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The world is better off today in basically every way than it was 100 years ago, and almost unimaginably better than it was 200 years ago. The worst 10% today d

The world is better off today in basically every way than it was 100 years ago, and almost unimaginably better than it was 200 years ago. The worst 10% today do about as well as majority of West was doing back then. And the condition of the poor is improving rapidly. The places were it is not true, it is due to wars. But well, this is perspective of a Polish person. My country lost 25% of the population during wars with Sweden, 90% population of Warsaw. And then another 20% in WWII, and another 90% of Warsaw was lost. My grandmother lived through that. Later, during communist regime she managed to escape Poland right before Martial Law in 80' to Netherlands. My mother was persecuted after that due to contacts in the West. Now we live in the EU. I have extremely hard time imagining my Swedish or German colleagues trying to kill me. Not everyone is peaceful to the east, but at least their tanks are not in Poland. That's progress too.

diordiderot 5y ago
Your husband takes out a variable rate mortgage 120% of your homes value to spend on luxury goods, Buys a g-wagon, and starts embezzling from his company. Instead of paying for utilities you steal then from neighbors. To save on garbage collection you fly tip. The last 5 years have been wonderful for you quality of life. You shouldn't question your situation because things are 'better'.
- qsort 5y ago
  What does this have to do with anything? Most of the West (let alone most of the rest of the world) is far better off than it was even just 50 years ago by almost every single metric you can conceive. It's hard to believe it's due to financial games exclusively: people are better off in real terms. Inequality is a problem because when members of your community are living in very different conditions, the cohesion of said community is undermined, but worrying about inequality is the archetypical first world problem: a problem nonetheless, but a problem that presumes you've come a long way.
  - rmchugh 5y ago
    it's not about financial games, but rather externalities. There are significant external costs of our way of life that are borne by others. That new car emits CO2 that contributes to global heating. The steaks we eat come from cows that have been fed with soy beans from cleared rainforests. etc etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Negative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Negative
    - qsort 5y ago
      It frankly still is a stretch to claim that living conditions would revert to even just 1950s levels if we reduced emissions to a sustainable level. Again, most of those improvements have been in real terms. We are simply more productive.
      - whoisburbansky 5y ago
        Do we have a good sense of how much of that increase in productivity can be sustained in a carbon neutral fashion?
      - plutonorm 5y ago
        is it? I think it's entirely possible that our civilisation would completely collapse.
      - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
        the analogy of course assumes that there are a bunch of different problems that will come to the family when the cops, the IRS, the electric company, and their bank all come to talk to them at once. Just as it is generally claimed by scientists that there are a bunch of different problems coming to humanity when ecosystems collapse, temperatures rise by 1.5 degrees celsius, there's not enough freshwater to go around... it might be stretch to claim etc. etc. but nobody is making that claim, the claim is that humanity is not reducing emissions and not doing anything significant to handle when the bills come due for the last century of everything improving! on edit: changed is a bunch to are a bunch - is a bunch is probably still correct but are a bunch sounds more correct to my ear.
- drunkpotato 5y ago
  I love this analogy, and it's definitely a perspective to take seriously. "It's always okay, until it isn't" is something to consider, as is the idea that civilization is living on borrowed time, or borrowing from the future to pay the present. I don't know if it's true, or if it's even something we can falsify at any moment in history, but stable civilizations have collapsed, and it's worth understanding that it could happen to ours too.
coldtea 5y ago
>The world is better off today in basically every way than it was 100 years ago, and almost unimaginably better than it was 200 years ago. ... in the kind of metrics people like Hans Rosling of Steven Pinker care about, when taking quantitative state-produced stats at face value, and with naive extrapolation (and ignoring statistical fluctuations, black swans, etc). E.g. "the condition of the poor is improving rapidly. The places were it is not true, it is due to wars". Global warming is already a big factor and is only expected to be more so in the future. And that's not even before any real battle for resources such as water, crops, and dwindling minerals start, mass immigration due to climate change brings its own conflicts and challenges, the decline of the US hegemony brings forth new hegemonical and tons of peripheral claims, and lets not even count inflation and other pressures (including boomer-era people coming to retirement age en masse with lots of savings issues in the US, and broken pension systems in Europe). I haven't even mentioned a possible permanent (or long term) covid mutations situation (we're already 2 years in, and measures already had a huge impact on economies). >Now we live in the EU. I have extremely hard time imagining my Swedish or German colleagues trying to kill me. Not to make it sound like equivalent times, but jewish people had an extremely hard time imagining their German co-patriots would try to kill them too, plenty of such historical accounts from pre/early WWII, even up to the point they were already dealing with force registration in ethnicity lists, deportations, and so on.
- qsort 5y ago
  > in the kind of metrics people like Hans Rosling of Steven Pinker care about I'm curious by what kind of metrics the world was better 100 years ago. You're arguing against a strawman: there are challenges ahead != we were better off before.
  - nosianu 5y ago
    Well, CO2 in the atmosphere (and amount of carbon above ground in general, a lot has been brought up from below in the last 100 years) and plastic pollution come to mind. Ocean pollution. Bio-diversity. Less or no weapons of mass destructions. No climate change yet, e.g. in the western US water from rivers was less of an issue and could be distributed more freely. There were a lot of extremely dirty industrial processes which we are doing much better now (in the developed countries at least), superfund sites in the US and their equivalent in other industrialized nations as the known locations, but it did not reach the global scale yet, plus, what they buried or just left in the ground where the factories spilled it is still there now for the most part. I think that in quite a few ways we've gotten better, sure, but partly by kicking the can down the road instead of actually solving issues such as sustainable energy or water use instead of drawing from and heavily relying on exhaustible stores, as well as not having closed loops with the things we produce.
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
>The world is better off today in basically every way than it was 100 years ago, and almost unimaginably better than it was 200 years ago. so this seems sort of like the old joke about jumping off the skyscraper and as you fall past the 10th floor say "so far so good", only now the person falling is doing cocaine and says "things are only getting better!"
- marcusverus 5y ago
  GP is objectively correct. 200 years ago, ~95% of humans lived in extreme poverty. 100 years ago it was ~85%. Today only ~10% live in extreme poverty, and the number continues to fall. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty
  - esarbe 5y ago
    That doesn't change that fact that the ground is getting closer and closer and we're still accelerating. We're burning the planet.
another_story 5y ago
People are better off, but not our arable land, the fish in our oceans, the soil we grow our crops in, the animals in our forest, the forest themselves, etc... We're in a sports car hitting the gas as we head towards a cliff and you're talking about how much better the interior is on this new model compared to the last.
- Isinlor 5y ago
  Reduction of global child mortality from near 50% to below 4% is not "talking about how much better the interior is" ... The past was an ongoing disaster worse than any westerner can imagine.
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  Production per acre of farmland has increased massively and is still increasing. The size of forests in developed countries has increased substantially. At the same time the rate of population growth has decreased and is projected to go negative within a few decades. Sure, lots of things are still getting worse, but "getting worse more slowly" is progress. No reason to get complacent but in my opinion doom sayers do more harm than good by promulgating the nihilistic philosophy that we're all doomed anyways, so fighting our problems doesn't do any good.
  - another_story 5y ago
    Forest cover has increased after we cut much of it down. We've replaced much of it with monoculture timber that gets one maybe two growth cycle before the soil is depleted. Production of food has increased along with our unsustainable use of fossil fuels and the other products needed to do so. Topsoil is disappearing at an alarming rate. I don't think a person sounding the alarm that we'll have depleted our fish stocks within 25 years, or are losing an incredible amount of topsoil each year, or are heading for dramatic climate changes that will cause an increase in disasters is a doomsayer. They're just living according to what every scientific report says. Being optimistic won't change a disruption in food supply or mass migration due to shifting weather patterns.
polytely 5y ago
But isn't all this progress bought with the destruction of our environment? It isn't sustainable at all and we are basically betting we can switch to a sustainable model before everything starts breaking down.
- Isinlor 5y ago
  Climate change is no good, and we have to do better, but the past was even worse. Try to imagine near 50% child mortality on a global scale in 1800. That's the past. Today even the poorest regions in Africa have "only" ~15% child mortality.
  - birksherty 5y ago
    The better things will not remain so for long. Many of the industry and technical progress came at a huge cost. It's the future generation who will bear it. Data conclusively indicates real-world climate change is tracking the IPCC's worst case scenario. https://youtu.be/fliCxyAwBWU https://youtu.be/fliCxyAwBWU
- Gravityloss 5y ago
  Well, many things in the environment are a lot worse now than 100 years ago, but some things are better. While there was much less industrial production, it was more polluting per output. Waste water cleaning, industrial process cleaning or in general taking care of garbage has improved a lot in the last sixty years in developed countries.
  - birksherty 5y ago
    Why per output? To make it look better? Total is worse, more co2, more pollution, more oil spill in oceans, plastic in oceans even inside animals etc. It's better just for a selfish species.
    - Gravityloss 5y ago
      Well, in many places, since population and consumption per capita has plateaued, total pollution has reduced a lot. Some local anecdotes follow. Waste water cleaning plants were built, so human excrement wasn't dumped to the sea anymore. At some point district heating replaced coal and wood burned in houses. Double and triple glazing arrived. The metro started operating in the eighties, replacing a lot of buses. Lead gasoline was banned in the nineties as well. Cars got electronic ignition, fuel injection and catalytic converters. Diesel engines started having tightening regulations every few years. Waste water treatment was upgraded to even remove nitrogen. New bicycle highways were made, the metro is being extended, tram lines are being built, and just a few weeks ago many diesel bus lines were replaced by Chinese electric ones. Some things have gotten better, some things have gotten worse. But not everything has gotten worse.
phendrenad2 5y ago
This is because we've more efficiently exploited the poorest people on Earth. As we run out of human resources to extract, surely something will change. Perhaps we'll reach an equilibrium, at least until jobs start to become automated by Google machine learning and Boston Robotics drones.
miltondts 5y ago
> The world is better off today in basically every way than it was 100 years ago This is orthogonal as to whether a collapse is around the corner or not. If you look at the science in the IPCC report, combine with the inability to hit every single emissions target defined in every single climate treaty. It seems civilization collapse is on the table. Also: We probably are already at 2C locked in: https://www.ecowatch.com/greenhouse-gases-paris-agreement-2649767807.html https://www.ecowatch.com/greenhouse-gases-paris-agreement-26... Billions of refugees by 2100: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0264837715301812?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02648... Etc. If we don't drastically reduce emissions in the next decades, it seems very probable that this global civilization will end. Which might not be a bad thing in the long run, but in the short term it will cause a lot of suffering.
birksherty 5y ago
When people say "the world is better today", they mean only humans right? Because for all other species it's worse. Humans are pretty selfish to say world is better.

diordiderot 5y ago

Your husband takes out a variable rate mortgage 120% of your homes value to spend on luxury goods, Buys a g-wagon, and starts embezzling from his company. Instead of paying for utilities you steal then from neighbors. To save on garbage collection you fly tip. The last 5 years have been wonderful for you quality of life. You shouldn't question your situation because things are 'better'.

qsort 5y ago
What does this have to do with anything? Most of the West (let alone most of the rest of the world) is far better off than it was even just 50 years ago by almost every single metric you can conceive. It's hard to believe it's due to financial games exclusively: people are better off in real terms. Inequality is a problem because when members of your community are living in very different conditions, the cohesion of said community is undermined, but worrying about inequality is the archetypical first world problem: a problem nonetheless, but a problem that presumes you've come a long way.
- rmchugh 5y ago
  it's not about financial games, but rather externalities. There are significant external costs of our way of life that are borne by others. That new car emits CO2 that contributes to global heating. The steaks we eat come from cows that have been fed with soy beans from cleared rainforests. etc etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Negative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Negative
  - qsort 5y ago
    It frankly still is a stretch to claim that living conditions would revert to even just 1950s levels if we reduced emissions to a sustainable level. Again, most of those improvements have been in real terms. We are simply more productive.
    - whoisburbansky 5y ago
      Do we have a good sense of how much of that increase in productivity can be sustained in a carbon neutral fashion?
    - plutonorm 5y ago
      is it? I think it's entirely possible that our civilisation would completely collapse.
    - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      the analogy of course assumes that there are a bunch of different problems that will come to the family when the cops, the IRS, the electric company, and their bank all come to talk to them at once. Just as it is generally claimed by scientists that there are a bunch of different problems coming to humanity when ecosystems collapse, temperatures rise by 1.5 degrees celsius, there's not enough freshwater to go around... it might be stretch to claim etc. etc. but nobody is making that claim, the claim is that humanity is not reducing emissions and not doing anything significant to handle when the bills come due for the last century of everything improving! on edit: changed is a bunch to are a bunch - is a bunch is probably still correct but are a bunch sounds more correct to my ear.
drunkpotato 5y ago
I love this analogy, and it's definitely a perspective to take seriously. "It's always okay, until it isn't" is something to consider, as is the idea that civilization is living on borrowed time, or borrowing from the future to pay the present. I don't know if it's true, or if it's even something we can falsify at any moment in history, but stable civilizations have collapsed, and it's worth understanding that it could happen to ours too.

coldtea 5y ago

>The world is better off today in basically every way than it was 100 years ago, and almost unimaginably better than it was 200 years ago. ... in the kind of metrics people like Hans Rosling of Steven Pinker care about, when taking quantitative state-produced stats at face value, and with naive extrapolation (and ignoring statistical fluctuations, black swans, etc). E.g. "the condition of the poor is improving rapidly. The places were it is not true, it is due to wars". Global warming is already a big factor and is only expected to be more so in the future. And that's not even before any real battle for resources such as water, crops, and dwindling minerals start, mass immigration due to climate change brings its own conflicts and challenges, the decline of the US hegemony brings forth new hegemonical and tons of peripheral claims, and lets not even count inflation and other pressures (including boomer-era people coming to retirement age en masse with lots of savings issues in the US, and broken pension systems in Europe). I haven't even mentioned a possible permanent (or long term) covid mutations situation (we're already 2 years in, and measures already had a huge impact on economies). >Now we live in the EU. I have extremely hard time imagining my Swedish or German colleagues trying to kill me. Not to make it sound like equivalent times, but jewish people had an extremely hard time imagining their German co-patriots would try to kill them too, plenty of such historical accounts from pre/early WWII, even up to the point they were already dealing with force registration in ethnicity lists, deportations, and so on.

qsort 5y ago
> in the kind of metrics people like Hans Rosling of Steven Pinker care about I'm curious by what kind of metrics the world was better 100 years ago. You're arguing against a strawman: there are challenges ahead != we were better off before.
- nosianu 5y ago
  Well, CO2 in the atmosphere (and amount of carbon above ground in general, a lot has been brought up from below in the last 100 years) and plastic pollution come to mind. Ocean pollution. Bio-diversity. Less or no weapons of mass destructions. No climate change yet, e.g. in the western US water from rivers was less of an issue and could be distributed more freely. There were a lot of extremely dirty industrial processes which we are doing much better now (in the developed countries at least), superfund sites in the US and their equivalent in other industrialized nations as the known locations, but it did not reach the global scale yet, plus, what they buried or just left in the ground where the factories spilled it is still there now for the most part. I think that in quite a few ways we've gotten better, sure, but partly by kicking the can down the road instead of actually solving issues such as sustainable energy or water use instead of drawing from and heavily relying on exhaustible stores, as well as not having closed loops with the things we produce.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

>The world is better off today in basically every way than it was 100 years ago, and almost unimaginably better than it was 200 years ago. so this seems sort of like the old joke about jumping off the skyscraper and as you fall past the 10th floor say "so far so good", only now the person falling is doing cocaine and says "things are only getting better!"

marcusverus 5y ago
GP is objectively correct. 200 years ago, ~95% of humans lived in extreme poverty. 100 years ago it was ~85%. Today only ~10% live in extreme poverty, and the number continues to fall. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty
- esarbe 5y ago
  That doesn't change that fact that the ground is getting closer and closer and we're still accelerating. We're burning the planet.

another_story 5y ago

People are better off, but not our arable land, the fish in our oceans, the soil we grow our crops in, the animals in our forest, the forest themselves, etc... We're in a sports car hitting the gas as we head towards a cliff and you're talking about how much better the interior is on this new model compared to the last.

Isinlor 5y ago
Reduction of global child mortality from near 50% to below 4% is not "talking about how much better the interior is" ... The past was an ongoing disaster worse than any westerner can imagine.
bryanlarsen 5y ago
Production per acre of farmland has increased massively and is still increasing. The size of forests in developed countries has increased substantially. At the same time the rate of population growth has decreased and is projected to go negative within a few decades. Sure, lots of things are still getting worse, but "getting worse more slowly" is progress. No reason to get complacent but in my opinion doom sayers do more harm than good by promulgating the nihilistic philosophy that we're all doomed anyways, so fighting our problems doesn't do any good.
- another_story 5y ago
  Forest cover has increased after we cut much of it down. We've replaced much of it with monoculture timber that gets one maybe two growth cycle before the soil is depleted. Production of food has increased along with our unsustainable use of fossil fuels and the other products needed to do so. Topsoil is disappearing at an alarming rate. I don't think a person sounding the alarm that we'll have depleted our fish stocks within 25 years, or are losing an incredible amount of topsoil each year, or are heading for dramatic climate changes that will cause an increase in disasters is a doomsayer. They're just living according to what every scientific report says. Being optimistic won't change a disruption in food supply or mass migration due to shifting weather patterns.

polytely 5y ago

But isn't all this progress bought with the destruction of our environment? It isn't sustainable at all and we are basically betting we can switch to a sustainable model before everything starts breaking down.

Isinlor 5y ago
Climate change is no good, and we have to do better, but the past was even worse. Try to imagine near 50% child mortality on a global scale in 1800. That's the past. Today even the poorest regions in Africa have "only" ~15% child mortality.
- birksherty 5y ago
  The better things will not remain so for long. Many of the industry and technical progress came at a huge cost. It's the future generation who will bear it. Data conclusively indicates real-world climate change is tracking the IPCC's worst case scenario. https://youtu.be/fliCxyAwBWU https://youtu.be/fliCxyAwBWU
Gravityloss 5y ago
Well, many things in the environment are a lot worse now than 100 years ago, but some things are better. While there was much less industrial production, it was more polluting per output. Waste water cleaning, industrial process cleaning or in general taking care of garbage has improved a lot in the last sixty years in developed countries.
- birksherty 5y ago
  Why per output? To make it look better? Total is worse, more co2, more pollution, more oil spill in oceans, plastic in oceans even inside animals etc. It's better just for a selfish species.
  - Gravityloss 5y ago
    Well, in many places, since population and consumption per capita has plateaued, total pollution has reduced a lot. Some local anecdotes follow. Waste water cleaning plants were built, so human excrement wasn't dumped to the sea anymore. At some point district heating replaced coal and wood burned in houses. Double and triple glazing arrived. The metro started operating in the eighties, replacing a lot of buses. Lead gasoline was banned in the nineties as well. Cars got electronic ignition, fuel injection and catalytic converters. Diesel engines started having tightening regulations every few years. Waste water treatment was upgraded to even remove nitrogen. New bicycle highways were made, the metro is being extended, tram lines are being built, and just a few weeks ago many diesel bus lines were replaced by Chinese electric ones. Some things have gotten better, some things have gotten worse. But not everything has gotten worse.

phendrenad2 5y ago

This is because we've more efficiently exploited the poorest people on Earth. As we run out of human resources to extract, surely something will change. Perhaps we'll reach an equilibrium, at least until jobs start to become automated by Google machine learning and Boston Robotics drones.

miltondts 5y ago

> The world is better off today in basically every way than it was 100 years ago This is orthogonal as to whether a collapse is around the corner or not. If you look at the science in the IPCC report, combine with the inability to hit every single emissions target defined in every single climate treaty. It seems civilization collapse is on the table. Also: We probably are already at 2C locked in: https://www.ecowatch.com/greenhouse-gases-paris-agreement-2649767807.html https://www.ecowatch.com/greenhouse-gases-paris-agreement-26... Billions of refugees by 2100: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0264837715301812?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02648... Etc. If we don't drastically reduce emissions in the next decades, it seems very probable that this global civilization will end. Which might not be a bad thing in the long run, but in the short term it will cause a lot of suffering.

birksherty 5y ago

When people say "the world is better today", they mean only humans right? Because for all other species it's worse. Humans are pretty selfish to say world is better.