Things have gotten better and progress has been made from times past, it just seems worse now because we have more access to information. We’ve come far, and have further to go!
The extreme poverty one is laughable especially when criteria to define extreme poverty is ridiculous. Extreme poverty in places where you earn less than $1.90 but can still have subsistence farming and community doesn’t make sense - also if living in San Francisco and earning $2/day isn’t extreme poverty… I don’t know what is.
Poverty shouldn’t be tied to capital but to standards of living - that would be a completely different story.
The poverty rate stuff is pure bs. The world bank just lowered the stated official poverty line without actually improving living conditions.
https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-poverty
besides this, China did a huge job on getting people out of poverty - if you like or not
Mass producing shit at inhuman factories with deaths by the millions. I guess you’re not poor if you’re just dead.
Look at the statistics. I am not lying. You can complain, but that are facts.
What statistics? The one the CCP made up? Over a quarter of chinese are still in extreme poverty and a huge amount of chinese still have an income of under 1500 yuan a month.
Sure, they might have lifted some people out of poverty, but they also put them into poverty in the first place under mao. So celebrating this is kind of self congratulatory.You can google it. It takes just a few seconds. I think you can handle it… If I search it for you, you wouldn’t believe it.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/56213271.amp
I did. It’s state propaganda.
By that definition france lifted millions of people out of poverty.LOL!
“Elsewhere in the region, Vietnam has also seen a dramatic fall in extreme poverty rates over a similar period. Another large country, India, had 22% of its population living below the international poverty line in 2011 (the most recent data available). Brazil has 4.4% of its people earning less than $1.90 a day.”
How many people has the US lifted out of poverty? How many people has Britain lifted out of poverty? How many has any state in the EU lifted out of poverty? And france isn’t even mentioned in the article. Vietnam is btw. socialistic.
Yeah, because they finally decided to adopt a free market model, and suddenly “starving people in China” was less of a thing.
idiot
Said the CCP Boot
I think you wrote Bot wrong… But who knows? I am just a Bot. Beep Boop Boop. I am a Bot.
No i meant Boot. As in Bootlicker.
Oh, sure you’re not a Bot? Also I am not licking any boots.
Why wouldn’t people like it?
because they hate china…
Maybe I’m too naive, but even if you hate a country for its economic and political choices, you can still be glad their working class population is getting out of poverty and It’s not like they are getting richer by slaving a whole continent
Yeah… you can like some things and still hate everything else about it. Not everything is black or white - but some don’t like grey-scales.
Jesus Christ this thread. The technicalities aren’t the point. You are allowed to find happiness where you can in an imperfect world that contains suffering. It doesn’t mean you’ll be complacent to injustice. Fighting against injustice can be done without thinking the world is hopeless dogshit. There’s satisfaction that can be justifiably had, through means other than smug superiority at knowing all the depressing truths of the world, or the sympathy of others for your problems. We feed ourselves so much rage and sadness via the internet, can we not have a palate-cleanser like this without chewing it up and spitting it out, and then going back to gorging on more?
Holy shit, I thought you were kidding but this whole thread is just full of sad people.
The thingeis: the world is getting less free and inequality has been constantly rising in the last decades.
This Steven Pinker BS is advertising complacency, while we should agitate people to fight for a better world.
If you want to be optimistic, look around for the average kindness of everyday live inside communities. The FOSS community, unions, mutual aid in neighborhoods etc. This would lift you up and point in the direction where things could get better.
Liberal copium.
None of those things will last. Remember, MIT ran the simulations. Society is supposed to collapse by 2040.
Hey look not everything’s total and utter crap
“BUT MIT SAID IT’LL ALL END IN 15-20 YEARS”
Go outside and smell the roses while they last then.
the last two are easily debunked. I hate shit like this because it reinforces an idea that time = progress. There are influential and powerful people alive today who would reverse any of these trends if it meant money in their pocket.
It’s not like we don’t still have problems to fix, but always only focusing on them doesn’t show just how far we’ve come.
The problem is that the line between “we’ve come a long way” and it’s corollary “therefore why are you upset/why do we have to address [insert issue]?” is razor thin.
Celebrating success is great. Using it as a cudgel to stop further success is not.
Yeah definitely. But only thinking of the worst everything all the time is bad for mental health and isn’t reflective of reality.
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But the bad news is what social media and news amplifies.
Digsstisyi
The real problem with ignoring progress we’ve made is that it gives the false impression that what we’re doing is worthless, leading to demands to tear down everything we’re doing.
People are constantly clamoring to replace our systems with new ones “that actually work”. This is a result of being blind to the ways our current system works.
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I’m not arguing for good enough. You’re framing this as a false dichotomy between completely ignoring all the accomplishments of past generations and all the valuable aspects of our current system, and completely giving up.
What we can do is decide to recognize that parts of our current system work really well, and stop always talking about trying to uproot what we have and replace it.
Bkdiyddoyd
The average American didn’t die at age 51. And, while the average life expectancy might have been 51 years, that’s a Spiders Georg moment.
The life expectancy was thrown off by all the child mortality. If you lived past 10 years, you were likely to live to 70.
Look, I feel like “children dead before 10” is a pretty upsetting and relevant statistic.
Sure, but it’s not the same as 25 years old being mid-life.
I feel like you’re just excited to share a fact about a common misconception rather than actually paying attention to what’s being said. Infant mortality is still a bad thing. While it’s true folks lived about as long less infant mortality is still a net improvement.
I’m paying attention. I feel like you just want to point out that it’s a common misconception rather than engage with the fact that dying at 51 is very different from child mortality.
Wealth inequality is possibly the highest it’s ever been in history.
I wouldn’t be surprised if food wasted (food that goes straight to the trash) nowadays is also at peak numbers, or close to.
During the Bolsonaro years (2019-2022), Brazil saw a drastic increase in extreme poverty, made worse by the pandemic. Poor people were literally scavenging carcasses for anything that could still be eaten. We’re still trying to recover.
Do not take any of those good things for granted, they can be very easily reverted by a small number of psychopath assholes.
Wealth inequality is higher now than it was back when most of us were serfs who barely owned the clothes on our backs while one family lived in a castle and owned the rest of us?
Wealth inequality has nothing useful to say about quality of life for people.
You know what? I did like this post, thanks.
factfulness
