> To avoid portraying the world in a static way, we have to start 200 years ago, before the time when living conditions really changed dramatically.
What a bizarre and (unintentionally?) result-biasing statement.
Picking 200 years ago is literally choosing what may be the lowest point in global living standards for a millennia -- early industrialization and colonialism had each radically shocked the shape of the societies touched by them, breaking stable, comfortable, familiar lifestyle and community traditions in a race for abstract economic development with little concern for exploitation or local consequence.
Maybe everybody is better off now than they were 200 years ago, but most individuals in the world were much worse off 200 years ago than they were 200 years before that, so the discussion is quite complicated and an analysis like this doesn't tell you that we're doing the best thing now, just that we're seemingly doing much better than when we first really fucked it all up.
> but most individuals in the world were much worse off 200 years ago than they were 200 years before that
I am extremely suspicious of this claim, and would like to see some kind of proof.
Most people do not understand just how bad life as a low-productivity subsistence farmer was, and in 1600, that describes approximately everyone. Agricultural productivity steadily rose in the early modern period, and this resulted in a rise in the standard of living.
What is problematic about the poverty measure in the TFA is that it is based on monetary exchange.
In the past, a lot of value was not based on actually buying things in the market. People grew food, or exchanged things within families or communities via non-monetary measures. Today, almost all value is exchanged monetarily. The poverty graph, at least at the lower end, is to a great extent a replacement of that self/social value with monetary value.
While living standards for most have improved, the story for those of the bottom is not accurately portrayed by the poverty graph.
Do you think researchers who dedicate their lives to measuring poverty haven't thought about a problem you thought of in a few minutes?
> These poverty figures take into account non-monetary forms of income — for poor families today and in the past, this is important, as many of them are subsistence farmers who live largely from their own food production.
This dataset certainly does not do this adequately. This is a very active area of research, and it will take a long time before we converge to reasonable estimates of the past. Even today, countries routinely change their GDP figures after a few years because of how difficult such a thing is to to measure.
You should mentally put large error bars on these graphs. The fact that they don't come up with them already is concerning.
You will not find such a thing. Economic progress before the Industrial Revolution was slow, but not zero. The further back you go the better the last 200 years look, and the impact of every major war and famine becomes less and less notable. TFA is not cherry picking.
Why do you assume that well being is the same as economic progress? Look, I like indoor plumbing as much as the next guy, but it isn't the only contributor to my well-being.
Statistics and charts can't help you draw conclusions about global history before modernity because nobody was compiling data to either modern or common norms. Scholars familiar with a specific time and place can sometimes generate compelling estimates, but these estimates are usually only useful to looking at trends within the narrow region/time context of the scholar's specialty and not suitable for aggregating across the world or across time. There's no real way around that.
So you're left to more subjective assessments. If you haven't read much history or anthropology, or tried to reason about it, it's easy to assume the narrative of modernity being a triumph over 500,000 years of human desperation and decay. But if you have read history, especially the "small" history of personal lives, or read late-20th-century anthropology, or really thought about the necessities for a classical societies to have prevailed and thrived and grown for hundreds of years, or for tribal communities to carry on in stable tradition for millenia, you can't help but wonder why that narrative about modernity even had traction in the first place.
One explanation being that recent modernity is genuinely a mostly progressive advancement from less recent modernity, and so it's easy to assume that the trend carried back indefinitely. But that's an assumption with no charts or data too, so taking it as the default is itself arbitrary at best.
Even today where everyone is generating massive amounts of records detailing their lives a lot of the worst parts are kept hidden and will never be recorded in a newspaper, or a census, or even a social media post for historians to find.
If anything people today tend to present misleading appearance of their lives and that was likely true in the past. Getting an accurate idea of people's struggles will always be difficult for historians.
This kind of approach is also what perpetuates myths like the idea that human lifespans used to average out at around 30 years old. This might have been true for medieval and early industrial Europe. But everywhere else in the world the average lifespan past the age of 5 was between 70-80 years old. People's non-industrial lives were not "nasty, brutish, and short" as the popular Western imagination holds it. It's the medieval peasant and the early industrial worker who's life was so short
By the medieval period, the vast majority of the world were peasants, and they did not live significantly better outside of Europe. Asia had significantly higher agricultural productivity, which made their lives more stable on average, but when famine did strike, it was far deadlier because foraging was less of an option.
> But everywhere else in the world the average lifespan past the age of 5 was between 70-80 years old
Uh, no.
The life expectancy for those who lived past 15 during the Paleolithic was 39 years. For the Neolithic it was 28-33 years. It hardly matters where you look either. In the Americas, for instance an Aztec's life expectancy at 15 averaged just another 19 years. For Copán, those who had reached 15 lived on average another 29 years. In say, Japan during the Jomon period, someone who lived to 15 could expect to live another 32 years.
Accidents, disease, childbirth, famine and war killed a lot of people. While the average life expectancy is "skewed" because of high infant mortality, it was still brutishly short even when early childhood is excluded.
This is extremely outdated science that doesn't utilize archeological evidence well and makes a lot of assumptions.
The current emerging consensus is a constant of around 70 years of age. In fact, there is a remarkable similarity between the mortality profiles of various traditional peoples.
The former post appears to cite a study of hunter gatherers in the 20th century.
The latter explicitly states that life expectancy at 15 has risen significantly over the last 600 years for women and used studies that exclude violent deaths for men and was limited to societies’ elite classes.
Just to be clear, citing Wikipedia's table (which appears to be your source), in the Paleolithic that's an additional 39 years after reaching age 15. Or in other words, average life expectancy, conditioned on having survived childhood, was 54 years.
And, as you note, that figure actually decreased in the Neolithic and Bronze/Iron Age. Early civilization was seemingly harder living for adults than was the Paleolithic era.
Maybe you’re right (I am missing references to data points supporting your claims).
Yet: you have to correct for total people on the planet. The total population has gone from 1 billion to 8 billion.
Integrating over all human beings you can be sure that the sum of “being better off” is much higher than 200 years ago.
Now we can endlessly debate what “better” is. I just think it’s totally fair to start at a point where population growth started to take off exponentially.
That's a bizarre take. Where was life stable or comfortable for regular people in 1824? At that time it was still common for people to literally starve to death due to crop failures.
You are imagining an idealized history which never existed (outside of many a few limited areas).
You may have misread something, as my comment is specifically making the point that 1824 was not some status quo start to modern history but actually a bleak minima resulting from the widespread and harsh negative impacts of early industrialization and colonialism.
The "take" is that the article is a bit deceptive in its claims because its measuring progress from a time that -- for much of the world -- was deeply unlike and worse of than times before it.
You may also think that that take is bizarre, but it's a different one than you seemed to have read and responded to.
I'm not so sure about that. Studies of the bones of pre-Columbian Indians in America showed that they suffered from repeated famine. I read an article years ago that women would spend all day kneeling grinding corn, and it would ruin their joints. They also did not have horses to do the heavy work. And used slave labor.
I don't think we know enough about the pre-Columbian Indians to make a solid evaluation about their lifestyle. Even estimates of how many there were vary by an order of magnitude.
It is hard to know what things were like as, horses, smallpox (and other disease), firearms, and other general dry goods (cast iron pans) all worked there way across mostly ahead of Europeans (or with traders who were not concerned about keeping the type of records we want and if they did keep records it was to sell their activities to the public back home (public might just be kings) and so they had reasons to make up a story for people who couldn't verify the story (and who mostly cared that the gold was coming so a false story that helped sell those people were evil worth destroying was welcomed)
What we know about their lifestyle was for the most part how they lived after all the above arrived, but each is expected to create major culture changes.
> I think that's a pretty low bar? It doesn't matter which you pick, they're both going to be much worse than life is now for most of us reading this.
I don't think it takes away from what you're trying to say, but the irony of this paragraph is delicious given that "most of us reading this" are in the global 1% of today, if not higher, and in some astronomical percentile as measured against history. When used as the measure against whatever historical deprivation and insecurity there was, we make for a pretty low bar!
Yeah, I was just trying to make a very rough comparison. Maybe we could go back to the statistics on Our World In Data then? They are about global poverty and it does seem to be improving.
The Wikipedia summary of 1491 makes it sound like it's basically a book filled with fun facts about how American Indians societies were more complex than what most people give them credit for. It's not a serious analysis of whose lives were "better."
> The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city
I mean.. sure. But they were also an imperialist power that could grab what they wanted from neighboring nations, militarized like Sparta. They had such a great time because they made others work for them, not unlike the Romans or the Brits. Before automation the main way to get a better standard of living was to have slaves.
This article reads like "see how good you have it", when for most folks the upsetting part these days is around inequality, globally as well as nationally. You're not going to convince folks the world is better when they know what kind of deal they're getting vs others out there. Blame the rise of mass communication if you want, but it's depressingly easy to see what both ends of inequality looks like and dismiss articles like this as "so what".
"
There are big problems that remain. None of the above should give us reason to become complacent. On the contrary, it shows us that a lot of work still needs to be done — accomplishing the fastest reduction of extreme poverty is an important achievement, but the fact that 85% of the world live on less than $30 per day is unacceptable. We also must not accept the restrictions of our liberty that remain. It is also clear that humanity’s impact on the environment is at a level that is not sustainable and is endangering the biosphere and climate on which we depend.
"
The problem is that those who would like to maintain the status quo are bound to pick only the optimistic stats and suggest nothing should be done because the trend is naturally towards a better society. The truth is that progress is made in spite of these people, and in spite of some of the policies they promote. So such articles are more like a reality check of sorts, showing that we can make progress but we need to work hard for it, it does not just happen by the magic waving of an invisible hand.
It's interesting to me that people care about equality. I can't say that I, personally, do. I care only about absolute life standards. If my life is improving I don't care that someone else's is too. But absolute life standards do matter.
If Bezos gets another rocketship every minute that's fine if I get another million dollars every minute. I can't really care about his life like that.
For those always looking in others' bowl to see if they got more, I can see how this makes them unhappy. It sounds corrosive to the soul.
It's not about jealousy or unhappiness; it's about the fact that wealth buys power, and significant power differentials are dangerous for the people on the short end. If Bezos can afford to buy a rocketship every minute, he can afford to rearrange the society you live in such that he will get to siphon off most of the million dollars a minute you've been enjoying, and there will be nothing you can do about it. This is what rich people do: this is what it means to be that rich.
Actually, it does so a lot less in our current world than it did in the past.
> If Bezos can afford to buy a rocketship every minute, he can afford to rearrange the society you live in
No, he can't, because in a society that can supply him with a rocketship a minute, the wealth that allows him to buy them will be a very small fraction of the total wealth that exists, just as it is now.
Whereas in, say, the Middle Ages, the wealth of feudal lords and rulers was a significant fraction of the total wealth that existed, and that is why that wealth bought them so much power.
The siphoning off of the money is what the government does. Just have a look at our government, and how much of the GDP it consumes (and that consumption is accelerating every day).
Sure, but the government is made up of our neighbours that we choose to represent us. Like Lincoln said, our government is of the people, by the people, and for the people.
You absolutely do care about equality. There are some places where absolute standards are fine, but when we discuss social contracts - equality is fundamental.
You are not operating as a solitary individual, you are operating within a society that both takes and gives to you, and ensuring that social contracts remain fair is fundamental to keeping that society as a whole alive and functional.
ex - how would you feel if the government issues everyone rebates on taxes. you receive 1 dollar. Everyone else receives 100k.
Or the government funds schools - your kids receive 1 free book, every other child receives a free college education.
Or the government increases park allocations - you are given a 5ftx5ft greenspace, the neighborhood over receives a 10 acre maintained park.
Absolute standards are bogus when we are discussing the allocation of group resources. You paid in, you should be monitoring how that resource is paid out.
To be oblivious is to essentially be abused. We should care deeply about wealth inequality in society at large. We should not compare ourselves to our neighbors in individual circumstances. They are different things.
I see. You oppose redistribution through the government. That's a view I can be sympathetic to. If taxes were near zero then this would be less of a problem. Fair enough.
Redistribution is fine - being aware of how that distribution occurs is important, though.
Otherwise you end up with situations where "redistribution" essentially becomes handouts to those most influential with the ones making the distribution decisions, instead of meaningful improvements to society as a whole.
Is it a good thing if Besos gets a rocket every minute if that means climate change destroys my local community?
Is it a good thing if we excessively bail out companies that make poor decisions at tax payer expense?
Is it a good thing to promote school systems that ignore and underfund certain neighborhoods along racial lines?
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My argument is not that redistribution is bad in itself, my argument is that social groups depend on "fairness" to operate.
And those definitions are certainly challenging (one person's fair might be another person's horror story). But they are critical to how a society decides to exist and cooperate.
Like - this isn't a new idea... it's what a social contract is. I also don't sign contracts without reading them, and an educated populace should care about what's in the fine print.
It's not about making sure I get personal wealth or advantages from that contract, it's about making sure I find that contract morally acceptable. Because if enough people reach that stage where they don't... you have a civil war or a rebellion. They will try to write a new contract.
In some countries, there are no laws against how much credit card fees can be. In those countries, a small fraction of the wealth of poor people is transferred to rich people [1]. In other countries, the fees are limited to small values, so this wealth transfer happens at a much smaller scale or doesn't happen at all.
Or a government can license a coal plant in some area [1], destroying the air quality and health outcomes of people in the area, while most of the wealth generated by the plant goes to the investors.
[1] Because credit card companies charge fees inversely proportional to expenses. And give rewards to those who can spend more.
[2] Or worse, in an adjoining area far enough away to commute for jobs, but still in the same air shed.
Historically, the best off maintain their largess by making sure there are enough in the fat and happy middle to not support a revolt by those left to deprivation and exploitation.
It's reasonable to be fat enough and happy enough that you don't want to rock the boat and don't mind that others have "more in their bowl", which is why this pattern persists through geography and time, but you might want to keep an eye out on how the worst off are doing, whether they're growing or shrinking, and whether things are getting worse or better for them because the other part of the pattern is not unprecedented or unreasonable either.
For those who are dirt poor inequality might look like a problem, but as TFA shows the trend line is -and long has been- that everyone gets wealthy enough to have a decent life. If no one is dirt poor, does it really matter if some are much wealthier than others?
For example, Elon Musk has many many many times more wealth than I, and I don't care. Ditto Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and so on and on. I don't care about inequality -- I care about poverty and ending it.
Formulations like "the problem is no longer poverty but inequality" are a lot like the post-USSR formulations like "now that we have solved the production problem we need to solve the distribution problem". It's Marxism moving the goal posts as economic freedom delivers all the things that Marxists say they want. To argue that one should be given power to solve the problems that are already being solved one has to keep making yet other problems into bigger problems than they really are.
> If no one is dirt poor, does it really matter if some are much wealthier than others?
Yes, because the wealth distribution has a self-reinforcing inertia, especially over generations. Absent mechanisms for redistribution of personal wealth (e.g. confiscatory inheritance/estate tax over a certain amount) it will only concentrate into a kleptocracy.
Too much inequality is bad, even if the lowest 5% lives very well, because it is not a sustainable equilibrium. On the other hand, too little inequality is also not sustainable or desirable.
I agree that accumulation of power is bad, and since wealth eventually becomes power, accumulation of wealth beyond some point can be bad. However, complaints about inequality invariably seem to go beyond complaints about the lofty 0.001%.
But this hasn't happened. See the book Missing Billionaires by White and Hagani. Subsequent generations are much better at squandering wealth than hoarding it. So that issue sort of takes care of itself.
The US has one of the highest child poverty rates of any "first world" nation, minimum wage is lower than it has ever been, we pay more for healthcare than any of these same nations and have worse healthcare outcomes than Cuba, housing is an impossible dream for most... Wealth inequality is just one indicator of a larger problem, not the problem in it's entirety, and poverty is still one of the biggest problems of the modern era. Saying that we are slightly better than the 1800s isn't the win people seem to think it is.
There's a homeless population in Seattle, but as a percentage it is pretty low. They also mostly consist of drug addicts and alcoholics who reject attempts to put them in housing.
Renting is still housing. Besides, you never actually own a home. You rent it from the city, and the zoning/code rules greatly restrict what you can do with it.
Besides, the statement was "housing", not "owning a home".
The government does a lot to restrict the supply of housing, too.
Don't forget all the expenses one has owning a home. My rent to the city went up 10% this year.
Sure, that's still not the win you think it is when the material conditions of the average person is pretty awful all around. I laid out a small percent of that in my original comment. and that's not even considering the poverty "first world" countries rely upon from the heavy exploitation of the "3rd world" from slavery conditions, to coups and death squads funded by US corporations, to stealing their resources.
The thing is, the US has clearly gotten way better in the past 50+ years, while the past 30 years is maybe debatable. But if we're looking at past 30 years globally, there's no sane way to argue it hasn't gotten way. It's been an absolutely amazing past few decades in terms of reducing global poverty. We've seen something like a billion people lifted out of poverty—child mortality, clean drinking water, education, basic nutrition. We've a long ways to go, but if you're argument rests on ignoring over a billion people having their lives transformed in this way, I'm not sure you're on the side of the poor.
Dude, chill. They're not merely some abstract rhetoric device for arguing about American policy. They're real people, and you can ask them how they feel about infant mortality dropping, starvation rates dropping, clean water access shooting up, education access increasing. You don't even have to fly down--loads of them now have internet access (and electricity!)
Yes, the US has done a bunch of really bad stuff, but a higher percentage of people having food and water and medicine is actually good. And yes, those real human beings tend to agree.
> that's still not the win you think it is when the material conditions of the average person is pretty awful all around.
What? This is nonsense.
> and that's not even considering [...]
This is changing the subject, which one should probably take as conceding the previous point. Even granting all of this I'm pretty sure that life today almost everywhere on this planet is much less brutish for humans than it was 200 years ago, let alone 400, 2,000, 10,000, or 100,000 years ago.
> The US has one of the highest child poverty rates of any "first world" nation
Yeah, we should do way better, but this article isn't about the US today vs. western Europe today. It's about the world today vs. the world in the past. Child poverty in the US is way better right now than it was pretty much anywhere a hundred years ago, and poverty across the globe is way better than in the past.
> minimum wage is lower than it has ever been,
Good news: ~98.7% of workers earn more than the minimum wage. Wage growth for the lowest quartile has been especially good these past few years, handily outpacing inflation for the poorest among us.
> Saying that we are slightly better than the 1800s isn't the win people seem to think it is.
Slightly better? Child mortality in rich countries in the 1800s was 20%. What's it today, 0.5%? "Oh, but in some countries it's less than that, so this isn't actually better than before"?
Calling these changes "slightly better" is just an incredibly dishonest take. It's a massive improvement, and that shows just how much we're able to improve if we honestly look at what works and implement it.
This isn't a pro-complacency article. It's an argument against doomerism.
Of the 74 million children in the US, 11 million live in poverty. The average American makes 40,000 a year and healthcare and housing are more expensive than ever. Yes, the things that are problems have changed, medical advanced have been made, but most of that is out of reach for the majority of people unless they are willing to take on millions in medical debt for things like cancer and diseases that have preventable measures. just the fact that we have to reel back that far to paint a good picture of the present, says a lot. Let's be real, this audience is generally wealthy and are not necessarily going to be in touch with how the average person lives.
The things that today would be considered poverty were considered the norm when my neighbor was a kid.
I've worked with many and been close friends with many poor people. I'm under no illusions that their lives are all hunky dory. I just don't feel the need to pretend things weren't significantly worse in many important ways in the recent past.
> Of the 74 million children in the US, 11 million live in poverty.
That's an absolute number, and let's grant that it's accurate. What is the evolution of child poverty in the U.S. since its founding? Let's use caloric intake -say- as a yardstick of poverty.
The descendants of Mark Zuckerberg will continue to build dynastic wealth through no skill of their own without doing any real work. Other people in the same country are single parents working multiple jobs just to keep their family sheltered and fed. You don't think that's a situation that we can improve?
> For example, Elon Musk has many many many times more wealth than I, and I don't care. Ditto Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and so on and on. I don't care about inequality -- I care about poverty and ending it.
What I wonder is, how much poverty (in developed countries) results from the ultra-wealthy accumulating more wealth? At what point does extreme wealth come at the expense of the poor?
The causality is a hard question to answer honestly but I can answer the ending poverty portion. So ignore it for now and engage in a bit of rough math. Take the 5.2 trillion of every US billionaire combined and divide it by a third of the US population. It comes out to a one-time payment of about $45k. An amount which would certainly be appreciated by the bottom third of the population, certainly but not a panacea. The poverty line is defined via income and not assets. So lets do a conversion, if paying out the interest only at long-term treasury bond rates that would give the bottom third a "trust fund" which gives an extra $2K per year.
Of course that is ignoring many of the messy practicalities. The inflation that would ensue from this hypothetical influx of cash to the bottom third, or if one could even extract the nominal market cap via selling assets vs the value crashing after the first third is put on the market. Combine that with the fact that the fortunes are invested in productive assets and the hypothetical mother of all liquidations would do majorly bad things to productivity and the economy.
That's marginal income, which is not necessarily related to book value, and is almost certainly just a small fraction, which brings you back to less than $2,000 per person per year. I.e., it's not much, and you really can't extract it.
Eating the rich doesn't work. It's never worked when it has been tried. It cannot work. It will never work.
People like Elon Musk aren't "accumulating" wealth. They're creating it.
> At what point does extreme wealth come at the expense of the poor?
Wealth that is created doesn't come at the expense of anyone.
It is true that many rich people (for example much of the financial industry) don't get rich by creating wealth but by siphoning it from other people's pockets into their own. But the other people in such cases are the middle class, not the poor.
Tesla annotators make $20 / hour. That's hardly a well-paying job.
I think we can easily make a case that any Tesla employee or contractor who earns at the poverty level supports an argument that extreme wealth comes at the expense of the poor.
That $20/hour is coming from wealth that Tesla is creating. It's not taken from someone else. Indeed, it's helping those people since without Tesla those jobs would not exist and they might have to work at other jobs that paid even less.
> at the poverty level
$20/hour times 2000 hours is $40K per year. The US Federal poverty level even for a household of 4 people is $31K per year [1], and is significantly lower for smaller households (for a household of 1 person it's $15K per year). So no, Tesla annotators are not earning "at the poverty level".
Ever driven through rural America? Lots of people raise their own chickens, keep hens for eggs, grow their own veggies and fruit. Their property taxes are low, their income is low, but they're not hungry, and often want for nothing.
Yes, looking at global or even national statistics tells you nothing about your own circumstances, which you can judge for yourself without any statistics at all. And it’s true that averages can be misleading.
Inequality isn’t about your personal circumstances, though. It’s about what you read in the news. You need statistics to judge it.
These statistics are relevant when people talk about where the country is going or where the world is going.
> You're not going to convince folks the world is better when they know what kind of deal they're getting vs others out there
So people can never be happy if inequality exists? Sounds like an unsolvable problem. No matter how good everything gets, people will still be unhappy because someone else seemingly has it better. 1000 years from now:
"Poor person: Sure, I own a 7000 sq ft mansion with an electric drone that can fly me around everywhere and my life expectancy is 105 and my standard of living is an order of magnitude better than the richest people living in 20XX, but Elon Musk VII's life expectancy is 120 and he owns an entire planet with a space fleet, my life sucks, the universe is so unfair."
How is this funny? They have: free food, free medical care, electricity, clean running water and sewer, mobile phones, subsidized or free housing, and don't pay any taxes.
Just consider food: the quality and variety of food today is far greater than was available to medieval kings. Like coffee, fresh fruit year round, meat that's free of disease, etc.
Henry 8 suffered horribly from health problems that are easily treated today.
Research has shown that happiness is heavily based on social status, and wealth or income is one of the key factors in social status. People constantly compare themselves against everyone they see, including in the media.
As a meta question we should ask whether happiness is the right metric to optimize in social policy? Unhappiness motivates some people to work harder and accomplish more. Whether that's a good or bad thing is entirely subjective.
Happiness = Reality minus expectations. Also, people, like many animals, are innately driven to compare each other and themselves. This may be a trait that provides (or has provided) an evolutionary advantage, especially in in the process of mating.
Huh, it's interesting how I interpreted the parent poster's point in a completely different way.
My takeaway was that my personal happiness is moderately diminished by the fact that I had such a privileged upbringing compared to others born into almost inescapable poverty, and that my charitable contributions towards famine relief / malaria / etc. don't make a huge impact on addressing the root causes of inequity.
Interesting that you read that comment as inequality...
> You're not going to convince folks the world is better when they know what kind of deal they're getting vs others out there
Somehow i read that as equal opportunities.... To me a fair deal generally means, something close to equal opportunities(of course, ceteris paribus, and rarely do we have all other things equal, but adjusting for it..)
but opportunities are far from equal in many parts of the world, including the US. poverty alone limits your opportunities when you can't even afford a car to apply for a job, or are stuck in a bad school that limits your chances to go to college. in other parts of the world you can't even go to school if you can't afford it.
Yeah, a lot of people in the US are seeing their standard of living decline and their children having to struggle a lot more and in ways neither they or their parents had to. Even the most basic things like clean drinking water and reliable electric power are getting less common in the US. No amount of telling people how bad farmers had it in the 1800s will make people feel better about the new struggles they have to deal with or the things they have to give up having today.
This discussion needs to distinguish equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome. People don't mind playing games, but if they perceive the games' rules to be tilted (or some players to be cheating), then they will want to flip the board.
Avoiding totalitarianism means recognizing the need for both public and private power structures counteracting each other, not going all-in on one of them alone.
Also progressive taxation (a moderate position) which avoids the authoritarian measures of both left and right while counteracting the cancerous effects of exponential growth.
Unfortunately the data gets a lot worse, so you don’t get the nice graphs anymore. But historians do try. Ancient empires were not any better; they all had slavery.
The lesson of history is that living in historical times was mostly terrible for most people.
I love our world in data but I will say this article is wordy.
> Global poverty is one of the very largest problems in the world today. Is it possible to make progress against this problem? To see where we are coming from, we must go far back in time. 30 or even 50 years are not enough. When you only consider what the world looked like during our lifetime, it is easy to think of the world as static — the richer parts of the world here and the poorer regions there — and to falsely conclude that it always was like that and will always be like that.
> Take a longer perspective and it becomes clear that the world is not static at all. We can change the world. The countries that are rich today were very poor just a few generations ago.
> To avoid portraying the world in a static way, we have to start 200 years ago, before the time when living conditions really changed dramatically.
This could be written “to really see how much progress we’ve made we have to look back 200 years ago.”
The key missing metric is "Happiness/Contentment." While its definition may be somewhat subjective, asking people how satisfied they are with their lives could be a good start.
However, it'd be less surprising if that metric might not have the same trajectory as the overall trend of the other graphs.
Happiness being subjective is exactly why it is an important metric. We are conscious beings with subjective experiences. I don't care how many studies say that I'm objectively happy I read, if I'm not happy, the metrics are meaningless and perhaps even harmful to me.
That being said, optimizing for some of these collective benchmarks does create some baseline stability from which people can pursue and build their own rich, meaningful and happy lives.
They optimize for system health, not health of each node. However, a healthy system is great, though if all the nodes kill themselves, or tear the system apart, maybe it isn't so healthy?
I'm referring to slow suicide through "lifestyle choices", and war, both physical and cultural.
So work should be done on all levels of abstraction, from the system level down to the compute node, and even lower, to the energy, and maintenance of compute subsystems.
Hard to measure that. Even GDP/capita is too rough a measure. People who do subsistence farming may not be starving or dirt poor, but GDP/capita completely fails to capture their production and consumption. But at least GDP/capita is a decent enough measure because as a nation gets wealthier there is more specialization of labor and subsistence farming becomes a thing of the past (and along the way food security improves dramatically). But let's just say that food security enables happiness/contentment -- that the rest is up to each individual, because how else could it be?
That seems pretty flattering for the GDP-growth dogma, then, if organizations trying to measure happiness and human development feel that GDP statistics are an important input.
GNI is about inequality, which again many of us in this thread argue is not a good measure. Bringing it back in through the backdoor doesn't help. Argue the points.
Would such a metric even honestly exist on the historical time-frames covered? I would guess late industrial-early modernity at best as the beginning of such data systematically.
The social "sciences" and their consequences have been a disaster for the human race. We'd be better off if we just stopped applying labels like "metric" or "data" to subjective concepts altogether.
Minimum wage in 1980 could afford you about 6 big macs per hour; in 2022 that number fell to less than 1 big mac per hour; in the same timeframe, worker productivity has gone up multiple times over. We are being pillaged, and headlines like this seem to be a subtle justification that we should not worry about it too much.
The past is no place to live; when I see atrocity happening when and where I live, I am going to talk about it, and I am going to be thinking about ways we can improve or offset it.
Headline is in poor taste. Yes I fucking love science and all that but it is unproductive and insulting to all those in our current year struggling with inhumane living conditions and progressively decreasing opportunities.
The statutory US federal minimum wage does not reflect actual labor prices. A more useful measure of comparison would be changes in 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc decile/quantile of annual and hourly wages.
Also, the US is so big and varied in terms of cost of living, that there would need to be an adjustment to account for that. Or just compare within specific metros over a time period.
Big macs were never that cheap. Minimum wage in the early 1980s was $3.35/hr and unlike today, McDonald's actually had people standing in line to apply for jobs at that wage. I was one of them.
A Big Mac at that time was around $1.00 although the "value combo" concept had emerged so most people didn't buy them individually.
McDonald's today pays $15/hr and has trouble hiring. They couldn't hire anyone if they just offered minimum wage. A Big Mac is around $5.00 so the ratio is broadly the same.
How many hours a week does an adult man in a hunter gatherer band deep in the Amazon or in sub-Saharan Africa work? Anthropologists say usually less than forty hours, which means less than most people here.
Not much money, but they don't pay $2000 a month or more for rent or a mortgage. No taxes. No profit from their labor sent to some class expropriating their surplus labor time. It's a basis of comparison any how.
If our economic system was great you wouldn't have to pay think tanks to tell people how great their lot is.
I don't think this is the correct line of argument, to juxtapose two very different modes of living to make parallels and criticise the current way of living.
First because it distracts from actually useful discussions which should revolve around making what we have now better, more sustainable, inclusive and fair.
Second because our economic system isn't great because people pay a lot on mortgage or taxes, or because people have a hard time understanding state of the art research. It's not great because it is designed to produce profits at all costs, which leads to people getting overworked and underpaid.
Well, it's possible that certain groups in society -- in particular, highly-educated individuals in Western societies -- have become outliers in how positively they imagine the state of the world to be. (This was Hans Rosling's conclusion, which led to the formation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapminder_Foundation ).
maybe it's a type of an addendum on despite we now have more technology & facilities, we still need to work more to survive than when we had stones, berries & caves as surviving tools
Well, apart from the often-documented regular raids from /other/ hunter-gather bands, including torture, rape, murder and slavery. Do you think, absent that $2000 a month mortgage, internal tribal and familial relations would not include abuses of power, including physical and sexual?
Even if you think the current economic and social framework magnified or exacerbated this, can you point to systems in hunter-gather networks that would allow this to be systemically ameliorated at the same scales we now operate, and with the same resource challenges we now face?
(I'd readily agree that there are differences in opinion about the levels of violence and the variation in prehistoric societies, but I think it's worth highlighted the assumptions that your statement makes about those levels.)
> often-documented regular raids from /other/ hunter-gather bands, including torture, rape, murder and slavery.
There is no slavery in migratory hunter-gatherer bands, I can't even conceive how that would function. Slavery arose with the agricultural revolution. This is not "oft-dicumented" or even documented
> internal tribal
A hunter-gatherer band is not in a tribe.
I am talking about migratory hunter-gatherer bands and you are talking about slave societies and then tribes.
I don't think what you say is correct. Just a casual search of the literature reveals fairly detailed descriptions of slavery in pre-agricultural societies. Here's one book dedicated to an analysis of slavery in the hunter-gatherer society in the Pacific Northwest:
You seem to be making a strong distinction between "bands" and "tribes" that doesn't seem to be clear-cut elsewhere, which may be where we're getting confused; maybe it would be useful to just drop that element of my list, and concentrate on the other aspects of hunter-gatherer society?
I read something similar somewhere that while UK serfs had a lot of crappy conditions and a lack of autonomy, outside of planting and harvesting seasons they actually had a fair bit of free time. Especially in the winter.
Sure, that time might be spent fishing and collecting sticks and twigs, and repairing clothes and nets, but how is that different than the housecleaning, yard maintenance (I have a large(ish) property with trees and gardens and chickens) and other things we all do after our 35-50 hour "work" weeks?
The most dangerous thing about Capitalism is imho its universal equivalence, its ability to make us covert everything into a monetary value.
In other words, it’s just like a programming language where everything can be implicitly converted to a given top type.
In the progress we certainly made over the last century or so, we certainly also lost other things whose value is not representable in our modern value system.
I think it's important to optimize life for metrics, but I think it's even more important to remember that we (conscious beings) are the ones living, so if we hate it, the metrics are either wrong or not relevant.
Imagine living somewhere and feeling miserable, and everywhere there are billboards and ads everywhere saying "Remember that you are happy! All the metrics are better! Oh you're not happy, you must be confused or wrong in some way."
So what's wrong with these metrics? That they are an aggregate, synthetic measurement attempting to measure something subjective, or at very least measuring qualities that may not be the causal factors for "happiness".
I'm not suggesting that these are the wrong metrics necessarily, but rather that work may need to be done in the soft and squishy world of "self development" or "spiritually", so that people may be able to create happiness and joy, and eliminate aspects of life that do not support that.
For example, learning about nutrition, exercise, healthy detox pathways, emotional health (through whatever lens appeals to each person), relationships, purpose, and more.
I think honestly there is a bit of a crisis of meaning: humans realized it's a rather challenging place to live, so we/they built technology and civilizations, and now many more people are living more "comfortable," "safe" lives, and in the absence of an external threat, are lacking in purpose. Some people think we need some external threat, so risks like damaging the environment are framed as a "war against climate change", because thus far, external threats have been good motivators. However, I'm sick and tired of being motivated and seeing life as a battle, and I know I'm not alone. In this period of objective peace and prosperity, I'd love if more people shifted their focus inward, to discovery fountains of love and creativity, and use that creative energy to shape the world and life towards further connection and play. This won't happen on a mass scale if most people are physically and emotionally unhealthy, fighting with family, fighting with people in war, and avoiding intentional inner development.
For those of you that think this doesn't matter, imagine trying to build something, and all of people you're working with have PTSD, or can't stay motivated for more than 5 mins without scrolling instagram?
Imagine camping on another planet looking up at an "aurora", or creating your dream movie by talking to an AI, or perhaps even living out your wildest dreams through VR, or for those that think this way, "hacking the matrix" and living it for real.
"Hacking the matrix" could be finding new properties of physics that make the impossible possible, it could be learning that we are in a simulation, or it could be something more "mystical", the real point is making a quantum leap in what is possible as a human.
Starving isn't fun. Starving people aren't likely to be happy. Making sure that people don't starve is one way to enable them to be happy. Not everyone can be happy all the time -- in fact, no one can because life events happen.
> I think it's important to optimize life for metrics, but I think it's even more important to remember that we (conscious beings) are the ones living, so if we hate it, the metrics are either wrong or not relevant.
Almost everyone already basis their political beliefs based on their own personal experiences rather than hard metrics. When they point to hard metrics, it's just to confirm their beliefs. The same conservatives who bragged about the record stock market performance under Trump would use use liberals bragging about record stock market performance under Biden as evidence of being out of touch and vice versa. If people actually cared about metrics in a way that would inform their beliefs, they would stop asking for demand subsidies and we'd have a LVT.
What a bizarre and (unintentionally?) result-biasing statement.
Picking 200 years ago is literally choosing what may be the lowest point in global living standards for a millennia -- early industrialization and colonialism had each radically shocked the shape of the societies touched by them, breaking stable, comfortable, familiar lifestyle and community traditions in a race for abstract economic development with little concern for exploitation or local consequence.
Maybe everybody is better off now than they were 200 years ago, but most individuals in the world were much worse off 200 years ago than they were 200 years before that, so the discussion is quite complicated and an analysis like this doesn't tell you that we're doing the best thing now, just that we're seemingly doing much better than when we first really fucked it all up.