this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
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What’s a hard quality of life indicator?
I think a good place to start are the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. I know things feel bed, especially in the United States, where there are severe regressions. But at a global level many things are far better than ever for billions upon billions of people, especially in China and India.
TL;DR - At a worldwide level, hunger and extreme poverty is down, while healthcare and education is up. War is also up, and the environment is suffering more than ever.
A bunch of interactive charts are available here where you can scrub through time: https://ourworldindata.org/sdgs
I’ll summarize in case you don’t want to go through the charts yourself.
Extreme poverty in particular is a far less objective or meaningful measurement than you would think given how often the "everything is fine" crowd likes to cite it. The daily income defined as "extreme poverty" is abysmally low; $2 USD per day wouldn't be enough to get basic necessities for food and shelter, and while its terrifying to think about having to live on even less we shouldn't congratulate ourselves when the bar is just barely above the lowest levels of hell. Different poverty lines show different trends and by standards that would allow a person to live decently rather than merely avoiding the absolute worst deprivations we actually see very little change. And that's before getting into the way poverty is distributed globally and the ways that even with the lowest poverty lines we see a lot of the poorest of the poor who have seen far less of a shift.
Very good point, extreme poverty shows the biggest trend forward, while other thresholds do not show the same progress. That being said, poverty in general seems to be declining according to the graphs you’ve shown.
In no way does a mere positive trend imply “good job team, we fixed the world and we can quit now”. Poverty is still rampant, and we should do what we can to fix it, obviously.
you’re pushing the “But on the other hand most hard quality of life indicators are up globally” line but like, the number of negative things you’ve listed is more than the positives.
I mean, it’s almost as if you are manipulating yourself into questioning and rejecting reality*. You should stop doing that
*there is no one word description for this action. Believe me, I looked, and I’d use it if it existed.
Sure, that’s fair enough. I was emphasizing more on the critical short term things like food security (something that can kill in weeks) than on long term things like climate change and environmental destruction (something that can kill in decades).
I think my point was that most people focus only on the bad things that are happening without acknowledging the massive good things that are also happening in the world.
I don't know shit about these stats, and everything can be debated, but just wanted to say: don't let people get you down.
Feeling positive/hopeful isn't always appropriate about everything, but people in here are acting like it's a mental illness.
Sure, people simply don’t like to change their minds. I’ve already conceded several points that I was incorrect about, because learning is part of being a healthy human.
It’s best to make conclusions from the statistics instead of groupthink or gut feelings, and the statistics say that there’s still a lot of good happening in the world right now.