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> If you actually measure the world, however, then by almost any measure things are better now than they have been in the past (two notable exceptions are clima

> If you actually measure the world, however, then by almost any measure things are better now than they have been in the past (two notable exceptions are climate change and democracy vs autocracy). Or US life expectancy, or healthcare/childcare/university costs (in the US), or homicides (in the US), or suicides, or population growth (arguably a good thing for climate change, but most people aren't choosing to put off kids because they care about overpopulation), or topsoil availability, or fresh water availability (climate change contributes but we're also using way too much), or garbage in the ocean, or the decimation of life in the ocean (which climate change isn't helping but it's more from overfishing), etc etc etc. That's just off the top of my head, and I'm sure I can hunt down a lot more. And it's super dependent on where you live too. Try telling Ukrainians, Sri Lankans, Syrians, Yemenis, Lebanese, etc. if they're better off now than they were in the past.

_dw7s 4y ago
The whole better off trope has been popularized by people like Hans Rosling in books like Factfulness. You can read reviews from experts to figure out what's wrong with it. But I've often seen these arguments in the context of 'everything is going great, there's nothing to worry about' with arguments such as 'we had the most people lifted out of poverty ever in history'. In my view that's just capitalist koolaid to keep the middle class workers content, optimistic and most importantly, compacent. 'Don't look up' style. All these arguments explicitly ignore the many elephants in the room, like the global fucking pandemic we've been mishandling for the past two years or the climate disaster which is already making itself felt by westerners. The outcome is actually pretty grim if you read between the lines. You don't have to monitor the news or social media to figure out that we're not in the best place right now when it comes to a lot of global metrics. We can pick and chose a couple and make ourselves feel good and go about our business being productive little bees in the capitalist machine, but we're just fooling ourselves. My personal assessment is that the effects of climate change will zero out a lot of those measures for which we're doing better than our forefathers.
- andrewmutz 4y ago
  > The whole better off trope has been popularized by people like Hans Rosling in books like Factfulness Hans Rosling is right. And the success of the world does not mean we shouldn't work to improve it. It means we shouldn't be doomers and think the world is falling apart. Max Roser said it well with "The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better." https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better
  - decebalus1 4y ago
    > the success of the world Which part of the world is succeeding? What does that actually mean? 'Success of the world' is such an empty statement. What did it succeed at? Destroying our habitat? > does not mean we shouldn't work to improve it Most of the more brilliant minds in the current industrialized world are working on making more money for someone (themselves or others). Who's working on actually improving it? And improve it how? By making the world a better place 'through minimal message oriented transport layers'? > It means we shouldn't be doomers and think the world is falling apart Nobody is saying one should be a doomer or whatever. Doomer implies losing all hope. What I'm advocating is losing hope for the current system, not for the world.
  - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    If Rosling is right why are NASA scientists gluing themselves to oil company offices to make a point about climate catastrophe? We're about to learn that you can't spreadsheet and infographic your way out of a collapsing ecosystem. And we're going to do it the hard and stupid way, because the intelligent way required changes starting 30 or 40 years ago.
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  While I don’t disagree with the negatives here unless you’ve experienced extreme poverty saying it’s “capitalist koolaid” sounds frankly a little naive. These are billions of people who aren’t struggling to do basic things like drink water and eat, shelter themselves and their family, etc, not just at a personal level but at a national level. The change in the world from nearly everyone in that state to today where almost everyone isn’t is a success. But it might also be our doom. I guess we shall see. I wager we will make it though.
andrewmutz 4y ago
When I look up many of these bad numbers you mention, they do not seem very bad. Life expectancy is up and to the right (https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/life-expectancy https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/life...), homocide has recently had an uptick but on a longer time scale is good (https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/murder-homicide-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/murd...), and the suicide rate is about the same as it was 30-40 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States). I agree it depend on where you are, but if you look at the globe in its entirety, things look even better than if you restrict your view to the US.
- cableshaft 4y ago
  The crime/life expectancy stuff were just things I've been hearing about the most recent few years. They've been mostly on a better trend if you extend the timescale, sure, but the pandemic threw a total monkey wrench into everything, and these things are going the wrong direction again. Will it stay that way, I don't know, maybe not, but they're not currently getting better, which is counter to the 'everything is doing better except these two things' the parent was suggesting. And I suspect as the other issues (such as the following paragraph) become even worse, all these figures will start doing a lot worse again, as people have to start competing/fighting/possibly going to war, over a smaller and smaller number of resources. The war in Ukraine really shined a light on that, as food and natural gas availability became a big problem for many countries. Topsoil and water and animal life and freshwater and other things are doing much, much worse though, and very little is being done to reverse course there (and will take hundreds of generations to fix naturally even if we stop 100% now).
gumby 4y ago
The US is only 5% of the population. On a global scale all of those factors are improving. Just as the Gibson quote went: "The future is already here -- it's just not evenly distributed"
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  That suggests Rest of World will soon experience the decline the US, UK and some other Western countries are experiencing.
  - gumby 4y ago
    Or that the USA will eventually catch up with the more advanced nations. Actually even if everybody regressed to the mean it would be a step up for the States.
- tuatoru 4y ago
  No, they're not all improving. Topsoil exhaustion and poisoning is global. Freshwater scarcity is much worse in China and the Subcontinent than in the USA. Antibiotic resistance is world-wide. Destruction of rainforests: likewise. Female literacy is declining in developing countries, despite more time spent in "school".
fnordpiglet 4y ago
Declining population growth is in all ways a positive. Rising population is a good thing to essentially linearly improve nominal GDP, but does little to improve per capita GDP. Other than that nominal GDP bump I struggle to see any positive associated with population growth. Most people put off having kids because, effectively, people are living much longer and it’s economically easier to have kids older. Effective contraception, sexual education, extended life spans, and a general social acceptance that children aren’t the mark of a successful life are IMO primary contributors to that decline. I would note in my own life we waited a long time to have a kid because we wanted to be engaged in our careers early on. Once we had a kid we decided to stop simply because we enjoyed the focus on our daughter and didn’t see having a ton of kids as a social imperative. That puts our family at below replacement rate. My experience isn’t particularly unique among the parents I know, and we are actually younger than many. I know all of the above is anecdotal and conjecture, but I’m fairly confident if I did my normal citation and data collection I would largely be supported (having seen the data and analysis in the past) but I’m sick and have too little energy right now.
- valj 4y ago
  I disagree - declining population is a disaster that only ends in a country becoming poor. As you allude to in your response, sub-replacement-rate fertility is what drives population decline, so declining populations are always ageing populations. The economics of ageing populations don't work for obvious reasons - as people get older they need more care and produce less, and with fewer workers to provide that care, the care becomes more expensive in ways that governments never provisioned for (see Japan and many countries in Western Europe for good examples of this in practice). In the longer term this depresses GDP per capita as resources have to be diverted from productive industries like high-tech manufacturing into extremely unproductive industries like aged care. Again, Japan and many Western European countries provide good examples of this in practice. Finally, as the reality of the broader economic decline sets in, second order effects start to take hold like brain drain - as young workers see higher wages working in more productive economies, they decide to leave, worsening the population pyramid and depriving the government of precious tax revenue needed to pay for aged care. (Japan and many Western European countries are sadly, again, examples of this phenomenon). The short term effects you're describing of nominal GDP rising and per capita GDP falling is only true when populations are growing through bad immigration policy, which is what we commonly see in the US for example. Growing population organically and sustainably, or through productive immigration that targets gaps in the country's labor force, should never have that effect as the new member of the population should eventually increase GDP by more than the average existing worker today. At an individual rather than population level of course, having fewer or no children is easier, which is why people are doing it. But this describes a local optimum only, while the true optimum is population growth.

_dw7s 4y ago

The whole better off trope has been popularized by people like Hans Rosling in books like Factfulness. You can read reviews from experts to figure out what's wrong with it. But I've often seen these arguments in the context of 'everything is going great, there's nothing to worry about' with arguments such as 'we had the most people lifted out of poverty ever in history'. In my view that's just capitalist koolaid to keep the middle class workers content, optimistic and most importantly, compacent. 'Don't look up' style. All these arguments explicitly ignore the many elephants in the room, like the global fucking pandemic we've been mishandling for the past two years or the climate disaster which is already making itself felt by westerners. The outcome is actually pretty grim if you read between the lines. You don't have to monitor the news or social media to figure out that we're not in the best place right now when it comes to a lot of global metrics. We can pick and chose a couple and make ourselves feel good and go about our business being productive little bees in the capitalist machine, but we're just fooling ourselves. My personal assessment is that the effects of climate change will zero out a lot of those measures for which we're doing better than our forefathers.

andrewmutz 4y ago
> The whole better off trope has been popularized by people like Hans Rosling in books like Factfulness Hans Rosling is right. And the success of the world does not mean we shouldn't work to improve it. It means we shouldn't be doomers and think the world is falling apart. Max Roser said it well with "The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better." https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better
- decebalus1 4y ago
  > the success of the world Which part of the world is succeeding? What does that actually mean? 'Success of the world' is such an empty statement. What did it succeed at? Destroying our habitat? > does not mean we shouldn't work to improve it Most of the more brilliant minds in the current industrialized world are working on making more money for someone (themselves or others). Who's working on actually improving it? And improve it how? By making the world a better place 'through minimal message oriented transport layers'? > It means we shouldn't be doomers and think the world is falling apart Nobody is saying one should be a doomer or whatever. Doomer implies losing all hope. What I'm advocating is losing hope for the current system, not for the world.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  If Rosling is right why are NASA scientists gluing themselves to oil company offices to make a point about climate catastrophe? We're about to learn that you can't spreadsheet and infographic your way out of a collapsing ecosystem. And we're going to do it the hard and stupid way, because the intelligent way required changes starting 30 or 40 years ago.
fnordpiglet 4y ago
While I don’t disagree with the negatives here unless you’ve experienced extreme poverty saying it’s “capitalist koolaid” sounds frankly a little naive. These are billions of people who aren’t struggling to do basic things like drink water and eat, shelter themselves and their family, etc, not just at a personal level but at a national level. The change in the world from nearly everyone in that state to today where almost everyone isn’t is a success. But it might also be our doom. I guess we shall see. I wager we will make it though.

andrewmutz 4y ago

When I look up many of these bad numbers you mention, they do not seem very bad. Life expectancy is up and to the right (https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/life-expectancy https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/life...), homocide has recently had an uptick but on a longer time scale is good (https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/murder-homicide-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/murd...), and the suicide rate is about the same as it was 30-40 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States). I agree it depend on where you are, but if you look at the globe in its entirety, things look even better than if you restrict your view to the US.

cableshaft 4y ago
The crime/life expectancy stuff were just things I've been hearing about the most recent few years. They've been mostly on a better trend if you extend the timescale, sure, but the pandemic threw a total monkey wrench into everything, and these things are going the wrong direction again. Will it stay that way, I don't know, maybe not, but they're not currently getting better, which is counter to the 'everything is doing better except these two things' the parent was suggesting. And I suspect as the other issues (such as the following paragraph) become even worse, all these figures will start doing a lot worse again, as people have to start competing/fighting/possibly going to war, over a smaller and smaller number of resources. The war in Ukraine really shined a light on that, as food and natural gas availability became a big problem for many countries. Topsoil and water and animal life and freshwater and other things are doing much, much worse though, and very little is being done to reverse course there (and will take hundreds of generations to fix naturally even if we stop 100% now).

gumby 4y ago

The US is only 5% of the population. On a global scale all of those factors are improving. Just as the Gibson quote went: "The future is already here -- it's just not evenly distributed"

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
That suggests Rest of World will soon experience the decline the US, UK and some other Western countries are experiencing.
- gumby 4y ago
  Or that the USA will eventually catch up with the more advanced nations. Actually even if everybody regressed to the mean it would be a step up for the States.
tuatoru 4y ago
No, they're not all improving. Topsoil exhaustion and poisoning is global. Freshwater scarcity is much worse in China and the Subcontinent than in the USA. Antibiotic resistance is world-wide. Destruction of rainforests: likewise. Female literacy is declining in developing countries, despite more time spent in "school".

fnordpiglet 4y ago

Declining population growth is in all ways a positive. Rising population is a good thing to essentially linearly improve nominal GDP, but does little to improve per capita GDP. Other than that nominal GDP bump I struggle to see any positive associated with population growth. Most people put off having kids because, effectively, people are living much longer and it’s economically easier to have kids older. Effective contraception, sexual education, extended life spans, and a general social acceptance that children aren’t the mark of a successful life are IMO primary contributors to that decline. I would note in my own life we waited a long time to have a kid because we wanted to be engaged in our careers early on. Once we had a kid we decided to stop simply because we enjoyed the focus on our daughter and didn’t see having a ton of kids as a social imperative. That puts our family at below replacement rate. My experience isn’t particularly unique among the parents I know, and we are actually younger than many. I know all of the above is anecdotal and conjecture, but I’m fairly confident if I did my normal citation and data collection I would largely be supported (having seen the data and analysis in the past) but I’m sick and have too little energy right now.

valj 4y ago
I disagree - declining population is a disaster that only ends in a country becoming poor. As you allude to in your response, sub-replacement-rate fertility is what drives population decline, so declining populations are always ageing populations. The economics of ageing populations don't work for obvious reasons - as people get older they need more care and produce less, and with fewer workers to provide that care, the care becomes more expensive in ways that governments never provisioned for (see Japan and many countries in Western Europe for good examples of this in practice). In the longer term this depresses GDP per capita as resources have to be diverted from productive industries like high-tech manufacturing into extremely unproductive industries like aged care. Again, Japan and many Western European countries provide good examples of this in practice. Finally, as the reality of the broader economic decline sets in, second order effects start to take hold like brain drain - as young workers see higher wages working in more productive economies, they decide to leave, worsening the population pyramid and depriving the government of precious tax revenue needed to pay for aged care. (Japan and many Western European countries are sadly, again, examples of this phenomenon). The short term effects you're describing of nominal GDP rising and per capita GDP falling is only true when populations are growing through bad immigration policy, which is what we commonly see in the US for example. Growing population organically and sustainably, or through productive immigration that targets gaps in the country's labor force, should never have that effect as the new member of the population should eventually increase GDP by more than the average existing worker today. At an individual rather than population level of course, having fewer or no children is easier, which is why people are doing it. But this describes a local optimum only, while the true optimum is population growth.