The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
What a bizarre and (unintentionally?) result-biasing statement.
Picking 200 years ago is literally choosing what may be the lowest point in global living standards for a millennia -- early industrialization and colonialism had each radically shocked the shape of the societies touched by them, breaking stable, comfortable, familiar lifestyle and community traditions in a race for abstract economic development with little concern for exploitation or local consequence.
Maybe everybody is better off now than they were 200 years ago, but most individuals in the world were much worse off 200 years ago than they were 200 years before that, so the discussion is quite complicated and an analysis like this doesn't tell you that we're doing the best thing now, just that we're seemingly doing much better than when we first really fucked it all up.
Is there like a particular graph or chart that puts numbers on this?
It doesn't matter how nice your environment otherwise is, if your seed multiplication ratio is below 3, your life is hell.
So you're left to more subjective assessments. If you haven't read much history or anthropology, or tried to reason about it, it's easy to assume the narrative of modernity being a triumph over 500,000 years of human desperation and decay. But if you have read history, especially the "small" history of personal lives, or read late-20th-century anthropology, or really thought about the necessities for a classical societies to have prevailed and thrived and grown for hundreds of years, or for tribal communities to carry on in stable tradition for millenia, you can't help but wonder why that narrative about modernity even had traction in the first place.
One explanation being that recent modernity is genuinely a mostly progressive advancement from less recent modernity, and so it's easy to assume that the trend carried back indefinitely. But that's an assumption with no charts or data too, so taking it as the default is itself arbitrary at best.
Link to book: https://www.amazon.com/1491-Second-Revelations-Americas-Colu...
I don't think we know enough about the pre-Columbian Indians to make a solid evaluation about their lifestyle. Even estimates of how many there were vary by an order of magnitude.
What we know about their lifestyle was for the most part how they lived after all the above arrived, but each is expected to create major culture changes.
It's not pre-contact, but The Cutting-Off Way seems like a good source on Native American warfare.
https://www.amazon.com/Cutting-Off-Way-Indigenous-Warfare-15...
I don't think it takes away from what you're trying to say, but the irony of this paragraph is delicious given that "most of us reading this" are in the global 1% of today, if not higher, and in some astronomical percentile as measured against history. When used as the measure against whatever historical deprivation and insecurity there was, we make for a pretty low bar!
I mean.. sure. But they were also an imperialist power that could grab what they wanted from neighboring nations, militarized like Sparta. They had such a great time because they made others work for them, not unlike the Romans or the Brits. Before automation the main way to get a better standard of living was to have slaves.
Uh, no.
The life expectancy for those who lived past 15 during the Paleolithic was 39 years. For the Neolithic it was 28-33 years. It hardly matters where you look either. In the Americas, for instance an Aztec's life expectancy at 15 averaged just another 19 years. For Copán, those who had reached 15 lived on average another 29 years. In say, Japan during the Jomon period, someone who lived to 15 could expect to live another 32 years.
Accidents, disease, childbirth, famine and war killed a lot of people. While the average life expectancy is "skewed" because of high infant mortality, it was still brutishly short even when early childhood is excluded.
And, as you note, that figure actually decreased in the Neolithic and Bronze/Iron Age. Early civilization was seemingly harder living for adults than was the Paleolithic era.
The current emerging consensus is a constant of around 70 years of age. In fact, there is a remarkable similarity between the mortality profiles of various traditional peoples.
https://www.sapiens.org/biology/human-lifespan-history/
Here's a 2008 paper with some actual studies and hard numbers:
The latter explicitly states that life expectancy at 15 has risen significantly over the last 600 years for women and used studies that exclude violent deaths for men and was limited to societies’ elite classes.
Yet: you have to correct for total people on the planet. The total population has gone from 1 billion to 8 billion.
Integrating over all human beings you can be sure that the sum of “being better off” is much higher than 200 years ago.
Now we can endlessly debate what “better” is. I just think it’s totally fair to start at a point where population growth started to take off exponentially.
You are imagining an idealized history which never existed (outside of many a few limited areas).
The "take" is that the article is a bit deceptive in its claims because its measuring progress from a time that -- for much of the world -- was deeply unlike and worse of than times before it.
You may also think that that take is bizarre, but it's a different one than you seemed to have read and responded to.
I am extremely suspicious of this claim, and would like to see some kind of proof.
Most people do not understand just how bad life as a low-productivity subsistence farmer was, and in 1600, that describes approximately everyone. Agricultural productivity steadily rose in the early modern period, and this resulted in a rise in the standard of living.
In the past, a lot of value was not based on actually buying things in the market. People grew food, or exchanged things within families or communities via non-monetary measures. Today, almost all value is exchanged monetarily. The poverty graph, at least at the lower end, is to a great extent a replacement of that self/social value with monetary value.
While living standards for most have improved, the story for those of the bottom is not accurately portrayed by the poverty graph.
> These poverty figures take into account non-monetary forms of income — for poor families today and in the past, this is important, as many of them are subsistence farmers who live largely from their own food production.
You should mentally put large error bars on these graphs. The fact that they don't come up with them already is concerning.
" There are big problems that remain. None of the above should give us reason to become complacent. On the contrary, it shows us that a lot of work still needs to be done — accomplishing the fastest reduction of extreme poverty is an important achievement, but the fact that 85% of the world live on less than $30 per day is unacceptable. We also must not accept the restrictions of our liberty that remain. It is also clear that humanity’s impact on the environment is at a level that is not sustainable and is endangering the biosphere and climate on which we depend. "
The problem is that those who would like to maintain the status quo are bound to pick only the optimistic stats and suggest nothing should be done because the trend is naturally towards a better society. The truth is that progress is made in spite of these people, and in spite of some of the policies they promote. So such articles are more like a reality check of sorts, showing that we can make progress but we need to work hard for it, it does not just happen by the magic waving of an invisible hand.
If Bezos gets another rocketship every minute that's fine if I get another million dollars every minute. I can't really care about his life like that.
For those always looking in others' bowl to see if they got more, I can see how this makes them unhappy. It sounds corrosive to the soul.
It's reasonable to be fat enough and happy enough that you don't want to rock the boat and don't mind that others have "more in their bowl", which is why this pattern persists through geography and time, but you might want to keep an eye out on how the worst off are doing, whether they're growing or shrinking, and whether things are getting worse or better for them because the other part of the pattern is not unprecedented or unreasonable either.
You are not operating as a solitary individual, you are operating within a society that both takes and gives to you, and ensuring that social contracts remain fair is fundamental to keeping that society as a whole alive and functional.
ex - how would you feel if the government issues everyone rebates on taxes. you receive 1 dollar. Everyone else receives 100k.
Or the government funds schools - your kids receive 1 free book, every other child receives a free college education.
Or the government increases park allocations - you are given a 5ftx5ft greenspace, the neighborhood over receives a 10 acre maintained park.
Absolute standards are bogus when we are discussing the allocation of group resources. You paid in, you should be monitoring how that resource is paid out.
To be oblivious is to essentially be abused. We should care deeply about wealth inequality in society at large. We should not compare ourselves to our neighbors in individual circumstances. They are different things.
Otherwise you end up with situations where "redistribution" essentially becomes handouts to those most influential with the ones making the distribution decisions, instead of meaningful improvements to society as a whole.
Is it a good thing if Besos gets a rocket every minute if that means climate change destroys my local community?
Is it a good thing if we excessively bail out companies that make poor decisions at tax payer expense?
Is it a good thing to promote school systems that ignore and underfund certain neighborhoods along racial lines?
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My argument is not that redistribution is bad in itself, my argument is that social groups depend on "fairness" to operate.
And those definitions are certainly challenging (one person's fair might be another person's horror story). But they are critical to how a society decides to exist and cooperate.
Like - this isn't a new idea... it's what a social contract is. I also don't sign contracts without reading them, and an educated populace should care about what's in the fine print.
It's not about making sure I get personal wealth or advantages from that contract, it's about making sure I find that contract morally acceptable. Because if enough people reach that stage where they don't... you have a civil war or a rebellion. They will try to write a new contract.
In some countries, there are no laws against how much credit card fees can be. In those countries, a small fraction of the wealth of poor people is transferred to rich people [1]. In other countries, the fees are limited to small values, so this wealth transfer happens at a much smaller scale or doesn't happen at all.
Or a government can license a coal plant in some area [1], destroying the air quality and health outcomes of people in the area, while most of the wealth generated by the plant goes to the investors.
[1] Because credit card companies charge fees inversely proportional to expenses. And give rewards to those who can spend more.
[2] Or worse, in an adjoining area far enough away to commute for jobs, but still in the same air shed.
Bezos only represents himself.
Actually, it does so a lot less in our current world than it did in the past.
> If Bezos can afford to buy a rocketship every minute, he can afford to rearrange the society you live in
No, he can't, because in a society that can supply him with a rocketship a minute, the wealth that allows him to buy them will be a very small fraction of the total wealth that exists, just as it is now.
Whereas in, say, the Middle Ages, the wealth of feudal lords and rulers was a significant fraction of the total wealth that existed, and that is why that wealth bought them so much power.
So people can never be happy if inequality exists? Sounds like an unsolvable problem. No matter how good everything gets, people will still be unhappy because someone else seemingly has it better. 1000 years from now:
"Poor person: Sure, I own a 7000 sq ft mansion with an electric drone that can fly me around everywhere and my life expectancy is 105 and my standard of living is an order of magnitude better than the richest people living in 20XX, but Elon Musk VII's life expectancy is 120 and he owns an entire planet with a space fleet, my life sucks, the universe is so unfair."
> You're not going to convince folks the world is better when they know what kind of deal they're getting vs others out there
Somehow i read that as equal opportunities.... To me a fair deal generally means, something close to equal opportunities(of course, ceteris paribus, and rarely do we have all other things equal, but adjusting for it..)
As a meta question we should ask whether happiness is the right metric to optimize in social policy? Unhappiness motivates some people to work harder and accomplish more. Whether that's a good or bad thing is entirely subjective.
My takeaway was that my personal happiness is moderately diminished by the fact that I had such a privileged upbringing compared to others born into almost inescapable poverty, and that my charitable contributions towards famine relief / malaria / etc. don't make a huge impact on addressing the root causes of inequity.
For example, Elon Musk has many many many times more wealth than I, and I don't care. Ditto Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and so on and on. I don't care about inequality -- I care about poverty and ending it.
Formulations like "the problem is no longer poverty but inequality" are a lot like the post-USSR formulations like "now that we have solved the production problem we need to solve the distribution problem". It's Marxism moving the goal posts as economic freedom delivers all the things that Marxists say they want. To argue that one should be given power to solve the problems that are already being solved one has to keep making yet other problems into bigger problems than they really are.
Yes, because the wealth distribution has a self-reinforcing inertia, especially over generations. Absent mechanisms for redistribution of personal wealth (e.g. confiscatory inheritance/estate tax over a certain amount) it will only concentrate into a kleptocracy.
Too much inequality is bad, even if the lowest 5% lives very well, because it is not a sustainable equilibrium. On the other hand, too little inequality is also not sustainable or desirable.
85% of American millionaires are self-made.
What I wonder is, how much poverty (in developed countries) results from the ultra-wealthy accumulating more wealth? At what point does extreme wealth come at the expense of the poor?
People like Elon Musk aren't "accumulating" wealth. They're creating it.
> At what point does extreme wealth come at the expense of the poor?
Wealth that is created doesn't come at the expense of anyone.
It is true that many rich people (for example much of the financial industry) don't get rich by creating wealth but by siphoning it from other people's pockets into their own. But the other people in such cases are the middle class, not the poor.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-autopilot-workers-treatm...
Tesla annotators make $20 / hour. That's hardly a well-paying job.
I think we can easily make a case that any Tesla employee or contractor who earns at the poverty level supports an argument that extreme wealth comes at the expense of the poor.
That $20/hour is coming from wealth that Tesla is creating. It's not taken from someone else. Indeed, it's helping those people since without Tesla those jobs would not exist and they might have to work at other jobs that paid even less.
> at the poverty level
$20/hour times 2000 hours is $40K per year. The US Federal poverty level even for a household of 4 people is $31K per year [1], and is significantly lower for smaller households (for a household of 1 person it's $15K per year). So no, Tesla annotators are not earning "at the poverty level".
[1] https://aspe.hhs.gov/topics/poverty-economic-mobility/povert...
I would consider $40k / year poverty level in Buffalo, NY. It's a rather upscale area.
Of course that is ignoring many of the messy practicalities. The inflation that would ensue from this hypothetical influx of cash to the bottom third, or if one could even extract the nominal market cap via selling assets vs the value crashing after the first third is put on the market. Combine that with the fact that the fortunes are invested in productive assets and the hypothetical mother of all liquidations would do majorly bad things to productivity and the economy.
I tend to look at extreme wealth accumulation as a symptom of not paying people enough.
IE, instead of requiring a liquidation, what about increasing pay at the lowest levels?
Eating the rich doesn't work. It's never worked when it has been tried. It cannot work. It will never work.
We're not "slightly" better than in the 1800s. We are way way way better than in the 1800s. World-wide.
What? This is nonsense.
> and that's not even considering [...]
This is changing the subject, which one should probably take as conceding the previous point. Even granting all of this I'm pretty sure that life today almost everywhere on this planet is much less brutish for humans than it was 200 years ago, let alone 400, 2,000, 10,000, or 100,000 years ago.
Yes, the US has done a bunch of really bad stuff, but a higher percentage of people having food and water and medicine is actually good. And yes, those real human beings tend to agree.
Yeah, we should do way better, but this article isn't about the US today vs. western Europe today. It's about the world today vs. the world in the past. Child poverty in the US is way better right now than it was pretty much anywhere a hundred years ago, and poverty across the globe is way better than in the past.
> minimum wage is lower than it has ever been,
Good news: ~98.7% of workers earn more than the minimum wage. Wage growth for the lowest quartile has been especially good these past few years, handily outpacing inflation for the poorest among us.
> Saying that we are slightly better than the 1800s isn't the win people seem to think it is.
Slightly better? Child mortality in rich countries in the 1800s was 20%. What's it today, 0.5%? "Oh, but in some countries it's less than that, so this isn't actually better than before"?
Calling these changes "slightly better" is just an incredibly dishonest take. It's a massive improvement, and that shows just how much we're able to improve if we honestly look at what works and implement it.
This isn't a pro-complacency article. It's an argument against doomerism.
Who has electricity?
Who has indoor plumbing?
Who has air conditioning?
Who has internet access at home?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/technology-adoption-by-ho...
The things that today would be considered poverty were considered the norm when my neighbor was a kid.
I've worked with many and been close friends with many poor people. I'm under no illusions that their lives are all hunky dory. I just don't feel the need to pretend things weren't significantly worse in many important ways in the recent past.
That's an absolute number, and let's grant that it's accurate. What is the evolution of child poverty in the U.S. since its founding? Let's use caloric intake -say- as a yardstick of poverty.
Most of the population lives on the street?
There's a homeless population in Seattle, but as a percentage it is pretty low. They also mostly consist of drug addicts and alcoholics who reject attempts to put them in housing.
Besides, the statement was "housing", not "owning a home".
The government does a lot to restrict the supply of housing, too.
Don't forget all the expenses one has owning a home. My rent to the city went up 10% this year.
When I was young, the discussion was always about the quality of life for the poor. The inequality problem is a fairly recent thing.
When people are free, inequality is the result. To remove inequality requires a totalitarian government.
Be careful what you wish for.
Are a lot of people actively and actually suggesting the full removal of inequality? Finding ways to reduce it is a very different thing.
Instead, examine government policies that hold people back from being free. For example, making it difficult for a business to employ people.
The communists had equal opportunity. It didn't work out so well.
The magic ingredients are:
1. equality under the law
2. freedom
Also progressive taxation (a moderate position) which avoids the authoritarian measures of both left and right while counteracting the cancerous effects of exponential growth.
Inequality isn’t about your personal circumstances, though. It’s about what you read in the news. You need statistics to judge it.
These statistics are relevant when people talk about where the country is going or where the world is going.
The lesson of history is that living in historical times was mostly terrible for most people.
> Global poverty is one of the very largest problems in the world today. Is it possible to make progress against this problem? To see where we are coming from, we must go far back in time. 30 or even 50 years are not enough. When you only consider what the world looked like during our lifetime, it is easy to think of the world as static — the richer parts of the world here and the poorer regions there — and to falsely conclude that it always was like that and will always be like that.
> Take a longer perspective and it becomes clear that the world is not static at all. We can change the world. The countries that are rich today were very poor just a few generations ago.
> To avoid portraying the world in a static way, we have to start 200 years ago, before the time when living conditions really changed dramatically.
This could be written “to really see how much progress we’ve made we have to look back 200 years ago.”
See e.g. The World Happiness Report, (I)HDI, GNW, GNH.
You're probably confusing it to the Gini coefficient.
That being said, optimizing for some of these collective benchmarks does create some baseline stability from which people can pursue and build their own rich, meaningful and happy lives.
They optimize for system health, not health of each node. However, a healthy system is great, though if all the nodes kill themselves, or tear the system apart, maybe it isn't so healthy?
I'm referring to slow suicide through "lifestyle choices", and war, both physical and cultural.
So work should be done on all levels of abstraction, from the system level down to the compute node, and even lower, to the energy, and maintenance of compute subsystems.
https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2024/happiness-of-the-young...
https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2019/the-sad-state-of-happi...
The past is no place to live; when I see atrocity happening when and where I live, I am going to talk about it, and I am going to be thinking about ways we can improve or offset it.
Headline is in poor taste. Yes I fucking love science and all that but it is unproductive and insulting to all those in our current year struggling with inhumane living conditions and progressively decreasing opportunities.
Also, the US is so big and varied in terms of cost of living, that there would need to be an adjustment to account for that. Or just compare within specific metros over a time period.
A Big Mac at that time was around $1.00 although the "value combo" concept had emerged so most people didn't buy them individually.
McDonald's today pays $15/hr and has trouble hiring. They couldn't hire anyone if they just offered minimum wage. A Big Mac is around $5.00 so the ratio is broadly the same.
Not much money, but they don't pay $2000 a month or more for rent or a mortgage. No taxes. No profit from their labor sent to some class expropriating their surplus labor time. It's a basis of comparison any how.
If our economic system was great you wouldn't have to pay think tanks to tell people how great their lot is.
First because it distracts from actually useful discussions which should revolve around making what we have now better, more sustainable, inclusive and fair.
Second because our economic system isn't great because people pay a lot on mortgage or taxes, or because people have a hard time understanding state of the art research. It's not great because it is designed to produce profits at all costs, which leads to people getting overworked and underpaid.
"If our economic system was great you wouldn't have to pay think tanks to tell people how great their lot is."
We're not healthy, mentally or otherwise.
It's probably not going to convince you for me to pull more stats from World In Data, but according to this, people do, in general, seem to be fairly happy with their lot https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction
Sure, that time might be spent fishing and collecting sticks and twigs, and repairing clothes and nets, but how is that different than the housecleaning, yard maintenance (I have a large(ish) property with trees and gardens and chickens) and other things we all do after our 35-50 hour "work" weeks?
Even if you think the current economic and social framework magnified or exacerbated this, can you point to systems in hunter-gather networks that would allow this to be systemically ameliorated at the same scales we now operate, and with the same resource challenges we now face?
(I'd readily agree that there are differences in opinion about the levels of violence and the variation in prehistoric societies, but I think it's worth highlighted the assumptions that your statement makes about those levels.)
There is no slavery in migratory hunter-gatherer bands, I can't even conceive how that would function. Slavery arose with the agricultural revolution. This is not "oft-dicumented" or even documented
> internal tribal
A hunter-gatherer band is not in a tribe.
I am talking about migratory hunter-gatherer bands and you are talking about slave societies and then tribes.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Aboriginal+S...
You can find many more, I hope!
You seem to be making a strong distinction between "bands" and "tribes" that doesn't seem to be clear-cut elsewhere, which may be where we're getting confused; maybe it would be useful to just drop that element of my list, and concentrate on the other aspects of hunter-gatherer society?
In other words, it’s just like a programming language where everything can be implicitly converted to a given top type.
In the progress we certainly made over the last century or so, we certainly also lost other things whose value is not representable in our modern value system.
What things? Are they more important than child mortality?
Imagine living somewhere and feeling miserable, and everywhere there are billboards and ads everywhere saying "Remember that you are happy! All the metrics are better! Oh you're not happy, you must be confused or wrong in some way."
So what's wrong with these metrics? That they are an aggregate, synthetic measurement attempting to measure something subjective, or at very least measuring qualities that may not be the causal factors for "happiness".
I'm not suggesting that these are the wrong metrics necessarily, but rather that work may need to be done in the soft and squishy world of "self development" or "spiritually", so that people may be able to create happiness and joy, and eliminate aspects of life that do not support that.
For example, learning about nutrition, exercise, healthy detox pathways, emotional health (through whatever lens appeals to each person), relationships, purpose, and more.
I think honestly there is a bit of a crisis of meaning: humans realized it's a rather challenging place to live, so we/they built technology and civilizations, and now many more people are living more "comfortable," "safe" lives, and in the absence of an external threat, are lacking in purpose. Some people think we need some external threat, so risks like damaging the environment are framed as a "war against climate change", because thus far, external threats have been good motivators. However, I'm sick and tired of being motivated and seeing life as a battle, and I know I'm not alone. In this period of objective peace and prosperity, I'd love if more people shifted their focus inward, to discovery fountains of love and creativity, and use that creative energy to shape the world and life towards further connection and play. This won't happen on a mass scale if most people are physically and emotionally unhealthy, fighting with family, fighting with people in war, and avoiding intentional inner development.
For those of you that think this doesn't matter, imagine trying to build something, and all of people you're working with have PTSD, or can't stay motivated for more than 5 mins without scrolling instagram?
Imagine camping on another planet looking up at an "aurora", or creating your dream movie by talking to an AI, or perhaps even living out your wildest dreams through VR, or for those that think this way, "hacking the matrix" and living it for real.
"Hacking the matrix" could be finding new properties of physics that make the impossible possible, it could be learning that we are in a simulation, or it could be something more "mystical", the real point is making a quantum leap in what is possible as a human.
Almost everyone already basis their political beliefs based on their own personal experiences rather than hard metrics. When they point to hard metrics, it's just to confirm their beliefs. The same conservatives who bragged about the record stock market performance under Trump would use use liberals bragging about record stock market performance under Biden as evidence of being out of touch and vice versa. If people actually cared about metrics in a way that would inform their beliefs, they would stop asking for demand subsidies and we'd have a LVT.