[_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.