10 ms·

The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it

109 points by _Microft 2y ago

feedforward 2y ago
How many hours a week does an adult man in a hunter gatherer band deep in the Amazon or in sub-Saharan Africa work? Anthropologists say usually less than forty hours, which means less than most people here. Not much money, but they don't pay $2000 a month or more for rent or a mortgage. No taxes. No profit from their labor sent to some class expropriating their surplus labor time. It's a basis of comparison any how. If our economic system was great you wouldn't have to pay think tanks to tell people how great their lot is.
- gchamonlive 2y ago
  I don't think this is the correct line of argument, to juxtapose two very different modes of living to make parallels and criticise the current way of living. First because it distracts from actually useful discussions which should revolve around making what we have now better, more sustainable, inclusive and fair. Second because our economic system isn't great because people pay a lot on mortgage or taxes, or because people have a hard time understanding state of the art research. It's not great because it is designed to produce profits at all costs, which leads to people getting overworked and underpaid.
  - luqtas 2y ago
    maybe it's a type of an addendum on despite we now have more technology & facilities, we still need to work more to survive than when we had stones, berries & caves as surviving tools
  - apercu 2y ago
    Poster summed it up well: "If our economic system was great you wouldn't have to pay think tanks to tell people how great their lot is." We're not healthy, mentally or otherwise.
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      That is specious reasoning. It might not be perfect, but it is hard to show a better option with empirical success.
    - dannyobrien 2y ago
      Well, it's possible that certain groups in society -- in particular, highly-educated individuals in Western societies -- have become outliers in how positively they imagine the state of the world to be. (This was Hans Rosling's conclusion, which led to the formation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapminder_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapminder_Foundation ). It's probably not going to convince you for me to pull more stats from World In Data, but according to this, people do, in general, seem to be fairly happy with their lot https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction
- apercu 2y ago
  I read something similar somewhere that while UK serfs had a lot of crappy conditions and a lack of autonomy, outside of planting and harvesting seasons they actually had a fair bit of free time. Especially in the winter. Sure, that time might be spent fishing and collecting sticks and twigs, and repairing clothes and nets, but how is that different than the housecleaning, yard maintenance (I have a large(ish) property with trees and gardens and chickens) and other things we all do after our 35-50 hour "work" weeks?
- dannyobrien 2y ago
  Well, apart from the often-documented regular raids from /other/ hunter-gather bands, including torture, rape, murder and slavery. Do you think, absent that $2000 a month mortgage, internal tribal and familial relations would not include abuses of power, including physical and sexual? Even if you think the current economic and social framework magnified or exacerbated this, can you point to systems in hunter-gather networks that would allow this to be systemically ameliorated at the same scales we now operate, and with the same resource challenges we now face? (I'd readily agree that there are differences in opinion about the levels of violence and the variation in prehistoric societies, but I think it's worth highlighted the assumptions that your statement makes about those levels.)
  - feedforward 2y ago
    > often-documented regular raids from /other/ hunter-gather bands, including torture, rape, murder and slavery. There is no slavery in migratory hunter-gatherer bands, I can't even conceive how that would function. Slavery arose with the agricultural revolution. This is not "oft-dicumented" or even documented > internal tribal A hunter-gatherer band is not in a tribe. I am talking about migratory hunter-gatherer bands and you are talking about slave societies and then tribes.
    - dannyobrien 2y ago
      I don't think what you say is correct. Just a casual search of the literature reveals fairly detailed descriptions of slavery in pre-agricultural societies. Here's one book dedicated to an analysis of slavery in the hunter-gatherer society in the Pacific Northwest: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Aboriginal+Slavery+on+the+Northwest+Coast+of+North+America&publication_year=1997& https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Aboriginal+S... You can find many more, I hope! You seem to be making a strong distinction between "bands" and "tribes" that doesn't seem to be clear-cut elsewhere, which may be where we're getting confused; maybe it would be useful to just drop that element of my list, and concentrate on the other aspects of hunter-gatherer society?
candiddevmike 2y ago
This article reads like "see how good you have it", when for most folks the upsetting part these days is around inequality, globally as well as nationally. You're not going to convince folks the world is better when they know what kind of deal they're getting vs others out there. Blame the rise of mass communication if you want, but it's depressingly easy to see what both ends of inequality looks like and dismiss articles like this as "so what".
- mouse_ 2y ago
  Excellent take. Thank you.
- imjonse 2y ago
  The article itself has this towards the end: " There are big problems that remain. None of the above should give us reason to become complacent. On the contrary, it shows us that a lot of work still needs to be done — accomplishing the fastest reduction of extreme poverty is an important achievement, but the fact that 85% of the world live on less than $30 per day is unacceptable. We also must not accept the restrictions of our liberty that remain. It is also clear that humanity’s impact on the environment is at a level that is not sustainable and is endangering the biosphere and climate on which we depend. " The problem is that those who would like to maintain the status quo are bound to pick only the optimistic stats and suggest nothing should be done because the trend is naturally towards a better society. The truth is that progress is made in spite of these people, and in spite of some of the policies they promote. So such articles are more like a reality check of sorts, showing that we can make progress but we need to work hard for it, it does not just happen by the magic waving of an invisible hand.
  - thro2309 2y ago
    [dead]
  - Diederich 2y ago
    This is an outstanding analysis, thank you, and very succinctly summarizes my own views.
mouse_ 2y ago
Minimum wage in 1980 could afford you about 6 big macs per hour; in 2022 that number fell to less than 1 big mac per hour; in the same timeframe, worker productivity has gone up multiple times over. We are being pillaged, and headlines like this seem to be a subtle justification that we should not worry about it too much. The past is no place to live; when I see atrocity happening when and where I live, I am going to talk about it, and I am going to be thinking about ways we can improve or offset it. Headline is in poor taste. Yes I fucking love science and all that but it is unproductive and insulting to all those in our current year struggling with inhumane living conditions and progressively decreasing opportunities.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  The statutory US federal minimum wage does not reflect actual labor prices. A more useful measure of comparison would be changes in 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc decile/quantile of annual and hourly wages. Also, the US is so big and varied in terms of cost of living, that there would need to be an adjustment to account for that. Or just compare within specific metros over a time period.
- daedrdev 2y ago
  Currently fewer than 1% of people in the US make the federal minimum wage.
- vehemenz 2y ago
  I live in an average area of the midwest, and every McDonald's starts at $14/hr. That's two Big Macs after tax, or three if you use the app.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Big macs were never that cheap. Minimum wage in the early 1980s was $3.35/hr and unlike today, McDonald's actually had people standing in line to apply for jobs at that wage. I was one of them. A Big Mac at that time was around $1.00 although the "value combo" concept had emerged so most people didn't buy them individually. McDonald's today pays $15/hr and has trouble hiring. They couldn't hire anyone if they just offered minimum wage. A Big Mac is around $5.00 so the ratio is broadly the same.
asabil 2y ago
The most dangerous thing about Capitalism is imho its universal equivalence, its ability to make us covert everything into a monetary value. In other words, it’s just like a programming language where everything can be implicitly converted to a given top type. In the progress we certainly made over the last century or so, we certainly also lost other things whose value is not representable in our modern value system.
- jsbg 2y ago
  > other things whose value is not representable in our modern value system What things? Are they more important than child mortality?
  - asabil 2y ago
    Why do things have to be comparable? Why did you cherry pick infant mortality? Yes reducing infants mortality is one of the things where we improved.
- Aloisius 2y ago
  I’m not sure I’d ascribe that behavior to capitalism given it long predates capitalism.
stanleykm 2y ago
I dont think 200 years is sufficient. The 19th century is the beginning of the industrial revolution and well into colonial rule by European empires.
- skybrian 2y ago
  Unfortunately the data gets a lot worse, so you don’t get the nice graphs anymore. But historians do try. Ancient empires were not any better; they all had slavery. The lesson of history is that living in historical times was mostly terrible for most people.
mentalgear 2y ago
The key missing metric is "Happiness/Contentment." While its definition may be somewhat subjective, asking people how satisfied they are with their lives could be a good start. However, it'd be less surprising if that metric might not have the same trajectory as the overall trend of the other graphs.
- cryptonector 2y ago
  Hard to measure that. Even GDP/capita is too rough a measure. People who do subsistence farming may not be starving or dirt poor, but GDP/capita completely fails to capture their production and consumption. But at least GDP/capita is a decent enough measure because as a nation gets wealthier there is more specialization of labor and subsistence farming becomes a thing of the past (and along the way food security improves dramatically). But let's just say that food security enables happiness/contentment -- that the rest is up to each individual, because how else could it be?
  - jampekka 2y ago
    There are plenty of such measures. They just aren't very flattering for the GDP-growth dogma. See e.g. The World Happiness Report, (I)HDI, GNW, GNH.
    - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
      I checked the first two, and both the World Happiness Report and IHDI seem to be very well correlated with GDP per capita.
      - jampekka 2y ago
        The Happiness Index includes GDP per capita in their metric, IHDI includes GNI per capita.
        SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
        That seems pretty flattering for the GDP-growth dogma, then, if organizations trying to measure happiness and human development feel that GDP statistics are an important input.
swatcoder 2y ago
> To avoid portraying the world in a static way, we have to start 200 years ago, before the time when living conditions really changed dramatically. What a bizarre and (unintentionally?) result-biasing statement. Picking 200 years ago is literally choosing what may be the lowest point in global living standards for a millennia -- early industrialization and colonialism had each radically shocked the shape of the societies touched by them, breaking stable, comfortable, familiar lifestyle and community traditions in a race for abstract economic development with little concern for exploitation or local consequence. Maybe everybody is better off now than they were 200 years ago, but most individuals in the world were much worse off 200 years ago than they were 200 years before that, so the discussion is quite complicated and an analysis like this doesn't tell you that we're doing the best thing now, just that we're seemingly doing much better than when we first really fucked it all up.
- oconnor663 2y ago
  > most individuals in the world were much worse off 200 years ago than they were 200 years before that Is there like a particular graph or chart that puts numbers on this?
  - cryptonector 2y ago
    You will not find such a thing. Economic progress before the Industrial Revolution was slow, but not zero. The further back you go the better the last 200 years look, and the impact of every major war and famine becomes less and less notable. TFA is not cherry picking.
    - tway_GdBRwW 2y ago
      Why do you assume that well being is the same as economic progress? Look, I like indoor plumbing as much as the next guy, but it isn't the only contributor to my well-being.
      - Tuna-Fish 2y ago
manofmanysmiles 2y ago
I think it's important to optimize life for metrics, but I think it's even more important to remember that we (conscious beings) are the ones living, so if we hate it, the metrics are either wrong or not relevant. Imagine living somewhere and feeling miserable, and everywhere there are billboards and ads everywhere saying "Remember that you are happy! All the metrics are better! Oh you're not happy, you must be confused or wrong in some way." So what's wrong with these metrics? That they are an aggregate, synthetic measurement attempting to measure something subjective, or at very least measuring qualities that may not be the causal factors for "happiness". I'm not suggesting that these are the wrong metrics necessarily, but rather that work may need to be done in the soft and squishy world of "self development" or "spiritually", so that people may be able to create happiness and joy, and eliminate aspects of life that do not support that. For example, learning about nutrition, exercise, healthy detox pathways, emotional health (through whatever lens appeals to each person), relationships, purpose, and more. I think honestly there is a bit of a crisis of meaning: humans realized it's a rather challenging place to live, so we/they built technology and civilizations, and now many more people are living more "comfortable," "safe" lives, and in the absence of an external threat, are lacking in purpose. Some people think we need some external threat, so risks like damaging the environment are framed as a "war against climate change", because thus far, external threats have been good motivators. However, I'm sick and tired of being motivated and seeing life as a battle, and I know I'm not alone. In this period of objective peace and prosperity, I'd love if more people shifted their focus inward, to discovery fountains of love and creativity, and use that creative energy to shape the world and life towards further connection and play. This won't happen on a mass scale if most people are physically and emotionally unhealthy, fighting with family, fighting with people in war, and avoiding intentional inner development. For those of you that think this doesn't matter, imagine trying to build something, and all of people you're working with have PTSD, or can't stay motivated for more than 5 mins without scrolling instagram? Imagine camping on another planet looking up at an "aurora", or creating your dream movie by talking to an AI, or perhaps even living out your wildest dreams through VR, or for those that think this way, "hacking the matrix" and living it for real. "Hacking the matrix" could be finding new properties of physics that make the impossible possible, it could be learning that we are in a simulation, or it could be something more "mystical", the real point is making a quantum leap in what is possible as a human.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
spyckie2 2y ago
I love our world in data but I will say this article is wordy. > Global poverty is one of the very largest problems in the world today. Is it possible to make progress against this problem? To see where we are coming from, we must go far back in time. 30 or even 50 years are not enough. When you only consider what the world looked like during our lifetime, it is easy to think of the world as static — the richer parts of the world here and the poorer regions there — and to falsely conclude that it always was like that and will always be like that. > Take a longer perspective and it becomes clear that the world is not static at all. We can change the world. The countries that are rich today were very poor just a few generations ago. > To avoid portraying the world in a static way, we have to start 200 years ago, before the time when living conditions really changed dramatically. This could be written “to really see how much progress we’ve made we have to look back 200 years ago.”
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
greenie_beans 2y ago
i see this and think: 85% of people in the world struggle to live on less than $1k/month
shove 2y ago
I wish David Graeber was still around to give a rebuttal.

109 points by _Microft 2y ago

How many hours a week does an adult man in a hunter gatherer band deep in the Amazon or in sub-Saharan Africa work? Anthropologists say usually less than forty hours, which means less than most people here. Not much money, but they don't pay $2000 a month or more for rent or a mortgage. No taxes. No profit from their labor sent to some class expropriating their surplus labor time. It's a basis of comparison any how. If our economic system was great you wouldn't have to pay think tanks to tell people how great their lot is.

gchamonlive 2y ago
I don't think this is the correct line of argument, to juxtapose two very different modes of living to make parallels and criticise the current way of living. First because it distracts from actually useful discussions which should revolve around making what we have now better, more sustainable, inclusive and fair. Second because our economic system isn't great because people pay a lot on mortgage or taxes, or because people have a hard time understanding state of the art research. It's not great because it is designed to produce profits at all costs, which leads to people getting overworked and underpaid.
- luqtas 2y ago
  maybe it's a type of an addendum on despite we now have more technology & facilities, we still need to work more to survive than when we had stones, berries & caves as surviving tools
- apercu 2y ago
  Poster summed it up well: "If our economic system was great you wouldn't have to pay think tanks to tell people how great their lot is." We're not healthy, mentally or otherwise.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    That is specious reasoning. It might not be perfect, but it is hard to show a better option with empirical success.
  - dannyobrien 2y ago
    Well, it's possible that certain groups in society -- in particular, highly-educated individuals in Western societies -- have become outliers in how positively they imagine the state of the world to be. (This was Hans Rosling's conclusion, which led to the formation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapminder_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapminder_Foundation ). It's probably not going to convince you for me to pull more stats from World In Data, but according to this, people do, in general, seem to be fairly happy with their lot https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction
apercu 2y ago
I read something similar somewhere that while UK serfs had a lot of crappy conditions and a lack of autonomy, outside of planting and harvesting seasons they actually had a fair bit of free time. Especially in the winter. Sure, that time might be spent fishing and collecting sticks and twigs, and repairing clothes and nets, but how is that different than the housecleaning, yard maintenance (I have a large(ish) property with trees and gardens and chickens) and other things we all do after our 35-50 hour "work" weeks?
dannyobrien 2y ago
Well, apart from the often-documented regular raids from /other/ hunter-gather bands, including torture, rape, murder and slavery. Do you think, absent that $2000 a month mortgage, internal tribal and familial relations would not include abuses of power, including physical and sexual? Even if you think the current economic and social framework magnified or exacerbated this, can you point to systems in hunter-gather networks that would allow this to be systemically ameliorated at the same scales we now operate, and with the same resource challenges we now face? (I'd readily agree that there are differences in opinion about the levels of violence and the variation in prehistoric societies, but I think it's worth highlighted the assumptions that your statement makes about those levels.)
- feedforward 2y ago
  > often-documented regular raids from /other/ hunter-gather bands, including torture, rape, murder and slavery. There is no slavery in migratory hunter-gatherer bands, I can't even conceive how that would function. Slavery arose with the agricultural revolution. This is not "oft-dicumented" or even documented > internal tribal A hunter-gatherer band is not in a tribe. I am talking about migratory hunter-gatherer bands and you are talking about slave societies and then tribes.
  - dannyobrien 2y ago
    I don't think what you say is correct. Just a casual search of the literature reveals fairly detailed descriptions of slavery in pre-agricultural societies. Here's one book dedicated to an analysis of slavery in the hunter-gatherer society in the Pacific Northwest: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Aboriginal+Slavery+on+the+Northwest+Coast+of+North+America&publication_year=1997& https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Aboriginal+S... You can find many more, I hope! You seem to be making a strong distinction between "bands" and "tribes" that doesn't seem to be clear-cut elsewhere, which may be where we're getting confused; maybe it would be useful to just drop that element of my list, and concentrate on the other aspects of hunter-gatherer society?

candiddevmike 2y ago

This article reads like "see how good you have it", when for most folks the upsetting part these days is around inequality, globally as well as nationally. You're not going to convince folks the world is better when they know what kind of deal they're getting vs others out there. Blame the rise of mass communication if you want, but it's depressingly easy to see what both ends of inequality looks like and dismiss articles like this as "so what".

mouse_ 2y ago
Excellent take. Thank you.
imjonse 2y ago
The article itself has this towards the end: " There are big problems that remain. None of the above should give us reason to become complacent. On the contrary, it shows us that a lot of work still needs to be done — accomplishing the fastest reduction of extreme poverty is an important achievement, but the fact that 85% of the world live on less than $30 per day is unacceptable. We also must not accept the restrictions of our liberty that remain. It is also clear that humanity’s impact on the environment is at a level that is not sustainable and is endangering the biosphere and climate on which we depend. " The problem is that those who would like to maintain the status quo are bound to pick only the optimistic stats and suggest nothing should be done because the trend is naturally towards a better society. The truth is that progress is made in spite of these people, and in spite of some of the policies they promote. So such articles are more like a reality check of sorts, showing that we can make progress but we need to work hard for it, it does not just happen by the magic waving of an invisible hand.
- thro2309 2y ago
  [dead]
- Diederich 2y ago
  This is an outstanding analysis, thank you, and very succinctly summarizes my own views.

mouse_ 2y ago

Minimum wage in 1980 could afford you about 6 big macs per hour; in 2022 that number fell to less than 1 big mac per hour; in the same timeframe, worker productivity has gone up multiple times over. We are being pillaged, and headlines like this seem to be a subtle justification that we should not worry about it too much. The past is no place to live; when I see atrocity happening when and where I live, I am going to talk about it, and I am going to be thinking about ways we can improve or offset it. Headline is in poor taste. Yes I fucking love science and all that but it is unproductive and insulting to all those in our current year struggling with inhumane living conditions and progressively decreasing opportunities.

lotsofpulp 2y ago
The statutory US federal minimum wage does not reflect actual labor prices. A more useful measure of comparison would be changes in 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc decile/quantile of annual and hourly wages. Also, the US is so big and varied in terms of cost of living, that there would need to be an adjustment to account for that. Or just compare within specific metros over a time period.
daedrdev 2y ago
Currently fewer than 1% of people in the US make the federal minimum wage.
vehemenz 2y ago
I live in an average area of the midwest, and every McDonald's starts at $14/hr. That's two Big Macs after tax, or three if you use the app.
SoftTalker 2y ago
Big macs were never that cheap. Minimum wage in the early 1980s was $3.35/hr and unlike today, McDonald's actually had people standing in line to apply for jobs at that wage. I was one of them. A Big Mac at that time was around $1.00 although the "value combo" concept had emerged so most people didn't buy them individually. McDonald's today pays $15/hr and has trouble hiring. They couldn't hire anyone if they just offered minimum wage. A Big Mac is around $5.00 so the ratio is broadly the same.

asabil 2y ago

The most dangerous thing about Capitalism is imho its universal equivalence, its ability to make us covert everything into a monetary value. In other words, it’s just like a programming language where everything can be implicitly converted to a given top type. In the progress we certainly made over the last century or so, we certainly also lost other things whose value is not representable in our modern value system.

jsbg 2y ago
> other things whose value is not representable in our modern value system What things? Are they more important than child mortality?
- asabil 2y ago
  Why do things have to be comparable? Why did you cherry pick infant mortality? Yes reducing infants mortality is one of the things where we improved.
Aloisius 2y ago
I’m not sure I’d ascribe that behavior to capitalism given it long predates capitalism.

stanleykm 2y ago

I dont think 200 years is sufficient. The 19th century is the beginning of the industrial revolution and well into colonial rule by European empires.

skybrian 2y ago
Unfortunately the data gets a lot worse, so you don’t get the nice graphs anymore. But historians do try. Ancient empires were not any better; they all had slavery. The lesson of history is that living in historical times was mostly terrible for most people.

mentalgear 2y ago

The key missing metric is "Happiness/Contentment." While its definition may be somewhat subjective, asking people how satisfied they are with their lives could be a good start. However, it'd be less surprising if that metric might not have the same trajectory as the overall trend of the other graphs.

cryptonector 2y ago
Hard to measure that. Even GDP/capita is too rough a measure. People who do subsistence farming may not be starving or dirt poor, but GDP/capita completely fails to capture their production and consumption. But at least GDP/capita is a decent enough measure because as a nation gets wealthier there is more specialization of labor and subsistence farming becomes a thing of the past (and along the way food security improves dramatically). But let's just say that food security enables happiness/contentment -- that the rest is up to each individual, because how else could it be?
- jampekka 2y ago
  There are plenty of such measures. They just aren't very flattering for the GDP-growth dogma. See e.g. The World Happiness Report, (I)HDI, GNW, GNH.
  - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
    I checked the first two, and both the World Happiness Report and IHDI seem to be very well correlated with GDP per capita.
    - jampekka 2y ago
      The Happiness Index includes GDP per capita in their metric, IHDI includes GNI per capita.
      - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
        That seems pretty flattering for the GDP-growth dogma, then, if organizations trying to measure happiness and human development feel that GDP statistics are an important input.

swatcoder 2y ago

> To avoid portraying the world in a static way, we have to start 200 years ago, before the time when living conditions really changed dramatically. What a bizarre and (unintentionally?) result-biasing statement. Picking 200 years ago is literally choosing what may be the lowest point in global living standards for a millennia -- early industrialization and colonialism had each radically shocked the shape of the societies touched by them, breaking stable, comfortable, familiar lifestyle and community traditions in a race for abstract economic development with little concern for exploitation or local consequence. Maybe everybody is better off now than they were 200 years ago, but most individuals in the world were much worse off 200 years ago than they were 200 years before that, so the discussion is quite complicated and an analysis like this doesn't tell you that we're doing the best thing now, just that we're seemingly doing much better than when we first really fucked it all up.

oconnor663 2y ago
> most individuals in the world were much worse off 200 years ago than they were 200 years before that Is there like a particular graph or chart that puts numbers on this?
- cryptonector 2y ago
  You will not find such a thing. Economic progress before the Industrial Revolution was slow, but not zero. The further back you go the better the last 200 years look, and the impact of every major war and famine becomes less and less notable. TFA is not cherry picking.
  - tway_GdBRwW 2y ago
    Why do you assume that well being is the same as economic progress? Look, I like indoor plumbing as much as the next guy, but it isn't the only contributor to my well-being.
    - Tuna-Fish 2y ago

manofmanysmiles 2y ago

I think it's important to optimize life for metrics, but I think it's even more important to remember that we (conscious beings) are the ones living, so if we hate it, the metrics are either wrong or not relevant. Imagine living somewhere and feeling miserable, and everywhere there are billboards and ads everywhere saying "Remember that you are happy! All the metrics are better! Oh you're not happy, you must be confused or wrong in some way." So what's wrong with these metrics? That they are an aggregate, synthetic measurement attempting to measure something subjective, or at very least measuring qualities that may not be the causal factors for "happiness". I'm not suggesting that these are the wrong metrics necessarily, but rather that work may need to be done in the soft and squishy world of "self development" or "spiritually", so that people may be able to create happiness and joy, and eliminate aspects of life that do not support that. For example, learning about nutrition, exercise, healthy detox pathways, emotional health (through whatever lens appeals to each person), relationships, purpose, and more. I think honestly there is a bit of a crisis of meaning: humans realized it's a rather challenging place to live, so we/they built technology and civilizations, and now many more people are living more "comfortable," "safe" lives, and in the absence of an external threat, are lacking in purpose. Some people think we need some external threat, so risks like damaging the environment are framed as a "war against climate change", because thus far, external threats have been good motivators. However, I'm sick and tired of being motivated and seeing life as a battle, and I know I'm not alone. In this period of objective peace and prosperity, I'd love if more people shifted their focus inward, to discovery fountains of love and creativity, and use that creative energy to shape the world and life towards further connection and play. This won't happen on a mass scale if most people are physically and emotionally unhealthy, fighting with family, fighting with people in war, and avoiding intentional inner development. For those of you that think this doesn't matter, imagine trying to build something, and all of people you're working with have PTSD, or can't stay motivated for more than 5 mins without scrolling instagram? Imagine camping on another planet looking up at an "aurora", or creating your dream movie by talking to an AI, or perhaps even living out your wildest dreams through VR, or for those that think this way, "hacking the matrix" and living it for real. "Hacking the matrix" could be finding new properties of physics that make the impossible possible, it could be learning that we are in a simulation, or it could be something more "mystical", the real point is making a quantum leap in what is possible as a human.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

spyckie2 2y ago

I love our world in data but I will say this article is wordy. > Global poverty is one of the very largest problems in the world today. Is it possible to make progress against this problem? To see where we are coming from, we must go far back in time. 30 or even 50 years are not enough. When you only consider what the world looked like during our lifetime, it is easy to think of the world as static — the richer parts of the world here and the poorer regions there — and to falsely conclude that it always was like that and will always be like that. > Take a longer perspective and it becomes clear that the world is not static at all. We can change the world. The countries that are rich today were very poor just a few generations ago. > To avoid portraying the world in a static way, we have to start 200 years ago, before the time when living conditions really changed dramatically. This could be written “to really see how much progress we’ve made we have to look back 200 years ago.”

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

greenie_beans 2y ago

i see this and think: 85% of people in the world struggle to live on less than $1k/month

shove 2y ago

I wish David Graeber was still around to give a rebuttal.