4 ms·

I'm not sure I agree with that assertion in the first place. Life has improved a lot for most people, but it has improved in ways that you don't really notice.

I'm not sure I agree with that assertion in the first place. Life has improved a lot for most people, but it has improved in ways that you don't really notice. Your car is safer, your apartment is safer, your neighbor's apartment is safer (so it's less likely to burn down yours), there's less crime, there's less hunger, there's more available life saving medicines etc etc. These improvements just aren't all that noticeable. But this is the stuff that really matters. Whether the wealthiest person's bank account shows an extra zero or not means very little in comparison to your kid being able to get medicine for a disease that wasn't treatable 30 years ago.

JohnFen 4y ago
[flagged]
- kfkfodlnfkfdk 4y ago
  I know people below the poverty line who have access to cheap forms of insulin that didn't even exist fifty years ago because rich people funded the research They wouldn't even be alive if your lie was true
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    > They wouldn't even be alive if your lie was true I'm not lying. I admit I could be wrong (although I can bring up counterexamples to yours), but I was not intentionally attempting to deceive anyone.
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  If you look at any metric like life expectancy, literacy rates, child mortality, things have gotten so much better. (One exception is the US where life expectancy dropped. As was heavily discussed online the last days, this is mostly due to gun violence, traffic accidents and drug abuse which IMO are largely cultural and not due to automation)
  - timr 4y ago
    > this is mostly due to gun violence, traffic accidents and drug abuse which IMO are largely cultural and not due to automation) Not really. It's mostly due to food and metabolic disorders (i.e. diabetes, heart disease; iirc heart disease is the #1 cause of death in the US, and depending on how you group, diabetes is in the top five), which actually underscores the point. People are dying at higher rates because they can get cheap calories at a rate unprecedented in human history.
    - ajmurmann 4y ago
      https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799722418556931?s=20 https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799722418556931?...
      - timr 4y ago
        Both this and what I wrote can be true at the same time.
  - photochemsyn 4y ago
    Again, are you looking at the average or the median? Just saying the same thing over and over without data to back it up doesn't count for much. The discrepancy is fairly large - average US 'familial' net worth is $748,000, median is only $122,000 - and the median net worth for non-homeowning families is only $6,000. https://financebuzz.com/us-net-worth-statistics https://financebuzz.com/us-net-worth-statistics A serious medical condition is also likely to cause bankrupty and loss of homeowner status for many homeowners in the mid-range for US citizens, which is unusual relative to other industrialized countries. If you add in obvious stress factors - economic instability, environmental degradation, increasing climatic variability, the revival of infectious disease threats - then you can see why a dystopian future is a real probability, and that the status quo approach is unwise.
    - ajmurmann 4y ago
      Is there a median child mortality or literacy rate? For net-worth, which I never mentioned, your own source shows increases over time of both median and average since 2016. All the distressing situations you describe of course are real, but were they less common in the US in the past? QoL has gone up tremendously over the last fifty years, especially if you look at it globally. Do we need something like UBI to avoid terrible poverty for everyone? Absolutely! As we slowly move towards a post-scarcity society, re-distribution of wealth becomes more and more critical. That said, I'd rather be bottom 30% of income today than top 70% 50 years ago. No money in the world could have bought you minimally-invasive surgery, modern anesthesia... Nice summary of all the ways things have gotten better: https://twitter.com/JosephPolitano/status/1638379674999873538?s=20 https://twitter.com/JosephPolitano/status/163837967499987353...
- dukeyukey 4y ago
  I'll bet that a poor person today has cheaper access to better medicines than a poor person 30 years ago.
  - theonlybutlet 4y ago
    Yes, that's progress, lucky for some of us, we no longer live in a world of subsistence (living hand to mouth at the mercy of the world around us). The real question is, are we creating additional value i.e. is the value that we developing/building/creating compounding? (You'll see this in increasing GDP per capita and increased productivity) and what proportion of that are we taking? The amount we are taking for our efforts is deteriorating and inequality is widening, eventually it gets to a point where social mobility is halted and you're back to subsistence.
marcyb5st 4y ago
While what you say is true, housing is becoming an issue pretty much in every first world country, purchase power for the bottom 50% percentile is at historical lows, young people have issues entering a job market, retirement age is constantly pushed exacerbating the difficulty's young people have in entering the job market.So, yes, quality of life is increasing in some dimensions, but it's also drastically decreasing in others. For instance, until I manage to purchase an house I felt very stressed about renting for my whole life and owning nothing of consequence. This impacted severely my mood and indirectly my quality of life.
theonlybutlet 4y ago
You only need to go look at the productivity & remuneration graph over the last 50 years to see that that doesn't hold. They're diverging. Inequality continues to increase, yes everyone's standard has been improving but the common man is getting less and less of that additional value-add from their additional productivity.

JohnFen 4y ago

[flagged]

kfkfodlnfkfdk 4y ago
I know people below the poverty line who have access to cheap forms of insulin that didn't even exist fifty years ago because rich people funded the research They wouldn't even be alive if your lie was true
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > They wouldn't even be alive if your lie was true I'm not lying. I admit I could be wrong (although I can bring up counterexamples to yours), but I was not intentionally attempting to deceive anyone.
ajmurmann 4y ago
If you look at any metric like life expectancy, literacy rates, child mortality, things have gotten so much better. (One exception is the US where life expectancy dropped. As was heavily discussed online the last days, this is mostly due to gun violence, traffic accidents and drug abuse which IMO are largely cultural and not due to automation)
- timr 4y ago
  > this is mostly due to gun violence, traffic accidents and drug abuse which IMO are largely cultural and not due to automation) Not really. It's mostly due to food and metabolic disorders (i.e. diabetes, heart disease; iirc heart disease is the #1 cause of death in the US, and depending on how you group, diabetes is in the top five), which actually underscores the point. People are dying at higher rates because they can get cheap calories at a rate unprecedented in human history.
  - ajmurmann 4y ago
    https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799722418556931?s=20 https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799722418556931?...
    - timr 4y ago
      Both this and what I wrote can be true at the same time.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  Again, are you looking at the average or the median? Just saying the same thing over and over without data to back it up doesn't count for much. The discrepancy is fairly large - average US 'familial' net worth is $748,000, median is only $122,000 - and the median net worth for non-homeowning families is only $6,000. https://financebuzz.com/us-net-worth-statistics https://financebuzz.com/us-net-worth-statistics A serious medical condition is also likely to cause bankrupty and loss of homeowner status for many homeowners in the mid-range for US citizens, which is unusual relative to other industrialized countries. If you add in obvious stress factors - economic instability, environmental degradation, increasing climatic variability, the revival of infectious disease threats - then you can see why a dystopian future is a real probability, and that the status quo approach is unwise.
  - ajmurmann 4y ago
    Is there a median child mortality or literacy rate? For net-worth, which I never mentioned, your own source shows increases over time of both median and average since 2016. All the distressing situations you describe of course are real, but were they less common in the US in the past? QoL has gone up tremendously over the last fifty years, especially if you look at it globally. Do we need something like UBI to avoid terrible poverty for everyone? Absolutely! As we slowly move towards a post-scarcity society, re-distribution of wealth becomes more and more critical. That said, I'd rather be bottom 30% of income today than top 70% 50 years ago. No money in the world could have bought you minimally-invasive surgery, modern anesthesia... Nice summary of all the ways things have gotten better: https://twitter.com/JosephPolitano/status/1638379674999873538?s=20 https://twitter.com/JosephPolitano/status/163837967499987353...
dukeyukey 4y ago
I'll bet that a poor person today has cheaper access to better medicines than a poor person 30 years ago.
- theonlybutlet 4y ago
  Yes, that's progress, lucky for some of us, we no longer live in a world of subsistence (living hand to mouth at the mercy of the world around us). The real question is, are we creating additional value i.e. is the value that we developing/building/creating compounding? (You'll see this in increasing GDP per capita and increased productivity) and what proportion of that are we taking? The amount we are taking for our efforts is deteriorating and inequality is widening, eventually it gets to a point where social mobility is halted and you're back to subsistence.

marcyb5st 4y ago

While what you say is true, housing is becoming an issue pretty much in every first world country, purchase power for the bottom 50% percentile is at historical lows, young people have issues entering a job market, retirement age is constantly pushed exacerbating the difficulty's young people have in entering the job market.So, yes, quality of life is increasing in some dimensions, but it's also drastically decreasing in others. For instance, until I manage to purchase an house I felt very stressed about renting for my whole life and owning nothing of consequence. This impacted severely my mood and indirectly my quality of life.

theonlybutlet 4y ago

You only need to go look at the productivity & remuneration graph over the last 50 years to see that that doesn't hold. They're diverging. Inequality continues to increase, yes everyone's standard has been improving but the common man is getting less and less of that additional value-add from their additional productivity.