Things have gotten better and progress has been made from times past, it just seems worse now because we have more access to information. We’ve come far, and have further to go!
The poverty rate stuff is pure bs. The world bank just lowered the stated official poverty line without actually improving living conditions.
https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-poverty
As well as the average life span being skewed by those same infant mortality rates. People have been living long and now they’re forced to retire later.
Plus, while we have extended life, we haven’t made progress with extended life care. So you might live 20 years longer, but those 20 years will be spent in your bed waiting for your nurse to clean your diaper.
besides this, China did a huge job on getting people out of poverty - if you like or not
Mass producing shit at inhuman factories with deaths by the millions. I guess you’re not poor if you’re just dead.
Technically correct. A dead person is neither rich nor poor.
So that’s what happened to the middle class.
The best kind of correct
Look at the statistics. I am not lying. You can complain, but that are facts.
What statistics? The one the CCP made up? Over a quarter of chinese are still in extreme poverty and a huge amount of chinese still have an income of under 1500 yuan a month.
Sure, they might have lifted some people out of poverty, but they also put them into poverty in the first place under mao. So celebrating this is kind of self congratulatory.You can google it. It takes just a few seconds. I think you can handle it… If I search it for you, you wouldn’t believe it.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/56213271.amp
I did. It’s state propaganda.
By that definition france lifted millions of people out of poverty.LOL!
“Elsewhere in the region, Vietnam has also seen a dramatic fall in extreme poverty rates over a similar period. Another large country, India, had 22% of its population living below the international poverty line in 2011 (the most recent data available). Brazil has 4.4% of its people earning less than $1.90 a day.”
How many people has the US lifted out of poverty? How many people has Britain lifted out of poverty? How many has any state in the EU lifted out of poverty? And france isn’t even mentioned in the article. Vietnam is btw. socialistic.
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If you look at the history of western countries industrializing it didn’t look much better.
Life expectancy has also gone up. You’re lying through your fucking teeth.
Why wouldn’t people like it?
because they hate china…
Maybe I’m too naive, but even if you hate a country for its economic and political choices, you can still be glad their working class population is getting out of poverty and It’s not like they are getting richer by slaving a whole continent
Yeah… you can like some things and still hate everything else about it. Not everything is black or white - but some don’t like grey-scales.
What? How did china get people out of poverty?
The Great Leap Forward. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
It was a massive effort to industrialize China under Mao, and resulted in the largest famine in human history with tens of millions dead.
Not what Guildo guy was going for but yes, horrible thing and that did improve ehm… statistics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_China I am also pretty sure, that the great leap forward was under Mao and not Deng Xiaoping, but who knows? I am just a CCP-Bot. Beep Boop Boop. Wikipedia is also under the control of China. Beep Boop Boop. Winnie Pooh Xi Jinping Beep Boop Boop
" For example, the World Bank draws a higher poverty line for upper-middle-income countries, which tries to reflect economic conditions. It sets this at $5.50 a day. China is now an upper-middle-income country, says the bank.
About a quarter of China’s population is in poverty, according to this metric. For comparison, this is slightly higher than Brazil.
And there is widespread income inequality. Last year, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said China still had 600 million people whose monthly income was barely 1,000 yuan ($154). He said that was not enough to rent a room in a city.
The great leap forward is the reason so many people from extreme poverty died and reversing those changes is not liftig people out of poverty but reversing changes that put people in extreme poverty.".
Yes, by 1980 third world country standards china has a 0.7 percent poverty rate. Thats ignoring 40 years of development of the rest of the world. And also that china is not a third world country anymore.
Go move into a Tofu Dreg Highrise and tell me how good it looks from up there.
You’re talking all the time like China is still a third world country. You have to decide.
Oh I bet it was and they’ll just ignore the great famine as being some natural thing that just happened and wasn’t due to the policies of the CCP.
That’s how everyone I’ve met that has talked about the CCP raising people from poverty have posed it.
CCP shills
Probably…
Yeah, because they finally decided to adopt a free market model, and suddenly “starving people in China” was less of a thing.
The Great Leap Forward was decades before the market reforms
idiot
Said the CCP Boot
I think you wrote Bot wrong… But who knows? I am just a Bot. Beep Boop Boop. I am a Bot.
No i meant Boot. As in Bootlicker.
Oh, sure you’re not a Bot? Also I am not licking any boots.
This writeup is a great argument, here’s some highlights I thought were good:
I simply pointed out that we cannot ignore the fact that the period 1820 to circa 1950 was one of violent dispossession across much of the global South. If you have read colonial history, you will know colonizers had immense difficulty getting people to work on their mines and plantations. As it turns out, people tended to prefer their subsistence lifestyles, and wages were not high enough to induce them to leave. Colonizers had to coerce people into the labour market: imposing taxes, enclosing commons and constraining access to food, or just outright forcing people off their land.
Remember: $1.90 [chosen poverty line] is the equivalent of what that amount of money could buy in the US in 2011. The economist David Woodward once calculated that to live at this level (in an earlier base year) would be like 35 people trying to survive in Britain “on a single minimum wage, with no benefits of any kind, no gifts, borrowing, scavenging, begging or savings to draw on (since these are all included as ‘income’ in poverty calculations).” That goes beyond any definition of “extreme”. It is absurd. It is an insult to humanity.
From 1980 to 2000, the IMF and World Bank imposed structural adjustment programs that did exactly the opposite: slashing tariffs, subsidies, social spending and capital controls while reversing land reforms and privatizing public assets – all in the face of massive popular resistance. During this period, the number of people in poverty outside China increased by 1.3 billion. In fact, even the proportion of people living in poverty increased, from 62% to 68%.
But there is something else that needs to be said here. You and Gates like to invoke the poverty numbers to make claims about the legitimacy of the existing global economic system. You say the system is working for the poor, so people should stop complaining about it.
When it comes to assessing such a claim, it’s really neither absolute numbers nor proportions that matter. What matters, rather, is the extent of poverty vis-à-vis our capacity to end it. As I have pointed out before, our capacity to end poverty (e.g., the cost of ending poverty as a proportion of the income of the non-poor) has increased many times faster than the proportional poverty rate has decreased (to use your preferred measure). By this metric we are doing worse than ever before. Indeed, our civilization is regressing. Why? Because the vast majority of the yields of our global economy are being captured by the world’s rich.
“You literally have two nickels to rub together. You’re fine.”
It holds true no matter what poverty line you choose.
Living conditions of the so called poor today is much better than living conditions of kings just a couple of centuries ago.
lol guess it’s possible to believe anything
These are the facts. You don’t have to believe them, they just are.
That’s right. Kings were famous for being malnourished, starving, homeless or forced to do child labour in toxic rare earth mineral mines. /s
People literally starve to death dude.
Lol ok
the last two are easily debunked. I hate shit like this because it reinforces an idea that time = progress. There are influential and powerful people alive today who would reverse any of these trends if it meant money in their pocket.
It’s bewildering why they decided to restate the 1st point as the 3rd point when they could’ve just said the average retirement age is 10 years lower than it was 100 years ago https://www.statista.com/statistics/319983/average-retirement-age-in-the-us/
I don’t get why they are comparing things to the depression rather than after ww2. 50 years would be a better measure. Also retirement wise people can’t always choose to so income and home ownership in retirment would be more practical.
Well that’s easy, because the statistics wouldn’t paint the view they’re trying to convey. Saying things are better now than they were 100 years ago is as useful as saying things are better than they were 3000 years ago, aka completely useless to say since when you compare to more recent times like 40 years ago you can point to how many things have gotten objectively worse.
We’ve made a lot of strides on social issues, but everything else? Lmao.
Yeah thought it didn’t sound right.
It’s not about time = progress, it’s about showing that there was progress even if feels like we’re in a shitty downward phase currently. I don’t validate the numbers, just the intention.
It’s fair to want to be optimistic and to want to fight against doomerism. I think OP was misguided at best.
To be fair, I don’t think I was as clear as I could have been either. It’s just that post just has smells of neoliberalism has fixed the world propaganda. These are the same kinda statistics they use to justify an immoral and unethical economic system. I think a lot of people agree and get slightly triggered seeing these same untrustworthy statistics paraded around.
Classic SMBC
While “technically” true. We all know the average lifespan was brought down by a high infant mortality. So comparingbthat to when peopke retired is meaningless. That said, it dies seem worse because with more information we realize how much better it could be. 100 years ago, the average american had no idea how common slums were outside the US. And those that knew considered those slum people less than human. So what we have really done is expanded who is considered human, and who matters. That certainly does make it look worse.
Yeah, mean lifespan is meaningless if the distribution is bimodal. Median would be a more useful average.
100 years ago, the average american had no idea how common slums were outside the US.
This was and still is very true. The level of the poverty in places like that is astounding and beyond the experience of most anyone in a 1st world country. I grew up in America, in poverty of the level that my single mother was only eating what she could scrounge at work some years so she’d have enough to feed us kids. Yet when I deployed to Panama in the mid 90’s for a 2 month military operation, and had to operate in many of the rural areas of Panama during those missions, I had my eyes opened to what real 3rd world poverty looks like. The way I grew up would have been a huge improvement for many of the people I saw there. You can’t really understand it until you’ve seen it with your own eyes.
Also, significantly less dead babies increasing average lifespan is a very happy way to boost that number
*fewer dead babies
*significantly less dead baby
I think we can all agree to that.
Wealth inequality is possibly the highest it’s ever been in history.
I wouldn’t be surprised if food wasted (food that goes straight to the trash) nowadays is also at peak numbers, or close to.
During the Bolsonaro years (2019-2022), Brazil saw a drastic increase in extreme poverty, made worse by the pandemic. Poor people were literally scavenging carcasses for anything that could still be eaten. We’re still trying to recover.
Do not take any of those good things for granted, they can be very easily reverted by a small number of psychopath assholes.
Wealth inequality is higher now than it was back when most of us were serfs who barely owned the clothes on our backs while one family lived in a castle and owned the rest of us?
Believe it or not, even the richest monarchs didn’t have over a million serfs working directly under them. Even today there are many people who still barely own the clothes they wear
There’s more wealth being transferred in circulation than ever before
There’s more food being produced than ever before
Your points are invalid without the context we need better regulation and methods to prevent collapse and waste. We’re literally outgrowing by production over our knowledge.
Wealth being transferred is meaningless when it’s amongst the wealthy, and more food is also being wasted than ever before.
We’re at a point in human civilization where we should be able to provide more for EVERYONE while expecting them to work less, yet here I am one catastrophic car accident or unexpected massive medical bill away from telling my kids we’re homeless. But the very fact that, for now, I have a mortgage and my kids are getting a decent education and three square meals a day means I’m still way ahead of a shitload of people in my country, and I’m filthy fucking rich compared to people elsewhere in the world.
My wife and I work hard for our family, but I know for a fact that others work WAY harder. Since their labor is considered less valuable than mine they make WAY less than we do. The dumbest thing is that if society does implode, the guys working manual labor for peanuts will be more capable and provide more value than me, an asshole who sits on his ass all day fucking with Excel.
Our society is fucked.
There’s more wealth being transferred in circulation than ever before
Which, as lingh0e pointed, is meaningless since most of it is coming from and going to the wealthy.
There’s more food being produced than ever before
And yet, hunger is still an issue worldwide. What’s the point of producing, say, 100 tons of food if 40 tons go straight to the trash?
Your points are invalid without the context
What context? Inequality is rising and you can check that with a quick search for “countryname inequality index per year”. For the food, it’s probably harder to really assess how much of the production is wasted, but it’s a significant number.
we need better regulation and methods to prevent collapse and waste
Good luck doing that, as it hurts profits, and the profiteers will spend more money than you and me will ever make in our entire lives combined to fight said regulations.
Wealth inequality has nothing useful to say about quality of life for people.
It has. That inequality means that a small number of people can drive the price of certain items, such as housing, way above inflation, making it impossible for people who rely on their salaries to buy and own a home, or even manage to pay rent. Being forced to live farther and farther away from where you work, wasting precious time in transit to and back from work (or anywhere you need to be), just in order to have some money, reduces the quality of life.
There is enough money around to fix poverty in most places and still have rich people enjoying their luxurious lives. Inequality has a very direct impact in the quality of life of millions.
What’s the opposite of doom-posting? Because this is refreshing as hell.
Hope-posting?
Posting a bunch of context-free statistics without any citations is not what I’d call hope-posting.
There are hopeful trends in the world: the resurgence of unions, successful environmental protest, public opinion changing against police, etc. They inspire hope because they point to the possibility of a better world. Statistics like these just point to how bad the world used to be, and in contrast, how good the current world is. It’s a way of saying “be thankful for what you have”, a sentiment easily weaponized against progress and protest.
I think we can take a moment to be grateful for what we have while still recognizing we have further to go.
We’ve made progress this last century, and we’ll make progress this next one as well if we keep fighting for it.
Perhaps a hundred years hence, two people on the internet will be looking at how life is in the current year, comparing how much better they have it.
Two of these “trends in the world” are really just things in the US, mate.
I’m not so sure that the police one is US only, but point taken.
What
If someone has something to live for, they can overcome any obstacle. Just said a different way.
Yeah… I don’t get why it’s being downvoted - people are averse to overcoming adversity?
Yes they are! Many people’s identity is wrapped up in the idea of saving people who can’t save themselves. If you go around suggesting people have some power to save themselves, these people need to find a new identity.
Not really any way to overcome the adversity of the 10 generations that came before you polluting the world to the point of civilizational collapse. Nice quote though.
Where there is life, where there is Will, there is hope. We should already be extinct twice by now. And by all probability in the known Universe we should never have existed at all.
tfw an inspirational quote about overcoming the adversity in the world gets downvoted…
Hey, that’s from Twilight of the Idols!
Zork-posting? Or possibly Zorch-posting?
Barbie fashion designer posting
Jesus Christ this thread. The technicalities aren’t the point. You are allowed to find happiness where you can in an imperfect world that contains suffering. It doesn’t mean you’ll be complacent to injustice. Fighting against injustice can be done without thinking the world is hopeless dogshit. There’s satisfaction that can be justifiably had, through means other than smug superiority at knowing all the depressing truths of the world, or the sympathy of others for your problems. We feed ourselves so much rage and sadness via the internet, can we not have a palate-cleanser like this without chewing it up and spitting it out, and then going back to gorging on more?
The thingeis: the world is getting less free and inequality has been constantly rising in the last decades.
This Steven Pinker BS is advertising complacency, while we should agitate people to fight for a better world.
If you want to be optimistic, look around for the average kindness of everyday live inside communities. The FOSS community, unions, mutual aid in neighborhoods etc. This would lift you up and point in the direction where things could get better.
Well said!
Hey OP, this is a book about just that: https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Better/dp/1250107814
This is a website that goes along with it and has updated stats: https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness-book/32-improvements/
Basically everything is getting better, despite public opinion to the contrary. The one thing (as this thread is harping on) is climate change, and ya, that’s big, but it is good to acknowledge that most other things are changing for the better in most ways.
Holy shit, I thought you were kidding but this whole thread is just full of sad people.
If you like this post maybe read The Progress Paradox. It goes in much more detail than this meme, it then poses the question but then why aren’t we happy. Without giving answers it does point to possible paths. It’s a good book.
The extreme poverty one is laughable especially when criteria to define extreme poverty is ridiculous. Extreme poverty in places where you earn less than $1.90 but can still have subsistence farming and community doesn’t make sense - also if living in San Francisco and earning $2/day isn’t extreme poverty… I don’t know what is.
Poverty shouldn’t be tied to capital but to standards of living - that would be a completely different story.
If the only positive things you can come up with are lies and half-truths, maybe keep it to yourself.
The average American didn’t die at age 51. And, while the average life expectancy might have been 51 years, that’s a Spiders Georg moment.
The life expectancy was thrown off by all the child mortality. If you lived past 10 years, you were likely to live to 70.
Yep, and now there’s not a deluge of dead children dragging the average down, which is objectively pretty great
Look, I feel like “children dead before 10” is a pretty upsetting and relevant statistic.
Yeah if I had to choose how to bump up the life expectancy, reducing child mortality would definitely be my first choice.
Sure, but it’s not the same as 25 years old being mid-life.
I feel like you’re just excited to share a fact about a common misconception rather than actually paying attention to what’s being said. Infant mortality is still a bad thing. While it’s true folks lived about as long less infant mortality is still a net improvement.
I’m paying attention. I feel like you just want to point out that it’s a common misconception rather than engage with the fact that dying at 51 is very different from child mortality.
Correct; “average” and average can be different things.
Yeah, in particular the “average age of death” might be 51 if the average includes a lot of people who died as children. OTOH, the average person dying at 51 is fundamentally different in how you think of it.
Life expectancy at, is used by academics when relevant. Average at birth, adulthood and even once they’re over the hill have utility. Like identifying outliers.
Regardless, the average person is going to use average as a nebulas concept occasionally informed by science but hearsay and superstition on an average day.
*nebulous
Conservatives are trying to roll it back, don’t worry.
And the climate change will help them. They are basically a team just that one of them doesn’t know about the partnership and the other didn’t choose it…
The environmental problems are critical, though. And it’s what ultimately will decide the fate of our species. There is room for optimism in some aspects of our society, but that is not an indication that in the end everything will be alright.
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