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This Steven Pinker stuff is absolute hogwash. There are more people living in extreme poverty today than existed 250 years ago. So what that as a percentage and
by anm89 4y ago
This Steven Pinker stuff is absolute hogwash. There are more people living in extreme poverty today than existed 250 years ago. So what that as a percentage and when you are very careful with the definitions that they are a smaller proportion.
And what, I can get an extra 5 years in a nursing home where there's a decent chance I'll suffer physical and psychological abuse but will be forcefully kept alive in a stupor on a cocktail of drugs.
It's just unabashed justification for the interests of the top couple percent. They do in fact have it better right now by far than any other cohort in history.
- mech765 4y agoWould you figure that if the population increases by 10x that the number of people living in extreme poverty increases by 10x? That's what I would assume if the world was not getting any better or worse.
- anm89 4y agoNo I would assume that at the margin, increases in population are drastically skewed towards more poverty. So if we we went from 8B to 80B I'd argue we'd go from 1B -> >50B in poverty. Maybe a lot worse than that. This is obviously dependent on where you are born but especially true once you consider that the places left with high fertility have nearly perfect overlap with the places with high volumes of extreme poverty. And this is only in the short term. Those people are generating plastic waste, consuming fuel, and many other things that are net negatives to the planet over time. So over the long term this problem just gets worse.
- s1artibartfast 4y agobut isnt that the exact point. you might expect poverty to go up by a factor of 50x when the population goes up by 10x, but what we see is the opposite, poverty has grown more slowly than the overall population.