I think this is the most important thing to retain from reading this article:<p>>[...] Both are true at the same time: The world is much better than in the past and it is still awful.<p>>To bring this to mind I need to know both statistics: When someone says we can sit back and relax because the world is in a much better place, I point out that 11 children are still dying every minute. We cannot accept the world as it is today. And when I feel hopeless in the face of this tragedy, I remember that we reduced annual child deaths from 20 million to 5.6 million in the last fifty years.<p>Keeping this in mind at all times is a very important thing.
First off, I stand up and applaud the Gates Foundation, and everybody, who work to improve the lives of everybody on the planet.<p>WRT: Extreme Poverty, a few years back, we had a political party who tackled the problem of poverty by redefining the measuring stick of what constitutes poverty. <i>POOF</i> much celebration and self-handshaking when they announced that during their term, their efforts dropped the number of people living in poverty by a very significant amount.<p>This has left a bad taste in my mouth ever since to never trust claims from politicians.<p>So I wonder, in the case of this article, how many of those people no longer living at the adjusted poverty line and now only marginally above it and no longer included. They're still their, but buy grace of a single digit, are now considered much better off.
There is a fantastic video by Hans Rosling about the global population growth and why global population might actually stall around 10 billion people:<p><a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth/up-next" rel="nofollow">https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_...</a><p>This relates to fact 2 in the article.
Relevant Kurzgesagt video on overpopulation: <a href="https://youtu.be/QsBT5EQt348" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/QsBT5EQt348</a><p>I learnt about the overpopulation myth during my undergrad, but I'm continuously surprised by how many people (including Thanos) didn't know this.<p>Edit: Here's a chart of expected population growths. It's expected to start slowing down[1]<p>[1]: Select WORLD from the menu: <a href="https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/" rel="nofollow">https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/</a>
I'm curious about one thing. Like the article alludes to there is currently an extremely strong connection between fertility and low education, low income, and high religiosity. This [1] is a list of nations by <i>net</i> natural population growth. So births - deaths. From the top (according to UN predictions for 2015-2020): Uganda, Angola, Mali, Somalia, Tanzania, etc. From the bottom on nations that are collectively dying: Bulgaria, Latvia, Ukraine, Hungary, Lithuana, Romania, Portugal, Greece, Japan, Germany, Italy, etc.<p>One of the facts is that 137,000 people/day have been escaping 'extreme poverty'. But what happens when the part of society that is living in economically stable and educated households is not even reproducing to the point of replacing itself, while those living in low education and low income households are massively reproducing?<p>The natural response here is that if we can just improve the situation of places such as Africa then this situation ought resolve itself with birth rates starting to become comparable thus preventing a condemnation of the next generation. There are two problems with this view. The first is that this relies exclusively on a correlation which to date has proved less than predictive of African fertility levels. More importantly this effect is not just international but also intranational. Those who earn the most in the US have the fewest children with households earning less than $10,000 having a 50% greater fertility rate than those earning $200,000+. [2] It seems we're creating a society where each new birth is more and more likely to come into this world in some of the least appropriate households.<p>[1] - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_increase" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_i...</a><p>[2a] - <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/" rel="nofollow">https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...</a><p>[2b] - <a href="https://www.census.gov/topics/health/fertility.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.census.gov/topics/health/fertility.html</a> (the link to statista presents this data in a cleaner format - also adding this as just a more reliable source)
If you want more facts like this I’d highly suggest anything but Steven Pinker especially:<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010/ref=nodl_" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/...</a>
There's an interesting link between Facts 1 and 2 that the author misses:<p>> Fact #1: Since 1960, child deaths have plummeted from 20 million a year to 6 million a year.<p>About half of this reduction (from 20 - 10 million) is because:<p>> Fact #2: Since 1960, the fertility rate has fallen by half.<p>Globally, the population of young people has decreased. Child mortality has decreased, too, but not by a factor of 3.<p>[1] <a href="https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.0014.TO.ZS" rel="nofollow">https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.0014.TO.ZS</a> World Bank reports 0-14 years, rather than 0-5 used for infant mortality.
Looks good right? but all is not so great.
Whats happening is a squeezing of the middle. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1oHJezqBYU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1oHJezqBYU</a><p>Thats why this is also front page HN: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17413622" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17413622</a>
The book which Bill Gates recently gave a copy of to all 2018 college graduates - Factfulness, is a very well written and comprehensive treatment of this and more by Hans Rosling (Gapminder). Highly recommended, it's not long either - you could read it in a couple of evenings or a weekend easily.
I don't think the graph regarding extreme poverty accounts for inflation. I don't know what an international dollar is, assuming its close, but 1.90 USD in 1850 is equivalent to about $55 today (according to Google), or 20,000 USD per year. That's not extreme poverty, I've lived on less than that.