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
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.
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
I guess that’s one way to stop poverty
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Probably…
The real answer is probably opening to state controled capitalism and globalization, becoming the factory of the world for a couple of decades.
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.
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.
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.”
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lol guess it’s possible to believe anything
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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.
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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.
How is the last one debunked?
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.
Holy shit, I thought you were kidding but this whole thread is just full of sad people.
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.
In the US every single one of those indicators is going the other way. It’s only by looking globally that you can say that.
Well fuck the rest of the world, amirite? U S A! U S A! U S A!
US income inequality plummeted under Roosevelt (inequality coefficient: 0.59 - 0.47) and began its steady climb under Regan. It leveled out in 2012 under Obama (0.58) and had a slight dip (0.58 - 0.57 - 0.58) in 2020 under Trump. We’re almost back to where we started when Roosevelt took measures to help. The USA has, however consistently been well below the world average for income inequality (0.71- 0.66). https://ourworldindata.org/economic-inequality
Infant/Child mortality rate hasn’t raised anywhere since 1960 and is lower everywhere than it was in 1950, and yes the USA is still winning:
https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality
Extreme poverty is trending downward faster in the US than the world average:
https://ourworldindata.org/poverty
Thank you for this research, it gives great perspective.
The wealth gap between the US and citizens of dirt-poor nations is insane. People live on less in a day than I make in a few minutes. I don’t mind losing a little to help bring others up, and, since it’s not zero-sum, it ends up being a larger plus overall than the minus for us.
If that’s where it was going I wouldn’t mind but researchers have tracked the missing wages and extra profits to the 1 percent.
When you think about what people live on in other countries you also have to think about what things cost around them. An apple, for example, is far cheaper for them to buy. That said there are still people in poverty even with that in mind and they should be helped. But that’s not what’s causing the inequality gap in western countries and it’s far overblown as an argument to make Westerners ashamed to complain while they are exploited by the extremely wealthy.
The gap isn’t necessarily bad. It’s the things that cause it (and that the rising tide isn’t lifting all boats) that’s the problem.
This gap very much is. It’s way too much for any sustainable society.
Be happy the silent generation won some serious gains that the boomers, X, and millennials are steadily eroding for profit?
No thanks. That’s called complacency.
Celebrating and taking pride in what has been achieved is part of what motivates people to defend it. Doomposting online does nothing to motivate people and merely depresses them.
Every inch of progress has been won through a combination of a rhetoric of hope for what could be achieved, and a recognition of the shortcomings of the current system. Having the former without the latter leads to complacency, but having the latter without the former leads to apathy and despair.
Considering that most progress in the last few hundred years has been fought for (sometimes violently), like weekends, the 8 hour day, etc. kinda proves you wrong.
And it was fought for by people who had hope for what could be achieved, and crucially used that to unite working people.
I’m not arguing for complacency; I’m arguing that labour movements work best when they are pushing for clearly defined goals (like an 8 hour work week), and the labour movement should honour those that gave their lives for the cause in those doomed strikes at Homestead, Blair Mountain, or Pullman.
Great, I agree! … But unfortunately, OP used data fragments that IMHO promote complacency (i.e. general “progress”) instead of celebrating victories of social movements.
Celebrating the achievements made in the past while obliterating them in the present is nothing more than white washing the problems people face. Like the record numbers of homeless seniors.
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?
Yes. Modernity made it a lot easier to create wealth out of thin air. However most of the worlds lowest class have it better in pretty much every metric than that family.
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That’s funny, cause wealth was also measured like this in the GDR.
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
Yeah actually. It wasn’t until industrialization that work hours and pay got so bad. Most commoners in the middle ages did just fine on what we would consider to be a half day of work and suffered for things out of human control like droughts.
Not that Feudalism was a better system, just more that people were more scarce, less replaceable, and automation was zero.
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 is possibly the highest it’s ever been in history.
What does this mean and why is it a problem?
Yes there are more rich people now with more money than poor people. But they don’t exactly have the power of Mansa Musa.
Also, I’d rather my neighbor be a billionaire and me be a thousandaire, than my neighbor be a thousandaire and me be a negativeair
What does this mean and why is it a problem?
It means that the cake is growing, but your share is getting smaller. Companies declare record profits and celebrate by mass firing people. People with big investments are never at risk of losing money due to inflation. Meanwhile, workers’ salaries are in a constant struggle against inflation and cost of living.
There’s huge amounts of money circulating around, but most of it ends up in the pockets of very few people. To ensure that even more money ends up in their pockets, they invest in new venues that will get more of your money for themselves. Because a very small number of people can simply buy up “everything”, and usually do so for pure speculation, prices rise faster than your salary. Rent and home prices keep going up because of this, people that actually want and need a home don’t have the means to buy them, but a single asshole with money can buy a lot of stuff, drive up prices and fuck everyone who can’t pay.
If you don’t see a problem with wealth getting more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer hands as time passes, you probably want few people to effectively control the world.
But they don’t exactly have the power of Mansa Musa.
They do. Anyone with over 100 million dollars laying around could easily crash some local economies, maybe not in the USA, but definitely in a number of developing countries’ cities.
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.
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.
Also, significantly less dead babies increasing average lifespan is a very happy way to boost that number
*fewer dead babies
*significantly less dead baby
The less/fewer distinction is arbitrary Victorian bullshit flying directly in the face of how English is used. The only point of it was to try and make English more like Latin and allow aristocrats who spoke Latin to look down on those without expensive private education.
Please dont perpetuate it.
I think we can all agree to that.
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.
Every one of which we are backsliding on. We should be alarmed.
This meme effectively expired in 2019. COVID reversed out the direction on all of it. About the only thing we haven’t stopped backsliding on is “shareholder value”.
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.
Idk about the entire world, but at least here in Europe police cruelty is not really an issue at all
Since when?!
Since when it isn’t an issue? Idk, has it ever been one?
What
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Yeah… I don’t get why it’s being downvoted - people are averse to overcoming adversity?
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
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.
Don’t worry the Anti-Vax movement is looking to bring back those numbers!
Hooray! :(
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.
Yeah if I had to choose how to bump up the life expectancy, reducing child mortality would definitely be my first choice.
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
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If the only positive things you can come up with are lies and half-truths, maybe keep it to yourself.
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…
I think the point of this post is not to hide the problems we face. More that the struggle against them is not fruitless.
I don’t criticise the post, I like it a lot.
With students I like to use Gapminder as an example in statistics. And there sometimes I get the same reaction you see here in the comment section. Some people feel if you are showing the gains that means you want to stop improvement or that you don’t take the struggles of people seriously.
I have no idea about psychology, so I don’t know what’s the reason.
The opposite is true, also. If you don’t say something 100 % positive, people tend to assume you are in opposition. ;)
Refreshing to see this instead of the usual screeching here on lemmy. I really need to stop looking at 99% of this bullshit on here.
Atleast for 2 minutes I believed the average quality of content will not go to the shitter like reddit.
What’s the 99% of this site that is bs to you? And why are you hanging around if it’s that terrible? Genuinely asking.
99% of lemmy is: bashing and memeing rich, companies, conservatives. Posting outrage and celeb articles. Honestly these issues are not even on my mind a fraction as much as it is for most guys here.
Im mainly hanging around for my preferred topics to reach a critical level so that it will be enjoyable.
As of right now, even main lemmy sites like technology is not even about technology but this bullshit “how Musk fucked over twitter at this moment”. And look at that. Wasnt this trend taken 1:1 from reddit. I cant clean up properly because this spam keeps leaking into my feed. I cant subscribe to my only preferred communities as they are too small.
… So it’s a lefty/progressive space and you don’t like it, so you claim that the platform is derangedor some shit.
What do you think would happen on a platform where most people are just fed up with late-stage capitalist enshittification?
I grant you the being left/progressive part, but I never said a word about that being an issue did I. I am heavily left leaning if you want to put a badge on it, but I have nothing to do with character assasination attempts and bashing certain people all day. That is just shitty conduct. Celeb news level of bullshittery.
I never encountered any character assassination attempts. At least not on the memes community (where you commented, after all).
As I said: people being fed up with late stage capitalism is a valid reason for class conscious comedy.
sounds like you need an echo chamber, friend! Truthsocial sounds more up your alley
Does a site like that have proper communities for things like spirituality, Zen, audio equipment and drugs?
I think its pretty self explanatory that we are already in an echo chamber since I never fucking said anything about what my political beliefs are. The current lemmy community is kind of okay to keep up with the events in the world, but still dogshit. And I want to look at the conservative bullshittery even less.
I have high standards.
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That never worked out for me. People feel attacked regardless. They might not comment (in any meaningful way) as they have no way of reflecting on my argument, but they still downvote.
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Nonsense. Don’t read something that was never said. Really simple. If you need to bring it up, formulate a passive, neutral question.
Dude, you’re in a meme community. Just don’t come here if it’s too leftie for you.
As if memes need to be political, no, they don’t.
They don’t need to be. But some of them inevitably will be. 🙄
Truth Social is technically a Mastodon instance! lol
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.
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.
