Global living conditions are getting better

It&#x27;s sad how many comments dismiss the remarkable data, e.g. by commenting that the article &quot;only&quot; shows that average living conditions have improved, as if that is an argument against the conclusion that global living conditions have been continuously improving (and likely to continue if the trend continues).<p>The data shows that for all the selected metrics global living standards have improved, regardless of wealth distribution etc. For example, fewer children are dying today than in 1800 or 1960:<p>- a child born in 1800 had a 43.3% probability of dying before their fifth birthday<p>- in 1960 the probability was 18.5%<p>- in 2015 the probability was 4.25%<p>The 1800 estimate is astonishing. Almost half the children born in 1800 would probably have died by 1805. To me even the 1960 mortality rate is astonishing. Almost a fifth of all children born in 1960 would probably have died by 1965.<p>An even bigger improvement can be seen in extreme poverty (defined as living on $1.9 a day adjusted for inflation and price differences between countries):<p>- in 1820 94% of the global population lived in extreme poverty<p>- in 1960 64% lived in extreme poverty<p>- in 2015 only 9.6% lived in extreme poverty<p>I cannot see how such statistics can be interpreted as anything other than extraordinarily positive, and I just hope the trend continues.

I would love to see a complement to this piece examining our &quot;loss potential&quot;, which I basically define as the potential for us to undo all of the good we&#x27;ve done.<p>Sure, things are better, but I would argue that there&#x27;s a greater loss potential. As technological potential grows that means more and more people have a target on their back, dooming them to inevitable irrelevance. Say our technological&#x2F;societal progress results in us destroying ourselves with some weapon&#x2F;technology in the year 3000. One would amortize the negative infinity loss through the preceding years. This would result in negative progress each year, right? Of course it&#x27;s impossible to predict when such a thing would happen.<p>----<p>Also, it would be nice to compare things to what we could have achieved. For example, if western civilization really did stunt potential of certain places or people, and NOW they&#x27;re finally catching up, is that impressive? The alternative could mean we would be where we&#x27;re at now a few decades ago.

This is interesting and give me hope but is it accurate?<p>This article suggests that vox does not get it right all the time:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;Media-Business-in-2015-How-credible-are-articles-on-vox-com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;Media-Business-in-2015-How-credible-ar...</a>

I recall a dead-tree uncle writing his daughters (longhand perfect cursive) a summary of life. His life is &quot;good&quot; ( I forget his exact words) conclusion was very surprising.<p>The &quot;humanity&quot; question is really one thing to me. More or less live births.<p>The mindset of &quot;better&quot; had been passed down our generations and I am greatful for it<p>Edit. He lived in the US in the mid 1800s

Regardless of my opinions on this, it&#x27;s the comments from articles like this that make me wish there really was a longer reprieve from political discussions on Hacker News. I&#x27;d take no political discussion over really heated political discussion, because often in comments (from both sides) people get so heated that I can&#x27;t even get through one or two paragraphs without losing understanding of whatever point they are getting across or refuting. I enjoy reading HN for the comments primarily, but it seems that when it comes to political discussions it seems worse off than Reddit.

there are also things that are worse now. half of animal species alive in 1970 are now extinct. we have created new diseases as we&#x27;ve removed the threat of old ones. things like sitting outside and looking at the stars are harder, or listening to birdsong. the family no longer spends much time together. our lives are more virtual and less based in reality, which leads to a lower quality life and less happiness.

I like the hope in this article. I can&#x27;t trust it any more than I can trust other media sources but I&#x27;d rather believe this than some doomsday prophecy that was mostly designed to scare views into watching more.

There is for example less land per person now than ever before. So, it&#x27;s more a question of what you value than objectively better.

What&#x27;s heavier, the linked web page as provided (html, css, js and image files) or as ONE large image?<p>I tested it: the whole page rendered as one high quality 1918 x 17591 JPEG file weighs 3.58 MB.<p>As loaded by the browser, without ad blocking, it does +280 http requests to dozens of servers and downloads 6.9 MB.<p>If pages were provided as images, we might burn less CPU cycles and produce less CO2. Not so good for clicking ads though ;)

The article should be retitled &#x27;proof that life became net better between 1800 and today&#x27;.<p>No evidence is given that life at any point in the future will be better than it is currently.<p>Disappointing and misleading.

Wrong. The average of all lives is getting better. I think people feel disgruntled because life in the upper end is not improving. Its all good and nice that humanity is dragging its tail forward, but that kinda happens by default, all the time, even without effort. Somehow people feel that the head is not moving forward fast enough , though. We want our flying cars!

Contraception is not improvement in health. Around 1800&#x27;s women used to have atleast 10 children. Women now cannot even imagine having 10 children. Most of them will die before giving birth to 10th one.

Unless you can prove that humans are becoming more content or happier, then I don&#x27;t think this proves anything. If we have massive advancements in technology but we&#x27;re all still angry, xenophobic, selfish, etc, nothing is getting better

I meet a lot of people whose idea of &quot;getting better&quot; is wealth being more evenly diffused across humanity. If that really is our aim the easiest way to achieve it would be to halt, or even reverse, quality of life improvements for the top x percent of people.<p>If &quot;getting better&quot; means raising the maximum possible quality of life inequality seems unavoidable, since people need an incentive to pursue and propagate technological advances.

As a species we need more stress to get evolution to shape us harder. We are cheating! And there is a price to pay to evolution, as a species. From a single specimen perspective, yes, life is fantastic these days.

This is neoliberal propaganda. It argues from average lives that no one actually lives. For example: The share of people living in extreme poverty has decreased immensely. However, your life can be absolutely miserable in a place like the United States while technically not living in extreme poverty. Reducing the dynamics of the entire world and the experiences of each human being to a single number is preposterous.<p>An example particularly in the United States: Poverty levels have decreased in the US. However, cost of living has exploded in certain areas, meaning that people who technically don&#x27;t meet the official definition of poverty in, say, San Francisco can have their lives completely upended by the fact that they can no longer afford housing.<p>A related example not in exactly the same vein is neoliberal identity politics: It is ok for people to be oppressed my structurally racist institutions so long as the oppressor class is sufficiently racially diverse. s&#x2F;race&#x2F;{gender, orientation}&#x2F;g Hide the fact that identities are tied to material relationships of economics and power behind a statistic about &quot;&quot;&quot;diversity&quot;&quot;&quot;.<p>Reducing people to statistics is a technocrat&#x27;s wet dream and a fundamental ideological goal of neoliberalism: Reduce everyone to rational market actors, measure everything with statistics which abstract away actual reality and allow governments and corporations to justify any action they want because they set the definitions, dissimulate coercive power relationships by refusing to measure them.<p>Vox is faux-progressive propaganda for the worst kind of capitalism.