[vinceguidry]

The 'vast majority of people' have not had their lives improved. They were, and still are, given a Squid Game-esque choice to either participate in a status-seeking game to destroy your health for someone else's comfort or exist in total squalor, dependent on other people who are destroying their health so that you can exist on the crumbs they throw your way.

Capitalism seems more or less benign in affluent nations which can afford to value individual life at millions of dollars. You can rest assured that the homeless people you ignore aren't going to starve, that they'll just buy drugs with the money you'd have given them anyway. It's easy to squint your eyes and believe in the system.

It's much harder to look at countries were life is much much cheaper and accept that the system is a net improver of lives rather than one of enforced stagnation. Where getting people fed, clothed and housed is a matter of politics, not logistics. Everywhere you go in the developing world, you see politics, by that I mean rich people preserving their riches, keeping the people willing to do the legwork and work out the logistics, from following through on their altruistic missions.

We need to stop pretending the system designed to make people feel better about exploiting whatever they can in self-interest is the arbiter of human worth.

Scarcity could go away tomorrow if the rent-seekers could just get out of the way.

[mym1990]

Your first sentence is absolutely wrong and your second sentence is absolutely absurd. If you want to have a real conversation, maybe keep out the latest thing you watched on Netflix as a source of your bias.

Global living conditions across multiple facets have DRAMATICALLY improved in the last 200 years. No, I am not talking about the last 10 or 20 years, I mean over many generations: https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-condit...

[vinceguidry]

You can look at numbers on reports, or you can go and actually look at some of these run-down areas. It's actually kinda hard to do, my eyes were opened one day when I was trying to get from point A to point B in Colombia and I took a shared cab some 400 miles. Seeing it in person is way different than looking at pictures online, lemme tell you. It hits you that it's not just that part of rural Colombia that looks like that, rural everywhere does. And you'll never unsee it, but you'll never actually see it either unless you go out there and look.

The world isn't much different now than the one that caused the Buddha to leave his princely lifestyle and dedicate his life to teaching and spirituality. Those material gains over the last 200 years, sorry they just don't seem all that germane.

[NikolaeVarius]

Wait, is your argument really to ignore the data and go with your gut?

Wow, in the past 200 years, we've seen the eradication of smallpox, treatment for Tuberculosis, vaccines for pneumonia, all issues plaguing humanity for pretty much all of recorded history.

A rural farmer in Nigeria can access price data in real time using a cell phone, while democracy in India allows dozens of politicians from every state argue on live TV simultaneously to get their views heard.

What, pray tell, can you say that the world isn't a better place

[vinceguidry]

The world is a better place... For those best positioned to take advantage. Those who aren't, can go work in Amazon warehouses.

[nindalf]

Amazon workers are paid $20/hour plus benefits. What % of humanity had access to such economic opportunities 200 years ago? Those Amazon workers also don’t need to worry about their whole families dying from diseases (smallpox, cholera, TB), famine, and war.

What are you even talking about? 150 years ago a large fraction of the world population were slaves. You’re insulting them and your own intelligence if you think their lives were comparable to Amazon workers.

You go on one trip to Columbia and think your eyes are open. Meanwhile many of the people in this thread have lived their whole lives in such countries, including me.

[mym1990]

I had a feeling you wouldn't want to look at the data and accept the possibility that you are wrong. I see the poverty everywhere, I lived in SF paying $3000 for rent while homeless people were everywhere, I don't disagree that capitalism is hitting a stride that will be hard to recover from. But the fact that you claim to know what the world was like when Buddha was around is even more alarming.

[halo-and-talon]

Do you know how many babies used to die before they were a year old?

It sounds like you saw real poverty and it woke you up to your immense wealth and comfortable existence, so kudos on that. You took the wrong leap though and decided that your life is the default state, when in fact it is in an incredible aberration of history. For millions of years every person was poor, then a few were rich, then more were rich, and now you're one of them.

[slothtrop]

> You can look at numbers on reports, or you can go and actually look at some of these run-down areas.

You're advocating for ignoring research and data in favor of anecdotes. You're not even trying to argue in good faith.

[iammisc]

> The world isn't much different now than the one that caused the Buddha to leave his princely lifestyle and dedicate his life to teaching and spirituality. Those material gains over the last 200 years, sorry they just don't seem all that germane.

In my experience, the people who are typically 'shocked' by this destitution are people who have lived extremely privileged lives, believe this is the default state of the world, and then see this destitution, and are so moved, that they dedicate their lives to eradicating it, while often misidentifying the cause.

Buddha is the archetypical version of this narrative, and it's no wonder -- as a rich prince, he had no idea what the world was really like.

In reality, most of the problems you see in rural areas all around the world are human-caused problems, typically where humans are interfering with individual freedom (civil and economic).

> It hits you that it's not just that part of rural Colombia that looks like that, rural everywhere does.

Except it doesn't. My parents live used to live in rural America and it was quite nice. My brother lives in the countryside and it's also quite nice. It's no less destitute than the area of Portland I live in. Have you ever been to a city? It's not like they're some model of refinement.

[vinceguidry]

> In reality, most of the problems you see in rural areas all around the world are human-caused problems, typically where humans are interfering with individual freedom (civil and economic).

This is exactly what I'm trying to say. Rent-seekers are keeping the world under their callous little thumbs, just like they have been for thousands of years. I think I'm done. HN hivemind, you can have your echo chamber back.

[iammisc]

If you let humans freely exchange goods, and not interfere, you get capitalism. Capitalism is not a creed like marxism. Capitalism is Marx's term used to describe what happens when people can exchange goods freely.

If you're arguing that we should protect free markets in these areas, like Colombia (which would also include curtailing criminal cartels, which infringe on freedom), then sure, we can have a discussion.

If you're going to pretend that rural areas are sometimes impoverished because of 'muh evil capitalism' and that we need 'insert untried, or failed social policy here', then I don't see the point.

[vinceguidry]

Here's an idea, capitalism, without the rent-seeking. When someone wants to do something everyone knows is wrong, we don't let them. Instead of making excuses, we hold people with power and affluence to higher standards.

What a concept.

[dude187]

Capitalism has greatly increased the quality of life across the board

[justupvoting]

Spoken like a religious tenet, detached from everything interesting.

Which board? What implementation of capitalism? You don't pretend that the States are running a free market or anything absurd like that, do you? The States have a Crony system at best.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for capitalism. I think humans are a rotten animal at heart and capitalism is the only way to effectively harness that bad nature for good results. But like any technical system, the implementation matters, and the implementation in the States in the last 50 years has been dreadfully short-sighted.

We have gradually whittled away at every collectively positive subsystem for generations now and are left with an inordinate number of miserable people whose day to day life would show up as, 'improved' on the Pinker style charts & graphs.

The subjective is the core of wellbeing.

Objective reality matters, certainly. But all the more so when you apply nuance to your reading of it.