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!

    • SeabassDan@lemmy.world
      85·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Scubus@sh.itjust.works
        14·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • Guildo@feddit.de
      48·
      1 year ago

      besides this, China did a huge job on getting people out of poverty - if you like or not

      • Nobsi@feddit.de
        6·
        1 year ago

        What? How did china get people out of poverty?

        Edit: They didnt. After a long journey we found out that china is boasting about how all chinese citizens are now above 1 dollar a day aka. EXTREME poverty(in 2011) Aparrently this is an achievement and not incredibly sad.

        Also Guildo is a CCP Shill.

          • Nobsi@feddit.de
            4·
            1 year ago

            Not what Guildo guy was going for but yes, horrible thing and that did improve ehm… statistics.

              • Nobsi@feddit.de
                4·
                1 year ago

                " 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.

                • Guildo@feddit.de
                  6·
                  1 year ago

                  You’re talking all the time like China is still a third world country. You have to decide.

                  • Nobsi@feddit.de
                    4·
                    1 year ago

                    No i am not. I literally said it isnt in 3 of my answers to you. Do you know how to read? Do you want me to communicate in Chinese with you?

            • Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world
              5·
              1 year ago

              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.

        • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
          2·
          1 year ago

          The real answer is probably opening to state controled capitalism and globalization, becoming the factory of the world for a couple of decades.

          • Nobsi@feddit.de
            2·
            1 year ago

            And reversing most of the things that mao did.
            He killed over 50 million people and caused a braindrain in china that no following leader has managed to fix. The fact that china got everyone over the extreme poverty line in 2020 is sad. A marketleader like china shouldnt have anyone in extreme poverty.

          • Calavera@lemm.ee
            4·
            1 year ago

            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

            • Guildo@feddit.de
              2·
              1 year ago

              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.

    • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      13·
      1 year ago

      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.