The steady gain of humanity | Hacker News Reader

The steady gain of humanity

csmonitor.com

43 pointsgruseom26 comments

It looks like this is pretty much a gloss on a press release put out by a non-profit trying to sell their report?

Here's the executive summary of the actual report: http://www.millennium-project.org/millennium/SOF2012-English...

And here's the page where you can buy the whole deal if you want ($10-$40): http://www.millennium-project.org/millennium/2012SOF.html

I can't tell so far whether this is offering anything new, or is just a bunch of generalities hacked together by recent-college-graduate consultants to sell to other recent-college-graduate consultants. Has anyone read the report and found it useful?

I thought this bit from the executive summary was interesting -- the variables they're following where they think they have enough data to evaluate the last twenty years and make predictions for the next ten years:

Where are we winning? • Access to water • Literacy rate • Life expectancy at birth • Poverty $1.25 a day • Infant mortality • Wars • HIV prevalence • Internet users • GDP/capita • Women in parliaments • School enrollment, secondary • Energy efficiency • Population growth • Undernourishment prevalence • Nuclear proliferation

Where are we losing? • Total debt • Unemployment • Income inequality • Ecological footprint / biocapacity ratio • GHG emissions • Terrorist attacks • Voter turnout

Where there is no significant change or change is not clear? • Corruption • Freedom rights • Electricity from renewables • Forest lands • R&D expenditures • Physicians per capita

I've seen this shared quite a bit around the internet and I'm surprised how many people are surprised by this. The standard of living has, for the most part, continuously risen throughout the course of human history. And with the aid of technology, the rate of improvement is increasing as well. We have problems and it's great to acknowledge them, but personally I have a deep faith in the ability of humans to make things better for themselves. Most of the people I hear complaining about how humans are messing everything up would consider the circumstances under which even rich people lived just 100 years ago to be entirely beneath them.

Regarding the food, water and energy comments, I don't see how that is a problem. Our planet is covered by 70% water and the sun (directly or indirectly) provides enough energy for our food to grow and machines to run.

I wonder if humans are predisposed towards pessimism. Is there some advantage to selectively seeing only the things that aren't going well? From what I hear every generation thought that things were going badly and everything was better in the past. If that was really the case, when would all the improvement have happened?

Pessimists are good at identifying threats, prepare for the worst and therefore are more likely to survive when the worst does eventualy happen.

Alternative vision : pessimists are good at sacrificing the future for perceived potential threats in the present.

Pessimists may be good at identifying threats, but actually preparing for them implies the belief that the outcome can be changed with effort. That's pretty much the definition of optimism.

Obviously there's at least one spectrum here.

I've ceased to be surprised. People love to believe the claims that standards of livings have been falling since the 30's. At which point I like to remind people that many Americans still had dirt floors around that time.

I wonder if humans are predisposed towards pessimism.

Certainly seems that way, and there doesn't seem to be a damn thing we can do about it.

;)

I doubt there is a mean biological predisposition towards pessimism (assuming that's what you meant). For the vast majority of human history, the vast majority of people lived horrendous lives relative to our own.

Imagine.. for hundreds of thousands of years, we had no idea how the universe operated, we feared death and the dark.. natural disasters were thought of as acts of god and most people died by 30 or 40. And unlike most other animals, we somewhat comprehend our predicament... that we and the people we care about aren't going to be here for long. Yet most humans still attempt to do something with their lives, and to leave a better world for their children.

We never gave up as individuals and societies and persevered until we improved our material conditions significantly. That's a pretty strong indication of a species wide predisposition towards optimism.

I find it hard to get from, "Food, water, and energy shortages, exacerbated by climate change, could lead to instability and violence and the forced migration of hundreds of millions of people in the future" to, “Yet the probability of a more peaceful world is increasing." Food and water (and to some extent, now, energy) are base needs, and if those end up in short supply, it doesn't matter if we're "winning" or "gaining" in other areas. Fundamentally, a sustainable supply of food and water trumps everything else on that list, and if we end up losing at that, we've lost at everything... just worth keeping in mind.

Well, that's more a political and organizational problem than anything else. The US alone produces enough grain to feed well over a billion people (though most isn't consumed directly).

Imagine two scenarios. On the one hand you have a Bangladesh as it exists today struggling against, say, flooding or drought or brownouts. On the other hand you have a Bangladesh that is industrially developed and wealthy (say, as wealthy and developed as South Korea is today). Obviously a wealthy and developed country is going to be better able to deal with such problems, and is going to make it less likely that war or famine result from disasters or adversities.

I can see your point, but, taking a longer-term view, what happens when we hit hard limits to global growth?

In a world in which every country is developed and wealthy... where in the world does that material wealth come from? I can't conceive of how such a world could exist without some kind of significant technological breakthrough or massive social change.

Are there hard limits to global growth? What are they exactly? What's the evidence that the Earth cannot support a population of 10 billion with wealth equivalent to, say, the current US?

Today there are potential long-term problems in the way we use fresh water and hydrocarbons, but those are not fundamentally insoluble, far from it they are immanently tractable engineering problems. Consider that by the year 2100 the global economy will likely be over a quadrillion dollars in size (in 2012 dollars). And it will be filled with millions upon millions more engineers, entrepreneurs, technicians, and so forth than the world of today. I find it hard to believe that such a world will have trouble growing food or operating desalinization plants or adapting to using nuclear fission power, etc.

None of this requires massive social change or technological breakthroughs, it merely requires that people invest money and effort into engineering solutions to problems as those problems develop, which is something mankind has excelled at for millenia and will be extremely well prepared for in the 21st century.

A bit of evidence to underscore just how much difference:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1369307/Japan-tsunam...

If the same thing were to happen in Bangladesh it likely would take a bit longer to fix.

Inequality within countries might be rising, but the last decade was economically the best ever for developing nations, and they have enough of the world's population that the global Gini coefficient has been falling since 2002.

But that good news, and goods news don't sell newspaper so it won't be broadcasted.

People want drama and suffering. Talk about a war instead and you'll get more listeners, and thus more money

Gains have been and continue to be steady. I quietly smile and take it with a grain of salt when someone longs for "the good old days". People have quite selective memories of their favorite decades.

It strikes me as wishful thinking to be optimistic based on the fact that we (supposedly) have the resources to deviate from our current course. If we were already going in the right direction then it would be one thing, but this is like arguing that Romney is the favorite because people will feel bad for him being down in the polls. Doesn't work like that.

I think the poInt is that, as a species, we are going in the right direction. Sure the developed world has hit a speed bump and most advanced countries have had a few quarters of recession, but China is doing fine and much of Africa is undergoing a sustained economic boom. There are major challenges, but nothing that can't be overcome. That's nOt an argument for complacency, it's an argument to rise to those challenges and overcome them.

It's largely by stealing from future generations that we've been able to solve many short term problems (e.g. hunger), so using the fact that we've solved many short term problems to argue that our civilization will be sustainable in the long term makes no sense.

I think the authors are right that all of our major problems are theoretically solvable. But using the fact that we've solved many problems previously to argue that we're likely to solve all our future problems is not only wrong, but it's in part thinking like this that's why everything is so broken to begin with.

> It's largely by stealing from future generations that we've been able to solve many short term problems

This seems to be a fairly unjustified claim. What exactly have we "stolen" from them?

It rather seems that we've given greatly to future generations. We've discovered ways of producing orders of magnitude more food from the same plots of land. We've taught ourselves a good deal about how the universe operates, and (through technology) how to gain control over our lives to a great and growing extent.

"We've discovered ways of producing orders of magnitude more food from the same plots of land."

By completely depleting our non-renewable resources: groundwater, soil, and oil.

70% of the earth is covered by water. If need be we can always desalinate with nuclear energy.

Soil? Are you serious? 95% of soil depletion has happened in the last century, true, but we only discovered that soil can be depleted as a result. We also discovered that it can be replenished, and how to accomplish this.

"If need be we can always desalinate with nuclear energy."

While I have no doubt that renewable energy, nuclear, and desalination technology will all continue to improve, it's hard to believe that desalinating enough water to grow food for 10 billion people will ever be possible. I have no doubt that civilization will be possible at some level, but the claim of the original article is that things will continue to get better for the 5 billion people who are going to be at the bottom of the pyramid, which seems dubious.

Also, while soil can be renewed, it isn't currently happening. And while it could happen at some point in the future, when we get hit by the triple threat of no more cheap water and oil-based fertilizer it's hard to believe that we're going to be able to fix all three problems at once without first going through a period of mass starvation and/or another world war. It's certainly possible that we'll rise to the challenge through a combination of new technology and competent leadership, but based on the way things are going currently it seems like an outside chance.

It's certainly possible that we'll rise to the challenge through a combination of new technology and competent leadership...

There you go, that's the beginning of optimism :)

It's so true that the human race has great prospects in the long term future.

Yet some people lament about short term, inequalities, and so on. It just doesn't matter in the long term.

What really worries me is when we start to sacrifice our future for the present.

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