Hans Rosling: Why the Statistics Point Toward Progress
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
Isn't happiness the goal? Are we really better off if we are unhappy?
Also, it's easier to measure people's discontent nowadays thanks to mass media - who surveyed the miserable folks of antiquity? Improved communications and the mass media also make it easier to compare ourselves against others. Once upon a time I might have deemed myself the best woodworker in the world (if all I knew were the people in my town) but as soon as you get online, you get put in your place!
The Internet is ridiculously cool. WiFi is too, as is, for that matter, most modern technology. We are veritably surrounded by awesome stuff. I'm not going to get in someone's way if they are insistent on their discontent, but I probably will laugh at them.
Anytime you're dealing with "doomsayers", you can almost bet that that person actually wants their variant of doom to occur, often for the tremendous corrections required. The effect of a real economic collapse would be:
1. A great reduction in "things" (read: toys) available.
2. A greater day-to-day struggle for necessities.
3. A replacement of humanity's highly variable yet trivial problems with one big, common problem.
There's every reason to believe that the above three things, if not taken too far, are actually a prescription for happiness. There's a forth one, of course:
4. A fundamental change in the ruling class.
That, of course, could be bad or good, but it explains why the government is happy to spend 100s of billions to fight every dip.
That is an excellent observation.
If you want to know how happy people were the good old days, try looking at old photographs. Most people don't look happy at all. Not even rich people.
It wasn't just that the convention wasn't to smile in photographs. You can tell by looking at people's eyes. Life was hard.
From the book "Deep Economy" http://jamestravels.com/2008/01/deep-economy-growth-and-decl...
I've noticed the looks on faces in old photos too. Yes, today, we all smile, but they are forced smiles. "Say cheese!" They didn't do that in the early days of photography. Photos were expensive and were a serious endeavor.
I think a lot of the smiles in photos are fake. We smile for the camera whether we are happy or not.
Yes, life was hard, but I feel happy when I'm working hard and being productive and I feel life is worth it. I think today, we are filling our lives with material goods and sacrificing a lot of the earth and resources and invading other countries and killing people to take their oil and things like that take a toll on people.
Even more, we pop pills to alleviate our depression. The unfortunate side effect of these pills is that they also limit the upside of happiness. They flat line us at a normal mood. Not a happy mood -- a not depressed mood.
Add to this the migration out of families and into more individual lives. We are isolating ourselves from the group. We are gregarious animals by nature, but living independently in little square boxes all alone violates our natural drives to be with others. We need more community. A push to materialism comes at the expense of community.
But when you start getting traffic jams and long commutes, high fructose corn syrup as the main ingredient in the food on supermarket shelves, the constant temptation to stare at one screen or another rather than interact with the world around you, the interruptions enabled by ubiquitous communications, the lack of exercise due to going from bed to car to cubicle to car to couch to bed again, the benefits from advances in technology seem more ambiguous.
I know this makes me sound like a Luddite, but I just think those of us who like technology and gadgets for their own sake should step back once and a while and consider whether more technology is always better or if there are also potential downsides.
If you're just looking at the rest of the world in comparison to history, then yes, things are getting better. China's economy is growing; so are the economies of southeast Asia. Africa is becoming more stable. Child mortality is falling around the world. This is good.
But it's a mistake to look at that information and conclude that the American doomsayers are wrong. The US middle class has been decimated by the same economic forces that are benefiting Asia. Low-skill jobs are being shipped away, leaving millions of people in this country unemployed, and slipping into poverty. We've had back-to-back recessions, and it looks like neither recovery is going to regain the jobs lost. US citizens are more indebted than ever. There are good reasons to believe that the days of US economic resilience may be over.
We've masked our problems with debt spending over the last decade, but that isn't sustainable. Meanwhile, the first-world credit bubble has been funding the economic expansion in Asia, and we give tons of international aid to help bring down child mortality and cure diseases. What happens when we can't afford that anymore? (we can't afford it now!)
There are reasons to be optimistic about global development, but this guy isn't the "middle way".
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_y...