Evidence for Abundance | Hacker News Reader

Evidence for Abundance

singularityhub.com

32 pointsAlexey_Nigin11 comments

One of the graphs struck me as odd - percent of per capita disposable income spent on food, falling. The problem with that is inequality - it's been widely discussed that most of the gains of the last decade have been made by the richest, while wages for the poorest have stagnated. But that means the percent of disposable income spent on food by the poorest might not be falling at all?

It turns out USADA do have that graph as well (in fact it's the one right below the one in the article, taken from http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics...) http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/detail.a... - for the lowest quintile of the US population, the % of disposable income spent on food has gone up from 32% to 34% from 2006 to 2014.

The abundant future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed?

> while wages for the poorest have stagnated. But that means the percent of disposable income spent on food by the poorest might not be falling at all

No, that's not true at all. If wages are stagnant and goods are getting cheaper, then you are getting richer. I see this "stagnant wages" meme brought up all the time, but I don't see why nobody ever talks about cost of goods. Ex: Even the poorest today in the US can afford amazingly complex cellphones and computers, which was unthinkable 25 years ago (if we were to somehow make one of the same capacity)

> If wages are stagnant and goods are getting cheaper, then you are getting richer. I see this "stagnant wages" meme brought up all the time, but I don't see why nobody ever talks about cost of goods.

Because the wages are stagnant in real (that is, inflation-adjusted) terms, which means that the cost of goods is already considered.

Considered for the most part. You will expectedly still be able to find goods and services that cost considerably more or less than in past, real terms.

Cost of some goods are smaller, but the big chunk goods in the USA have been going up a lot: Healthcare, Education and Housing.

Higher education has been getting much more expensive, and in many areas of the country, so has housing.

> NOTE: This is not to say that there aren't major issues we still face, like climate crisis, religious radicalism, terrorism, and so on.

The author felt compelled to include this disclaimer because people are afraid that by pointing out the good trends, that we are taking our eye off the ball in eradicating problems. As if by pointing out any promising trends in poverty, that this is equivalent to saying that we should stop trying to eradicate poverty. As if we declared mission accomplished!

I think this explains the aversion to good-news reporting, not that we over-emphasize the negative because of evolutionary bias. We always feel we need to add a disclaimer: but there is more work to do!

If I've learned one thing from this, it's that the worst places on Earth are in Sub-Saharan Africa. That's some staggering poverty which has really resisted major change after what appears to be a major shift in the early 80's.

Guinea worm is a great victory, but like Smallpox it's not emblematic of a general trend. You should not look at a chart of guinea worm infections and draw conclusions about rates of Malaria, VHF's, HIV, etc.

What has clearly and drastically improved is the standard of living in the US and Western Europe, which should shock no one at all.

The Bottom Billion is a good book about the factors that make the poorest regions in the world, of which Sub-Saharan Africa is the largest block.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bottom_Billion

Does the first chart account for inflation seeing as it's defined in terms of US dollars?

Yes. The source is a bit clearer on the point, mentioning that the chart is in terms of 2011PPP. So it accounts for differences in cost of living too, attempting to measure consumption in vaguely absolute terms. (a bit down the page: https://ourworldindata.org/world-poverty/ )

As a meta point, financial statistics that don't account for inflation are so utterly meaningless and bankrupt the thing to do if you have this concern is to go check and report back if they are crap. The default assumption should be that they do account for inflation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com