[andrewmutz]

Most of what you read on the news and social media would have you convinced that civilization is declining or collapsing. If you actually measure the world, however, then by almost any measure things are better now than they have been in the past (two notable exceptions are climate change and democracy vs autocracy).

What does this mean? Why the difference between the measurable state of the world and the doomer discourse? I think its rooted in two things.

The first reason is that both social media and news media are monetized by your attention, and attention is far higher when things are presented as terrible than when things are presented as good. Bad news goes viral far better than good news.

The second reason is that being highly online is correlated with depression. The people who are most likely to be spending their time posting online are more likely to be depressed and lose perspective about the world around them.

What's the solution? I don't know for sure but I think a good first step is to limit the time you spend consuming news media and social media, and instead spend time offline living life. What's the point of a constant stream of information if it leads to inaccurate perceptions of the world?

[lisper]

> two notable exceptions are climate change and democracy vs autocracy

"Notable" is quite the understatement IMHO.

[cableshaft]

> If you actually measure the world, however, then by almost any measure things are better now than they have been in the past (two notable exceptions are climate change and democracy vs autocracy).

Or US life expectancy, or healthcare/childcare/university costs (in the US), or homicides (in the US), or suicides, or population growth (arguably a good thing for climate change, but most people aren't choosing to put off kids because they care about overpopulation), or topsoil availability, or fresh water availability (climate change contributes but we're also using way too much), or garbage in the ocean, or the decimation of life in the ocean (which climate change isn't helping but it's more from overfishing), etc etc etc.

That's just off the top of my head, and I'm sure I can hunt down a lot more.

And it's super dependent on where you live too. Try telling Ukrainians, Sri Lankans, Syrians, Yemenis, Lebanese, etc. if they're better off now than they were in the past.

[andrewmutz]

When I look up many of these bad numbers you mention, they do not seem very bad. Life expectancy is up and to the right (https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/life...), homocide has recently had an uptick but on a longer time scale is good (https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/murd...), and the suicide rate is about the same as it was 30-40 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States).

I agree it depend on where you are, but if you look at the globe in its entirety, things look even better than if you restrict your view to the US.

[cableshaft]

The crime/life expectancy stuff were just things I've been hearing about the most recent few years. They've been mostly on a better trend if you extend the timescale, sure, but the pandemic threw a total monkey wrench into everything, and these things are going the wrong direction again.

Will it stay that way, I don't know, maybe not, but they're not currently getting better, which is counter to the 'everything is doing better except these two things' the parent was suggesting. And I suspect as the other issues (such as the following paragraph) become even worse, all these figures will start doing a lot worse again, as people have to start competing/fighting/possibly going to war, over a smaller and smaller number of resources.

The war in Ukraine really shined a light on that, as food and natural gas availability became a big problem for many countries.

Topsoil and water and animal life and freshwater and other things are doing much, much worse though, and very little is being done to reverse course there (and will take hundreds of generations to fix naturally even if we stop 100% now).

[fnordpiglet]

Declining population growth is in all ways a positive. Rising population is a good thing to essentially linearly improve nominal GDP, but does little to improve per capita GDP. Other than that nominal GDP bump I struggle to see any positive associated with population growth. Most people put off having kids because, effectively, people are living much longer and it’s economically easier to have kids older. Effective contraception, sexual education, extended life spans, and a general social acceptance that children aren’t the mark of a successful life are IMO primary contributors to that decline.

I would note in my own life we waited a long time to have a kid because we wanted to be engaged in our careers early on. Once we had a kid we decided to stop simply because we enjoyed the focus on our daughter and didn’t see having a ton of kids as a social imperative. That puts our family at below replacement rate. My experience isn’t particularly unique among the parents I know, and we are actually younger than many.

I know all of the above is anecdotal and conjecture, but I’m fairly confident if I did my normal citation and data collection I would largely be supported (having seen the data and analysis in the past) but I’m sick and have too little energy right now.

[valj]

I disagree - declining population is a disaster that only ends in a country becoming poor. As you allude to in your response, sub-replacement-rate fertility is what drives population decline, so declining populations are always ageing populations. The economics of ageing populations don't work for obvious reasons - as people get older they need more care and produce less, and with fewer workers to provide that care, the care becomes more expensive in ways that governments never provisioned for (see Japan and many countries in Western Europe for good examples of this in practice).

In the longer term this depresses GDP per capita as resources have to be diverted from productive industries like high-tech manufacturing into extremely unproductive industries like aged care. Again, Japan and many Western European countries provide good examples of this in practice. Finally, as the reality of the broader economic decline sets in, second order effects start to take hold like brain drain - as young workers see higher wages working in more productive economies, they decide to leave, worsening the population pyramid and depriving the government of precious tax revenue needed to pay for aged care. (Japan and many Western European countries are sadly, again, examples of this phenomenon).

The short term effects you're describing of nominal GDP rising and per capita GDP falling is only true when populations are growing through bad immigration policy, which is what we commonly see in the US for example. Growing population organically and sustainably, or through productive immigration that targets gaps in the country's labor force, should never have that effect as the new member of the population should eventually increase GDP by more than the average existing worker today.

At an individual rather than population level of course, having fewer or no children is easier, which is why people are doing it. But this describes a local optimum only, while the true optimum is population growth.

[fnordpiglet]

I think you made an erroneous assumption. Here you say the declining birthdays are always aging populations that require more care and this is a net drag. First, care and health services do contribute to GDP and provide good income work for those providing care. Second, while the aging population is larger than the younger population who are working at first that’s just because during the elder generations birth rate was higher. As that ages out of the population you’re back to an equilibrium. Third, aging population doesn’t mean decrepit population. Part of our aging story in the developed world is that quantity of life has sort of capped out but we are continuously improving the quality of life at all ages through medicine, nutrition, education, etc. Fourth, people are working considerably longer. People used to retire around 50 to 55, then 60-65, now it’s more towards 62-70. I don’t see that trend reversing frankly especially as quality of life care improves which I expect it to dramatically in the next 10 years. I suspect we are also within spitting distances of genetic, mRNA, and other cancer treatments that virtually eliminate the need for radiation and chemo while providing astounding outcomes as close to “cured” as you can get with cancer. Fifth, you bring up Japan as well one should - but if you look at Japan they’re doing fine by any standard and their per capita GDP is about the same as it was in 1990 in adjusted currency. It’s not like we’ve never seen youth / aging boom and busts in history and everything is fine.

As a final point I think older workers are generally more productive as long as they’re able to use the tools they’ve developed skill with. With the advent of computers and information technology older generations were unable to map their skills to the new way of work. Society existed in the state they were used to for 10,000 years and suddenly instead of being masters as the elder had been, they were bumbling fools - made more tragic in that they were otherwise highly skilled at what they did with a lifetime of experience. This colors our perception of the aged because we are still in the middle of that transition. But do you think you and I will be limited by ability to use information technology? Mental decline doesn’t generally start until much later in life, and people are doing careers into their 70’s with success.

[trention]

>while the aging population is larger than the younger population who are working at first that’s just because during the elder generations birth rate was higher. As that ages out of the population you’re back to an equilibrium.

This is absolutely wrong. The "aging population" will be larger than the "younger population" in any situation in which there is sub-replacement fertility + stable (or increasing, obviously) life expectancy. It's just that the ratio may stabilize but it will be <1.

[burnished]

I think you're thinking about 'old professionals' when whats under discussion is "jesus fuck you are old as dirt" people, and how the economics change when your distribution starts skewing towards that old and ineffective side.

[marssaxman]

> while the true optimum is population growth.

Right up until you overshoot your ecological carrying capacity and the whole society collapses, of course. That part tends to be less optimal.

[gumby]

The US is only 5% of the population. On a global scale all of those factors are improving.

Just as the Gibson quote went: "The future is already here -- it's just not evenly distributed"

[tuatoru]

No, they're not all improving.

Topsoil exhaustion and poisoning is global. Freshwater scarcity is much worse in China and the Subcontinent than in the USA. Antibiotic resistance is world-wide. Destruction of rainforests: likewise. Female literacy is declining in developing countries, despite more time spent in "school".

[TheOtherHobbes]

That suggests Rest of World will soon experience the decline the US, UK and some other Western countries are experiencing.

[gumby]

Or that the USA will eventually catch up with the more advanced nations. Actually even if everybody regressed to the mean it would be a step up for the States.

[_dw7s]

The whole better off trope has been popularized by people like Hans Rosling in books like Factfulness. You can read reviews from experts to figure out what's wrong with it. But I've often seen these arguments in the context of 'everything is going great, there's nothing to worry about' with arguments such as 'we had the most people lifted out of poverty ever in history'. In my view that's just capitalist koolaid to keep the middle class workers content, optimistic and most importantly, compacent. 'Don't look up' style.

All these arguments explicitly ignore the many elephants in the room, like the global fucking pandemic we've been mishandling for the past two years or the climate disaster which is already making itself felt by westerners.

The outcome is actually pretty grim if you read between the lines. You don't have to monitor the news or social media to figure out that we're not in the best place right now when it comes to a lot of global metrics. We can pick and chose a couple and make ourselves feel good and go about our business being productive little bees in the capitalist machine, but we're just fooling ourselves.

My personal assessment is that the effects of climate change will zero out a lot of those measures for which we're doing better than our forefathers.

[andrewmutz]

> The whole better off trope has been popularized by people like Hans Rosling in books like Factfulness

Hans Rosling is right.

And the success of the world does not mean we shouldn't work to improve it. It means we shouldn't be doomers and think the world is falling apart.

Max Roser said it well with "The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better."

https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better

[decebalus1]

> the success of the world

Which part of the world is succeeding? What does that actually mean? 'Success of the world' is such an empty statement. What did it succeed at? Destroying our habitat?

> does not mean we shouldn't work to improve it

Most of the more brilliant minds in the current industrialized world are working on making more money for someone (themselves or others). Who's working on actually improving it? And improve it how? By making the world a better place 'through minimal message oriented transport layers'?

> It means we shouldn't be doomers and think the world is falling apart

Nobody is saying one should be a doomer or whatever. Doomer implies losing all hope. What I'm advocating is losing hope for the current system, not for the world.

[TheOtherHobbes]

If Rosling is right why are NASA scientists gluing themselves to oil company offices to make a point about climate catastrophe?

We're about to learn that you can't spreadsheet and infographic your way out of a collapsing ecosystem.

And we're going to do it the hard and stupid way, because the intelligent way required changes starting 30 or 40 years ago.

[fnordpiglet]

While I don’t disagree with the negatives here unless you’ve experienced extreme poverty saying it’s “capitalist koolaid” sounds frankly a little naive. These are billions of people who aren’t struggling to do basic things like drink water and eat, shelter themselves and their family, etc, not just at a personal level but at a national level. The change in the world from nearly everyone in that state to today where almost everyone isn’t is a success.

But it might also be our doom.

I guess we shall see. I wager we will make it though.

[cableshaft]

How much of 'we', do you reckon?

If you just mean "some much smaller number of humans might survive this", then I think there's a decent chance you're right. And I suspect that number will end up being 100 million or less. I still think our current trajectory is more likely on track for 0 (or damn near it), though.

There's no way in hell the earth is going to maintain 8 billion+ people on the planet indefinitely. There's going to be a major, major drop at some point, probably spurred by war over declining resources, and it's probably going to take a good chunk of civilization down with it. We might be several decades away from that (or perhaps not, there's some disturbing signs out there), but there's just no way that "number goes up always" on a finite planet.

[adrianN]

Most measures we typically see are economic measures. They are indeed going up: fewer people life in poverty, and all dependent variables like lifespan and education improve too.

However, economic growth is currently tied to exploiting finite resources with ever increasing speed. Consequently, all measures that look at natural resources give rise to increasing existential angst: The oceans are empty, biodiversity is crashing; the climate is messed up, likely beyond the point where we can prevent catastrophic warming; topsoil is eroding at an amazing rate, aquifers are depleting; plastics, and other "forever chemicals" keep accumulating with as of yet mostly unknown effects.

So while the economy keeps growing, it looks like we're just increasing the speed at which we'll hit the wall.

[specialist]

Equilibrium is hard to maintain in complex adaptive systems. Butterfly effect, chaos theory, Gaia Hypothesis, and all that.

Our awareness of the potential for collapse is absolutely crucial. We have agency. We can nudge our systems. Postpone catastrophic outcomes for another day.

Humanity will always be kicking the can down the road. There is no stable state.

--

I don't know what to do or say about fatigue, burnout, and apathy due to chronic doomsaying. For my part, I've pulled back. No corporate media. No politics with friends and family. Started journalling. Prioritized my life and try to stick to the plan. Sometimes successfully.

[thrown_22]

That was true in 2010. In 2020 things are getting worse.

Is it a blip? Maybe. But the first measured decline in life expectancy was measured in 2015, and there have been declines in half the years since then.

[LeanderK]

> democracy vs autocracy

Is this really true? Some democracies are under pressure (USA for example), but for example easter europe wasn't a democracy not so long ago. I don't really know what's going on in Africa. How many democracies are developing there vs backsliding?

[jdkee]

This video on the deaths in WWII will put things into perspective.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-RioU