoid mid-ranking officer away from global thermonuclear destruction, giving us the '90s, the '00s, and the '10s to work with. So we seem quite unarguably in the top 25% of the past 12 decades, so "not even close" is rather unfair. I will not argue the relative rankings of the past three decades except to state that it is not obvious what they should be. I am not disputing that our world is on a knife edge. I am saying that it has always been like this, or worse.
- crazygringo 7y agoYou literally just answered your own question -- the other decades since the cold war, meaning the 90's and 00's were obviously far, far better politically. But I'd argue that what's particularly scary is the fact that things have gotten worse politically. It's not that the 10's were improving less fast -- it's that long-trusted political institutions are falling apart, and nobody knows how much further they have to go, or if they'll be able to be put back together.
- cabaalis 7y ago> it's that long-trusted political institutions are falling apart This isn't the first time that's happened, you know. And the institutions that replace them will also fall apart and be replaced. And those as well. You should stop worrying about governing body A or B and start hoping that the next group who seizes power respects inalienable rights as much as the ones who created your current situation.
- bbeckerman 7y agoI appreciate the positivity until it comes at the snarky expense of environmentalists and ecologists.
- justforyou 7y agoPropoganda.
- scarmig 7y agoFor an invective against environmental politics, this Spectator article somehow managed to avoid even alluding to carbon. If you're going to say that all green types are nuts because everything is hunky dory, you have to at least put in some claim that the Earth isn't even really warming, or isn't warming as much as we thought, or that rapid warming is good. Any of them would be false, but you've at least got to try.
- tucaz 7y agoWhat’s the ideal temperature of Earth and how do we know that’s the ideal temperature?
- scarmig 7y agoDumb question. It can be either X or X+10F. The issue is how rapidly we move from one to the other. If it happens at a slow enough rate, natural patterns of human migration and urban development can account for it; if it's fast enough, it kills people and causes tens of trillions of dollars of economic damage.
- tucaz 7y agoAlright. I’m sorry for my dumb question. Let me try another one. What’s the ideal rate then at what temperatures should change? What is “slow enough”?
- scarmig 7y agoYou're playing a silly game by trying to make me state there is some "ideal" way the world "should" work, since everyone here knows the world isn't designed for anything. I can just as well demand you tell me what the ideal rate of change in temperature is. Note that you can't dodge that with "whatever the rate of temperature change would be if we enacted no policies", because there's no particular reason to think that whatever that exact amount is isn't too high (or too low!). The point is that current levels of climate emissions are much costlier and deadlier than a world where (good) policies have been enacted to decrease the flow of carbon into the atmosphere. Just to throw it out there, though, I'd suggest a guaranteed change of 2F/century would be greeted with an instant acceptance and sigh of relief by everyone.
- kerkeslager 7y agoThis is the worst paragraph of the whole article: > Perhaps one of the least fashionable predictions I made nine years ago was that ‘the ecological footprint of human activity is probably shrinking’ and ‘we are getting more sustainable, not less, in the way we use the planet’. That is to say: our population and economy would grow, but we’d learn how to reduce what we take from the planet. And so it has proved. An MIT scientist, Andrew McAfee, recently documented this in a book called More from Less, showing how some nations are beginning to use less stuff: less metal, less water, less land. Not just in proportion to productivity: less stuff overall. ...and what you're leaving out here is that this is far too little, far too late. This is like noting a decrease in the number of iceburg collisions in the last hours before the Titanic sank. This is NOT a cause for optimism. We're destroying the environment at a slower rate, but that doesn't mean we're not destroying the environment.
- tucaz 7y agoHow much can we use and at what rate can we use resources from the planet?
- Filligree 7y agoAbout half of what we're doing, as a rule of thumb.
- FussyZeus 7y agoThe answer to this question is far too vast and complex for a hacker news comment. The real problem is that the people who hold the levers of power to create change are far too invested in the status quo. They may have an ethical and humanitarian reason to respond to the scientific communities concerns and data, but they have literally every other single interest pointed in the exact opposite direction. I think we're rapidly approaching the point where the youngest people are going to abandon "civil" methods of change. They're being faced with a world they won't be able to live in, and are derided, mocked, parodied, and of course denied any kind of power to exact the changes needed.
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- sundeepprikar 7y agoNot sure who you mean by “we”. I’m from India and I regularly see people starving on the streets here, in ghettos that abut luxury developments. It’s very important to specify who is meant by “we”.
- 11thEarlOfMar 7y agoThere are certainly many major issues to address. Still, it's good for our collective mental health to acknowledge that many really important elements of the human experience are really improving in meaningful ways. If nothing else, openly acknowledging the successes of the past decades gives humanity confidence to address the considerable challenges of the present. Strictly focusing on either the negative or the positive is out of balance. Balance is healthy.
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- rjkennedy98 7y agoNo mention of any cultural or individual progress. Of course technology will get better because we can build on the past. Individual and cultural progress should be the measure of a society.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- grabbalacious 7y agoI broadly agree with Ridley, Pinker, et al, that material conditions, education, crime reduction, and various other aspects of life have been improving lately. I would also agree that economic growth and energy usage aren't inherently bad; these are only problematic at our current level of technology. And we're going to need a lot more of both in order to tackle future existential problems among other things. However one aspect of well-being which isn't always included in these treatments is that of 'mental health' or the state of our 'souls' as it used to be thought of. Both concepts are vague but they do point to something real and profoundly important. So here's an unrhetorical question: are we getting better or worse in this respect, on average? Or is it simply impossible to measure at our present inadequate level of understanding?
- Mugwort 7y agoThat can't possibly be true, not while Trump is president.
- Mugwort 7y agoWe also passed 400 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere. Best decade ever for sealing peoplekind's fate.
- Sawamara 7y agoJust one click to the author's name reveals these titles: https://www.spectator.co.uk/author/matt-ridley/ https://www.spectator.co.uk/author/matt-ridley/ >The most dangerous thing about the Amazon fires is the apocalyptic rhetoric >Ignore the global warming hysteria: hurricanes are not getting worse >The eradication of South Georgia’s rats proves we can do anything >Wind turbines are neither clean nor green and they provide zero global energy >The world is getting greener. Why does no one want to know? And my personal favorite: >How hunting and shooting help wildlife – and not just in Africa Bloody brilliant, let me tell you.
- riazrizvi 7y agoHe should do a suggestion box for new pieces... ‘The plucky resilience of poor children who still drink tap water in Flint, Michigan’, ‘Why we are better off without polar bears’, ‘Are snow capped mountains really all that?’...
- booleandilemma 7y agoThe number of homeless is increasing, but so is the number of humans in general.
- Sawamara 7y ago"Productivity is up and wages might stagnate - but here's why its actually a good thing"
- cm2187 7y agoI haven’t read those articles but I can think of a few good points behind many of those titles. It appeared the Amazon fires weren’t worse than any other year, wind turbines have lots of challenges that make them pretty much unsuitable as a primary source of energy at scale, as for hunting, it seems counter intuitive but it is often what supports financially many natural reserves, which happen to also require population control.
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- ilaksh 7y agoSeems like they should mention how the global debt crisis is going to be resolved, if everything is really so great. The "roaring 20s" preceded the great depression. And then a world war.
- _aleph2c_ 7y agoThere is an interesting phenomenon happening here on hacker news. Optimistic comments are being voted down by the moderators (who have a high enough ranking to do so). Yet, this article has been pushed to the top by regular members. The messages within the down-voted comments aren't breaking any of the community rules. So the down-voting is happening because of a political disagreement. The moderators are intolerant of an opposing view and rather than engage in open debate; they instead wink the things they disagree with, out of the conversation entirely.
- dang 7y agoBy 'moderators' it seems that you mean users with enough karma to downvote and/or flag. Those are the users who've been affecting this thread. What you're seeing here is that the article is a divisive one, which is unsurprising, no? It's always been ok for downvoting to express disagreement on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314.
- miles 7y agoAn earlier article by the same author: Why climate change is good for the world - "Don't panic! The scientific consensus is that warmer temperatures do more good than harm" https://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/10/carry-on-warming/ https://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/10/carry-on-warming/ His tenure at Northern Rock does not inspire confidence: The man who crocked Northern Rock - and how the scandal will cost £55 BILLION https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1026384/The-man-crocked-Northern-Rock--scandal-cost-55-BILLION.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1026384/The-man-cro... Lessons of the fall - "How a financial darling fell from grace, and why regulators didn't catch it" https://www.economist.com/briefing/2007/10/18/lessons-of-the-fall https://www.economist.com/briefing/2007/10/18/lessons-of-the... Northern Rock chairman quits after crisis https://www.euronews.com/2007/10/19/northern-rock-chairman-quits-after-crisis https://www.euronews.com/2007/10/19/northern-rock-chairman-q... Matt Ridley would turn planet into Northern Rock https://theecologist.org/2018/nov/05/matt-ridley-would-turn-planet-northern-rock https://theecologist.org/2018/nov/05/matt-ridley-would-turn-...
- klenwell 7y agoI thought I recognized the name: http://www.mattridley.co.uk/books/ http://www.mattridley.co.uk/books/ I read his book Genome years ago and thought it was a moderately interesting primer on the revolution in genetic research starting to unfold in the wake of the Human Genome Project. I'm sorry to discover Viscount Ridley turned out to be such a hack: https://hansard.parliament.uk/search/MemberContributions?memberId=4272 https://hansard.parliament.uk/search/MemberContributions?mem...
- thu2111 7y agoIs that why this article is flagged? Because of who wrote it? Do you have any specific disagreement with anything he wrote? Because it seemed to be an interesting article with many things in it I didn't know, written in an engaging style. From glancing through the comments below it seems people are angry because this guy isn't angry, and doesn't believe the world is doomed. Why climate change is good for the world - "Don't panic! The scientific consensus is that warmer temperatures do more good than harm" You don't explicitly pass judgement on this, apparently believing climate sensitivity and impact of small temperature changes is so obvious as to be beyond doubt. But there's a lot of doubt about how sensitive the climate really is. Climatology is very far from being a precise and well understood science, and that's before you get into some of the questionable scientific practices found inside. The article is, again, well written and makes good arguments. It starts by citing a scientific meta-study into the economic impacts and goes from there. It also acknowledges the possible counter-arguments. For those who are interested in the question of climate sensitivity Nic Lewis (a published climate scientist and skeptic), has some good talks on the matter, like this one: https://www.nicholaslewis.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Lewis_Climate-Sensitivity_talk_Dublin2019-slides.pdf https://www.nicholaslewis.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Lew... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYZW-6jw98U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYZW-6jw98U
- jonnypotty 7y agoThis commentator is appealing to the idea that existential threats basically aren't real because they aren't measurable. Look: measurement a,b,c,d all show things are improving. So this is the truth. It's one point of view. There are plenty of other ways to look at the world seriously. It doesn't have to be reduced to 5 or 6 numbers.
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago>> For example, a normal drink can today contains 13 grams of aluminium, much of it recycled. In 1959, it contained 85 grams. Substituting the former for the latter is a contribution to economic growth, but it reduces the resources consumed per drink. Interesting. But before I hip-hip-hurray, I'd like to know how many 13g drink cans were made in 2019, and how many 85g cans were made in 1959.
- UncleEntity 7y agoThe google shall set you free --> http://www.cancentral.com/can-stats/statistics http://www.cancentral.com/can-stats/statistics At a quick glance I'd say, umm, more...
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y agoYep, thanks, you're absolutely right. Though the numbers are only for the US, total number of empty beverage cans produced and shipped in the US and US-controlled territories in 1960 was 9.700 (billions or tonnes, I'm not sure, the unit is not in the table) and in 2010 it was 96.457. So there's been a ten-fold increase of production for an eight-fold decrease in aluminum used. Note the numbers are for total cans, which I think includes steel, but there's only aggregate data up to 1979. Data from this table from the page you linked: http://www.cancentral.com/sites/cancentral.com/files/public-documents/Bev_by_Years_1960_-_2010.pdf http://www.cancentral.com/sites/cancentral.com/files/public-... Fortunately, it seems that for other types of cans production went down. For example, total number of food cans was 34.600 in 1970 and 28.432 in 2010. This table: http://www.cancentral.com/sites/cancentral.com/files/public-documents/CMI_Food_History_-_1970_-_2010.pdf http://www.cancentral.com/sites/cancentral.com/files/public-... Again thanks, I should have looked it up myself :)
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoI don't know about cans but overall aluminium production has rocketed, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aluminium#/media/File:Aluminium_-_world_production_trend.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aluminium#/media/Fi...
- einpoklum 7y agoDoes this guy think we were born yesterday? > predictions I made ... that ‘the ecological footprint of human activity is probably shrinking’ and ‘we are getting more sustainable, not less...’... our population and economy would grow, but we’d learn how to reduce what we take from the planet. And so it has proved. An MIT scientist, Andrew McAfee, recently documented this in a book called More from Less, showing how some nations are beginning to use less stuff: less metal, less water, less land. Not just in proportion to productivity: less stuff overall. That's the kind of evidence he gives? * "Some" nations, not all nor most, nor the largest ones. * "Beginning" to use less stuff, not "using" less stuff. * "less stuff: [one kind], [another kind], [a third kind]" - not using less generally, but using less of certain kinds of things, albeit important ones. and so on. This is Junk commentary. I wouldn't be surprised if even his sources are also painting an overly rosy picture.
- antihero 7y agoTell that to all the people oppressed by the right wing shitheads that are in power in so many countries.