Hacker News Reader

Comment by mathieuh | Hacker News Reader

So what, we should just sit back and not try to improve things? I’ve never understood this perspective. It just seems like a way to try for people who have done well in the current system to justify to themselves the fact that in reality people in wealthy countries do still struggle with poverty. There are millions of people living hand-to-mouth.

Not to mention the fact that the reason wealthy countries have got to this stage of development is often because they are exporting the negative externalities associated with this lifestyle to poor countries.

View on HN

For me the point of thinking like this is to remain centered and not freak out. I see some people who feel like ‘everything is going downhill and this is the worse time ever’ and that’s just not very grounded.

The benefit is that you can be optimistic that the hard work we’re putting in, more likely than not, might continue the progress. Even if there are blips along the way.

I was just talking about this today. There was a political comedy TV show here in Oz 'Shaun Micallefs : Mad as Hell'.

I cannot remember the details exactly but the general idea was something like this.

There was a dinner party with all these people talking about how bad they have things. One was complaining about how they had poor service at a restaurant. The next talked about the pain of the Covid lockdowns. The next spoke of rationing in the war time of the 1940's. The last one was a 10th century peasant that goes on about how "the skies turned dark and winter came and it never left. All the crops died and then the people. And then came the plagues..."

It was done as a way of saying, yes, we have issues but put into context, we are still doing fairly well.

No, the opposite. We should appreciate all the marvels that progress has brought us, and use that as motivation to bring about more. That was the conclusion of the piece, and I agree. Progress has gained a negative connotation to many people in recent times, and I take it that the author is pushing back against that sentiment.

I don't think that's the thrust of the piece, any more than celebrating your birthday is an invitation to commit suicide. Appreciation of where we are at, like a birthday, seems its point.

And that there are a great many people who don't feel all the blessings of these achievements. Not only is there relative inconvenience and suffering, there are also resentments and those have tangible social and political impacts. One useful step is to simply acknowledge them. I write this from a small town that lacks Uber, Doordash, and has people that basically work for a living, not sit behind a desk. Their construction and agricultural labor enables some of the luxuries-cum-expectations listed in the piece.

We'll always judge ourselves relative to surroundings and peers, so the billionaire needs to be a centibillionaire and the retired cotton field hand would like all their teeth back and AC that works. Let's not forget we, the readers of the piece, were basically born on third base already.

The essay ends

> But we can pay it forward: we can keep progress going, and build an even better world for the generations to come.

Exactly. My (mild) fear it that we ignore those kinds of issues and they blow back on us to start doing real harm to the overall system. To ignore the externalities like running up a credit card.

As to the second point, this is what empires do. They pump wealth away for their own gain until they are almost completely drained. And there still many countries that are empires in everything but name.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com