yes, but with plateaus and setbacks. however the overall trend line is towards improvement generally.
I think we’re at a point where a lot of our issues come from economic abundance instead of deprivation. climate change, pollution, resource shortages, obesity, income inequality.
The overall trend line looks good.
While I have not explored the website, I can recommend his book. He acknowledges the enormous distance and obstacles for further improvements, and states which things are not improving at all. But he also shows graphs of just how massive many improvements in practical indicators over twenty or two hundred years often are. More than I often guessed. More work still needs to be done, of course.
In fact, he lambastes some worthy charities and NGOs for not acknowledging some of the successes that they have had. Donors want to know their efforts are making a difference. They often are.
Rosling is frank about serious errors he made as a doctor, and as a speaker, based on incorrect assumptions. He tells a story about how he was invited to speak to women leaders at a multinational African Congress. He showed his graphs showing improvements in many important indicators in only twenty years. These often occurred at very rapid rates. Not fifty years ago, no one could have predicted the remarkable improvements seen in that period many Asian countries (say Korea or Vietnam).
Some African countries were improving at an even more rapid rate. There is no country in the world today with an average life expectancy below 50 years and a very, very small number under 60 years. These numbers should be bigger. But it is reasonable and enlightening to compare them to what existed before; some indicators have doubled. Usually a single number in isolation tells you less than a comparison or amount per capita.
His audience were polite but quite unimpressed with his lack of vision. He expected praise but was quickly put in his place. People did not want merely small but significant improvements in their daily lives. The women explained their goal was not merely to improve their appliances or education or acquire a bicycle or car. But to be able to visit other countries and see the world as welcome tourists instead of refugees or marginalized people. To do as many do.
But also to embrace emerging technologies to bypass outdated intermediate steps, and find creative and practical new ways of doing pragmatic things. To establish lasting prosperity and change local expectations, as well as your expectations or mine. Because the fact remains that none of us are very different or unfamiliar. Facts are better than fear. Information is better than ignorance. Perseverance and progress are better than severity and regression.
I vote no. For so many reasons. It could be so very much better and improving. But alas, I feel it is not.
When I read “The Better Angels of Our Nature” by Steven Pinker I was quite irritated. He kept claiming that things had got better and better since times immemorial, and he gave data and examples galore. It did not feel right.
Then I realized that one emerging property of the fact that things get better and better all the time for most individuals throughout history and in particular in the west is that things get worse overall.
So things get better? For me, they did. For the World, no. they did not.
I guess on some level, that is what I worry about. Economic abundance creates a cycle of population growth leading to resource shortages, pollution and climate change. IOW, the world is becoming a better place until all of a sudden it isn’t.
That fershlugginer Second Law of Thermodynamics again, eh?
If you mean to say that the Second Law is to Thermodynamics like the Second Amendment is to the World becoming a Better Place™ then yes, fershluggin’ indeed.
I think the world was becoming a better place until somewhere around 2015, in a 3 steps forward 2 steps back kind of a way. Since then, it seems to me that we’re now in in a 2 steps forward 3 steps back pattern. In particular, I’d point to three dates in the last few years as major blows to the world becoming better.
3/11/2020 - the official date that COVID-19 became a pandemic.
1/6/2021 - the insurrection to attempt to overthrow Biden’s election.
2/24/2022 - the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Three dates that will live in infamy in a three year period. That’s not a good sign.
IMHO before that one has to go back to 9/11/2001, and before that all the way back to the beginning of WWII. So yes, these last few years really do seem to point to things no longer getting better.
Today with tornadoes on many of our minds, you may be thinking of the tornado drills you’ve participated in at school, work or home.
Jeff Bezos, harbinger of the future of technology, lost six employees to a tornado. The next day he took a joy ride in a spacecraft.
Technology will preserve the human race, but not without empathy and self-awareness.
Happily US politics do not really effect the whole world.
So far the good news.
Observing the climate as it is being systematically destroyed (with not even a slowdown in growth of our emissions) does not inspire confidence.
Even COVID didn’t do much for the environment, if you zoom out a bit it was barely a glitch.
We need to start taxing emissions and stop subsidizing fossil fuels yesterday. Anything less than 10$/gallon is lying to ourselves. Never mind that planes are heavily subsidized and pay almost no taxes on fuels.
We (the west) have trouble dealing with immigration as it is, nevermind what happens if the climate keeps deteriorating.
We are just starting to realize the extent of how plastic waste is permeating everything, everywhere. (Plastic has been found in human blood: in all subjects that were tested). Nevermind that we pumped PFAS everywhere. Those levels are rising rapidly everywhere we look.
Politically there are very few (if any) nations that prioritize any of those issues. A high % of politics runs on hate or other bullshit— a large % of people simply doesn’t care about anything but hurting the right people.
Other than that: things are great.
I tried not to make my post US centric, and only one of my three dates centers on that, and I’m pretty sure that event affected people in other countries. But going back to my 2015 date, it’s not just Trump’s victory in the 2016 election. The 2010s were a rough time. There was Brexit, and victories in elections around the world by authoritarian leaders of all kinds, rightists and leftists. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil (2018), Viktor Orban in Hungary (2010), Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines (2016), Abiy Ahmed in Ethiopia (2018), Narendra Modi in India (2014), Recep Erdogan in Turkey (2014) are all examples, and represent multiple continents, histories, and religious traditions. It’s not something where we can just say it was confined to one continent or one religion or ethnic group, it’s a worldwide phenomenon.
ETA: Of course those are the newly minted authoritarian leaders / countries. If one wants to include those that were already authoritarian, the list would be much longer.
ETA 2: And of course the implication is that authoritarianism is a bad thing. I hope that much is obvious.
What am I missing about that quiz? I clicked a few topics - global warming, species… - and the questions/answers didn’t say anything about trends for the better/worse. Instead, as suggested above, they seemed to solely suggest that certain things weren’t as bad as many people think.
I have not seen much of anything to suggest that the climate and species extinctions are moving in a favorable direction.
I did read one book a while back - I’m sure others will know the author/name - which premised that the human condition was improving. Far fewer people are in grinding poverty, illiterate, lacking basic health care. Most of those gains were IIRC made by the folk WAY at the bottom. The family that used to not have electricity, running water, or transportation now has access to a village pump, and someone in their village has a radio and a moped…
My thread was based on the book, not an Internet quiz. The book absolutely postulates many indicators are improving. The argument that some things have been worse in recent years is also solid - democracy has had its challenges, Covid caused disruption, some things improved more slowly or got worse. But over longer periods - some good things got better, and many bad things became less bad.
that’s a valid concern. I guess my view is that as the world progresses, the amount of financial capital and human capital that we have available continues to grow. ideally enough of it will be devoted to finding ways to solve or bypass the problems due to resource shortages and pollution.
The world has hundreds of trillions in financial capital, and hundreds of millions of smart people. hopefully they get used in part to solve these problems, or at least take the edge off.
I just checked my reading log and, yes, Factfullness is the book I read back in 18. Was affirming to read. Tho I don’t know what level of living is scaleable worldwide. And I don’t recall what it said about climate and extinctions.
[pretentiously clears throat]
…affect.
[/pretentiously clears throat]
Initially I thought this was a “joke” thread, but after reading through it, apparently not. The answer is a resounding NO, the world is not a better place considering we’ve just had the largest invasion of a country and murder of its citizens since the WW2.
Iran and Iraq would like to have a word. Afghanistan was no small affair either. Or India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Heck both Gulf Wars featured vastly larger deployed forces and much heavier combat casualties on the Iraqi side at least (so far, I should add). Or jeez, Vietnam - the 1975 Spring Offensive of North Vietnam into South Vietnam alone was massive.
But at any rate wars are endemic to human history. The last decade has seen an upswing, but there has been a general decline before then since WW II. Measured against all of human history I’d consider this more an ugly anomaly in a general trend of decreasing warfare.
I think trying to look at the quesion over a narrow time period will mislead you as to the overall trend.
The twentieth century contained multiple periods of atrocious barbarism, the world was still a far better place in 1999 than it was in 1899.
That is the general trend we’ve seen, current blips notwithstanding it is also reasonable to expect that to continue on the long term. That’s something that Rosling’s view supports (though his view is not necessarily representative of the expert consensus and he doesn’t pay that much attention to climate change which we may not be able to control and could indeed tip the balance of progress)
I perhaps should have added “by a nuclear power” whereby the threat of a nuclear exchange is likely the highest it’s ever been.