[cmdkeen]

Or alternatively human ingenuity adapts and overcomes - Malthusians have been consistently proved wrong in their constant cries of overpopulation. There is still plenty of land, plenty of ability to grow food to feed us and plenty of advances being made in areas which will allow that to increase. We've already seen a vast decrease in the number of people living on less than $1 a day across the world enabling many countries to start reaping a demographic dividend.

If the pessimists can quote fossil fuel depletion then surely I can optimistically promote fusion, carbon capture etc. Capitalism has been one of the greatest success stories of humanity.

[Spooky23]

I never understood how one could embrace prophecies of doom in this day and age. We live in a near golden age of plenty, and the train hasn't slowed down yet.

[timr]

"We live in a near golden age of plenty, and the train hasn't slowed down yet."

If by "we", you mean "citizens in the most prosperous cities of the world", then yes.

If you mean "people in most of the USA", then I have some news for you: the train's wheels are locked, and sparks are flying while everything skids to a stop. It's absolutely shocking how much of the country has declined in prosperity in my lifetime. The smaller cities near where I grew up -- places that were thriving small towns as recently as the 1980s -- are nearly all trapped in downward spirals of poverty, debt and addiction.

If you mean "the citizens of this planet", well...for most people, the train never left the station. Even in modern "success stories" like China, you don't have to try very hard to find appalling levels of poverty and despair. A few have become incredibly wealthy, but mostly, people are struggling to keep up. In the third-world? Forget it. Yeah, people can pay for cellphones now, while they're dying of preventable diseases due to filthy water.

Optimism is one thing, but it takes a Silicon Valley (aka Leibnitzian) view of the world to claim that this is a "golden age". Mostly, a select group of people are getting richer, while everyone else stagnates (or just barely inches forward).

[drob]

> Mostly, a select group of people are getting richer, while everyone else stagnates.

Actually this isn't true. Middle classes in the developed world are doing poorly relative to the richest in the developed world, but global poverty is on a steep decline.

Throughout the developing world, economic development is pulling hundreds of millions of people out of poverty at breakneck speed. Check out some of the data here, for starters: http://ourworldindata.org/data/growth-and-distribution-of-pr...

[timr]

"Middle classes in the developed world are doing poorly relative to the richest in the developed world"

This, I believe. Part of the driving force of the trends in global poverty is globalization. And despite what I said earlier about middle-class America, I don't necessarily cry for the loss of overall wealth in this country, if it means greater equity for the rest of the world (I just wish the richest people in the world were paying a greater share).

"global poverty is on a steep decline."

This is highly debatable. The data you linked to seems to be mostly based on the World Bank data -- a single, rarely modified, global metric of $1.25 (now $1.90) a day, using self-reported statistics. Meanwhile, regional context is critical -- for example, sub-saharan Africa has actually seen increases in poverty. In India and China, there's good reason to believe that wealth inequality is increasing [1]:

"the benefits of economic growth in many developing countries often accrue to the rich. In India and China, inequality has been increasing in recent years. From 1981 to 2010, the average poor person in sub-Saharan Africa saw no increase in their income even as economies expanded. Because there is no household data since 2012, it is impossible to know if these trends towards greater inequality have since changed."

Meanwhile, the metric itself is questionable (ibid):

"Someone living today at the new poverty line does not necessarily enjoy the same standard of living as someone at the old line did in the past, however....Looking at national price indices rather than PPPs, half of the world’s population live in countries in which $1.90 buys you less now than $1.25 did back in 2005, according to a paper released this week by Sanjay Reddy of the New School for Social Research in New York."

Even the World Bank itself acknowledges that poverty is on the increase in sub-saharan Africa (a region, which, by the way, has over a billion people, or 1/7th of the world's current population) [2]:

"However, despite its falling poverty rates, Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in the world for which the number of poor individuals has risen steadily and dramatically between 1981 and 2010. There are more than twice as many extremely poor people living in SSA today (414 million) than there were three decades ago (205 million). As a result, while the extreme poor in SSA represented only 11 percent of the world’s total in 1981, they now account for more than a third of the world’s extreme poor. India contributes another third (up from 22 percent in 1981) and China comes next, contributing 13 percent (down from 43 percent in 1981)."

In other words: it's great that more people are self-reporting as living on more than this bottom-of-the-barrel income metric, but it isn't really a counter-argument to my point, except to say that we've made the absolute poorest of the poor a bit less poor. Maybe. And mostly in China.

[1] http://www.economist.com/news/finance-economics/21673530-num...

[2] http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2013/04/17/re...

[cmdkeen]

We've made over a billion of the poorest of the poor less poor - that is a massive achievement. The crucial thing about that being less poor is that they are then not in subsistence mode and able to consider things like educating their children, engaging in capitalism, i.e. economic activity which can increase their wealth further rather than merely trying to stay alive.

Your quotes highlighting the problems of SSA move quickly into using percentages of an overall number that has decreased - it acknowledges that in all other regions in the world poverty has fallen dramatically, especially in China where their middle class is now around 340 million.

[timr]

"We've made over a billion of the poorest of the poor less poor - that is a massive achievement."

That's a pretty meaningless claim. Again, the data you're leaning on to say that is using an exceptionally low bar, and it doesn't really take into account regional economic differences. The whole reason the World Bank had to raise it to $1.90 a day from $1.25 a day was because in many parts of the developing world, $1.90 a day buys you less than $1.25 did at the start of the measurements!

More importantly, $1.91 a day still makes for a pretty miserable life anywhere in the world. You're not magically on a trajectory to the middle class. You may be dying of waterborne illnesses and malnutrition, but you're not absolutely poor by World Bank standards!

The claim that there are far fewer poor people from 1820 to present is more reasonable, but the problem there is that the gains mostly came from things like "industrialization", which were big, one-time gains that, again, accrued mainly to the winners.

[MaysonL]

Bucky Fuller outlined the problems facing us in his book Critical Path.

To quote Abebooks's description: "Critical Path is Fuller's master work--the summing up of a lifetime's thought and concern--as urgent and relevant as it was upon its first publication in 1981. Critical Path details how humanity found itself in its current situation--at the limits of the planet's natural resources and facing political, economic, environmental, and ethical crises.

The crowning achievement of an extraordinary career, Critical Path offers the reader the excitement of understanding the essential dilemmas of our time and how responsible citizens can rise to meet this ultimate challenge to our future."

[cmdkeen]

In 1981 since when we've moved on from the Cold War (political crisis), massively decreased world poverty (economic crisis) and moved from an era of 14% inflation in the West being considered something economics couldn't address. On all of those measures we're doing much better than in 1981 - surely that demonstrates our capacity to improve and overcome problems.

[subsection1h]

In the US, the median retirement age keeps rising, and it's rising far faster than median life expectancy. My idea of a Golden Age of Plenty isn't one in which people punch a time card until they drop dead.