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 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.
Over the last 20 years, the proportion of people living in extreme poverty has almost been cut in half
If you quote this people will applaud gleefully, but if you ask “Which countries have been the most successful at eliminating poverty” you get called a bot.
Of course it’s mostly going to be in Asia and Africa since that’s where the largest concentration of people in extreme poverty was.
There’s no shortage of poverty in Latin America and Africa. However, the states that outperform their peers tend to be the ones westerners hate. Bolivia, South Africa, Burkina Faso…
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”.
Oh, look, a bastardization of statistics to defend the status quo wrapped up in “positivity” bullshit so if you call out their nonsense, you look like an asshole.
There’s a special place in hell for people like @Godric.
Try using the logic OP is espousing and applying it to other things which that logic has been employed to defend the status quo and keep certain people on top of society.
We can take the most obvious example, black people in America. At every single turn black people in America have been told to praise the freedoms they’ve been given by their slave masters then later by white people. We heard this same logic in the summer of 2020, literally 3 years ago, when black people were protesting, “we’ve come so far since the days of the past, start being grateful and positive.” So, saying that there’s more that needs to be done, but it’s “positivity” that they’ve been given some more rights is pathetic.
All this type of logic and people like you are doing is shutting down people, attacking the moral wrongs and questioning the status quo of society, who are fighting for a better world. Shame on all you.
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 expectancyat, 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.
I have noticed lately people on the Internet starting sentences more with “Look.” Is it just me or is this becoming more of a trend? (Not trying to judge or anything, just wondering if I am going crazy)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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). ourworldindata.org/economic-inequality
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.
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.
People are saying these aren’t even true which I believe, but also what this does not take into account is that the ability to take care of humanity has expanded far, far more than we’re allowing to actually happen. And if the right wing has anything to say about it, we’ll do even less caring for our people. We could easily solve world hunger with today’s wealth but instead we have people that could burn a million dollars a day and still be rich for many years
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