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Comment by akkad33 | Hacker News Reader

The book [factfulness](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34890015-factfulness) is precisely about this. They present how the world is improving in an irrefutable way but media and politicians would only focus on the negative. The authors are Swedish, so they talk first hand about Sweden, and their experiences how drastically Sweden changed in the last 2 generations is amazing

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> They present how the world is improving in an irrefutable way but media and politicians would only focus on the negative.

It's worth noting this 'world' that is constantly improving exists only for people.

I routinely counter this with the analogy: that's like a dentist saying your teeth are better than they've ever been -- not only that; they're getting better but at the same time your gums are screwed. Are those teeth dependant on those gums you might ask. Yeah.

Every serious envoirnmental science paper seems to conclude the same thing: biodiversity is collapsing. On the whole, the world we live in is worse than the past. Examples during the earths history that aren't really from external forces e.g. when the moon crashed in to earth, after asteroids, early earth volcanoes etc. are different and not under our control.

As far as I can see, you are totally correct. As it is the post you are replying to. Which begs the question: how can the state of all of humanity improve without damaging even more the environment? Will we ever confront that question honestly?

The answer is that birth rate needs to decline and the human population needs to level off and then also decline to sustainable levels. We're in overshoot right now and no amount of economic development (read: growth) is going to fix that. We need degrowth, and the only way that is achievable without harming standard of living is to have fewer humans. The only way to have fewer humans without murdering or starving a bunch is for population to level and drop off naturally.

It's hard to even have this conversation without being branded an eco-fascist, but there it is. We are just too many.

> The answer is that birth rate needs to decline and the human population needs to level off and then also decline to sustainable levels.

I agree that's an answer, but is it the answer?

It seems like reproduction rates in wealthy countries trend closer towards replacement levels, so perhaps you "just" need to get everybody's standard of living up to western levels to take population growth out of the equation.

Then you're left with supporting roughly our current population level which seems... entirely feasible?

Between existing but underutilized techniques like fission, renewables, smarter land use and management for agriculture (read: focus on producing more efficient crops and less on the intensive stuff like cows), retrofitting buildings with better insulation, and building out more efficient transit, it seems like we could get pretty close with current levels of technology.

Nevermind the developments we continue to make. Fusion power would immediately solve a lot of problems.

> Then you're left with supporting roughly our current population level which seems... entirely feasible?

That doesn't match data I've seen. For example, even the Wikipedia article on carrying capacity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity), second paragraph, states there are a number of lines of scientific evidence that we are already over capacity of Earth today. One project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day) does pretty intense data analysis to quantify how far we are over that capacity. The summary is, yes, we are definitely in overshoot, and all economic development to raise standard of living is making it worse.

But it's even worse than that. We aren't just exceeding the carrying capacity, it is diminishing as we reduce biodiversity and biomass through land use (read: obliterating wildlife and forests), overfishing, and over-industrialization of agriculture, which kills healthy soils.

> Between existing but underutilized techniques like fission, renewables, smarter land use and management for agriculture

It's not just about producing more energy. We are consuming everything too much, from biomass to raw materials, even fresh water.

> Fusion power would immediately solve a lot of problems.

It might reduce CO2 consumption but ironically it will increase per capita energy consumption, which encourages even more environmental destruction by making everything cheaper to build and buy. So more land use and more consumption.

Malthus had plenty of scientific evidence as well! What he didn’t have was fertilizer and tractors.

Fertilizer and tractors both contributed enormously to devastaing the biodiversity of the planet. The question is not whether we can sustain a larger population, but whether we can sustain a population as large as currently exists - while maintaining any semblance of a natural world. Over a long enough time line both questions almost certainly do in fact merge. But it's equally possible to conceive of a medium term future with nature utterly devastated and humanity clinging on in increasingly baroque ways to a dying rock.

> It seems like reproduction rates in wealthy countries trend closer towards replacement levels...

That seems unlikely, given that total fertility in wealthy countries is well below "replacement" (2.1 children per woman). Reproduction rate, number of daughters per woman, could only be approaching replacement if the sex ratio is massively skewed in favour of girls.

1. UN chart of TFR for "more developed regions": https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/FERT/TOT/...

Observe the assumed but never yet seen floor to fertility rate.

Unfortunately the assumption of real growth is very baked into things like social security, medicare, etc. There's no way to de-grow without an increased burden for those working to take care of a larger non-working aging cohort.

A deeper problem is that the benefits / "slack room" provided by real growth are constantly eradicated because people's wants (and needs) keep growing along commensurately.

Some changing expectations are fairly uncontroversial, e.g. better medical technology and doctor training costs more. Others are arguably less good, e.g. private jets (or taken to the extreme, passenger planes in general!)

There are different kinds of growth. The one needed for the above is growth in GDP which doesn't necessarily need growth in number of people, amount of energy used etc.

Right, we could definitely have real productivity growth without population growth - that's increased efficiency (I doubt this is possible without increasing energy expenditure though).

I think the problem is still the one I pointed out, whereby if increased efficiency halved the number of man-hours required to make an iPhone 15, instead of "being happy with the current iPhone 15 for half the cost", AAPL/the market/people's demands would result in the same number of man-hours being utilized to produce the next fancier iPhone 20 (or VR headset).

So I think a significant cultural shift would be required for increased productivity to translate into less work, rather than "more/better stuff" for the same (or an increased) amount of work.

I think it's certainly true with a fixed population size that technology helps us gain efficiency.

I guess we just need to change what we want out of mechanisation: historically it's been; more, cheaper, convenience, etc

We need to change to: sustainable, fair, necessary

The fact is, I can buy cheap plastic crap from somewhere to entertain myself for a day and get it shipped same/next day - but I don't _need_ to, nobody does. Like sugar is addicting, so is a lot of stuff in our modern lives. New phone every 6-12 months? There are people that do this and it's possible because everything has been set up to support it because we're _so_ concerned about our addiction to this sort of thing but not how it impacts the environment or social equity and so many other things.

Our species needs to change priorities so badly, but we're too weighed down by the cruel calculus that evolution gave us.

this will happen. when people are getting rich, they prefer to have less kids. UN predicted the largest number of population is 12 billion in future thirty years, then population start to diminish.

> when people are getting rich, they prefer to have less kids.

People are also having less kids because they are too poor. It's hard to pair off in an economy where 4 typical incomes are needed to make basic bills.

I know young people who aren't dating because there's presently no point. They aren't in the minority who earn enough to pay for half a household - nevertheless afford children.

Uh, poor people have way more kids:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...

Which in itself is a good argument to raise the standard of living from the bottom upwards .. below some ceiling of per capita consumption that exceeds current planet capacity to endure.

when society rich enough, the only way can let people want more kids is offer economic help. so this is not a pure linear relationship.

> Uh, poor people have way more kids:

Not in a wealthy country like the US they aren't.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/562541/birth-rate-by-pov...

Poor people get the burdens of a rich economy (ex: increasingly complex living) but have far fewer resources to offset them.

The graph you linked directly contradicts your comment.

> We need degrowth, and the only way that is achievable without harming standard of living is to have fewer humans

Why are you confident that having fewer humans would help with the standard of living? Doesn't most of the scarcity of what we consume come from the labor necessary to produce it, rather than the cost of physical stuff?

With food for example, for every dollar you spend on food only about 15 cents is actually buying food items from the farmer and the rest of it goes it to the work of processing, packaging, transporting, selling, servicing, etc

(https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-dollar-series/do...)

With fewer people, those things become even more scarce.

Housing, infrastructure, and energy would all be in huge surplus.

> only about 15 cents is actually buying food items from the farmer and the rest of it goes it to the work of processing, packaging, transporting, selling, servicing, etc

Part of the reason we need to do all of that is because we have too many people to feed. If the population is 1/10 of the number of people we have today in the US, suddenly we only need 1/10 of the cows, which domestically we can raise sustainably. No longer to we need to grow alfalfa in Arizona, ship it to Australia or Brazil where they raise the cows and then ship the meat back to the US. We’ll need 1/10 of the avocados that can be sustainably grown in California instead of importing it from Mexico.

This is generally true for primary production like agriculture, however, agriculture is something less than 5% of our effort, and for the majority of our economy we have the opposite effect where economies of scale enable much greater efficiency - i.e. more or better goods/services for the same amount of labor - than it could be possible with a much smaller population.

That economy of scale comes from a few billion people. A large fraction of the world's population neither contributes to it nor benefits much from it.

Why not focus on reengineering our political and economic systems and their inefficient built in contradictions, like optimizing for consumption?

Things used to be built to last. Planned obsolescence coupled with a human drive to consume needlessly are completely unnecessary to happiness, but decades of propaganda have convinced us otherwise. People don't need to keep driving to their fake jobs, etc.

It's not really extra physical goods that are the issue (e.g. that arm chair made from farmed wood going to landfill), it's the pollution required to create them or the improper disposal of them.

Some cast iron statues made using solar power as an energy source aren't a relevant climate issue.

As such, the proper response is a CO2 tax and proper landfill practices.

... or we could just build more nuclear plants and harness practically free energy, without getting weird about who's having babies

It's not just about energy, how do you store electricity ? How do you extract the materials ?

Nuclear energy is way more expensive than solar or wind.

The birth rate is coming down rather rapidly to the point where this will be a large problem for you when you’re in your golden years. Won’t that be ironic!

Do you have children? How do you propose to convince or force others not to have children without devolving into something that could reasonably be called “eco-fascism”?

Pretty easy really - promote social programs that lift the standard of living and promote easy access to quality education.

You can look at, say, Hans Rosling presentations over the past decades and see just how highly correlated education and women's rights are with reducing population expansion rates.

Free quality public TV | streaming doesn't hurt either.

How is that easy to accomplish nationally let alone globally? What if there’s places that buck the trend, or don’t want to incentivize low birth rates in this way?

It's easier than devolving into literal facism which was the first bar you set.

It's easy enough that the bulk of G20 countries got there sans the USofA which still struggles with public healthcare.

Of course doing something isn't as easy as sitting around doing nothing save moving a bar along and just asking.

Projection wise, for now, globally we're headed to peak and decline in population so much of this jawing is moot.

They got there by getting us to the point we’re at now, by burning fossil fuels and offloading many of their social ills to other regions. By all means, let’s improve education and get more money in people’s pockets. But degrowth is much more likely to be accomplished through fascism than by raising the standard of living globally in a way that preserves regional independence.

I agree that only an overwhelmingly powerful state apparatus could tear people away from their fast food and cat videos. And cars. And heat.

‘You will own nothing and you will be happy. For the good of the planet, of course.’

Taxes, sanctions, globalization. The idea, as I understand it, is that instead of using old fascism with boots and shootings, you just use new fascism with “economic realities” which basically do the same through starvation and homelessness. It works in the west, all you have to do is to give free youtube and tv to everyone in less developed regions, so they’d want that lifestyle badly.

How do we get people to do anything? Violence.

Unfortunately in our flesh and blood world as much as we have a dalliance with forming a society it still all comes down to violence at the end of the day. We hate it, but it's true.

Keep in mind my definition of violence is expansive, not only drawing blood but I would count imprisoning someone (who has broken laws) against their will as (a necessary) violence.

Came here to promote Hans Rosling's work, highly recommend taking a look at it for how global stats improve across the board over time.

People have having less children than replacement levels in all the developed countries. Probably all that is needed for the same to happen in Africa and the like is similar development.

Why would they need to be convinced or forced? Birth rates are declining around the world, in almost every culture. Having fewer children appears to be a choice that people are happy to make for themselves.

I hope you will lead by example and not have any children?

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

If the world won't have any children, it will be degrowth to zero in a lifetime. One child for everyone is enough to halven the population, according to my napkin math. Even two children is okay if you're ready to pay extra. You just have to not turn your family into a spawning pool and kids will be okay.

The problem is there, regardless of anyone who keeps their head in the sand. Humanity will meet the limit, and people will be unable to afford children. There's no if, there's when. The only question is whether future-we will be able to have 2, 1 or 0 kids on average, and how much fucked the planet will be at the point of realization. If your vote goes for "0 and very fucked", make sure to teach your kids to not whine about it later and to keep the pride.

Not that it's any of your goddamn business, but yes, I have decided to not have kids, for multiple reasons.

You have degrowth. Because degrowth is frankly, a disgusting ideology.

You're so wrong that you could hardly be any more wrong.

Economic growth is possible without consuming more resources. That's literally what technology is - producing more output with less input.

Rich countries have grown over the past 20 years without increasing CO2 emissions. Most developing countries have also grown faster than their CO2 emissions.

https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-relationship-between-gr...

Degrowth is murder, anyone promoting it is evil.

> Degrowth is murder, anyone promoting it is evil.

That's some emotive rhetoric there. I'm thinking that you're pretty passionate about the subject, and therefore not remotely objective.

I have used objective reasoning to conclude that degrowth is murder. Now I'm passionately opposing it. Same with Nazism, Communism, Decolonization, Hamas, etc.

How do you define murder ?

children dying because you don't produce enough food to feed them. people dying because your economy cannot support high technology required to make advanced drugs. old people freezing to death because you don't produce enough energy to heat their homes

this isn't a hypothetical. Look at any communist regime!

Yeah, right, but gppp’s degrowth means “not producing more humans than needed followed by food reduction”, not “starving the excess to death”. You’re seeing what isn’t there (and are all over the place in general, which makes it hard to reason).

Again, these emotive arguments: Children dying, sick people dying, old people dying.

None of that is actually murder. I don't think it's great, but it's not murder. However, I do wonder on your position on abortion? And preventative and responsible birth control? Would you count any of that as murder?

(There are plenty of fascist dictatorships and corrupt regiemes you could go for, but you pick "communism"?)

Pretty sure it's a logical fallacy to group the current argument with widely agreed and totally unrelated bads.

Degrowth is murder is not an argument.

Is that the best we can do in this day and age? Is this really the level of argumentation that we are at?

OP posted a comment and even provided evidence for his argument in one of his/her other comment. You did not.

You cherry picked 1 fact about CO2 emissions that is not even related to what OP was talking about which was resource scarcity and decrease in biodiversity.

Finally, even if your argument is correct regarding the fact that CO2 emissions are declining in the developed countries, it is only valid if you don't take into account the fact that developed countries have outsourced most of their manufacturing to developing countries.

That means that this CO2 was if fact emitted, just not counted in the stats of the developed countries anymore.

We can hardly call that a victory.

read the article I linked to

> The fall in CO2 emissions in advanced economies is also seen while considering consumption-based metrics, meaning that the fall in emissions in these regions is not merely a result of offshoring of manufacturing.

From you own quote: not merely. So it is in part responsible.

And I can also point to many dozens of article that agree with my statement.

But for the sake of argument, let's assume that you are completely correct, that doesn't change anything about deforestation, soil depletion, over-fishing and many other issues that have not been addressed.

All of these issues have nothing to do with CO2. So my original point stands. You are focusing on the CO2 part when OP was talking about resource depletion in the first place.

You can choose to bury your head in the sand and think that everything is fine, but that doesn't make it true.

On that note, considering that you did not address the point in my original comment, I can honestly say that you are arguing in bad faith and I don't have time for that so feel free to not respond.

Yeah I also find it hard to argue with such dishonesty, inability/unwillingness to look at statistics, and intellectual retardation.

Deforestation isn't an issue in advanced economies, e.g. in Europe. See OurWorldInData

Soil depletion? What's that? Plants don't need soil to grow, plants need nutrients (and can easily grow in water or even air!). We've been supplying nutrients artificially for more than a century now (see Haber-Bosch process). I'm sure we can continue doing so, just better with newer technology.

Netherlands is a tiny country, one of the worlds top food producers and exporters, and one quarter of its land is reclaimed (used to be the sea). It's not a problem.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/holland-...

> Each acre in the greenhouse yields as much lettuce as 10 outdoor acres and cuts the need for chemicals by 97 percent.

Over-fishing might be a problem, but we're solving it rapidly with aquaculture (farming of aquatic organisms). China is the other problem, e.g. they're fishing illegally in international waters off Argentina, probably will need to be reined in by international armed forces.

https://ourworldindata.org/fish-and-overfishing

Resources aren't a problem, peak oil is getting further and further away (because of fracking, new technologies, and new oil fields), and we're finding more and more other useful resources. With the advent of "too cheap to meter during daytime" solar power, we'll have more energy to extract/refine/recycle resources from other places as well (desalination, uranium from seawater, CO2-free steel, artificial (non-fossil) hydrogen and methane etc.).

Biodiversity might be a problem, but as with the above, I'm certain we'll be able to solve it.

Bottom line is, degrowth "green" propagandists are wrong, have always been wrong ("glaciers will be gone by 2020" LOL), and will continue to be wrong. Believe in our high-tech post-scarcity increasingly-moral free-market-capitalist civilization.

>("glaciers will be gone by 2020" LOL)

They're largely gone already.

And speaking of LOLing at failed predictions, do you know how many decades ago "too cheap to meter" electricity you've mentioned has been promised?

>Biodiversity might be a problem, but as with the above, I'm certain we'll be able to solve it.

Of course. With wishful thinking, anything is possible.

To sum up, technology will magically fix all the mess that growth and technology has created. Anything as long as we can have our cake and eat it too, and never make any sacrifice.

Even Alcubierre engines, so we can go and fetch resources from the Galaxy!

Is this really the level of argumentation that we are at?

I believe that’s where we at for most topics, we just tend to avoid places where exclamations get more attention than reason.

For some people growth is more like a religion, than something one can rationally examine that has tradeoffs.

And the religion even comes with miracles, where for any given problem caused by growth throwing more growth into it will fix it, usually by handwaving about non existing technologies that will "surely" arrive, or existing technologies that never proved themselves beyond toy scale.

And, as we can see from the "degrowth is murder" the religion comes with ethical deadly sins and fire-and-brimstone too.

How is degrowth murder? Is it murder if the entire planets worth of women aren't constantly pregnant because not embracing any and all potential for human life is murder?

Are you trying to say that saying only a % of people can have children is murder in regards to those that don't get to? Aren't we already doing this by imposing financial circumstances/classes on people rather than evenly distributing wealth as much as possible?

How do you know that 'we are too many' is the truth? How do you tell others what to do (or not to do) and bind others to such an obligation without that which you repudiate? How do we 'naturally' overcome the individual's natural instinct to reproduce? What do you think is happening in the current middle east conflict? We are seeing this logic play out in horror and tragedy.

You elevate standard-of-living to the sacrosanct. The addict's standard of living was never so high as during the rush. Some will always pine for the good old days when their backs didn't ache and their burden of knowledge weighed less great. Parts of society are addicted to convenience and ease, but the standard of living is not singular, this preference is not total. Technocratic institutions require democratic feedback.

Premising our solution with 'the maintenance of standards' ignores the truth that change is hard and many will bear the weight of the necessary adaptations. If the distribution of weights seem fair, we will bear it. Seemliness is a difficult problem in a chaotic world full of untrustworthy actors speaking at a distance, words of disguised self interest. We cannot transfer the burden of responsible living to 'other people' while not committing to appropriate action ourselves.

Irresponsible reproduction does risk diseases of society and the individual, and none of this argument should construe a preference for unrestrained growth.

Not until our infatuation with constant growth is confronted. Currently all major economies focus on growth(GPD), and any sign of slowdown is essentially a doomsday scenario. We have gotten massive efficiency gains in almost all labor intensive work, and while this means more goods and services can be pumped out to increase global wealth, it also means a rapid degradation of the environment.

As someone who wholeheartedly agrees with this statement, I do wonder why this mentality is so prevalent. Is it just a consequence of natural selection? Those who want to grow and compete will inevitably dominate those who do not, and so propagate more?

Yeah this question is a good one to chew on. I think ultimately humans are pretty good followers, and in my relatively short life time, I have not seen much in the way of good leadership at the global level. So we just end up following incompetent power hungry people around into their own interests(which is usually money and power).

All true. As a sidenote, in the Midwest rural area I grew up in there has been an extreme amount of growth in the past few years, with just about every big tech name buying land in the area and building data centers and plants, getting decades and hundreds of millions in tax breaks in the process. Once beautiful farmland and forests have been decimated in the process.

Local county politicians haven't really taken the lead, leaving townships to fend for themselves, in which it seems no-one has an idea what they are doing and constantly on their heels. There are many concerns over the environment and where the water is coming from. Stuff like this is going down with township trustees: https://www.newarkadvocate.com/story/news/local/granville/20...

There is a lot of whining and complaining from residents, but they all gladly accept the check when the players knock on their door with that Silicon Valley money. I think the obsession with growth is ingrained in American life at this point and inevitable. I don't blame the companies for finding cheap land, water, and tax breaks. And I don't blame landowners for taking money. At this point if someone is unwilling to accept growth, they will get left behind or boxed in. However, it doesn't make the decimation of forests and farmland any less sad, and this is the part that really bothers me about the whole thing.

I'm sure it's probably been shared here many times, but this is one of my favorite quotes from Tolstoy about the ideal life, which it seems is becoming a little harder to obtain the more this growth philosophy plays out.

“A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbour — such is my idea of happiness.”

> At this point if someone is unwilling to accept growth, they will get left behind or boxed in.

This really is a big crux of capitalism, there is simply no room for society to take a breather and enjoy life unless one is lucky enough to make it to retirement, and even more lucky to make it there in health. No room to reflect on new technology and inventions and decide whether we are on the right track, as a society. But chaos is inherent to big groups, so I'm not saying there is a different way forward on a planet with 8 billion people.

> I'm not saying there is a different way forward on a planet with 8 billion people.

So, you are saying that the solution is make small habitats outside of Earth :-) ? I would vote for that solution, but it’s so damn unpopular.

> how can the state of all of humanity improve without damaging even more the environment?

It can't. There are three to four billion young, new consumers coming on in the third world over the next 30-50 years, and they want what the first world has. And there's no fair argument to telling them they can't have it or strive for it.

That means enormous additional coal power plant production and emissions output.

Just ask India and China, they can't build coal power fast enough. Next comes Africa's energy build-out, and it will only partially be green, the rest will be coal. Take Africa's next billion new consumers and give that block the coal output of China, that's the end of the world as we know it (if the climate change forecasts are correct).

There's no stopping it now. Just enjoy your life, the future is set. Unless someone has an epic cheap energy breakthrough ready to go right now (so that we can have it deployed fully within 30-50 years).

Just what China and India are adding alone is enough to end the world. You could immediately cut US emissions in half and it wouldn't matter at all to the expansion going on in Asia. And again that's before we even get to what's about to happen in Africa. No matter how many times you bring this up to the green crowd, they just ignore it aggressively, pretending that doing little token virtue signaling things in one market (we cut emissions 5% in NY state, it's amazing!) is going to actually contribute meaningfully to stopping the avalanche. Anything that doesn't involve massively slashing the coal output of China and India (and preventing its rise elsewhere), is meaningless.

> that's the end of the world as we know it

Notably, this does NOT mean a mass die off and the end of human civilization or even the end of lots of nicely habitable bits of Earth.

My take is that environment will become lot more variable and we will just have to deal with it. Living in some areas will be worse than now and in others better. And we might need to move some things a bit, which is likely expensive but not life ending.

We have already seen quite a few lives ended during mass migrations, and there will be plenty more.

This is badly informed doomerism.

China installed 125GW of wind/solar power in 2022 alone, and their power sectors CO2 output is projected to decrease (!!) starting in 2025 [1].

> You could immediately cut US emissions in half and it wouldn't matter at all to the expansion going on in Asia

I know that many people don't like to hear this, but this is just absolving yourself from blame and it's despicable.

Yes the Asian continent emits more CO2 than North America-- about 10 times more people live there, what do you expect?!

What you conveniently gloss over is that the US does ABSOLUTELY NOT "lead by example"-- CO2/capita is the absolut WORST worldwide except for some superrich petrostates (~15 tons/year/person, compared to ~8 for EU/China and <3 for India).

Fact is that ANY contribution you make as US citizen is highly likely to be MORE effective (in terms of CO2/year saved) than anything a Chinese or Indian citizen could do, AND also likely to demand LESS from you (because an American family just has to leave the second car at home more often to save a ton of CO2, and Indian family has to turn off heating during winter to achieve the equivalent, basically).

[1]: https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/ci/research-an...

By moving manufacturing off world.

I think it’s important to remember that the future isn’t known to us. People will fixate on one scenario or another, forgetting that there are others. Our ability to forecast is limited.

Studying the recent past or the deep past gives us some perspective on how things have changed before. Making analogies might help us think of more scenarios, but it’s not so good for ruling things out.

> On the whole, the world we live in is worse than the past.

Some things are worse, some things are better.

For example, in the U.S., clean air and water have improved dramatically over the past 50 years.

Worldwide, deforestation is on the decline for the past 20 years.

> For example, in the U.S., clean air and water have improved dramatically over the past 50 years.

In large part through exporting our staggering manufacturing demands to poorer parts of the globe such that the localized effects of pollution happen there instead.

Biodiversity will come roaring back once humanity is gone. To the rest of life on our planet there is no difference to the damage done by a meteor or by humans. It’s not like an endangered owl is sitting around thinking about what counts as an external, life-threatening force!

Yay?

If you really care about the planet then you don’t really need to worry!

The condition of the planet affects our living, you can't really juste shurg it off

> biodiversity is collapsing

This is not the conclusion of the book Not the End of the World by Hannah Richie. As with many things, things are not so simple/binary.

The consensus is clearly 100 to 1000 of the background extinction rate, and that biomass is decreasing in wide range of categories (like mammals, insects, fishes, plants, etc). How they refuted that? Are there more and more diverse bacterias, and the rate of how diverse they become increased 100 fold?

Maybe biodiversity is shrinking, but the book has examples of environmental conservation efforts that have improved biodiversity in the case of tigers in India, to give one example. I strongly believe that when humans are doing better, the life around them will too. We are now more humane than ever. S Korea is banning dog meat, we have banned ivory production, rhinos are being protected in Africa.

It’s interesting how quickly an argument for “factfulness” morphs into cherry-picking data points as soon as the facts are unfavorable. Turns out that facts aren’t bestsellers or at least not memorable ones that everyone wants to read and share. Optimistic narratives are — they fit a human need in a time when on many fronts that matter realism and cynicism are predominantly one and the same.

"S Korea is banning dog meat"

Why is that a good thing, when the normal meat factories are bad as always? Because dogs have more rights to be treated nice, because they are considered cute, unlike pigs who are way more intelligent?

I live in the South West of Western Australia, in a bio-diversity hotspot.

I look South, and I see bush-land, a relatively small postage stamp sized block. I've counted about 23 separate species of orchids, and a huge variety of plants, and birds. One of the species of orchids is basically a sex-lure for wasps, and is absolutely fascinating.

I look North, East and West and I see farm-land as far as the eye can see (aside from another very small "reserve" to the NE). It's just paddocks for animals, and the diversity is "cattle" and "Sheep", and the various grasses which they eat. Very f absolutely fascinating.ew birds (not many trees), much less variety and diversity. And no orchids.

That's where food comes from, and it starts with a bulldozer, it relies on fossil-fuels (including the fertiliser) to keep producing. And we're still growing.

Banning ivory and protecting Rhino's is basically palliative care at this point.

You are cheery picking a few examples without looking at the whole picture. The Amazon forest is still being decimated, we are still over-fishing the oceans, and that's just for starters.

Let's not even talk about healthy soil depletion and what comes with that problem.

Insects are disappearing at an ever faster rate and they are at the base of many food chains.

Are there some things that are better now? Sure but you are looking at the tree and you missed the entire forest.

Theoretical question - if no humans existed, what is the “value” of nature?

If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it.

Nature has value because we exist. It wasn't as important to us for a while (and still isn't) but hopefully in the future it will become more and more important to people.

Nature also has value in that it is almost irreplaceable. If humans are around long enough that we see our entire planet destroyed, we live in space; in order to replace/get a new "nature" it would take billions of years of waiting and exactly the right conditions, which may not even be reproduceable.

And even then you get a different nature; if we want the same ecosystem we have now, then it is truly priceless, truly irreplaceable.

> Nature has value because we exist.

Agreed. Nature without humans has no value. Nature has value because humans value it.

And at the same time humans are a part of nature. When the first humans built a hut out of wood and leaves that isn't different than a beaver building a dam.

The idea that the only "true nature" is that which has not seen human activities makes no sense. Same with the logic that "we can only heal nature by removing humans".

> You can find all our data, visualizations, and writing related to biodiversity on this page. It aims to provide context on how biodiversity has changed in the past; the state of wildlife today; and how we can use this knowledge to build a future path where humans and other species can thrive on our shared planet.

https://ourworldindata.org/biodiversity

The winner takes it all, until nothings left for him.

An even better book recommendation (if you like the article) is "Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet" by Hannah Ritchie. Hannah Ritchie is head of research for ourworldindata.org; the book grew very directly out of the linked article.

Ritchie credits a lecture by Hans Rosling (one of the authors of Factfulness) in the forward for being what turned her from a pessimistic biology student into the person that writes a book like this.

A common criticism of the linked article is that "sure child mortality is going down, but what about X". Where X is climate change, species decline, quality of life, et cetera. The book addresses most "X"'s.

Not sure if this is the same lecture that Ritchie cites, but for anyone who hasn't seen this one by Rosling, it's worth a watch: https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_best_stats_you_ve...

The problem with the world improving in an irrefutable way on average is that this can be and is used to defend the status quo in almost any field and can lead to complacency and a false sense of optimism. The world became better due to science, technology, various policies, cultural changes, etc. and will only improve if these are continued. It is not always clear what brought improvement and whether that sort of improvement will keep scaling. This is just my long-winded way of saying that I don't like it when people say the system is great, don't change anything, don't complain, and in a few more generations we'll all be fine.

The problem with "fight the status quo" people is that they tend to demand more authoritarianism and centralization to fight something that isn't that bad. Authoritarianism tend to lead to worse outcomes and hurt progress, things progress faster with liberal ideals than authoritarian ideals.

There’s nothing about a “fight the status quo” mentality that inherently favors authoritarianism and it’s not helpful to claim otherwise.

That said, it is helpful to remember both knowing- and unconscious authoritarians will twist any framework into an excuse to establish and flex authority — that’s their whole modus operandi, after all.

I think this is true generally for anyone seeking power, whether they’re a soon-to-be dictator or a democratically elected politician

some variants of 'fight the status quo' are explicitly opposing the centralization of power and the too big to fail entities in non-authoritarian societies.

If by "centralization" you mean giving more power to central entities that can intervene to fight local abuses and coordinate policies, I don't see a path were we can do without it.

We're in this situation in no small part because big enough companies can just buy their way when facing local entities, and the only recourse that is working is to ask a higher up regulator to intervene. Weakening the regulation entities makes it basically impossible to have anything done.

In particular, I find that "fight the status quo" people want to change some external "system" more than the individual people (ie., themselves). It is easier to blame and demand change of external entities, while being comfortably numb about oneself and one's way of living. For example, see this article by the political professor Eric Kaufmann: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ssqu.13268

the improvement isn't even.

It seems obvious, but even that little bit of nuance escapes far too many people, most especially those whose livelihood is to talk about it.

Focusing on the bad is natural and makes sense because that’s what can be improved, but I feel like your mental health will be better if you focus on the bad when it’s productive and you can do something about it, and at other times realise that things aren’t that bad

Yep, its a very bizarre argument that we should focus on the good as if there will be some terminal state where things get better of and only if we believe.

There is no end, it's tradeoffs all the way down. And the good things that are happening are hard won victories from people not accepting the status quo.

> this can be and is used to defend the status quo in almost any field and can lead to complacency and a false sense of optimism

So, should we stick to lies about world becoming worse to not become complacent?

It is a highly politicized approach to the truth. The truth must be kept out of reach of political thinking. We need to keep our optimism at levels based on facts, not on our political goals. We need to stick to the truth based on empirical data even if it is not aligned with our political goals. At least if world wants to become much better.

I hate the way politicians argue their points. They ignore anything good about their opponents and anything bad about their own ideas. And maybe this is the reason why our world is not great.

> I don't like it when people say the system is great

I don't think anyone saying that. But from the other hand, our system is much better then it might be, and we'd better remember that, because if it wasn't, if we were in a local minimum, then we could change it in any direction to make it better. We need to remember that we are not at a minimum or a maximum, we need to think carefully about gradients before deciding were to move. So maybe we should say that our world is great, to not break it, to not make it worse?

You make me wonder if this isn't the marketing/sales vs dev/ops misalignment.

Marketing and Sales focus on the good parts of our software. Simple usability, high stability, great reactive customer support, ... Apparently, during corona, we were the only reliable vendor for a national support hotline by a massive margin, and chaotically on-boarded call-agents had the least number of issues with our system.

But then, I as a team lead in ops have to wonder why a single priority ticket didn't meet SLA. Why a routine update caused 4 minutes of downtime. Why a usually stable provider ripped a system away for 3 minutes. Why strange cache timeout interactions caused some class of requests to take 30s+ to respond.

My world is very much a world of shitty non-working janky software and it is my job to fix and improve it. It might be one of the better solutions in our market and other people may be able to sell it to happy customers, but in my world it's a janky and broken piece of shit with a million things to fix.

And looking at the nation I live in... that's honestly not that far away.

I run into this all the time w/ engineers I work with.

I always tell them the story of the mechanic. The mechanic works tirelessly every day fixing Toyota Camrys. For years on end, he stares at broken Toyota Camrys. He knows every bolt, and every failure point across decades of Toyota Camrys.

He is utterly and thoroughly convinced that Toyota Camrys are unreliable hunks of junk. After all, he sees them broken all the time.

What he doesn't see are the 100s of thousands of Toyota Camrys loggings hundreds of thousands of miles on the road, perfectly intact with no mechanical issues. His vision is completely skewed by his day to day responsibilities.

Same thing for us in software. It's our job to see the dirty edge cases. To notice when something goes wrong for 5 minutes. etc. Our job is to automate everything - so by definition, we don't see the thousands or millions of interactions between our customers and our software that go exactly as planned, because they're completely automated away from us. Completely invisible. We have a skewed vision because of our day to day responsibilities.

This is an important factoid - if you ask a mechanic for a vehicle recommendation you might not get the most reliable - but the easiest and cheapest to work on when it does break.

One of my favorite books. Changed my whole worldview (and I already had a positive world view before reading).

I've recommended this book to people probably 1,000 times.

> improving in an irrefutable way

The book was great and I think the main shinning point was to base each arguments on actual measures, but that's far from creating an irrefutable narrative.

At the end of the day those are numbers they chose and dressed, and other researchers will come up other equally true numbers that they'll filter and present in a different light.

An instance of this is in this article is the number of infant mortality: sure it's improving, but birth rates are also plummeting. To me the overall picture on infants is greyish and I'm not sure it's overall better than a few decades ago (I have no idea, didn't crunch the numbers), but here we're only getting the bright side and shown a sheer positive trend.

My point is probably that having numbers to back a claim is better but they still need to be looked at critically and in a context

And yet this narrative ("They present how the world is improving in an irrefutable way") falls exactly into the trap pointed out by the link in this story: "Solely communicating the progress that the world has achieved becomes unhelpful, or even repugnant, when it glosses over the problems that are real today."

(Even though I agree this narrative is mostly correct)

Well, the world is improving, but it can be better. That's the message of the book. It's very optimistic and you should read it.

Two more books in this vein are Fewer, Richer, Greener by Siegel and Abundance by Diamandis and Kotler

> They present how the world is improving in an irrefutable

For whom? Some things are improving, some things are getting worse. Saying that the world is getting better overall requires judgement of how much you value different things.

> Some things are improving, some things are getting worse.

Are there any global measures that are worse than they were a century ago? Or are you just saying that progress is uneven, with some areas seeing local setbacks despite the overall global gains?

Everyone reading Factfulness should also take a look at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328759928_Good_Thin...

I've always regarded this book as being blatant neoliberal propaganda.

Can you name a couple examples of blatant neoliberal propaganda in the book? Who is the propaganda being perpetrated on behalf of? Who is funding it? If it doesn’t have these latter elements, you might want to consider the possibility that it is simply a work that you disagree with.

I don't need to defend a personal opinion if I don't want to. I believe the book is an 'everything is fine' meme in book format, pandering to the current oligarchy who's arguing that everything is going in the right direction and direct action is unnecessary. Other people replying to the same comment have articulated it better than I did. Whenever a book like this comes along and the real capitalists start reviewing and recommending it, it triggers my bullshit sensors.

You might want to consider the possibility that it is simply an opinion that you disagree with and move on.

Ostensibly, we participate in this forum to discuss things. I thought it was provocative to call this book propaganda so I thought I'd probe a little. When you tell someone they are reading propaganda, one of the unsaid things you are doing is implying that people are being duped, and that you somehow come from a higher place and have the real answers. So yeah - you are going to get questions. So maybe don't throw the term around in a public forum if you aren't willing to engage the people you're insulting.

Everything is propaganda. This forum, for example, is full of techno-utopian/libertarian/accelerationist propaganda. Reading propaganda doesn't make you duped or stupid or whatever.

> you aren't willing to engage the people you're insulting

I'm sorry you feel insulted, that's mainly on you, this was not my intention. I suggest you reflect on why you feel insulted when an internet stranger calls a book (which you did not write) as propaganda.

I don't feel insulted, I pointed out you were being insulting.

If everything is propaganda, then the word is meaningless.

Symbols aside, dissemination of biased, misinformative, and arguably harmful information is not necessarily done with Ill intent.

Arguably harmful information is also arguably not harmful. Bias is a given for any work, why is that a problem to you? If there’s misinformation in the book - I’m all ears. Is it pervasive?

> Arguably harmful information is also arguably not harmful.

I can acknowledge without aversion that it may be possible that it is sometimes harmful, and sometimes not. Can you do the same?

>Bias is a given for any work, why is that a problem to you?

Bias and misinformation leads to delusion, delusion leads to disharmony, disharmony leads to suffering, at least often. I consider concern for the well being of others to be a good thing in an absolute sense...but this is a bias on my part, "each to his own", and enjoy the consequences Mother Nature rewards us. But please let's also consider how our fellow humans are making out in the lot they were born into.

> If there’s misinformation in the book - I’m all ears.

Is this to say that you are able and willing to consider all sound arguments, without bias?

As for Rosling: I think if people considered the entirety of his message things would be better....as I recall, he was an advocate of international aid rather than immigration and refugee policies saving some of the people from underdeveloped countries? To me, this seems like a better approach for several reasons.

> Is it pervasive?

I believe so, I think young Wittgenstein and many others are objectively correct, and that this can be objectively proven with virtually unlimited examples, because language is a fundamental building block of reality. The alternative, that all the people involved in disagreements derived from language are joking or something and I'm not in on it, is just too much for me.

> Is this to say that you are able and willing to consider all sound arguments, without bias?

Of course not, how could I possibly do that? I'm a human being, my life experience up to this point is my bias. Same goes for you.

What is a summary of the criticism? Is the data wrong or in some way misrepresented? It seems like the author doesn't like the attention Hans received.

From the wiki page

> Christian Berggren, a Swedish professor of industrial management, has questioned the authors' claims and suggested that Rosling's own thinking shows a bias towards Pollyannaism. Particularly, Berggren criticized the authors for understating the importance of the European migrant crisis, the environmental impacts of the Anthropocene, and continued global population growth. Furthermore, Berggren remarks that "Factfulness includes many graphs of 'bad things in decline' and 'good things on the rise' but not a single graph of problematic phenomena that are on the rise." It "employs a biased selection of variables, avoids analysis of negative trends, and does not discuss any of the serious challenges related to continual population growth." Berggren raises concerns that the simplistic worldview this book offers could have serious consequences.

If his point was "most things are getting better than they used to be, going from awful to still not good", what's wrong with that?

If the criticism against him is "he's picking the wrong data" and Berggren then picks his own data to make his point, it's that a bit of a carousel?

What's wrong with being neoliberal, and what makes the book propaganda? Do you disagree with the factual claims?

Steven Pinker's _Better Angels of our Nature_ is a great read on the subject, as well. Essentially a history of the decline of violence, but also including economic aspects that support humans becoming better.

FYI, Max Roser has mentioned several times that the book inspired him to create our world in data.

I think we can't really take such a basic view on such a complex topic. Sure, for the average person the world is objectively getting better every day, only if you compare to what the average person has and had, not the potential of what they could have.

It does not take into account magnitude, diversity and lost potential of betterment. For example the fact that billionaires will soon be trillionaires, such a new concept that apparently Firefox spellcheck knows what a billionaire is, but not a trillionaire.

It doesn't matter if we pay the average person 1 cent more each year and claim that their life is better for that 1 cent when a small percentage of people are getting 1000 dollars extra each year - sure the average person's life is technically better than the year before, but it has the potential to be even better.

Money is just a simple example by the way, doesn't take into account wanton ecosystem destruction by hyper corporates, the fact that we still get into stupid fucking wars (Russia, ie things haven't gotten better bc war never changes, apparently).

tbh Sweden feels like an outlier to me. Recently visited and it struck me as the most functional society I’ve encountered thus far. Even the demographics are healthier than much of rest of Europe especially compared to other rich nations.

That’s not to say the overall thesis is wrong but I suspect slight rose tinted glasses at play

There is still the specter of nuclear war…that side of the equation has gotten worse.

Surely you've heard of the Cold War?

I read "factfulness", really opened my eyes!

> They present how the world is improving in an irrefutable way but media and politicians would only focus on the negative

People are allowed to have their own opinions about what to value in the world. The idea of "irrefutable proof" the world has improved is completely asinine and counter productive... at best, and at worse just straight marketing for the ruling class.

I honestly don't trust the stats, and this kind of analysis and "blame on politicians for lying and focusing on negatives" does not convince me. Especially with all the ensuing gaslighting that happens in response to valid criticisms.

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