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> Compared with every metric in history, we are better. That claim alone should immediately make you doubt the metrics being used. In fact, it's easy to find d

by p-e-w 3y ago

> Compared with every metric in history, we are better. That claim alone should immediately make you doubt the metrics being used. In fact, it's easy to find dozens of metrics for which this isn't true. Housing affordability being a very obvious example. And the average democracy index has been going downwards for 15 consecutive years IIRC. Environmental pollution also most certainly isn't "at the best time in the entire human history". You've fallen for propaganda, I'm afraid.

411111111111111 3y ago
I haven't read the book but my assumption would be that they're thinking at larger sample sizes than you're currently thinking off. The last 50 decades have probably been the golden years of western civilization and democratic freedom, despite the evidence of decline within the last few years
- foldr 3y ago
  If the claim is only true over spans of time on the order of lifetimes, then it’s not much comfort.
hpaavola 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index shows that average democracy index has not been going downwards for 15 consecutive years.
- Kbelicius 3y ago
  Where? It says that world average in 2006 was 5.52 and in 2022 it was 5.29. That is clearly a downward movement.
  - hpaavola 3y ago
    "has been going downwards for 15 consecutive years" that was the claim. It's not been going down for 15 consecutive years as there has been ups and downs during the past 15 years. The overall trend is down, but going downwards for 15 years in a row is not true.
  - inexcf 3y ago
    You ignored the "15 consecutive years". Not that it matters much, but it went from 5.52 to 5.55 to 5.46 to 5.55 and then down to 5.29 since 2016. It was a bit of a pedantic point but it's 6 consecutive years.
    - hpaavola 3y ago
      Actually, the index went up last year. So 0 consecutive years of downwards trend.
dbspin 3y ago
Exactly this. Not only are objective metrics difficult - our interest in and capacity to measure social phenomena, especially self reported social phenomena varies over time, and is deeply amenable to accidental or deliberate manipulation (cognitive aspects of survey methodology is a whole field). Moreover, the subjective experience of a time is impossible to convey. Many of the deepest and most personally significant aspects of everyday interpersonal life - level of community integration, personal emotional investment in ones occupation, level of creative engagement etc - are hard or impossible to measure. To take an arbitrary example from my own life, the last recession was an incredible time in Ireland. The housing crisis that has boiled for decades diminished, cheap and free property rentals in Dublin lead to an explosion in the creative arts - including dozens of 'open access' non profit creative spaces. Mass underemployment meant that social status briefly became much more about creative engagement and sociability that wealth display. Bars became less the focus of social life, which moved to house parties and non-profit social spaces. It was a creative and social renaissance. All of this disappeared so completely during the 'recovery' that it's difficult to convey what it was like to people who weren't around to experience it. You can point to crisis of homelessness today, a generation forced to leave with their parents into their thirties, the worsening of the Irish health service, pressures on the cost of living. But you can't easily convey the comparative misery and defensive superficiality wrought by inequality in Dublin today. You can't capture on a chart the experience of living through a beautiful communal creative moment when an entire society caught a collective breath.
brabel 3y ago
Don't throw around accusations like that willy nilly. It causes "propaganda" to become a trivialized term that everyone can just throw at anyone making any statement they don't agree with after 1 minute of consideration. This book was written by Hans Rosling, a man who was an expert in data analysis and whose mission was to show actual world data to people in fantastic visualizations they could clearly understand. If there's anything that's far removed from propaganda, it's Rosling's data-based approach to what the situation of the world really is. About house affordability: do you have statistics for that for every country in the world, or you only care about your neck of the woods (which is not what Rosling cared about at all)? But even if that's true, it doesn't contradict the fact that almost every metric, if not every single one, is better today, please don't succumb to the strawman fallacy. I will leave his quote here, from his Wikipedia entry: "People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn't know about. That makes me angry. I'm not an optimist. That makes me sound naive. I'm a very serious "possibilist". That's something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful."
- Retric 3y ago
  Propaganda is about showing just the right data in the right way to make an argument. As such his backstory is perfect for a propaganda piece. > almost every metric That’s exactly the kind of thing that’s both misleading and false. Take global divorce rate, it’s one metric but you can easily turn it into several others if you’re trying to support a given narrative. Average length of marriage, percentage of the global population married, etc. You can even swap positive metrics for negative ones or do the reverse. Average lifespan after cancer diagnosis increasing is good but more people with cancer sounds bad. More treatment options is good, but spiraling cost of new treatments is bad
  - jvanderbot 3y ago
    Don't get uppity about "almost every metric". It's quite possibly true, after all. But then again we're defining the metrics aren't we, with all our recency bias and modern philosophy on life. A high divorce rate is a positive thing if it means people are getting out of bad marriages and living poverty free independent lives. We have a lot of civil law around divorce that makes it expensive and painful, but not Henry 8th.
rubyn00bie 3y ago
Housing affordability is an entirely new concept as a result of a better society. Go back a hundred or two hundred years and housing was not affordable because people didn’t have jobs. They were serfs and slaves.
nonethewiser 3y ago
> You've fallen for propaganda, I'm afraid. That seems shortsighted at best. Theres certainly a case to be made that increased life expectancy, increased consumption of goods and services, access to education and health services, reduction in poverty etc. outweigh those things you cited. Also, those things you cited are all highly political issues and arguably not true so be careful about suggesting people have fallen prey to propaganda. Environmental pollution, at least in the West, is down. Are you comparing comparable houses when comparing housing prices? In places with similar demand?
- p-e-w 3y ago
  > outweigh those things you cited The comment I responded to claimed that "we are better" according to "every metric". It wasn't about one thing "outweighing" the other. > Environmental pollution, at least in the West, is down. Not compared to 500 years ago. The comment I responded to was talking about all of history.
anovikov 3y ago
Housing affordability hasn't gone worse. People are picking on particular markets, but overall, especially in developed countries, it isn't getting any worse: inflation-adjusted price per square foot doesn't change over time, and average house size grows together with inflation-adjusted income. There are a couple exceptions (UK, Australia, Canada) but there are also opposite exceptions (Italy). Environmental pollution especially in developed countries is now way lower than in any point in the living memory, plus quite a bit more. In developing countries, it's hit and miss. Democracy only went down recently because it was forced upon many countries simply due to their defeat in the Cold War, those countries never been democratic before, never had any internal impulse to become democratic, and their peoples despised democracy and wanted this chaos to end as soon as possible. Reversal from artificial, externally forced democracy made vast majority of them happier. In many cases, their entire culture, religion and language itself precludes sustainable democracy. "Freedom" is not the universal desire of all people, time to get over it.

by p-e-w 3y ago

411111111111111 3y ago

I haven't read the book but my assumption would be that they're thinking at larger sample sizes than you're currently thinking off. The last 50 decades have probably been the golden years of western civilization and democratic freedom, despite the evidence of decline within the last few years

foldr 3y ago
If the claim is only true over spans of time on the order of lifetimes, then it’s not much comfort.

hpaavola 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index shows that average democracy index has not been going downwards for 15 consecutive years.

Kbelicius 3y ago
Where? It says that world average in 2006 was 5.52 and in 2022 it was 5.29. That is clearly a downward movement.
- hpaavola 3y ago
  "has been going downwards for 15 consecutive years" that was the claim. It's not been going down for 15 consecutive years as there has been ups and downs during the past 15 years. The overall trend is down, but going downwards for 15 years in a row is not true.
- inexcf 3y ago
  You ignored the "15 consecutive years". Not that it matters much, but it went from 5.52 to 5.55 to 5.46 to 5.55 and then down to 5.29 since 2016. It was a bit of a pedantic point but it's 6 consecutive years.
  - hpaavola 3y ago
    Actually, the index went up last year. So 0 consecutive years of downwards trend.

dbspin 3y ago

Exactly this. Not only are objective metrics difficult - our interest in and capacity to measure social phenomena, especially self reported social phenomena varies over time, and is deeply amenable to accidental or deliberate manipulation (cognitive aspects of survey methodology is a whole field). Moreover, the subjective experience of a time is impossible to convey. Many of the deepest and most personally significant aspects of everyday interpersonal life - level of community integration, personal emotional investment in ones occupation, level of creative engagement etc - are hard or impossible to measure. To take an arbitrary example from my own life, the last recession was an incredible time in Ireland. The housing crisis that has boiled for decades diminished, cheap and free property rentals in Dublin lead to an explosion in the creative arts - including dozens of 'open access' non profit creative spaces. Mass underemployment meant that social status briefly became much more about creative engagement and sociability that wealth display. Bars became less the focus of social life, which moved to house parties and non-profit social spaces. It was a creative and social renaissance. All of this disappeared so completely during the 'recovery' that it's difficult to convey what it was like to people who weren't around to experience it. You can point to crisis of homelessness today, a generation forced to leave with their parents into their thirties, the worsening of the Irish health service, pressures on the cost of living. But you can't easily convey the comparative misery and defensive superficiality wrought by inequality in Dublin today. You can't capture on a chart the experience of living through a beautiful communal creative moment when an entire society caught a collective breath.

brabel 3y ago

Don't throw around accusations like that willy nilly. It causes "propaganda" to become a trivialized term that everyone can just throw at anyone making any statement they don't agree with after 1 minute of consideration. This book was written by Hans Rosling, a man who was an expert in data analysis and whose mission was to show actual world data to people in fantastic visualizations they could clearly understand. If there's anything that's far removed from propaganda, it's Rosling's data-based approach to what the situation of the world really is. About house affordability: do you have statistics for that for every country in the world, or you only care about your neck of the woods (which is not what Rosling cared about at all)? But even if that's true, it doesn't contradict the fact that almost every metric, if not every single one, is better today, please don't succumb to the strawman fallacy. I will leave his quote here, from his Wikipedia entry: "People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn't know about. That makes me angry. I'm not an optimist. That makes me sound naive. I'm a very serious "possibilist". That's something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful."

Retric 3y ago
Propaganda is about showing just the right data in the right way to make an argument. As such his backstory is perfect for a propaganda piece. > almost every metric That’s exactly the kind of thing that’s both misleading and false. Take global divorce rate, it’s one metric but you can easily turn it into several others if you’re trying to support a given narrative. Average length of marriage, percentage of the global population married, etc. You can even swap positive metrics for negative ones or do the reverse. Average lifespan after cancer diagnosis increasing is good but more people with cancer sounds bad. More treatment options is good, but spiraling cost of new treatments is bad
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  Don't get uppity about "almost every metric". It's quite possibly true, after all. But then again we're defining the metrics aren't we, with all our recency bias and modern philosophy on life. A high divorce rate is a positive thing if it means people are getting out of bad marriages and living poverty free independent lives. We have a lot of civil law around divorce that makes it expensive and painful, but not Henry 8th.

rubyn00bie 3y ago

Housing affordability is an entirely new concept as a result of a better society. Go back a hundred or two hundred years and housing was not affordable because people didn’t have jobs. They were serfs and slaves.

nonethewiser 3y ago

> You've fallen for propaganda, I'm afraid. That seems shortsighted at best. Theres certainly a case to be made that increased life expectancy, increased consumption of goods and services, access to education and health services, reduction in poverty etc. outweigh those things you cited. Also, those things you cited are all highly political issues and arguably not true so be careful about suggesting people have fallen prey to propaganda. Environmental pollution, at least in the West, is down. Are you comparing comparable houses when comparing housing prices? In places with similar demand?

p-e-w 3y ago
> outweigh those things you cited The comment I responded to claimed that "we are better" according to "every metric". It wasn't about one thing "outweighing" the other. > Environmental pollution, at least in the West, is down. Not compared to 500 years ago. The comment I responded to was talking about all of history.

anovikov 3y ago

Housing affordability hasn't gone worse. People are picking on particular markets, but overall, especially in developed countries, it isn't getting any worse: inflation-adjusted price per square foot doesn't change over time, and average house size grows together with inflation-adjusted income. There are a couple exceptions (UK, Australia, Canada) but there are also opposite exceptions (Italy). Environmental pollution especially in developed countries is now way lower than in any point in the living memory, plus quite a bit more. In developing countries, it's hit and miss. Democracy only went down recently because it was forced upon many countries simply due to their defeat in the Cold War, those countries never been democratic before, never had any internal impulse to become democratic, and their peoples despised democracy and wanted this chaos to end as soon as possible. Reversal from artificial, externally forced democracy made vast majority of them happier. In many cases, their entire culture, religion and language itself precludes sustainable democracy. "Freedom" is not the universal desire of all people, time to get over it.