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>Has anyone more than small scale feel good stories or "promising advancements". Do we have things that really improved at scale in the last ten or twenty years

>Has anyone more than small scale feel good stories or "promising advancements". Do we have things that really improved at scale in the last ten or twenty years ? Yes, things are improving all the time. There are all sorts of organizations recording various metrics of quality of life kinds of things and the trends across the board are upwards, it's just very easy to live in a bubble and have no idea how things actually are across the world. https://epi.yale.edu/epi-results/2020/component/h2o https://epi.yale.edu/epi-results/2020/component/h2o https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/country-insights#/ranks https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/country-insights#/ranks

makeitdouble 1y ago
Thank you, that's a really good point: we hear about the dire stuff but seldom about the steady improvements. These numbers are to be taken with a spoon of salt though. Randomly taking the Republic of Congo as an example, it's currently in an acute crisis as a result of heavy conflicts, and water is trucked by health international organizations as part of the relief effort [0]. So thar 8.6 point improvement on sanitization and clean water access on the EPI scale is a bit head scratcher [1] [0] https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/03/1160706 https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/03/1160706 [1] https://epi.yale.edu/country/2024/COD https://epi.yale.edu/country/2024/COD
- colechristensen 1y ago
  >the Republic of Congo as an example, it's currently in an acute crisis as a result of heavy conflicts It is by no means acute, DRC has been chaotic with war for decades and has likewise been towards the bottom of these kinds of lists of quality of life, an improvement from 2014-2024 is entirely believable because it wouldn't take much. The news there from 2014 sounds very much like the news there from 2024 https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/country-chapters/democratic-republic-congo https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/country-chapters/democ...

makeitdouble 1y ago

Thank you, that's a really good point: we hear about the dire stuff but seldom about the steady improvements. These numbers are to be taken with a spoon of salt though. Randomly taking the Republic of Congo as an example, it's currently in an acute crisis as a result of heavy conflicts, and water is trucked by health international organizations as part of the relief effort [0]. So thar 8.6 point improvement on sanitization and clean water access on the EPI scale is a bit head scratcher [1] [0] https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/03/1160706 https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/03/1160706 [1] https://epi.yale.edu/country/2024/COD https://epi.yale.edu/country/2024/COD

colechristensen 1y ago
>the Republic of Congo as an example, it's currently in an acute crisis as a result of heavy conflicts It is by no means acute, DRC has been chaotic with war for decades and has likewise been towards the bottom of these kinds of lists of quality of life, an improvement from 2014-2024 is entirely believable because it wouldn't take much. The news there from 2014 sounds very much like the news there from 2024 https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/country-chapters/democratic-republic-congo https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/country-chapters/democ...