Are you? Do you have no worries in the world?
In other words, you can't measure it directly. For example, if you went to the future and noted a person owned a flying car, had infinite food and a huge castle would you be able to measure the poverty level of that person? No - it depends on how much his peers have. If his peers own spaceships and planets, then he is rather poor by comparison.
I found this Medium post which quotes the relevant parts: https://medium.com/chris-messina/surrogate-activities-the-po...
This is not a theory in the scientific sense. It's an idea Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, wrote about in his manifesto.
Ignorance - developed countries have never sent so many people to university.
War - Is less common in recent history and the wars we do get involved have fewer casualties. I know people will raise Iraq but you only need to go back as far as Vietnam to find a conflict that was an order of magnitude worse.
Poverty - Absolute poverty is very low in the developed world and decreasing elsewhere.
Dirt - Soap is cheap.
Disease - Smallpox, Malaria, Measles, Rubella, Syphilis, Rabies are all eradicated or falling heavily. Cancer is only so common because we live so long.
Frustration - Liberal values have given freedom to a lot of people that had been oppressed.
Hunger - Food has never been so cheap.
Fear - I live in the UK, there is nowhere in my country that I feel is out of bounds for me.
Overwork - Jonathan Sachs has a really good presentation on this, our hours have been falling for decades. Also technology has freed us from much backbreaking work.
I don't think anyone's arguing this. I think the argument is that we don't realize how good we have it since Orwell's time. What he described is many people's (especially on HN's) effective reality.
And yet, ignorance is still a significant problem in society, whether it be today's flavour of bigotry, a continued denial of the dangers of climate change, anti-vaxers, et cetera so on and so forth.
>War Less war is certainly not none, and the consequences of our current wars are hitting as close to home as they have in living memory. Terrorism, both domestic and foreign, are problems for real people.
>Poverty "Absolute" poverty maybe, but that doesn't mean that huge chunks of the western world aren't worrying about money constantly. Effective poverty is a tremendous issue.
Well, I could keep going, but I won't - suffice to say, all of those things are still issues. They may not all be the same, or even as bad in some "absolute" sense, but they're still relevant.