There are many measures by which we can judge our positive success. Of course there a ton of problems, but it still seems that we only like talking about problems and not any of the positives.
And what, I can get an extra 5 years in a nursing home where there's a decent chance I'll suffer physical and psychological abuse but will be forcefully kept alive in a stupor on a cocktail of drugs.
It's just unabashed justification for the interests of the top couple percent. They do in fact have it better right now by far than any other cohort in history.
So if we we went from 8B to 80B I'd argue we'd go from 1B -> >50B in poverty. Maybe a lot worse than that.
This is obviously dependent on where you are born but especially true once you consider that the places left with high fertility have nearly perfect overlap with the places with high volumes of extreme poverty.
And this is only in the short term. Those people are generating plastic waste, consuming fuel, and many other things that are net negatives to the planet over time. So over the long term this problem just gets worse.
you might expect poverty to go up by a factor of 50x when the population goes up by 10x, but what we see is the opposite, poverty has grown more slowly than the overall population.
I thought that had recently reversed.
On many objective measures, we are doing well. On many others, things are getting dramatically worse, fast.
>that's where we are in this country
Unfortunately it seems to be where everyone ends up in all developed societies. The US is an aberration because it is so young.