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The book [factfulness](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34890015-factfulness https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34890015-factfulness) is precisely about thi

The book [factfulness](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34890015-factfulness https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34890015-factfulness) is precisely about this. They present how the world is improving in an irrefutable way but media and politicians would only focus on the negative. The authors are Swedish, so they talk first hand about Sweden, and their experiences how drastically Sweden changed in the last 2 generations is amazing

bryanlarsen 3y ago
An even better book recommendation (if you like the article) is "Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet" by Hannah Ritchie. Hannah Ritchie is head of research for ourworldindata.org; the book grew very directly out of the linked article. Ritchie credits a lecture by Hans Rosling (one of the authors of Factfulness) in the forward for being what turned her from a pessimistic biology student into the person that writes a book like this. A common criticism of the linked article is that "sure child mortality is going down, but what about X". Where X is climate change, species decline, quality of life, et cetera. The book addresses most "X"'s.
- ebcode 3y ago
  Not sure if this is the same lecture that Ritchie cites, but for anyone who hasn't seen this one by Rosling, it's worth a watch: https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_best_stats_you_ve...
StopTheTechies 3y ago
> They present how the world is improving in an irrefutable way but media and politicians would only focus on the negative People are allowed to have their own opinions about what to value in the world. The idea of "irrefutable proof" the world has improved is completely asinine and counter productive... at best, and at worse just straight marketing for the ruling class.
maximinus_thrax 3y ago
Everyone reading Factfulness should also take a look at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328759928_Good_Things_on_the_Rise_The_One-Sided_Worldview_of_Hans_Rosling_Translation_of_an_essay_published_in_Kvartal_Sept_20_2018_httpskvartalseartiklarbra-saker-pa-uppgang-roslings-varldsbild-ar-ensidigt-pos https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328759928_Good_Thin... I've always regarded this book as being blatant neoliberal propaganda.
- LastTrain 3y ago
  Can you name a couple examples of blatant neoliberal propaganda in the book? Who is the propaganda being perpetrated on behalf of? Who is funding it? If it doesn’t have these latter elements, you might want to consider the possibility that it is simply a work that you disagree with.
  - maximinus_thrax 3y ago
    I don't need to defend a personal opinion if I don't want to. I believe the book is an 'everything is fine' meme in book format, pandering to the current oligarchy who's arguing that everything is going in the right direction and direct action is unnecessary. Other people replying to the same comment have articulated it better than I did. Whenever a book like this comes along and the real capitalists start reviewing and recommending it, it triggers my bullshit sensors. You might want to consider the possibility that it is simply an opinion that you disagree with and move on.
    - LastTrain 3y ago
      Ostensibly, we participate in this forum to discuss things. I thought it was provocative to call this book propaganda so I thought I'd probe a little. When you tell someone they are reading propaganda, one of the unsaid things you are doing is implying that people are being duped, and that you somehow come from a higher place and have the real answers. So yeah - you are going to get questions. So maybe don't throw the term around in a public forum if you aren't willing to engage the people you're insulting.
FredPret 3y ago
Two more books in this vein are Fewer, Richer, Greener by Siegel and Abundance by Diamandis and Kotler
tetha 3y ago
You make me wonder if this isn't the marketing/sales vs dev/ops misalignment. Marketing and Sales focus on the good parts of our software. Simple usability, high stability, great reactive customer support, ... Apparently, during corona, we were the only reliable vendor for a national support hotline by a massive margin, and chaotically on-boarded call-agents had the least number of issues with our system. But then, I as a team lead in ops have to wonder why a single priority ticket didn't meet SLA. Why a routine update caused 4 minutes of downtime. Why a usually stable provider ripped a system away for 3 minutes. Why strange cache timeout interactions caused some class of requests to take 30s+ to respond. My world is very much a world of shitty non-working janky software and it is my job to fix and improve it. It might be one of the better solutions in our market and other people may be able to sell it to happy customers, but in my world it's a janky and broken piece of shit with a million things to fix. And looking at the nation I live in... that's honestly not that far away.
- rco8786 3y ago
  I run into this all the time w/ engineers I work with. I always tell them the story of the mechanic. The mechanic works tirelessly every day fixing Toyota Camrys. For years on end, he stares at broken Toyota Camrys. He knows every bolt, and every failure point across decades of Toyota Camrys. He is utterly and thoroughly convinced that Toyota Camrys are unreliable hunks of junk. After all, he sees them broken all the time. What he doesn't see are the 100s of thousands of Toyota Camrys loggings hundreds of thousands of miles on the road, perfectly intact with no mechanical issues. His vision is completely skewed by his day to day responsibilities. Same thing for us in software. It's our job to see the dirty edge cases. To notice when something goes wrong for 5 minutes. etc. Our job is to automate everything - so by definition, we don't see the thousands or millions of interactions between our customers and our software that go exactly as planned, because they're completely automated away from us. Completely invisible. We have a skewed vision because of our day to day responsibilities.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    This is an important factoid - if you ask a mechanic for a vehicle recommendation you might not get the most reliable - but the easiest and cheapest to work on when it does break.
imjonse 3y ago
The problem with the world improving in an irrefutable way on average is that this can be and is used to defend the status quo in almost any field and can lead to complacency and a false sense of optimism. The world became better due to science, technology, various policies, cultural changes, etc. and will only improve if these are continued. It is not always clear what brought improvement and whether that sort of improvement will keep scaling. This is just my long-winded way of saying that I don't like it when people say the system is great, don't change anything, don't complain, and in a few more generations we'll all be fine.
- Jensson 3y ago
  The problem with "fight the status quo" people is that they tend to demand more authoritarianism and centralization to fight something that isn't that bad. Authoritarianism tend to lead to worse outcomes and hurt progress, things progress faster with liberal ideals than authoritarian ideals.
  - reb 3y ago
    There’s nothing about a “fight the status quo” mentality that inherently favors authoritarianism and it’s not helpful to claim otherwise. That said, it is helpful to remember both knowing- and unconscious authoritarians will twist any framework into an excuse to establish and flex authority — that’s their whole modus operandi, after all.
    - hamhock666 3y ago
      I think this is true generally for anyone seeking power, whether they’re a soon-to-be dictator or a democratically elected politician
  - imjonse 3y ago
    some variants of 'fight the status quo' are explicitly opposing the centralization of power and the too big to fail entities in non-authoritarian societies.
  - 3y ago
zubairq 3y ago
I read "factfulness", really opened my eyes!
rco8786 3y ago
One of my favorite books. Changed my whole worldview (and I already had a positive world view before reading). I've recommended this book to people probably 1,000 times.
s_dev 3y ago
> They present how the world is improving in an irrefutable way but media and politicians would only focus on the negative. It's worth noting this 'world' that is constantly improving exists only for people. I routinely counter this with the analogy: that's like a dentist saying your teeth are better than they've ever been -- not only that; they're getting better but at the same time your gums are screwed. Are those teeth dependant on those gums you might ask. Yeah. Every serious envoirnmental science paper seems to conclude the same thing: biodiversity is collapsing. On the whole, the world we live in is worse than the past. Examples during the earths history that aren't really from external forces e.g. when the moon crashed in to earth, after asteroids, early earth volcanoes etc. are different and not under our control.
- dsign 3y ago
  As far as I can see, you are totally correct. As it is the post you are replying to. Which begs the question: how can the state of all of humanity improve without damaging even more the environment? Will we ever confront that question honestly?
  - titzer 3y ago
    The answer is that birth rate needs to decline and the human population needs to level off and then also decline to sustainable levels. We're in overshoot right now and no amount of economic development (read: growth) is going to fix that. We need degrowth, and the only way that is achievable without harming standard of living is to have fewer humans. The only way to have fewer humans without murdering or starving a bunch is for population to level and drop off naturally. It's hard to even have this conversation without being branded an eco-fascist, but there it is. We are just too many.
    - throwawayqqq11 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - bombcar 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
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makeitdouble 3y ago
> improving in an irrefutable way The book was great and I think the main shinning point was to base each arguments on actual measures, but that's far from creating an irrefutable narrative. At the end of the day those are numbers they chose and dressed, and other researchers will come up other equally true numbers that they'll filter and present in a different light. An instance of this is in this article is the number of infant mortality: sure it's improving, but birth rates are also plummeting. To me the overall picture on infants is greyish and I'm not sure it's overall better than a few decades ago (I have no idea, didn't crunch the numbers), but here we're only getting the bright side and shown a sheer positive trend. My point is probably that having numbers to back a claim is better but they still need to be looked at critically and in a context
nl 3y ago
And yet this narrative ("They present how the world is improving in an irrefutable way") falls exactly into the trap pointed out by the link in this story: "Solely communicating the progress that the world has achieved becomes unhelpful, or even repugnant, when it glosses over the problems that are real today." (Even though I agree this narrative is mostly correct)
- akkad33 3y ago
  Well, the world is improving, but it can be better. That's the message of the book. It's very optimistic and you should read it.
DiffEq 3y ago
There is still the specter of nuclear war…that side of the equation has gotten worse.
- elliotec 3y ago
  Surely you've heard of the Cold War?
pchangr 3y ago
FYI, Max Roser has mentioned several times that the book inspired him to create our world in data.
Havoc 3y ago
tbh Sweden feels like an outlier to me. Recently visited and it struck me as the most functional society I’ve encountered thus far. Even the demographics are healthier than much of rest of Europe especially compared to other rich nations. That’s not to say the overall thesis is wrong but I suspect slight rose tinted glasses at play
account42 3y ago
> They present how the world is improving in an irrefutable For whom? Some things are improving, some things are getting worse. Saying that the world is getting better overall requires judgement of how much you value different things.
- handoflixue 3y ago
  > Some things are improving, some things are getting worse. Are there any global measures that are worse than they were a century ago? Or are you just saying that progress is uneven, with some areas seeing local setbacks despite the overall global gains?
zo1 3y ago
I honestly don't trust the stats, and this kind of analysis and "blame on politicians for lying and focusing on negatives" does not convince me. Especially with all the ensuing gaslighting that happens in response to valid criticisms.
fennecfoxy 3y ago
I think we can't really take such a basic view on such a complex topic. Sure, for the average person the world is objectively getting better every day, only if you compare to what the average person has and had, not the potential of what they could have. It does not take into account magnitude, diversity and lost potential of betterment. For example the fact that billionaires will soon be trillionaires, such a new concept that apparently Firefox spellcheck knows what a billionaire is, but not a trillionaire. It doesn't matter if we pay the average person 1 cent more each year and claim that their life is better for that 1 cent when a small percentage of people are getting 1000 dollars extra each year - sure the average person's life is technically better than the year before, but it has the potential to be even better. Money is just a simple example by the way, doesn't take into account wanton ecosystem destruction by hyper corporates, the fact that we still get into stupid fucking wars (Russia, ie things haven't gotten better bc war never changes, apparently).
garfieldnate 3y ago
Steven Pinker's _Better Angels of our Nature_ is a great read on the subject, as well. Essentially a history of the decline of violence, but also including economic aspects that support humans becoming better.

bryanlarsen 3y ago

An even better book recommendation (if you like the article) is "Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet" by Hannah Ritchie. Hannah Ritchie is head of research for ourworldindata.org; the book grew very directly out of the linked article. Ritchie credits a lecture by Hans Rosling (one of the authors of Factfulness) in the forward for being what turned her from a pessimistic biology student into the person that writes a book like this. A common criticism of the linked article is that "sure child mortality is going down, but what about X". Where X is climate change, species decline, quality of life, et cetera. The book addresses most "X"'s.

ebcode 3y ago
Not sure if this is the same lecture that Ritchie cites, but for anyone who hasn't seen this one by Rosling, it's worth a watch: https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_best_stats_you_ve...

StopTheTechies 3y ago

> They present how the world is improving in an irrefutable way but media and politicians would only focus on the negative People are allowed to have their own opinions about what to value in the world. The idea of "irrefutable proof" the world has improved is completely asinine and counter productive... at best, and at worse just straight marketing for the ruling class.

maximinus_thrax 3y ago

Everyone reading Factfulness should also take a look at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328759928_Good_Things_on_the_Rise_The_One-Sided_Worldview_of_Hans_Rosling_Translation_of_an_essay_published_in_Kvartal_Sept_20_2018_httpskvartalseartiklarbra-saker-pa-uppgang-roslings-varldsbild-ar-ensidigt-pos https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328759928_Good_Thin... I've always regarded this book as being blatant neoliberal propaganda.

LastTrain 3y ago
Can you name a couple examples of blatant neoliberal propaganda in the book? Who is the propaganda being perpetrated on behalf of? Who is funding it? If it doesn’t have these latter elements, you might want to consider the possibility that it is simply a work that you disagree with.
- maximinus_thrax 3y ago
  I don't need to defend a personal opinion if I don't want to. I believe the book is an 'everything is fine' meme in book format, pandering to the current oligarchy who's arguing that everything is going in the right direction and direct action is unnecessary. Other people replying to the same comment have articulated it better than I did. Whenever a book like this comes along and the real capitalists start reviewing and recommending it, it triggers my bullshit sensors. You might want to consider the possibility that it is simply an opinion that you disagree with and move on.
  - LastTrain 3y ago
    Ostensibly, we participate in this forum to discuss things. I thought it was provocative to call this book propaganda so I thought I'd probe a little. When you tell someone they are reading propaganda, one of the unsaid things you are doing is implying that people are being duped, and that you somehow come from a higher place and have the real answers. So yeah - you are going to get questions. So maybe don't throw the term around in a public forum if you aren't willing to engage the people you're insulting.

FredPret 3y ago

Two more books in this vein are Fewer, Richer, Greener by Siegel and Abundance by Diamandis and Kotler

tetha 3y ago

You make me wonder if this isn't the marketing/sales vs dev/ops misalignment. Marketing and Sales focus on the good parts of our software. Simple usability, high stability, great reactive customer support, ... Apparently, during corona, we were the only reliable vendor for a national support hotline by a massive margin, and chaotically on-boarded call-agents had the least number of issues with our system. But then, I as a team lead in ops have to wonder why a single priority ticket didn't meet SLA. Why a routine update caused 4 minutes of downtime. Why a usually stable provider ripped a system away for 3 minutes. Why strange cache timeout interactions caused some class of requests to take 30s+ to respond. My world is very much a world of shitty non-working janky software and it is my job to fix and improve it. It might be one of the better solutions in our market and other people may be able to sell it to happy customers, but in my world it's a janky and broken piece of shit with a million things to fix. And looking at the nation I live in... that's honestly not that far away.

rco8786 3y ago
I run into this all the time w/ engineers I work with. I always tell them the story of the mechanic. The mechanic works tirelessly every day fixing Toyota Camrys. For years on end, he stares at broken Toyota Camrys. He knows every bolt, and every failure point across decades of Toyota Camrys. He is utterly and thoroughly convinced that Toyota Camrys are unreliable hunks of junk. After all, he sees them broken all the time. What he doesn't see are the 100s of thousands of Toyota Camrys loggings hundreds of thousands of miles on the road, perfectly intact with no mechanical issues. His vision is completely skewed by his day to day responsibilities. Same thing for us in software. It's our job to see the dirty edge cases. To notice when something goes wrong for 5 minutes. etc. Our job is to automate everything - so by definition, we don't see the thousands or millions of interactions between our customers and our software that go exactly as planned, because they're completely automated away from us. Completely invisible. We have a skewed vision because of our day to day responsibilities.
- bombcar 3y ago
  This is an important factoid - if you ask a mechanic for a vehicle recommendation you might not get the most reliable - but the easiest and cheapest to work on when it does break.

imjonse 3y ago

The problem with the world improving in an irrefutable way on average is that this can be and is used to defend the status quo in almost any field and can lead to complacency and a false sense of optimism. The world became better due to science, technology, various policies, cultural changes, etc. and will only improve if these are continued. It is not always clear what brought improvement and whether that sort of improvement will keep scaling. This is just my long-winded way of saying that I don't like it when people say the system is great, don't change anything, don't complain, and in a few more generations we'll all be fine.

Jensson 3y ago
The problem with "fight the status quo" people is that they tend to demand more authoritarianism and centralization to fight something that isn't that bad. Authoritarianism tend to lead to worse outcomes and hurt progress, things progress faster with liberal ideals than authoritarian ideals.
- reb 3y ago
  There’s nothing about a “fight the status quo” mentality that inherently favors authoritarianism and it’s not helpful to claim otherwise. That said, it is helpful to remember both knowing- and unconscious authoritarians will twist any framework into an excuse to establish and flex authority — that’s their whole modus operandi, after all.
  - hamhock666 3y ago
    I think this is true generally for anyone seeking power, whether they’re a soon-to-be dictator or a democratically elected politician
- imjonse 3y ago
  some variants of 'fight the status quo' are explicitly opposing the centralization of power and the too big to fail entities in non-authoritarian societies.
- 3y ago

zubairq 3y ago

I read "factfulness", really opened my eyes!

rco8786 3y ago

One of my favorite books. Changed my whole worldview (and I already had a positive world view before reading). I've recommended this book to people probably 1,000 times.

s_dev 3y ago

> They present how the world is improving in an irrefutable way but media and politicians would only focus on the negative. It's worth noting this 'world' that is constantly improving exists only for people. I routinely counter this with the analogy: that's like a dentist saying your teeth are better than they've ever been -- not only that; they're getting better but at the same time your gums are screwed. Are those teeth dependant on those gums you might ask. Yeah. Every serious envoirnmental science paper seems to conclude the same thing: biodiversity is collapsing. On the whole, the world we live in is worse than the past. Examples during the earths history that aren't really from external forces e.g. when the moon crashed in to earth, after asteroids, early earth volcanoes etc. are different and not under our control.

dsign 3y ago
As far as I can see, you are totally correct. As it is the post you are replying to. Which begs the question: how can the state of all of humanity improve without damaging even more the environment? Will we ever confront that question honestly?
- titzer 3y ago
  The answer is that birth rate needs to decline and the human population needs to level off and then also decline to sustainable levels. We're in overshoot right now and no amount of economic development (read: growth) is going to fix that. We need degrowth, and the only way that is achievable without harming standard of living is to have fewer humans. The only way to have fewer humans without murdering or starving a bunch is for population to level and drop off naturally. It's hard to even have this conversation without being branded an eco-fascist, but there it is. We are just too many.
  - throwawayqqq11 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - bombcar 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

makeitdouble 3y ago

> improving in an irrefutable way The book was great and I think the main shinning point was to base each arguments on actual measures, but that's far from creating an irrefutable narrative. At the end of the day those are numbers they chose and dressed, and other researchers will come up other equally true numbers that they'll filter and present in a different light. An instance of this is in this article is the number of infant mortality: sure it's improving, but birth rates are also plummeting. To me the overall picture on infants is greyish and I'm not sure it's overall better than a few decades ago (I have no idea, didn't crunch the numbers), but here we're only getting the bright side and shown a sheer positive trend. My point is probably that having numbers to back a claim is better but they still need to be looked at critically and in a context

nl 3y ago

And yet this narrative ("They present how the world is improving in an irrefutable way") falls exactly into the trap pointed out by the link in this story: "Solely communicating the progress that the world has achieved becomes unhelpful, or even repugnant, when it glosses over the problems that are real today." (Even though I agree this narrative is mostly correct)

akkad33 3y ago
Well, the world is improving, but it can be better. That's the message of the book. It's very optimistic and you should read it.

DiffEq 3y ago

There is still the specter of nuclear war…that side of the equation has gotten worse.

elliotec 3y ago
Surely you've heard of the Cold War?

pchangr 3y ago

FYI, Max Roser has mentioned several times that the book inspired him to create our world in data.

Havoc 3y ago

tbh Sweden feels like an outlier to me. Recently visited and it struck me as the most functional society I’ve encountered thus far. Even the demographics are healthier than much of rest of Europe especially compared to other rich nations. That’s not to say the overall thesis is wrong but I suspect slight rose tinted glasses at play

account42 3y ago

> They present how the world is improving in an irrefutable For whom? Some things are improving, some things are getting worse. Saying that the world is getting better overall requires judgement of how much you value different things.

handoflixue 3y ago
> Some things are improving, some things are getting worse. Are there any global measures that are worse than they were a century ago? Or are you just saying that progress is uneven, with some areas seeing local setbacks despite the overall global gains?

zo1 3y ago

I honestly don't trust the stats, and this kind of analysis and "blame on politicians for lying and focusing on negatives" does not convince me. Especially with all the ensuing gaslighting that happens in response to valid criticisms.

fennecfoxy 3y ago

I think we can't really take such a basic view on such a complex topic. Sure, for the average person the world is objectively getting better every day, only if you compare to what the average person has and had, not the potential of what they could have. It does not take into account magnitude, diversity and lost potential of betterment. For example the fact that billionaires will soon be trillionaires, such a new concept that apparently Firefox spellcheck knows what a billionaire is, but not a trillionaire. It doesn't matter if we pay the average person 1 cent more each year and claim that their life is better for that 1 cent when a small percentage of people are getting 1000 dollars extra each year - sure the average person's life is technically better than the year before, but it has the potential to be even better. Money is just a simple example by the way, doesn't take into account wanton ecosystem destruction by hyper corporates, the fact that we still get into stupid fucking wars (Russia, ie things haven't gotten better bc war never changes, apparently).

garfieldnate 3y ago

Steven Pinker's _Better Angels of our Nature_ is a great read on the subject, as well. Essentially a history of the decline of violence, but also including economic aspects that support humans becoming better.