
Good news at last: the world isn’t as horrific as you think - Ours90
https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2018/apr/11/good-news-at-last-the-world-isnt-as-horrific-as-you-think
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birksherty
When I feel the world is going towards disaster, I don't actually see it from
human's own point of view. Yes, there were worse war, racism, economic
disaster and all the issues before. So from human's own selfish point of view,
we are in better position.

But I see it from the point of view of Earth as a whole. What I see is this:

The Earth loses 18.7 million acres of forests per year, which is equal to 27
soccer fields every minute, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)[1].

75% insects have disappeared in last 27 years[2]. They are in serious
trouble[3]. This made me depressed most in recent time.

Glaciers are shrinking at high rate.

Climate scientists can't sleep at night because they know much more than we
do[4].

Many species are disappearing. Giraffes are endangered now, last Male Northern
White Rhino just dies. Many more will be in next few decades.

We can talk about how better current time is compared to 200 years ago only
because we are selfish. Earth is not just a rock in space, it's the whole
ecosystem. Just like cancer cells spread and destroy our body, we do the same
to this beautiful planet.

[1]
[https://www.worldwildlife.org/threats/deforestation](https://www.worldwildlife.org/threats/deforestation)

[2]
[http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185809)

[3] [https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/oh-
no/54...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/oh-no/543390/)

[4] [https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a36228/ballad-of-
the-s...](https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a36228/ballad-of-the-sad-
climatologists-0815/)

------
kristianc
This is similar to the analysis from Pinker in "Enlightenment Now".

Pinker's book was a little bit bizarre: upset that people had not been
persuaded by the deluge of graphs in Better Angels of Our Nature, he decides
to provide us with yet more graphs.

What the analysis seems to miss is that life does not happen in the aggregate.
While the story around the world has been one of improving health, wealth and
prosperity, there are individuals around the world who have not felt the
benefit.

Pinker and Rosling's solution seems to be to call these people ungrateful,
whining, or "social justice warriors".

~~~
alendit
The basic fact is that the world is by virtually any objective measure of
human well-being in the best place since the start of the recorded history.
And still there are people (even in this thread) who see the sky falling and
the world ending tomorrow if not today. Somehow it became a mark of an
ostensibly grounded and serious person to be cynical and pessimistic about the
world's affairs. The only thing that Pinker tries to show, is that this
cynicism is not backed by the facts.

Interestingly, the very people the "social justice warriors" claim to fight
for reaped the most benefits of the social and economic progress. Well-
deserved, of course, since they started way behind. But it makes you wonder,
why the SJWs are as unhappy about the state of our society as they ever were?
A cynic would say, they are afraid of losing their metaphorical jobs. I'd
rather believe that they just lack the insight into just how much worse the
life was not so long ago.

~~~
firmgently
Isn't well-being subjective? It's for me to decide if I'm happy (although some
people like to tell others how they _should_ feel).

I've heard from friends with mental health problems that one of the hardest
things to deal with can be other people telling them that objectively their
life is good ("you have family, friends, success in work - what have you got
to be unhappy about?")... so on top of feeling depressed they're also emoting
wrongly.

Surely if a person feels that the sky is falling that would be a measure of
low well-being. In which case the 'objective measures of human well-being' are
badly chosen or (more realistically, and something that will cause massive
cognitive dissonance in lots of readers here): not everything can be measured
objectively. Experience happens subjectively, behind the eyes, and can never
be usefully measured. Which is why when someone tells you they're unhappy you
have to decide whether to believe them, or just tell them that they're wrong.

Personally I think trying to objectively measure how good life is now compared
to other times is embarrassingly futile. Your internal philosophy makes a huge
difference to how you handle life, it's perfectly possible for a person to
have a non-miserable life in a society with high infant mortality rates and a
life expectancy of 40, with hostile tribes nearby who might need to be fought
at any time. Expectations (norms) along with cultural and psychological
frameworks would make the experience for someone native to that time and place
very different than it would be for somebody who was dropped from the modern
Western world into a similar situation. Of course the same example native
person might also live unhappily. But to presume that their subjective life
experience should be ruled by abstract measurements is... unimaginative.

I can never find any reference to it online but years ago I remember Gordon
Brown (UK PM at the time I think) talking on TV about quality of life, saying
"one thing we've found is that people report being happier when they hear
birds singing... so we're looking into using recordings of birdsong to
increase happiness levels". LOL it's like, dude... you're really not getting
it are you?

------
hn0
According to Jason Hickel [1] global poverty has been rather constant
throughout the century, and what he calls “the good news narrative” is based
on heavily doctored figures by the World Bank and profit driven NGOs to
camouflage their abject failures. Hans Rosling was a known propagator of this
story.

I have not studied his claims but he makes a forceful argument in his book.

[1] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32603498-the-
divide](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32603498-the-divide)

------
KozmoNau7
No, it's much worse.

~~~
bcraven
Did you read the article?

"I call it the overdramatic worldview. It’s stressful and misleading. In fact,
the vast majority of the world’s population live somewhere in the middle of
the income scale. Perhaps they are not what we think of as middle class, but
they are not living in extreme poverty. Their girls go to school, their
children get vaccinated. Perhaps not on every single measure, or every single
year, but step by step, year by year, the world is improving. In the past two
centuries, life expectancy has more than doubled. Although the world faces
huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress."

~~~
KozmoNau7
Yes, I did.

Sure, a lot of people lead reasonably comfortable lives and we have never had
the quality of medicine or convenience that we enjoy today (in most of the
world).

But there are still _massive_ problems, such as the rapid (and rabid) rise of
the far-right in Eastern Europe, as well as deteriorating USA/Russia/China
relations, which could very well escalate to armed conflict if they're not
careful. I'm sure there were plenty of optimists during the cold war as well,
but the simple fact is that some high-powered people are currently playing a
_very_ dangerous game.

Not to mention the rapidly increasing stress levels in modern society, the
complete erosion of privacy and rising levels of mental health issues, partly
due to our "busybusybusy must be busy!" culture.

And that's before we get into things like accelerating climate change, which
has the potential to go into a complete runaway that we cannot stop,
potentially leading to a situation similar to the Permian-Triassic extinction
event, within just a few hundred years.

~~~
adventured
You said it's much worse.

Saying that there "are still massive problems," is a language structure
admission that in fact things are obviously better.

What you're describing is a paradise compared to any number of well known
periods of time in the past, including as recently as the 1950s or 1970s, much
less the WW1 or WW2 time frames.

The far right in Eastern Europe, in terms of fasicsm concerns, is a trivial
joke compared to the recent past in all regards. Spain as one example of real
political problems in Europe, had a four decade fascist dictatorship as
recently as 1975. Ceausescu ruled Romania as a brutal dictator for decades.

The worst of free Eastern Europe today is a bastion of liberalism by
comparison to the recent past. Eastern Europe was almost entirely under the
authoritarian boot of the USSR just 30 years ago. The people there were not
only hyper poor, but they also had few rights at all.

Today Romania has a higher GDP per capita than Russia and is one of the
fastest growing economies on earth.

Czech and Slovakia now have the economic per capita output of Portugal. Their
economies are solidly five times larger than they were in 1991.

Deteriorating relations with Russia? See ~1948-1990.

China? See: Korean War, Mao era in general.

The West is getting along extraordinarily well with China compared to the
past. The dispute today is trade, not who is going to nuke each other or when
the next war begins.

Things have gotten dramatically better.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
You're ignoring the part about the Anthropocene mass extinction.

