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Comment by Isinlor | Hacker News Reader

The world is better off today in basically every way than it was 100 years ago, and almost unimaginably better than it was 200 years ago.

The worst 10% today do about as well as majority of West was doing back then. And the condition of the poor is improving rapidly. The places were it is not true, it is due to wars.

But well, this is perspective of a Polish person. My country lost 25% of the population during wars with Sweden, 90% population of Warsaw. And then another 20% in WWII, and another 90% of Warsaw was lost. My grandmother lived through that. Later, during communist regime she managed to escape Poland right before Martial Law in 80' to Netherlands. My mother was persecuted after that due to contacts in the West.

Now we live in the EU. I have extremely hard time imagining my Swedish or German colleagues trying to kill me. Not everyone is peaceful to the east, but at least their tanks are not in Poland. That's progress too.

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> The world is better off today in basically every way than it was 100 years ago

This is orthogonal as to whether a collapse is around the corner or not. If you look at the science in the IPCC report, combine with the inability to hit every single emissions target defined in every single climate treaty. It seems civilization collapse is on the table.

Also:

We probably are already at 2C locked in: https://www.ecowatch.com/greenhouse-gases-paris-agreement-26...

Billions of refugees by 2100: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02648...

Etc.

If we don't drastically reduce emissions in the next decades, it seems very probable that this global civilization will end. Which might not be a bad thing in the long run, but in the short term it will cause a lot of suffering.

People are better off, but not our arable land, the fish in our oceans, the soil we grow our crops in, the animals in our forest, the forest themselves, etc...

We're in a sports car hitting the gas as we head towards a cliff and you're talking about how much better the interior is on this new model compared to the last.

Reduction of global child mortality from near 50% to below 4% is not "talking about how much better the interior is" ...

The past was an ongoing disaster worse than any westerner can imagine.

Production per acre of farmland has increased massively and is still increasing. The size of forests in developed countries has increased substantially.

At the same time the rate of population growth has decreased and is projected to go negative within a few decades.

Sure, lots of things are still getting worse, but "getting worse more slowly" is progress. No reason to get complacent but in my opinion doom sayers do more harm than good by promulgating the nihilistic philosophy that we're all doomed anyways, so fighting our problems doesn't do any good.

Forest cover has increased after we cut much of it down. We've replaced much of it with monoculture timber that gets one maybe two growth cycle before the soil is depleted.

Production of food has increased along with our unsustainable use of fossil fuels and the other products needed to do so. Topsoil is disappearing at an alarming rate.

I don't think a person sounding the alarm that we'll have depleted our fish stocks within 25 years, or are losing an incredible amount of topsoil each year, or are heading for dramatic climate changes that will cause an increase in disasters is a doomsayer. They're just living according to what every scientific report says. Being optimistic won't change a disruption in food supply or mass migration due to shifting weather patterns.

But isn't all this progress bought with the destruction of our environment? It isn't sustainable at all and we are basically betting we can switch to a sustainable model before everything starts breaking down.

Climate change is no good, and we have to do better, but the past was even worse.

Try to imagine near 50% child mortality on a global scale in 1800.

That's the past. Today even the poorest regions in Africa have "only" ~15% child mortality.

The better things will not remain so for long. Many of the industry and technical progress came at a huge cost. It's the future generation who will bear it. Data conclusively indicates real-world climate change is tracking the IPCC's worst case scenario.

https://youtu.be/fliCxyAwBWU

Well, many things in the environment are a lot worse now than 100 years ago, but some things are better. While there was much less industrial production, it was more polluting per output. Waste water cleaning, industrial process cleaning or in general taking care of garbage has improved a lot in the last sixty years in developed countries.

Why per output? To make it look better? Total is worse, more co2, more pollution, more oil spill in oceans, plastic in oceans even inside animals etc. It's better just for a selfish species.

Well, in many places, since population and consumption per capita has plateaued, total pollution has reduced a lot. Some local anecdotes follow.

Waste water cleaning plants were built, so human excrement wasn't dumped to the sea anymore. At some point district heating replaced coal and wood burned in houses. Double and triple glazing arrived. The metro started operating in the eighties, replacing a lot of buses. Lead gasoline was banned in the nineties as well. Cars got electronic ignition, fuel injection and catalytic converters. Diesel engines started having tightening regulations every few years. Waste water treatment was upgraded to even remove nitrogen. New bicycle highways were made, the metro is being extended, tram lines are being built, and just a few weeks ago many diesel bus lines were replaced by Chinese electric ones.

Some things have gotten better, some things have gotten worse. But not everything has gotten worse.

Some things are better only for humans. For every other species it's worse. The whole ecosystem is worse than ever. The better things will also become useless in few dacade as the climate is tracking the worst case scenario of the IPCC report.

The wastewater cleaning is certainly better for marine life.

That's only one thing, overall there are way too much oil leaks and plastic in oceans, so it's silly to say things are better. Then there are things that are hidden like https://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-environmental-disast...

and https://v.redd.it/ayd4itr1kqg71

Marine life halved in few decades https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/marine-wil...

Yeah, of course. But some areas in the sea, like close to the city where I live, are in much better shape than they were before I was born. There's plenty of data on that.

The sea in total is not doing great, because of agricultural emissions.

Your husband takes out a variable rate mortgage 120% of your homes value to spend on luxury goods, Buys a g-wagon, and starts embezzling from his company. Instead of paying for utilities you steal then from neighbors. To save on garbage collection you fly tip. The last 5 years have been wonderful for you quality of life.

You shouldn't question your situation because things are 'better'.

What does this have to do with anything? Most of the West (let alone most of the rest of the world) is far better off than it was even just 50 years ago by almost every single metric you can conceive.

It's hard to believe it's due to financial games exclusively: people are better off in real terms.

Inequality is a problem because when members of your community are living in very different conditions, the cohesion of said community is undermined, but worrying about inequality is the archetypical first world problem: a problem nonetheless, but a problem that presumes you've come a long way.

it's not about financial games, but rather externalities. There are significant external costs of our way of life that are borne by others. That new car emits CO2 that contributes to global heating. The steaks we eat come from cows that have been fed with soy beans from cleared rainforests. etc etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Negative

It frankly still is a stretch to claim that living conditions would revert to even just 1950s levels if we reduced emissions to a sustainable level. Again, most of those improvements have been in real terms. We are simply more productive.

Do we have a good sense of how much of that increase in productivity can be sustained in a carbon neutral fashion?

is it? I think it's entirely possible that our civilisation would completely collapse.

the analogy of course assumes that there are a bunch of different problems that will come to the family when the cops, the IRS, the electric company, and their bank all come to talk to them at once.

Just as it is generally claimed by scientists that there are a bunch of different problems coming to humanity when ecosystems collapse, temperatures rise by 1.5 degrees celsius, there's not enough freshwater to go around...

it might be stretch to claim etc. etc. but nobody is making that claim, the claim is that humanity is not reducing emissions and not doing anything significant to handle when the bills come due for the last century of everything improving!

on edit: changed is a bunch to are a bunch - is a bunch is probably still correct but are a bunch sounds more correct to my ear.

The problem is not that we could not revert to even just 1950 levels.

The problem is that it's advantageous for everyone to continue to externalize the costs and let everyone else pay the bill[0].

Since everyone is doing the externalizing, no one is paying the bill. Since no one is paying the bill, the resource will be exhausted sooner or later.

The resource in question is the resilience of our own biological life support system; we're wrecking it, both by by our predatory over exploitation and by pollution. We're destroying the foundations of our own survival.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

I love this analogy, and it's definitely a perspective to take seriously. "It's always okay, until it isn't" is something to consider, as is the idea that civilization is living on borrowed time, or borrowing from the future to pay the present.

I don't know if it's true, or if it's even something we can falsify at any moment in history, but stable civilizations have collapsed, and it's worth understanding that it could happen to ours too.

>The world is better off today in basically every way than it was 100 years ago, and almost unimaginably better than it was 200 years ago.

so this seems sort of like the old joke about jumping off the skyscraper and as you fall past the 10th floor say "so far so good", only now the person falling is doing cocaine and says "things are only getting better!"

GP is objectively correct. 200 years ago, ~95% of humans lived in extreme poverty. 100 years ago it was ~85%. Today only ~10% live in extreme poverty, and the number continues to fall.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty

That doesn't change that fact that the ground is getting closer and closer and we're still accelerating.

We're burning the planet.

This is because we've more efficiently exploited the poorest people on Earth. As we run out of human resources to extract, surely something will change. Perhaps we'll reach an equilibrium, at least until jobs start to become automated by Google machine learning and Boston Robotics drones.

When people say "the world is better today", they mean only humans right? Because for all other species it's worse. Humans are pretty selfish to say world is better.

>The world is better off today in basically every way than it was 100 years ago, and almost unimaginably better than it was 200 years ago.

... in the kind of metrics people like Hans Rosling of Steven Pinker care about, when taking quantitative state-produced stats at face value, and with naive extrapolation (and ignoring statistical fluctuations, black swans, etc).

E.g. "the condition of the poor is improving rapidly. The places were it is not true, it is due to wars". Global warming is already a big factor and is only expected to be more so in the future.

And that's not even before any real battle for resources such as water, crops, and dwindling minerals start, mass immigration due to climate change brings its own conflicts and challenges, the decline of the US hegemony brings forth new hegemonical and tons of peripheral claims, and lets not even count inflation and other pressures (including boomer-era people coming to retirement age en masse with lots of savings issues in the US, and broken pension systems in Europe). I haven't even mentioned a possible permanent (or long term) covid mutations situation (we're already 2 years in, and measures already had a huge impact on economies).

>Now we live in the EU. I have extremely hard time imagining my Swedish or German colleagues trying to kill me.

Not to make it sound like equivalent times, but jewish people had an extremely hard time imagining their German co-patriots would try to kill them too, plenty of such historical accounts from pre/early WWII, even up to the point they were already dealing with force registration in ethnicity lists, deportations, and so on.

> in the kind of metrics people like Hans Rosling of Steven Pinker care about

I'm curious by what kind of metrics the world was better 100 years ago. You're arguing against a strawman: there are challenges ahead != we were better off before.

Well, CO2 in the atmosphere (and amount of carbon above ground in general, a lot has been brought up from below in the last 100 years) and plastic pollution come to mind. Ocean pollution. Bio-diversity. Less or no weapons of mass destructions. No climate change yet, e.g. in the western US water from rivers was less of an issue and could be distributed more freely.

There were a lot of extremely dirty industrial processes which we are doing much better now (in the developed countries at least), superfund sites in the US and their equivalent in other industrialized nations as the known locations, but it did not reach the global scale yet, plus, what they buried or just left in the ground where the factories spilled it is still there now for the most part.

I think that in quite a few ways we've gotten better, sure, but partly by kicking the can down the road instead of actually solving issues such as sustainable energy or water use instead of drawing from and heavily relying on exhaustible stores, as well as not having closed loops with the things we produce.

Not a direct answer to your question (also 1921 isn't exactly a local optimum considering it's just after the end of WW1 and on the precipice of the Great Depression) but if you take away a "primitive" tribal community's land, charge them for living in it and pay them a starvation wage to work the land for you, you've increased their economical wellbeing by almost every metric.

Additionally the metrics being called out are things like the World Bank's poverty statistics, which applies fairly arbitrary definitions of income-based poverty that in many cases would identify people otherwise labelled "food insecure" as "not in poverty". The definitions are also applied globally and by their nature adjusted over time, which can skew the results. And even if all of these limitations are ignored most of the "improvements" are localized in China.

I'm not going to defend primitivism because I think the problem today is mostly a matter of distribution and resource inefficiency but for a metric that has gotten worse over time (though again not in the 100 year view for obvious reasons) consider leisure time. Hunter-gatherer societies spent considerably less time on sustaining themselves than the 40+ hours per week the average modern human spends working a job, doing household chores and shopping.

The problem is that a lot of the ills don't neatly fit into metrics and even when you try to do so, you have to rely on self-reporting for a lot of them. For example for most workers industrialization massively increased alienation from their work, remote work (but also on the opposite end the need to relocate for career advancement) has drastically increased social isolation, enclosure and the increasing commodification of leisure activity also have take their toll, and social media has increased the spread of disinformation, replaced social interaction with public performance and has been a massive cause of social anxieties.

And of course the thing is that a lot of the problems we have can't just be fixed by a clever improvement because their causes are intrinsic to the system. You can try to reduce overproduction and improve recycling but the best consumer action to help the environment is not to consume and the best industrial action to help the environment is not to produce. But considering how much of our economy hinges on demands people didn't know they had for things they didn't know they need (not just production but also sales, advertising, financing, sales and advertising for the financing, debt collection, sales and advertising for the debt collection to the companies doing the financing, insurance for the companies doing the financing, sales and advertising for the companies doing the insurance, and so on) that just translates into "killing jobs" and "ruining the economy".

Hugely more pollution (increased exponentially from 100 years ago as shown in graphs).

Higher temperatures (climate change, not the same as pollution).

Worsening infrastructure (the US, for example, is turning into a developing world country in many areas) as opposed to the era of great infrastructure projects, from scryscrappers and railways to the interstate system .

Lower/flattening productivity increases (as opposed to continuous productivity booms 100 years ago).

Lower/flattening invention rate (the low hanging fruits ended circa 1950-60).

More surveillance (in fact more, even at solely the state level, than even Stazi had, and with infinite potential for targeted surveillance).

Thining middle class (as opposed to incresing middle class 100 years ago).

Hugely increased inequality.

Crumbling pension systems (as opposed to pension systems being developed 100 years ago).

There are also a few tricks such "we're getting better" treatises use:

1) use the progress in countries starting from a very low bar to offset regressions in more developed countries (and since the third world countries have higher population, use an average state to shove it to the face of doubters who see their own lives and those of their countries/societies get worse and worse). This is kind of like averging Jeff Bezos' and mine wealth (kinda: what it does it says since e.g. 1 billion people went from $1/day to $2/day this is a huge 200% increase, who cares is another billion went from $100/day to $80/day and falling...).

2) take official measurements (made to make states and organizations affecting change look good) as the ground truth

3) when convenient, compare with say a century back, not 30 and 40 years back (e.g. when people didn't even have the notion of a pension, not when you expected and got one).

4) ignore any qualitative metric.

> - Hugely more pollution (increased exponentially from 100 years ago as shown in graphs). - Higher temperatures (climate change, not the same as pollution).

Fair enough

> Worsening infrastructure

If you're claiming that infrastructure 100 years ago was of lesser quality than today, you're living in an alternate reality.

> Lower/flattening productivity increases

False when increases taken in real terms: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RTFPNAUSA632NRUG It's pretty much a line as straight up as it gets.

> Lower/flattening invention rate

As in? Science is working worse now?

> More surveillance (in fact more, even at solely the state level, than even Stazi had, and with infinite potential for targeted surveillance).

That's hard to judge. Yes, modern states have more potential for surveillance, but they arguably can get away with less abuse than they used to.

> Thining middle class (as opposed to incresing middle class 100 years ago).

Very nice how you take the first derivative.

> Hugely increased inequality.

As much as people love talking about it, 'inequality' is a vague term. Are we talking income or wealth? Worldwide, US or Europe?

Worldwide, inequality has dramatically decreased (both income and wealth). Income inequality in the US is slightly higher than post war, but marginally so. The charts they show you don't have the origin at zero, that's all.

> Crumbling pension systems

In countries that have nationalized pension systems (which aren't actually a bad thing imo), pensions are generally pay-as-you-go. If pension systems are not sustainable it's simply because politicians love using them as the 21st century grain dole: they aren't crumbling for any fundamental reason other than the political unwillingness to do the honest thing and cut benefits.

> 1) use the... > 2) take... > 3) when...

I have no axe to grind and absolutely nothing to defend. If 'those treaties' do that, they are wrong. I like talking about concrete, factual statements though, "our society is getting worse" is something that's been said for literally millennia.

> ignore any qualitative metric.

Can you point out some qualitative metric that isn't just "life was better X years ago because I was X years younger?" Because let's be honest, that's what most "qualitative metrics" boil down to. As imperfect as it might be, data is at least an honest attempt to understand the world.

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