

The steady gain of humanity - gruseom
http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2012/1101/The-steady-gain-of-humanity

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JackC
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...](http://www.millennium-
project.org/millennium/SOF2012-English.pdf)

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

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jhuckestein
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?

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

~~~
argumentum
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.

~~~
pjscott
Obviously there's at least one spectrum here.

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connortomas
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.

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InclinedPlane
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.

~~~
connortomas
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.

~~~
InclinedPlane
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.

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Symmetry
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.

~~~
guylhem
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

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scott_meade
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.

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Alex3917
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.

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simonh
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.

~~~
Alex3917
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.

~~~
argumentum
> _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.

~~~
Alex3917
"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.

~~~
argumentum
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.

~~~
Alex3917
"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.

~~~
argumentum
_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 :)

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guylhem
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.

