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 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.
How is the last one debunked?
Classic SMBC
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
There’s no need to make shit up.
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.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/no-genuine-rule-dictates-the-use-of-less-or-fewer-cs25kv8s5
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”
Yeah, people who learn and understand language are the worst
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.
I think we can all agree to that.
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.
Removed by mod
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.
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.
I wonder how those people are doing nowadays
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.
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
Except we have people like Musk deciding when Ukraine can and cannot retaliate against Russia.
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.
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.
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”.
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! :(
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 start with look or listen a lot, idk why
Yeah if I had to choose how to bump up the life expectancy, reducing child mortality would definitely be my first choice.
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.
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
What’s the opposite of doom-posting? Because this is refreshing as hell.
Hope-posting?
Zork-posting? Or possibly Zorch-posting?
Barbie fashion designer posting
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.
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.
More of this is needed.
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.
Conservatives are trying to roll it back, don’t worry.
Just about time to retire this meme format, I think.
Possibly, but in this case it doesn’t really work because the format doesn’t fit the meme.
