By many objective measures we are doing well, we are living longer than ever, women and minorities have more opportunities than ever, the standard of living is higher than ever in history. Even poor people live better (and longer) than kings used to not that many generations ago.
There are many measures by which we can judge our positive success. Of course there a ton of problems, but it still seems that we only like talking about problems and not any of the positives.
This Steven Pinker stuff is absolute hogwash. There are more people living in extreme poverty today than existed 250 years ago. So what that as a percentage and when you are very careful with the definitions that they are a smaller proportion.
And what, I can get an extra 5 years in a nursing home where there's a decent chance I'll suffer physical and psychological abuse but will be forcefully kept alive in a stupor on a cocktail of drugs.
It's just unabashed justification for the interests of the top couple percent. They do in fact have it better right now by far than any other cohort in history.
Would you figure that if the population increases by 10x that the number of people living in extreme poverty increases by 10x? That's what I would assume if the world was not getting any better or worse.
No I would assume that at the margin, increases in population are drastically skewed towards more poverty.
So if we we went from 8B to 80B I'd argue we'd go from 1B -> >50B in poverty. Maybe a lot worse than that.
This is obviously dependent on where you are born but especially true once you consider that the places left with high fertility have nearly perfect overlap with the places with high volumes of extreme poverty.
And this is only in the short term. Those people are generating plastic waste, consuming fuel, and many other things that are net negatives to the planet over time. So over the long term this problem just gets worse.
you might expect poverty to go up by a factor of 50x when the population goes up by 10x, but what we see is the opposite, poverty has grown more slowly than the overall population.
Inequality is record high and growing, there's an ongoing political attack on LGBT people's (and especially trans people's) right to even exist, one of the US's two parties is straight-up fascist and has already attempted a coup, and not very much is being done about the growing climate disaster.
On many objective measures, we are doing well. On many others, things are getting dramatically worse, fast.
I would happily trade many of the increases in standard of living to regain our freedom. It's not enough to have a good standard of living, if you must live in constant oppressive fear of the abject tyranny imposed upon us. And make no mistake, that's where we are in this country. It might be subjectively considered better than most others, but that's just a way of saying our shit stinks less.
Personally, I agree with you about freedoms. I value personal freedoms very highly and would be happy to trade comfort and safety for more of them. Obviously the majority of people, especially on this site, are not going to share that same value. Most people just value a comfy life and don't mind trading their (and others) individual freedoms for it.
>that's where we are in this country
Unfortunately it seems to be where everyone ends up in all developed societies. The US is an aberration because it is so young.
There are many measures by which we can judge our positive success. Of course there a ton of problems, but it still seems that we only like talking about problems and not any of the positives.