The World Is Not Falling Apart (2014)
slate.com
slate.com
Edit: turns out it's a dupe, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8791117.
Violence among humans is only one of many metrics to gauge the state of the world. Other metrics show trends that are not as rosy. Let's not forget, for example, that we are in the middle of the sixth mass extinction event, exhibiting a rate of species extinction 10x greater than during any other extinction event.
If we especially ignore our anthropocentric biases one can make a convincing case that the world is falling apart.
Industrialization and the internal combustion engine has been one of the greatest drivers of prosperity in human history, and largely to drive subsistence farmers into less manual work and into cities. These shifts improve access to health services, networks etc... for all involved and has been the biggest driver of for example Chinese productivity growth and PPP improvement in the past 20 years. The downside is increasing carbon emissions. The biggest impacts of these emissions, in the climate sense, dis-proportionally affects groups like pacific islanders, current subsistence farmers and other groups on the boundaries.
Very few people look at this issue in terms of what we gain from industrial processes that cannot be cheaply implemented to reduce carbon emissions, and the gains in quality of life for the groups implementing them.
It's definitely preferable for emerging countries to generate power, do water processing, transportation etc... in a clean way, but right now the cheapest way to do that is through burning fossil fuels. If the alternative is to slow progress in these nations to prevent a few million pacific islanders from having to move, I think it would be more efficient for nations to assist those who are impacted from the climate externalities.
Well I did say..."pacific islanders, current subsistence farmers and other groups on the boundaries", but for brevity left all that out of the last part. Of course in current discourse, you have to lay everything out each time to excruciating detail otherwise people nitpick.
the reality is likely to be much worse.
My previous post was not intended to be exhaustive, but if you read the IPCC information [1] the bulk of the conclusions are that marginalized and poor regions are the ones who have the impact - and largely as a compounding factor for political, societal, governmental problems, not the only factor.
So if we bring 200M people out of poverty in China and closer to health and democracy, I think that is worth drought and famine for 10M people.
[1]http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg2/ar5_wgII_sp...
Why do you think this won't have unforseen effects like collapse of ecosystems and balances (of oxygen, say) in the world? Or maybe we won't be able to grow enough vegetables for everyone?
Don't you think that the population explosion poses a huge danger just like with any other species? Or are you willing to bet humans will fix everything all the time?
So while I won't say we will fix everything all the time, history seems to indicate that these things get solved.
As I said: "So while I won't say we will fix everything all the time"...
To your other point, prosperity is the #1 way to slow population growth historically [1]. Prosperity comes from development and access to heath services and technology, all of which are energy intensive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic-economic_paradox
Of course, less humans would help but it's not like the beggars in India are consuming all that much.
[0]: Though just try searching for "Climate Change Map" and see the likely effects in your parts of the world. Florida? Gone in some predictions, along with major European cities like Hamburg and vast swathes of the Netherlands, low lying land on the African coast and countless examples the world over. "A few million pacific islanders" this is not.
This is the point. Those societies least prepared, have traditionally been impacted by these events disproportionate to all others see: Katrina, Galveston, Luzon, Florida etc.... They won't become prepared without additional energy expenditure significantly beyond what they have now. They have to determine what that costs and "clean" energy production is significantly more expensive than "dirty" production currently. Or, they could decide not to build on the beach or in a flood plain.
If we can get to more clean fuels or nuclear that is cheap and plentiful, then great! It doesn't seem to be happening though and until it does, the only way to move communities up the quality of life scale is dirty.
That doesn't me we should give up or not try to build better sources of energy or more efficient distribution methods (so we don't lose 60% of production), on the contrary, we should. Lets be real though when trying to balance global mobility.
And by the way, saying that climate change is going to turn the earth into Mars is as hyperbolic and fantasy as saying that Climate Change is not happening and a conspiracy.
[1] that includes the set anthropogenic climate change, 'natural' climate change, asteroid strike, super volcanic eruptions, solar immolation, and plague.
So there are just as many other metrics to show improvement, not to suggest there aren't other areas we can improve. As for the mass extinction event, while some claim it they eventually call out numbers showing the previous five so swamped what is happening now that we are just simply better are recording events and it may not be as dire. It would take over two centuries at current and project rates to equal any previous mass extinction event and that is only if the dire projections are correct.
Moreover, I've seen some convincing analyses that suggest the world actually IS becoming (slghtly) more violent, but that advances in trauma medicine are minimizing the fact by reducing the death toll.
I will round up citations when I can.
Or, why I don't read anything but industry news.
Reading headline news will quickly erode your soul. You have nothing to gain by reading it and just about everything to lose.
When I tell this to people, the typical response is: "But I don't want to be uninformed". Information that you can't act on is not information; it's distraction.
The only thing worse than distraction is thinking you CAN act on news from around the world. If news from 100's of miles away is changing your behavior, that's bad. We're not going to die in a terrorist attack, a shark attack, from climate change, a new flu, etc...
These are the things people worry about incessantly. But we are going to die of cancer, heart disease, in a car accident, of old age, etc... how mundane.
But I think that this is something an ordinary citizen can do something about. The policy up until now was not created by arms manufacturers, or by neo-cons alone, but primarily by moderate liberals. Noam Chomsky or Norman Finkelstein would say that these moderate liberals had been tricked into acting as pawns for the neo-cons. That doesn't have the ring of truth to me. I think they act according to their own ideology, albeit a hypocritical one that is liberal at home and right wing on the Middle East. This ideology can be argued and lobbied against by people with different opinions.
Yup - when I teach probability, I start with the idea that what gets into the news is novel. What will kill you will not be in the news unless you are amazingly unlucky.
We wake up to the smell of fresh coffee. We have access to the most incredible food - from exotic fruit to deep-sea creatures.. We walk around with these incredible magical devices in our pockets, connected to this worldwide ocean of knowledge and we spend our days sharing and watching the shared stuff.
Then we go out on the weekends and we have lots of fun, we get drunk, we dance to great music, we get high, then we have great sex .. Or unlimited porn, of course.
It's like a good dream that we don't want to wake up from..
But guess what ?
You are going to loose it all.
There's this rule of the game - things change. Old stuff disappears (falls apart) and new stuff replaces it. It can be better or worse, but the rule is - it's going to change.
The consequence of this rule is - you're going to loose it all.
All this beautiful music, green pastures, bacon, pussy and cocaine ?
Enjoy it while it lasts, because you're renting it...
So yeah, our world is falling apart - either externally or internally, we're all going to the same place - out of here ;). No worries, this is the game, it's beautiful just the way it is, so don't forget to enjoy it :)
Basically, just because small effects (average levels of violence) are being smoothed out and minimized, does not imply that tail-end effects -- such as nuclear wars, large genocides, etc -- will not occur. Some people argue that the former may even raise the odds of the latter through artificial constriction until tensions reach a boiling point.
A big proponent of this type of thinking is Nassim Taleb, most notably in his book Antifragile.
> Cirillo and Taleb also found no evidence that wars cluster together, as earthquakes and episodes of financial volatility are known to do. Rather, big wars follow no trend and simply occur with equal likelihood through time. Doing the statistics right, they argue, shows that the recent peaceful past is almost certainly causing us to seriously underestimate how much violent conflict we're likely see in the future. [1]
There's an interesting back-and-forth between Taleb and Pinker on this topic, here are some links:
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf http://stevenpinker.com/files/comments_on_taleb_by_s_pinker....
[1] - http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-05-18/is-the-worl...
I'm not nearly as concerned with ISIS as I am the white gun nut next door who's off his meds... and I'm not nearly as concerned with THAT as I am the lack of No Entry and No U-Turn signs on my local highway. Because if someone near me is going to get killed, it will probably be when someone stops in the middle of the highway to turn where there's no lane to do so.
Those supposedly isolated wars are really an extended campaign that supports the petrodollar.
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/~paul20i/classweb/AFP2008/middleas...
But actually these middle east conflicts are basically tribal and go back hundreds of years including The Crusades and beyond.
We need a good alternative to clinging to the petrodollar's dominant position until it is pried out of our hands by a world war. Bitcoin looks like a good candidate.
It almost makes me wonder what the internet, online 'journalism' and social media would have been like if it existed during the two world wars.
Why kill people when you can just uproot them?
So if the argument that we are as safe as we have ever been is based on that data, it looks more like we were as safe as ever in 2010. And now we are going downhill.
Like stock market, the perceived future is what effects our emotion in the present.
Global poverty has decreased dramatically (halved in 20 years).
"Global income inequality peaked approximately in the 1970s when world income was distributed bimodally into "rich" and "poor" countries with little overlap. Since then inequality have been rapidly decreasing, and this trend seems to be accelerating. Income distribution is now unimodal, with most people living in middle-income countries."
http://www.voxeu.org/article/parametric-estimations-world-di...
http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2013/04/17/re...
Inequality is not a good metric for whether or not things are getting better.
As Thomas Sowell said, “Now the history of the United States in the 20th century shows an incredible increase in prosperity over that century, and it was brought about not because [the poor]’s slice of the pie got bigger — the whole pie got bigger. And so everybody had an increase in prosperity.”
And anyway, "income inequality" actually increases the more your government has subsidies for the poor. The more the poor are subsidized, the less incentive they have to work longer hours, the less they receive in income. It's not a coincidence that income inequality was lowest when countries had no government welfare programs at all.
If you only look at inequality PER COUNTRY it will look lower than the US. Of course, the same would be true if you broke up Connecticut and Mississippi in your income statistics.
Cuba is a totally different story, they have a maximum income law that says you cannot legally make more than $20 USD per month (except for doctors, who are allowed to make $30 USD per month). Can't really compare incomes in a country which artificially sets the legal income.
Possibility one -- you have good data, but you're looking at post-tax income data, which would be skewed because of our flatter tax structure, fewer transfers, low long-term capital gains tax rate, and our relatively high income tax as percentage of total tax burden.
Possibility two -- the Gini coefficient you're looking at took national rates and then averaged them, rather than actually comparing incomes of specific people across the EU.
I believe that if you compared pre-tax data across the EU (rather than national data, averaged) you would see the EU having considerably more income inequality.
Just speaking from first hand experience, I've seen the difference between the lives of the wealthy and poor in the US (from Connecticut to Mississippi), and the wealthy and poor in the EU (from Bulgaria to Norway). The difference is much starker in the EU.
I'm sure it probably doesn't sound very scientific, but I'm inclined to trust my own eyes over statistics. If the data shows otherwise, I have to imagine the data is skewed in some way.
As one would expect; in the short term those subsidies produce less post-transfer inequality of outcome, but that also equates to less inequality of opportunity, and therefore long-term less pre-transfer inequality of outcome, as well.
That depends on your definition of "better". Given the fact that relative deprivation has a demonstrably very strong negative subjective disutility, demonstrated in many studies, its pretty darned important if you want to understand increases or decreases in actual suffering.
This doesn't fit the simplistic way lots of people would like to think economic indicators should map to human experience, but that's a problem with the simplistic models.
While you may be right about your particular area, you're not correct about Africa as a whole, nor about sub-Saharan Africa collectively. For the past decade, economic growth in Africa has been higher than in East Asia. In sub-Saharan Africa, incomes are up by two thirds since 1998.
Since 1960, life expectancy for women in sub-Saharan Africa is up from 41 to 57 years, and the fraction of children attending school is up from low 40s percent to over 75%. Almost any poverty indicator you care to measure shows improvement.
This is not to say that the problem of poverty is solved -- far from it. But the problem is steadily getting smaller, not bigger.
How big and fat a political campaign is irrelevant.
It's ultimately the voters' responsibility. They are the one who elect the lizards, and listen to thrash news, and be terrified of serial killers and terrorists.
Lets take a more blatant example: In Hong Kong, the slate of chief executives are preselected by the Chinese authorities, and then the people then get to vote for the pre-approved candidates. The Chinese government openly states the following: "I don't care how the people in Hong Kong vote so long as I get to do the nominating".
In the United States, there is a group of very powerful people who provide money for candidates which essentially "pre selects" them as well with a "green primary". The public is voting for candidates vetted by the rich and powerful. When faced with a decision which contradicts the interests of the rich and powerful it takes a lot of discontent by the electorate to get a controversial policy through the lawmaking process.
The political system in the US has been corrupted. The Citizen's United Ruling by SCOTUS was especially damaging.
Russia is supplying military assistance to the government of Syria, while the U.S. (and other NATO countries) are supplying assistance to moderate Syrian rebel groups (but not ISIS). This breaks it down clearly:
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/world/middleeast/the-sy...
This just happened recently:
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/11/25/world/europe/turkey-syr...
Russia has repeatedly warned the US to not interfere directly in Syria (you might have seen this):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/putin-plea-for-cau...
This is all interesting considering the Republicans are already talking about increasing the US presence in Syria (for the purposes of defeating ISIS).
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/11/16/politics/republican-isis-2...
Statistics are nice but the model is too simple and doesn't account for the complexities of geopolitics.