How the World Is Getting Better
awealthofcommonsense.com
awealthofcommonsense.com
We are living in the best of times. We just don’t want to believe it.
Also, the mass shooting thing has gotten much worse in the last 30 years.
Gun violence deaths YTD at end of March 2023: ~10,000.
Question asked: "How many peole in the u.s. die in mass shootings compared to how many people die in gun violence?"
Source: https://www.phind.com/search?cache=6a726999-4846-410b-aa52-5...
You could make a very similar list focusing on income, cost of living and relative buying power on a timescale of 50 years or another on the environment on a scale of 20 years and both would be quite depressing.
It feels very "well actually" wishful thinking by someone well off enough to ignore all the cracks.
At least it doesn't feel quite as deliberately misleading as the Steven Pinker "we redefined the poverty line, look at all the poverty that's going away" slight of hand.
Well, you’re living. Without disease, war or famine. The world’s knowledge at your fingertips.
I’m about your age, and while there is a lot of work to be done, one of the most difficult hurdles to solving them is the nihilism and civic disengagement in our generation and industry. We’re sitting in a golden age of human achievement at the centre of the first world.
> could make a very similar list focusing on income, cost of living and relative buying power on a timescale of 50 years or another on the environment on a scale of 20 years and both would be quite depressing
Real wages have gone up over the last fifty and twenty years. Living in cities has become less affordable. But that you’re citing that as a standard of wellbeing, it’s a massive improvement from the post-War era.
On top of that the added anxiety people experience because of living paycheck to paycheck.
It's becoming more and more like in the movie Elysium - all the technological wonders are there - just not accessible to the poor.
Again, you’re comparing this to a past where continuing to exist wasn’t a given.
1900: 47%
1950: 55%
2000: 66%
2022: 66%
Further, ownership going beyond certain numbers does not necessarily mean good either.
Keep in mind that the mentioned "social housing factor" does exist, but it is also almost entirely in the hands of Gen X and older because building social housing had already stalled by that time.
I also see this complaint from 2nd+ generation Americans. The 1st generation immigrant families I know save their money meticulously and end up buying one, two, three houses and renting them out. They do this amazing feat by saving almost all of their income and forgoing all luxuries for 10 years, then renting the rooms of the house they buy out, using the income to buy the second house that’s rented out, etc. They live a life of wise frugality, never drinking an espresso drink or watching Netflix, and scrupulously managing their income and savings - on accountant and K12 teacher incomes. The truth is you can buy a place for $700k in say Seattle for $140k down payment, which if you save 50% of your net income making a dual income of $120k/year takes less than 10 years.
Read the Jungle for a sense of what housing felt like pre-WW2. Compare it to what I described above happens today. Ask yourself what specifically is challenging you compared to other succeeding at it today and those succeeding at it 100 years ago. Maybe hold the post war era as a blip and outlier, and draw a line between you and the past without letting the outlier dominate your perception of your lot in life. Or move somewhere other than San Francisco.
Prices literally went up by a cool 100% or so over the past 5 years or so (if you account for the now ludicrous financing rates; 62% in raw prices) in Germany.
Housing in Cologne cost 3451 EUR/m² in 2017. We're currently up to 5508 EUR/m². Morgage rates went from ~1.2% pa to almost 4% pa over the past 3 years.
That's not normal.
Ultimately supply is the only way to decrease price.
Look, I know the economics. I don't like them. Fundamentally. Housing shouldn't be owned, at least not at scale.
My comment was mostly to point how how asinine your "if you are persistent you can do it" point is, being that both rent and morgages are skyrocketing. My rent got raised by 14 percent (it's coupled to inflation, that used to be a better deal) and you'd need about 200k/yr (pre-tax) household income right now to even get approved for a morgage here. It's essentially impossible for a working class person, unless you're on the top few percent of (labor based) income. And those people tend to have substantial capital too. Tech salaries don't scale this far here.
Also, yeah sure, houses now are more expensive relative to salaries (mostly in cities but it's true generally).
However, in almost any other metric, we own a lot more, and have much more options to thrive, we are safer and healthier, and ultimately we're much much better off.
The world is getting better, and witnessing people deny this fact is depressing.
Like woop-dee-doo I can access more information than ever, but it hasn't really helped me stay employed for longer than 1 and a half years, and it's mathematically extremely unlikely I'll ever be able to stop working.
There is some good chance, given potential volumes, you misunderstood for people mistaking aggregates what could be instead people not referring to aggregates but to downfalls of civilization surrounding them.
Not a single mention of natural world.
~~~ Jacob Heilbrunn
Decline of the quality of education seen in many already leading Countries is producing weakened «citizens»; the consequences are massive, degrading quality of service and finally making entire classes of critical service fade into unusability.
The rigid consideration of aggregates like "more people in the world can read" reveals a potential of progress in long timespans and hides dire crises of immediate urgency.
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Edit:
while I had other contexts in mind, it is an interesting coincidence that the current _topmost_ submission in HN is "Ask Wirecutter: Can you recommend a not-smart TV for me?".