5 ms·

The mode quality of life is also sky high compared to 100 years ago. So is the median quality of life. Mode and median were raised even faster than the average

by yreg 3y ago

The mode quality of life is also sky high compared to 100 years ago. So is the median quality of life. Mode and median were raised even faster than the average. Humanity managed to uplift a huge fraction of people out of extreme poverty. In 1820s around 70-80% people lived in extreme poverty In 1920s it was around 60-70% In 2020s it's around 10% source: e.g. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/e20f2f1a-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/e20f2f1a-en https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/e20f2f1a-en/index.html?i...

vikinghckr 3y ago
That this even needed to be said on a forum like HN baffles me. I suspect it's a result of decades of mainstream political/cultural doom-and-gloom propaganda.
- nverno 3y ago
  This quality of life metric is purely economic, but it is easy to read it as general life quality- personally, I'd swap now for 1820s homesteading out west in a heartbeat even though that would register as 'extreme poverty' on the economic scale.
  - vikinghckr 3y ago
    Well, for a start, it's safe to assume you're not a woman or a minority. And even if you're a young healthy white male, your quality of life would be significantly worse in the 1820s. Not only would you lose access to a lot of the everyday conveniences of life today, you're also far more likely to die a young and painful death from any number of disease.
    - nverno 3y ago
      Conveniences don't make life worth living, and a long life doesn't mean a good life. Do you really think people, on average, enjoyed their lives less back then? I don't
      - vikinghckr 3y ago
        Well, enjoyment or happiness is tricky to measure because happiness = reality - expectation. So people in the 1820s might've been "happy" enough because they simply didn't know a better life like today's was a possibility. There's no reason to think they were happier than today's population though. And certainly, you as someone who experienced today's conveniences will not be happy long term if all those were taken away suddenly.
        nverno 3y ago
        I've spent the best years of my life living in the woods and in wall-less huts w/ no water, plumbing or electricity. Imho our modern conveniences don't make life any richer, and in many cases take away the pleasure of things we take for granted. If I had medical problems I would probably feel differently.
        ZephyrBlu 3y ago
        I feel like you are probably taking a lot of things for granted. Clothes, food, equipment, vehicles, etc. Heck, even just the ability to choose to live in a hut in the woods.
        vunderba 3y ago
        Uh huh. What were you wearing? Did you sew your own clothes and grow your own cotton for those clothes? There's a surprising amount of "on the grid" work that afforded you the ability to live "off the grid". There's also a big difference between living in a part of the world where the woods provide a relatively temperate climate. Try living out in the forest to Papua New Guinea with 100% humidity. By the way, try to make sure you don't accidentally get bitten by a rabid animal because the cure for rabies wasn't invented until the 1880s.
  - yreg 3y ago
    If you are jumping in a time machine to move your consciousness to a body in 1820 USA you are rolling dangerous dice because you have a significant chance of living the horrible life of a slave.
  - awwaiid 3y ago
    You can do this right now! It's called "Alaska".
    - nverno 3y ago
      I do hope to end up there eventually, but I think the government ended homesteading back in the 80s sadly.
      - antisthenes 3y ago
        Homesteading is a lifestyle. Government can't "end" it any more than it can end partying. If you're talking about the ability to live off the land you don't own and owning land without paying taxes, that's a different story.
        nverno 3y ago
        The US government passed Homestead Acts back in the 1800s where they gave away plots of land, called homesteads, (like 10% of the country) for free. It's a lifestyle, for sure, but living off land you don't own isn't what I was referring to. I think the last homesteads (free land) were given away in the 1980s.
  - gus_massa 3y ago
    Refrigerators. Just imagine your life without a refrigerator. If you go to 1820 you will have no refrigerator. From https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/worldwide-average-household-ownership-of-appliances-and-number-of-households-in-the-net-zero-scenario-2000-2030 https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/worldwide-ave... , now the 80% of the homes in the world have a refrigerator. [And 50% have a washing machine. Mine broke a few months and it was a big mess until we got a new one.]
didibus 3y ago
But that linked paper does mention near the end: > At the same time, the drop in global poverty after 1995 is the largest observed, despite the low correlation with GDP per capita. This implies a “lost opportunity”, for even faster poverty reduction could have been achieved if measures had been taken to contain increasing within-country income inequality Which I feel this is the topic at hand. Income inequality clearly impacts both local and global poverty. Production efficiency also has a positive impact, you can produce and serve more people for cheaper. Yes, but that implies the efficacy of production benefits people equally, otherwise there are "lost opportunity" in poverty reduction. This is what the "outrage" is here. It doesn't seem like AI support benefits the merchants or the workers, but exclusively the executives and shareholders. And this is the challenge that face AI. At face value, it's great technology, that could help everyone, but will it benefit everyone equally, or will there be losers here? If we want AI to be more positively received, that question needs to be addressed seriously.
usednet 3y ago
As somebody with a degree in economics who did research in this area, I strongly disagree. I cannot stress how important is to not equate poverty data with quality of life. Let me give you an example of how economic statistics can be misleading. In colonial India, economic production and GDP skyrocketed. Forests were razed, waterways were privatized, communal granaries were destroyed, etc. Agricultural production increased massively, yet hundreds of millions of Indian people starved and died. It is absolutely not clear-cut that poverty has actually decreased on a long term scale. The real wage evidence shows less poverty and higher incomes during precolonial times in several countries. The datasets are woefully incomplete and flawed prior to 1900. Furthermore, the global poverty line is still set at $1.90 (!), and reexaming the decrease in poverty using more realistic costs of living results in very little change. Compounding on that, the vast majority of poverty reduction in the last century has been in China, a non-capitalist country. Removing them from the dataset results in almost no change in global poverty in the last 50 years. I can go on.
- CapricornNoble 3y ago
  > the vast majority of poverty reduction in the last century has been in China, a non-capitalist country Can't it also be said that the vast majority of poverty reduction has been in China...once they began to adopt capitalist economic principles in the last 40 years ?
medion 3y ago
While quality of life has improved percentage wise for a small percentage of the earth's inhabitants, it is also a completely unsustainable way of living - it's a quality of life built on fossil fuels and debt. It's all a complete facade - if fossil fuels and access to effectively free money were wiped out tomorrow, quality of life would revert almost overnight... The fragility of it all is just extraordinary.

by yreg 3y ago

vikinghckr 3y ago

That this even needed to be said on a forum like HN baffles me. I suspect it's a result of decades of mainstream political/cultural doom-and-gloom propaganda.

nverno 3y ago
This quality of life metric is purely economic, but it is easy to read it as general life quality- personally, I'd swap now for 1820s homesteading out west in a heartbeat even though that would register as 'extreme poverty' on the economic scale.
- vikinghckr 3y ago
  Well, for a start, it's safe to assume you're not a woman or a minority. And even if you're a young healthy white male, your quality of life would be significantly worse in the 1820s. Not only would you lose access to a lot of the everyday conveniences of life today, you're also far more likely to die a young and painful death from any number of disease.
  - nverno 3y ago
    Conveniences don't make life worth living, and a long life doesn't mean a good life. Do you really think people, on average, enjoyed their lives less back then? I don't
    - vikinghckr 3y ago
      Well, enjoyment or happiness is tricky to measure because happiness = reality - expectation. So people in the 1820s might've been "happy" enough because they simply didn't know a better life like today's was a possibility. There's no reason to think they were happier than today's population though. And certainly, you as someone who experienced today's conveniences will not be happy long term if all those were taken away suddenly.
      - nverno 3y ago
        I've spent the best years of my life living in the woods and in wall-less huts w/ no water, plumbing or electricity. Imho our modern conveniences don't make life any richer, and in many cases take away the pleasure of things we take for granted. If I had medical problems I would probably feel differently.
        ZephyrBlu 3y ago
        I feel like you are probably taking a lot of things for granted. Clothes, food, equipment, vehicles, etc. Heck, even just the ability to choose to live in a hut in the woods.
        vunderba 3y ago
        Uh huh. What were you wearing? Did you sew your own clothes and grow your own cotton for those clothes? There's a surprising amount of "on the grid" work that afforded you the ability to live "off the grid". There's also a big difference between living in a part of the world where the woods provide a relatively temperate climate. Try living out in the forest to Papua New Guinea with 100% humidity. By the way, try to make sure you don't accidentally get bitten by a rabid animal because the cure for rabies wasn't invented until the 1880s.
- yreg 3y ago
  If you are jumping in a time machine to move your consciousness to a body in 1820 USA you are rolling dangerous dice because you have a significant chance of living the horrible life of a slave.
- awwaiid 3y ago
  You can do this right now! It's called "Alaska".
  - nverno 3y ago
    I do hope to end up there eventually, but I think the government ended homesteading back in the 80s sadly.
    - antisthenes 3y ago
      Homesteading is a lifestyle. Government can't "end" it any more than it can end partying. If you're talking about the ability to live off the land you don't own and owning land without paying taxes, that's a different story.
      - nverno 3y ago
        The US government passed Homestead Acts back in the 1800s where they gave away plots of land, called homesteads, (like 10% of the country) for free. It's a lifestyle, for sure, but living off land you don't own isn't what I was referring to. I think the last homesteads (free land) were given away in the 1980s.
- gus_massa 3y ago
  Refrigerators. Just imagine your life without a refrigerator. If you go to 1820 you will have no refrigerator. From https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/worldwide-average-household-ownership-of-appliances-and-number-of-households-in-the-net-zero-scenario-2000-2030 https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/worldwide-ave... , now the 80% of the homes in the world have a refrigerator. [And 50% have a washing machine. Mine broke a few months and it was a big mess until we got a new one.]

didibus 3y ago

But that linked paper does mention near the end: > At the same time, the drop in global poverty after 1995 is the largest observed, despite the low correlation with GDP per capita. This implies a “lost opportunity”, for even faster poverty reduction could have been achieved if measures had been taken to contain increasing within-country income inequality Which I feel this is the topic at hand. Income inequality clearly impacts both local and global poverty. Production efficiency also has a positive impact, you can produce and serve more people for cheaper. Yes, but that implies the efficacy of production benefits people equally, otherwise there are "lost opportunity" in poverty reduction. This is what the "outrage" is here. It doesn't seem like AI support benefits the merchants or the workers, but exclusively the executives and shareholders. And this is the challenge that face AI. At face value, it's great technology, that could help everyone, but will it benefit everyone equally, or will there be losers here? If we want AI to be more positively received, that question needs to be addressed seriously.

usednet 3y ago

As somebody with a degree in economics who did research in this area, I strongly disagree. I cannot stress how important is to not equate poverty data with quality of life. Let me give you an example of how economic statistics can be misleading. In colonial India, economic production and GDP skyrocketed. Forests were razed, waterways were privatized, communal granaries were destroyed, etc. Agricultural production increased massively, yet hundreds of millions of Indian people starved and died. It is absolutely not clear-cut that poverty has actually decreased on a long term scale. The real wage evidence shows less poverty and higher incomes during precolonial times in several countries. The datasets are woefully incomplete and flawed prior to 1900. Furthermore, the global poverty line is still set at $1.90 (!), and reexaming the decrease in poverty using more realistic costs of living results in very little change. Compounding on that, the vast majority of poverty reduction in the last century has been in China, a non-capitalist country. Removing them from the dataset results in almost no change in global poverty in the last 50 years. I can go on.

CapricornNoble 3y ago
> the vast majority of poverty reduction in the last century has been in China, a non-capitalist country Can't it also be said that the vast majority of poverty reduction has been in China...once they began to adopt capitalist economic principles in the last 40 years ?

medion 3y ago

While quality of life has improved percentage wise for a small percentage of the earth's inhabitants, it is also a completely unsustainable way of living - it's a quality of life built on fossil fuels and debt. It's all a complete facade - if fossil fuels and access to effectively free money were wiped out tomorrow, quality of life would revert almost overnight... The fragility of it all is just extraordinary.