3 facts that should make you feel a little better

[dead0man]

link
1. Since 1960, child deaths have plummeted from 20 million a year to 6 million a year.

-One key reason why we struggle to see progress in the world today is that we do not know how very bad the past was.  Both are true at the same time: The world is much better than in the past and it is still awful.  To bring this to mind I need to know both statistics: When someone says we can sit back and relax because the world is in a much better place, I point out that 11 children are still dying every minute. We cannot accept the world as it is today. And when I feel hopeless in the face of this tragedy, I remember that we reduced annual child deaths from 20 million to 5.6 million in the last fifty years.

2. Since 1960, the fertility rate has fallen by half.

-Improvements in conditions for women and the health of children have driven a rapid reduction in fertility rates across the world. In fact, the global fertility rate has halved in the last 50 years, from more than 5 children per woman to fewer than 2.5 children. The world population growth rate has also halved in the last 50 years and is just above 1 percent.

3. 137,000 people escaped extreme poverty every day between 1990 and 2015.

-In 1990, 1.86 billion people were living on less than 1.90 international-$ per day—more than every third person in the world. Twenty-five years later, the number of people living in extreme poverty has more than halved to 706 million, every tenth person.

[dead0man]

and another one you can ignore

Global life expectancy at birth rose over 38% between 1985 and 2015, from 52 years to 72 years.

[Starry Eyed Jagaloon]

Yes, people, the world is improving. Public health, global affluence, and quality of life have never been better in all of history.

(Neoliberalism Works)

[EPG]

Vast majority of these good news stats we hear from Roslingites-Pinkerites are due to one country, China, abandoning psychotic revolutionary Communism and becoming market-oriented and more liberal (not much more). Then some nearby countries enjoyed the side-benefits. But the median USA/European voter matters more for global policy.

[dead0man]

Vast majority of these good news stats we hear from Roslingites-Pinkerites are due to one country, China, abandoning psychotic revolutionary Communism and becoming market-oriented and more liberal (not much more). Then some nearby countries enjoyed the side-benefits. But the median USA/European voter matters more for global policy.

there has been a lot of improvement in all of the third world, not just China.  India and much of Africa (with some exceptions) are doing better too.

[Antonio the Sixth]

No one should feel better until those figures (except fertility, again, which really doesn't belong in the same category as the other two) actually fall to zero.

[dead0man]

There is a possible world where kids just can't die?  Does everybody stay home and live in a bubble?

[kcguy]

Stop wasting your breath, dead0man.  People are addicted to pessimism.  I see that with my mom, who talks about how bad crime is getting, when it's actually at its lowest levels in decades.

In reality,

• People don't care that the number of people worldwide living on $1.90/day (today's dollars) has dropped from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 710 million in 2015.
• People don't care that in 2015 Africa went a full year without a polio case or that the average life expectancy there is above 60 for the first time ever.
• People don't care that with the FARC truce, there are currently no wars in the Western Hemisphere.
• People don't care that the average number of people killed by NYPD police has dropped from 90 per year in the 1970s to 8 in 2015.
• People don't care that the number of "stage 1" smog days in Los Angeles went from 125 per year in the 1970's to less than one per year now.
• People don't care that the average Frenchman was more likely to die in a terrorist attack in the 1970s or 1980s than they are the current decade, even including the attacks of 2015 and 2016.
• People don't care that through the coordinated action of governments around the world, the ozone hole is shrinking.  (You young people have probably never heard of the ozone hole, but it was the big environmental bugaboo when I was your age.)

In all of these, I said "don't care", but "don't believe" might be more accurate.  And, dead0man, if you can somehow convince people that things aren't actually getting worse, then they'll say that we should be enraged that things haven't improved more or that the improvements have been going to "not our kind of people".

And they always seem to be so smug about their short-sightedness.  Their late-19th-century equivalents were probably extrapolating the extant data and bemoaning that New York City was about to be overrun by horses and that the end was nigh^*, when they completely failed to foresee the new technology of the automobile.  (And even then, there are probably some current-day apocalypse fetishists who think that car emissions are somehow a worse health risk than streets full of horse feces being constantly kicked up into the atmosphere.)

These pessimists are the reason Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders did so well in 2016, because the pessimists wanted politicians who can take any statistic and put the worst spin on it.  Politicians were able to center campaigns around manufacturing jobs disappearing, as if that meant an end to American manufacturing altogether.  But guess what.  In 1900, 85% of jobs were in agriculture, while today it's down to 2%.  No one says that meant an end to American agriculture.

And politicians can find plenty of voters who complain that they somehow can't afford even to live on today's prices, when food and clothing costs have dropped from 59% of American incomes in 1900 to 21% in 2001.  (It's not as if I don't understand the fear of losing a job.  I worked for a company once of 200 people that laid off 25 in a single day.  I work for a company now that's experimenting with outsourcing some of our work to India.  If I lose my job again, I'll move on, like I've moved on from other job losses in the past.  And yes, I do realize how lucky I am to good health and a reasonably good education.  But I'm also resilient enough not to wallow in the times when things have gone bad for me.)

I get so frustrated by how much pessimism there is out there, especially when it seems so unwarranted based on actual metrics.  It's not that I'm opposed to movements that want to change things--in fact, I'm a strong believer, for example, in California's energy conservation targets, but probably because I come at them from a strong "waste not, want not" perspective--but I despise movements that don't recognize how much we've achieved already.

Sorry for the rant.  (Or maybe not.  People who talk about how much better things were in "the old days" really push my buttons, and I see a lot of the comments above as being a flip side of the same coin.)  As it is, I'm about to finish a book, It's Better Than It Looks, that addresses this topic head-on, so I'm very much on board with the sentiments dead0man was expressing in his original post.


^*I didn't intend this, but after typing this, I realized that since I was talking about horses, I probably should have said, "The end is neigh."

[Antonio the Sixth]

There is a possible world where kids just can't die?  Does everybody stay home and live in a bubble?

That's irrelevant to my point.

[dead0man]

That's irrelevant to my point.

You said no one should feel better until zero children die, how is what I said not relevant to that bit of insanity?

[parochial boy]

Stop wasting your breath, dead0man.  People are addicted to pessimism.  I see that with my mom, who talks about how bad crime is getting, when it's actually at its lowest levels in decades.

In reality,

• People don't care that the number of people worldwide living on $1.90/day (today's dollars) has dropped from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 710 million in 2015.
• People don't care that in 2015 Africa went a full year without a polio case or that the average life expectancy there is above 60 for the first time ever.
• People don't care that with the FARC truce, there are currently no wars in the Western Hemisphere.
• People don't care that the average number of people killed by NYPD police has dropped from 90 per year in the 1970s to 8 in 2015.
• People don't care that the number of "stage 1" smog days in Los Angeles went from 125 per year in the 1970's to less than one per year now.
• People don't care that the average Frenchman was more likely to die in a terrorist attack in the 1970s or 1980s than they are the current decade, even including the attacks of 2015 and 2016.
• People don't care that through the coordinated action of governments around the world, the ozone hole is shrinking.  (You young people have probably never heard of the ozone hole, but it was the big environmental bugaboo when I was your age.)

In all of these, I said "don't care", but "don't believe" might be more accurate.  And, dead0man, if you can somehow convince people that things aren't actually getting worse, then they'll say that we should be enraged that things haven't improved more or that the improvements have been going to "not our kind of people".

And they always seem to be so smug about their short-sightedness.  Their late-19th-century equivalents were probably extrapolating the extant data and bemoaning that New York City was about to be overrun by horses and that the end was nigh^*, when they completely failed to foresee the new technology of the automobile.  (And even then, there are probably some current-day apocalypse fetishists who think that car emissions are somehow a worse health risk than streets full of horse feces being constantly kicked up into the atmosphere.)

These pessimists are the reason Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders did so well in 2016, because the pessimists wanted politicians who can take any statistic and put the worst spin on it.  Politicians were able to center campaigns around manufacturing jobs disappearing, as if that meant an end to American manufacturing altogether.  But guess what.  In 1900, 85% of jobs were in agriculture, while today it's down to 2%.  No one says that meant an end to American agriculture.

And politicians can find plenty of voters who complain that they somehow can't afford even to live on today's prices, when food and clothing costs have dropped from 59% of American incomes in 1900 to 21% in 2001.  (It's not as if I don't understand the fear of losing a job.  I worked for a company once of 200 people that laid off 25 in a single day.  I work for a company now that's experimenting with outsourcing some of our work to India.  If I lose my job again, I'll move on, like I've moved on from other job losses in the past.  And yes, I do realize how lucky I am to good health and a reasonably good education.  But I'm also resilient enough not to wallow in the times when things have gone bad for me.)

I get so frustrated by how much pessimism there is out there, especially when it seems so unwarranted based on actual metrics.  It's not that I'm opposed to movements that want to change things--in fact, I'm a strong believer, for example, in California's energy conservation targets, but probably because I come at them from a strong "waste not, want not" perspective--but I despise movements that don't recognize how much we've achieved already.

Sorry for the rant.  (Or maybe not.  People who talk about how much better things were in "the old days" really push my buttons, and I see a lot of the comments above as being a flip side of the same coin.)  As it is, I'm about to finish a book, It's Better Than It Looks, that addresses this topic head-on, so I'm very much on board with the sentiments dead0man was expressing in his original post.


^*I didn't intend this, but after typing this, I realized that since I was talking about horses, I probably should have said, "The end is neigh."

I mean, I broadly agree with dead0 that the economic and social development in much of the developing world over the last couple of decades is a real achievement to be celebrated; but at the same time, I think a lot of this post is cherry picked and ignoring alot of the experiences that people are having.

I mean, yes, it is unlikely that automation is going to make the majority of humanity obsolete - there have been technological disruptions before, and none led to permanent chronic unemployment. However, it is pretty heartless to ignore the fact that automation will lead to some pretty hevy duty disruption, that could have an enourmous human impact, and that we don't, can't, know how long this will last. So celebrating it is some great human progress, at the same time as rapidly increasing inequalities of wealth and power, seems pretty naive.

Add in to that the fact that there have been several developments over the last few decades that have, if not out and out made life worse for people in the, at least support the idea that some form of assumed social contract has been broken.

For instance, we live in the era of the most extreme concentrations of wealth in over 100 years, which goes hand in hand with a decline in social mobility that is destroying the idea that if you work hard you will get what you deserve.

Likewise, we are seeing wage stagnation, increased job and social precarity - and frankly the argument that it is all alright because we can buy cheap consumer items doesn't hold up. Owning an iPhone really doesn't make up to the disruption to people's lives that comes from insecurity, worries about the your kids' future, about the rent, about being able to hold on to a job. it doesn't make up for seeing the assumptions that you had about your life dissapear into thin air; and for the inrceasing number of increasingly vulnerable people at the bottom of society, doesn't make up for the absence of support networks that used to exist.

[Antonio the Sixth]

That's irrelevant to my point.

You said no one should feel better until zero children die, how is what I said not relevant to that bit of insanity?

Each and every child death is a tragedy. If you can feel satisfied about a world when this happens, you have a serious lack of empathy.

[dead0man]

Of course every time a kid dies it's a tragedy, but that doesn't mean every other human should be always and forever sad.  That is insane and I'm pretty sure you don't live your life that way.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Of course every time a kid dies it's a tragedy, but that doesn't mean every other human should be always and forever sad.  That is insane and I'm pretty sure you don't live your life that way.

So what? That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to.

[dead0man]

Of course every time a kid dies it's a tragedy, but that doesn't mean every other human should be always and forever sad.  That is insane and I'm pretty sure you don't live your life that way.

So what? That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to.

<throws hands up in the air and walks away>

[EPG]

It's not pessimistic beliefs about global aggregate human well-being, but simply that

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The average person cares about the well-being of the following people in the following order: his or her children, immediate family, himself or herself, often the local community and sometimes the nation as a whole. If those people are not getting richer, expect pessimistic global politics.