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 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.
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.
Since their labor is considered less valuable than mine they make WAY less than we do
This is such a sad realization. As a software engineer I didn’t really do anything to deserve the income. I work less hard than a lot of people and I’m valued more, for the sole reason that the computer can scale in a way a hammer cannot. I’m here largely because my parents went to college and encouraged me as a child to be an engineer. I didn’t earn any of this.
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 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.
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.
He didn’t decide? He said his internet service couldn’t be used for a strike at that time. Not defending him, but it’s not like he has any authority over then, he just had authority over the assets he controls.
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.
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.
I don’t really care about any of that. All that matters is that I’m constantly having to fight to keep wfh, it’s impossible to get health issues diagnosed and I just keep wasting hundreds of dollars on trying, I’ve resigned myself to staying untreated for adhd and whatever else, I am sick of having to work a job where I need to interact with people, and all the foods I enjoy the most make me incredibly sick and I’m sure are gonna kill me one day. If I had a choice I wouldn’t have been born. I am very lucky, I have no money problems, didn’t have to buy my house, have a good long term stable relationship, not having to deal with having had kids, quiet neighborhood with no crime… but things should be a lot better than this. People can shove their head in the sand and pretend things are not going to end very badly for humankind and I personally don’t care. I live my life and enjoy what I like and either I’ll be dead or will witness the glorious end of humanity. I just hope my AC keeps up with climate change lol!
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…
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. ;)
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 statista.com/…/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.
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.
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.
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.
I do beg your pardon, it was Georgian not Victorian era when this nonsense was dreamed up for no reason other than preference for trying to cram Latin-esque cases into english.
The very notion of a neat distinction between fewer and less according to whether the noun is countable or not is a myth. It was invented out of whole cloth by an ill- informed 18th-century pedant called Robert Baker in his book Reflections on the English Language (1770). He proposed this distinction not as a hard-and-fast rule of grammar, moreover, but as a tentative suggestion with caveats (“I should think . . . it appears to me . . . ”) that you won’t find in modern style guides.
The wiki article on it notes that
The Cambridge Guide to English Usage notes that the “pressure to substitute fewer for less seems to have developed out of all proportion to the ambiguity it may provide in noun phrases like less promising results”. It describes conformance with this pressure as a shibboleth and the choice “between the more formal fewer and the more spontaneous less” as a stylistic choice.
i.e. it is a shibboleth for saying “I am educated unlike you uncultured lot who use natural sounding language”
You cant say “the worst” when talking about an uncountable group, you have to say “the least good” because I prefer that and it makes me sound smart by correcting you. Apparently that is sufficient for it to be understanding language and for you to be wrong.
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.
If you like this post maybe read The Progress Paradox. It goes in much more detail than this meme, it then poses the question but then why aren’t we happy. Without giving answers it does point to possible paths. It’s a good book.
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