I am not listening to media and I am not saying it can't get better (post-scarcity is not something I believe is impossible for instance) but you have to be very precise when you make these kind of statements as they are ignoring the reality for many people. Just a simple fact that children today are less likely to live a better life than their parents in the west is worth thinking about.
It might be an indication that yes life is improving globally but that does not mean it improving in a way that is proving this trend to continue.
Yes thats what the article says. What I am others are saying is that that's not the whole story. The living conditions are not getting better for everyone in some important ways that means something for whether this can continue.
There is nothing new in the fact that globally the world is getting better but that primarily means the developing countries are getting better not the developed ones where the trend is either stagnating or seem to be reversing.
On a very simplistic level, the article can be reduced to three statements:
1) A minority of people today believe that life is getting better for humanity
2) Between 18XX and today, life improved (at least as measured by the examples given)
3) There are challenges facing humanity for the future and there is no guarantee that life will continue getting better
I'm not disputing any of the points or data sets in the article, nor am I disagreeing with the author. I am simply disappointed that at an article which barely touches on the issue of whether life is currently improving or not is misleadingly titled 'Life is getting better for humanity'.
Exactly. The article claims that the world is "better" because we have improved child mortality rates. They state (correctly) that the improvement is a consequence of alleviating poverty and improving material living conditions. But how did we DO that? Did we just put our heads down and chant "economic growth for everyone"?!
No. This growth was, and will continue to be, driven by industrial capital, mining, and fossil fuels. How are children born today going to raise grandchildren in the likely decline of those advantages? And there must be a discussion of the costs: pollution, climate change, resource depletion, species extinction, and myriad other social and environmental externalities.
Are things really "better" if more kids are born... into an unsustainable system? I think the younger generation today is ALREADY seeing the cracks, getting less from the system while paying higher costs to buy in. The energy-blind adherence to growth at all costs is a philosophy that does a disservice not just other species on earth, but future humans as well.
It's sad how many comments dismiss the remarkable data, e.g. by commenting that the article "only" shows that average living conditions have improved, as if that is an argument against the conclusion that global living conditions have been continuously improving (and likely to continue if the trend continues).
The data shows that for all the selected metrics global living standards have improved, regardless of wealth distribution etc. For example, fewer children are dying today than in 1800 or 1960:
- a child born in 1800 had a 43.3% probability of dying before their fifth birthday
- in 1960 the probability was 18.5%
- in 2015 the probability was 4.25%
The 1800 estimate is astonishing. Almost half the children born in 1800 would probably have died by 1805. To me even the 1960 mortality rate is astonishing. Almost a fifth of all children born in 1960 would probably have died by 1965.
An even bigger improvement can be seen in extreme poverty (defined as living on $1.9 a day adjusted for inflation and price differences between countries):
- in 1820 94% of the global population lived in extreme poverty
- in 1960 64% lived in extreme poverty
- in 2015 only 9.6% lived in extreme poverty
I cannot see how such statistics can be interpreted as anything other than extraordinarily positive, and I just hope the trend continues.
I understand, believe me. There's still a lot of suffering and misery in the world. We have far to go.
But there has been a pretty clear increase in standard of living, even if you consider that some people have long commutes in climate-controlled vehicles with comfortable seats and media devices at their fingertips, on their way to jobs where they earn a PPP-adjusted income that's historically and globally very high.
Think of the global decreases over the past century in starvation, disease, infant mortality, maternal mortality, illiteracy, accidental death, etc.
Things aren't perfect because they'll never be perfect, but that doesn't mean we haven't made progress overall.
At the very least, evidence demonstrating a persistent, long-term trend would seem to be evidence in favor of the trend applying to the current day. Especially when the main thing driving people's perception that life is _not_ getting better seems to be media reporting that fails to focus on the big picture. In other words, the world could be improving while (of course) human lives are partly bad. Focusing on the bad --which can always be found -- and not on the overall general trend skews our perception about whether and how things are changing.
Of course, there could be countervailing reasons (and evidence) that the general trend does not hold currently, like the suggestion that (a) distribution of benefits has become more uneven and (b) this uneven distribution may make things worse overall than they were before the benefits existed in the first place.
There are lots of ways people could try to provide evidence that the general trend somehow no longer applies. But I think the linked article points out: this sort of evidence is not what media is giving. News media points out that something is bad, sure, but it fails to place it in broader context. The broader context is one of general slow improvement over long periods of time, which is something that we don't get from the news; news media likes to focus on today's bad things, long general trends are not "newsworthy".
Also, as the article suggests, even today's positive evidence for the general trend is not newsworthy, in part because it is so pervasive and boring (e.g., every day 130,000 fewer people are living in extreme poverty). Something that happens regularly every day is not "news". (Or maybe the 130k fewer people thing is not news mostly because it's a good thing. The rate of murders and/or car accidents can be fairly stable, but people seem to have an appetite for hearing about each of these bad things as it happens, so that's what news reports.)
It is an argument. Life expectancy, infant mortality, access to food and housing, education and technology have never been higher. These are all good outcomes. Things are even getting better in developing countries on these measures. The only places where this is not happening is where superstition causes people to live under autocratic regimes that use imaginary sky people to control the population through fear and miseducation.
This is inescapable fact. Peoples lives in aggregate are getting better. That it is irritating to people pushing the opposite view is understandable, but doesn't invalidate the data. You can't just hand-wave it way and say 'doesn't matter'. You can't say it's not a valid argument because it 'might end' - which is in itself a poor argument.
It does matter. Life is getting better for a very large group of people, and that's good.
It's amazing how many people don't get that these three things can, and are, true at the same time.
Yes, things are so much better: child mortality keeps falling, people in extreme poverty have (slowly) fallen, wars are less frequent.
Yes, things are awful: climate catastrophe is incoming, income inequality is pushing gilded age levels, democracy has been backsliding for the past 20 years, there are more slaves today that at any point in history.
Yes, things can be better: we have not reached the end-stage in political and economic development, and we will move to something better than neoliberal capitalism, we can tackle climate change with massive concerted action.
You can absolutely try and make things better, but most people have very little perspective. Countless times I’ve seen people say things about how they’d never bring a child into the world because of how bad things are now. They mean global warming, Donald Trump, or whatever happens to be in the current news cycle.
We’re living in the very best time to be human so far. It wasn’t long ago that the world was living under the constant threat of global nuclear annihilation, before that two world wars, before that constant illness, famines, and other wars, etc. Long before that, just struggling to get enough food and shelter to survive.
The same goes for current working conditions/life. Some things are worse than 20 years ago but some are better.
Everything today is better then yesterday and tomorrow everything will be better then today (on average on a global a scale for all the issues you pointed out). Progress is being made all the time. But the news/media mostly just reports the failings/problems/issues (sells better) so it feels like everything is getting worse.
(There are some looming issues on the horizon like climate change etc. which might change this course in the future.)
things are still getting better. the presence of bad things doesn't mean you can ignore a huge upswing in living standards all over a country of a billion+ people.
My outlook is that the world certainly isn't getting better any time soon. It'll get a lot worse first. And who knows how long that will take. And I want to be young enough to enjoy time with my kids when they're adults. The complications and difficulties are worth it, I figure.
I say this as an American glossing through this comment thread though, so I don't know your circumstances.
People are steadily getting out of poverty [1], living longer [2], can afford more and more education [3]. Things like access to drinking water [4] and electricity [5] are also improving.
So, yes, world in theese important ways is better than ever before now. And imagining future is needed to continue making it better.
Just take a look at the massive rise in quality of life across the world. Your alarmist post is bunk. Life is getting better for everyone all the time.
I mean, the conclusion that things are better than people think is based entirely on measurements that the authors of the study decide represent "progress". It's true that some gender and racial inequalities have lessened slightly, but many people including myself would say they should be eliminated entirely. The authors are right that some health indicators like teen pregnancy for Americans have improved, but overall life expectancy for Americans has fallen for several years in a row now. The authors are right that incarceration rates have fallen slightly, but America still has by far the largest prison system in the world.
I do think in many ways things are getting worse. The American economic system becomes more openly exploitative by the day, and oligarchs openly flaunt their power while we are largely powerless to stop them. There is very little accountability for powerful companies that break the law (see something like Hertz Rental Cars getting people arrested with false reports of stolen cars), and income inequality in America is growing from it's already staggering heights.
The comparison for "are things getting better" shouldn't be a baseline of "things used to be even more terrible and now they are slightly less so", it should be "are we making things better at the rate that we should be", and I think the answer to the latter is clearly no.
That said I'm an optimist because my left wing politics demand it of me. A better world is certainly possible.
EDIT: this article doesn't mention climate change at all does it lol. The big looming thing that could ruin the next generation's lives entirely.
So I can't complain that the train is late because somewhere in the world other people don't even have trains?
I think you missed the point I was trying to make.
My point was simply that it's a not very controversial that the living conditions around the world are getting better, thats great.
But it does not mean that it's getting better for everyone and especially in the developed countries it's actually going the other way which is relevant to discuss as this might mean that things can't continue getting better.
The point of the article is that objectively the world, as a whole, is getting better, and in some cases improving quite dramatically. Personally, I don't think the survey quoted in the opening paragraph is really that interesting - it's not the least bit surprising that people replied subjectively rather than objectively.
My point about the Chinese experience being more pertinent was regarding these objective measures not how people replied subjectively to a survey question. It's not that the Chinese experience is pertinent to someone in US or France, but that recent Chinese economic development has been more pertinent to whether or not the world has objectively gotten better.
In the future we are also going to see far more reductions in poverty and child mortality in countries like India and China than in the USA, because the USA is so much wealthier. Additionally, if we want to understand how to improve the world in the future, I believe it's more important to look at countries that have recently improved standards of living, like China, rather than countries like the USA that experienced their most significant improvements in standards of living before the 1960s.
It might be an indication that yes life is improving globally but that does not mean it improving in a way that is proving this trend to continue.
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