[p-e-w]

> Compared with every metric in history, we are better.

That claim alone should immediately make you doubt the metrics being used. In fact, it's easy to find dozens of metrics for which this isn't true. Housing affordability being a very obvious example. And the average democracy index has been going downwards for 15 consecutive years IIRC. Environmental pollution also most certainly isn't "at the best time in the entire human history". You've fallen for propaganda, I'm afraid.

[brabel]

Don't throw around accusations like that willy nilly. It causes "propaganda" to become a trivialized term that everyone can just throw at anyone making any statement they don't agree with after 1 minute of consideration.

This book was written by Hans Rosling, a man who was an expert in data analysis and whose mission was to show actual world data to people in fantastic visualizations they could clearly understand. If there's anything that's far removed from propaganda, it's Rosling's data-based approach to what the situation of the world really is.

About house affordability: do you have statistics for that for every country in the world, or you only care about your neck of the woods (which is not what Rosling cared about at all)? But even if that's true, it doesn't contradict the fact that almost every metric, if not every single one, is better today, please don't succumb to the strawman fallacy.

I will leave his quote here, from his Wikipedia entry:

"People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn't know about. That makes me angry. I'm not an optimist. That makes me sound naive. I'm a very serious "possibilist". That's something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful."

[Retric]

Propaganda is about showing just the right data in the right way to make an argument. As such his backstory is perfect for a propaganda piece.

> almost every metric

That’s exactly the kind of thing that’s both misleading and false. Take global divorce rate, it’s one metric but you can easily turn it into several others if you’re trying to support a given narrative. Average length of marriage, percentage of the global population married, etc.

You can even swap positive metrics for negative ones or do the reverse. Average lifespan after cancer diagnosis increasing is good but more people with cancer sounds bad. More treatment options is good, but spiraling cost of new treatments is bad

[simonh]

Sure you can accuse statisticians like this of picking and choosing metrics and you can choose other metrics to paint a different picture. That's really not the point the book is making though.

What the book does is ask ordinary people what they think is happening on metrics do they care about, and are those metrics getting better or worse. So the metrics themselves are part of the story, but it's people's perception of them that's the main point. It turns out that people consistently get this wrong, and think that these things are getting worse when actually they are mostly getting much better.

So this isn't so much about the author painting a picture of the world getting better, though maybe that's part of the argument. It's about ordinary people having an extremely distorted view of progress. Whatever you think about these metrics or other metrics, it's hard to argue that this central thesis of the book about people's view of these metrics is wrong.

[Retric]

I don’t think it’s a distorted view to think in terms of the absolute numbers or even in terms of your society rather than just the global rates which makes many of those trends look far worse. The CCP’s genocide isn’t less important simply because they have a huge population and therefore it’s impacting a smaller percentage of their population than many past genocides.

There’s a few positive trends that show up on thousands of different metrics. Economic growth continues, but as much as that impacts poverty in a positive way it also results in an increasing number of deaths on an absolute scale from air pollution, CO2, plastic pollution etc. I am not saying it’s therefore bad, just that talking about things in terms of statistics is on it’s own misleading.

[simonh]

One way this is all very important is in how we think about it politically and in terms of policy. The fact is war, disease, poverty etc are shrinking drastically on a proportional basis because of work people are doing to make that happen, because policies are being implemented that have this effect. It's not by accident. So when we are evaluating whether such policies and projects are valuable and working, the voting public being aware of the fact that they actually are and to what extent is really important. The book is pointing out that this is largely not the case, and people being so badly misinformed is a real problem.

Those policies might also have negative effects, and that should absolutely be part of the conversation, but let's have a fully informed debate as best we can.

[Retric]

That’s a fair point, but people don’t seem to place a significant emphasis on foreign progress.

Where I think your point is strongest is people discounting the vast positive influence outsourcing has had on foreign economies long term development. People IMO take issue with sweatshops on products they buy because they can empathize with foreign workers more than vast swaths of poor people who would prefer working in sweatshops than their alternatives.

In the end none of that progress is judged as particularly important when faced with personal problems and any fig leaf issue which can justify their stance. ‘We can’t outsource UAE jobs to foreign workers with poor working conditions’ was really just we ‘can’t afford the competition.’ Farmers make the same basic argument and win not because their arguments are stronger but because they have more political power due to our political system favoring low population states. Which suggests the argument is ultimately meaningless.

[nindalf]

This book is a quick read. It wouldn't take you long to verify if it was misleading or not. Several people in this thread, myself included, think it isn't. I'm guessing most of us have some background working with data and metrics, so it's not that easy to fool us.

It's $10-12 on ebook or paper. Worth a read, certainly.

[jvanderbot]

Don't get uppity about "almost every metric". It's quite possibly true, after all. But then again we're defining the metrics aren't we, with all our recency bias and modern philosophy on life.

A high divorce rate is a positive thing if it means people are getting out of bad marriages and living poverty free independent lives. We have a lot of civil law around divorce that makes it expensive and painful, but not Henry 8th.

[brabel]

The book includes metrics that are really important , like rate of child mortality, people below the poverty line... stuff that really, really impacts the world population.

It's honestly bizarre to see people in this thread coming up with the most ridiculous metrics, like divorce rate, to "contradict" the general trend that the world is improving... it's seriously messed up to think those metrics are in some way similar.

[nonethewiser]

Divorce rate isnt strictly good but or bad though. Some of the increase in divorce is due to increased economic opportunity for women. To put it another way, we could decrease divorce rates by eliminating economic opportunities for women.

[Retric]

I didn’t mean to single out divorce as a bad thing just that you can create multiple statistics around the same thing. Economic growth itself is an extreme example of this you can find many positive and many negative statistics resulting from the same underlying trend.

Total number of people dying from air pollution is an easy way to make global economic growth look bad. I am not saying it’s inherently a bad thing, just that painting a very rosy picture means being selective about what’s included and how it’s presented. You can downplay anything by using percent of a growing population even if things don’t actually become less horrific for those impacted just because there’s more people.

[giantrobot]

> Average length of marriage, percentage of the global population married, etc.

Getting/being married is not itself a measure of happiness. Just the ability to get divorced is a huge positive change from the past. It means people don't have to be stuck in bad relationships.

> Average lifespan after cancer diagnosis increasing is good but more people with cancer sounds bad.

More people with detected cancer is good. A larger swath of the population has access to cancer screening and the capability of detecting cancer early is better than it ever was in the past. Just because cancer diagnosis has increased doesn't mean rates of incidence has increased.

[Retric]

Screening is a separate question, many drugs extend people’s lives pans with cancer but don’t actually cure it. I would call them a good thing, but they do directly mean a higher percentage of the population has cancer irrespective of detection. Which gets to my point, people with cancer isn’t a statistic that’s universally good or bad but a complex thing.

[ianburrell]

In addition to screening, chance of cancer increases with age. The effect of more cancer may just be people living longer. People are getting cancer at 80 instead of heart attack at 60 or shot at 20.

[rgbgraph]

> do you have statistics for that for every country in the world, or you only care about your neck of the woods (which is not what Rosling cared about at all)? But even if that's true, it doesn't contradict the fact that almost every metric, if not every single one, is better today, please don't succumb to the strawman fallacy.

The same could be said for Rosling. How much of his bias has crept into his analysis? Is he measuring the right things -- or simply what is en vogue (or worse, what is best for his interests).

I would trust a basement-dwelling amateur analyst to find the "truth," much sooner than I would a pseudo-celebrity/influencer, going around holding TED talks.

[dbspin]

Exactly this. Not only are objective metrics difficult - our interest in and capacity to measure social phenomena, especially self reported social phenomena varies over time, and is deeply amenable to accidental or deliberate manipulation (cognitive aspects of survey methodology is a whole field). Moreover, the subjective experience of a time is impossible to convey. Many of the deepest and most personally significant aspects of everyday interpersonal life - level of community integration, personal emotional investment in ones occupation, level of creative engagement etc - are hard or impossible to measure.

To take an arbitrary example from my own life, the last recession was an incredible time in Ireland. The housing crisis that has boiled for decades diminished, cheap and free property rentals in Dublin lead to an explosion in the creative arts - including dozens of 'open access' non profit creative spaces. Mass underemployment meant that social status briefly became much more about creative engagement and sociability that wealth display. Bars became less the focus of social life, which moved to house parties and non-profit social spaces. It was a creative and social renaissance. All of this disappeared so completely during the 'recovery' that it's difficult to convey what it was like to people who weren't around to experience it.

You can point to crisis of homelessness today, a generation forced to leave with their parents into their thirties, the worsening of the Irish health service, pressures on the cost of living. But you can't easily convey the comparative misery and defensive superficiality wrought by inequality in Dublin today. You can't capture on a chart the experience of living through a beautiful communal creative moment when an entire society caught a collective breath.

[rubyn00bie]

Housing affordability is an entirely new concept as a result of a better society. Go back a hundred or two hundred years and housing was not affordable because people didn’t have jobs. They were serfs and slaves.

[nonethewiser]

> You've fallen for propaganda, I'm afraid.

That seems shortsighted at best. Theres certainly a case to be made that increased life expectancy, increased consumption of goods and services, access to education and health services, reduction in poverty etc. outweigh those things you cited.

Also, those things you cited are all highly political issues and arguably not true so be careful about suggesting people have fallen prey to propaganda. Environmental pollution, at least in the West, is down. Are you comparing comparable houses when comparing housing prices? In places with similar demand?

[p-e-w]

> outweigh those things you cited

The comment I responded to claimed that "we are better" according to "every metric". It wasn't about one thing "outweighing" the other.

> Environmental pollution, at least in the West, is down.

Not compared to 500 years ago. The comment I responded to was talking about all of history.

[anovikov]

Housing affordability hasn't gone worse. People are picking on particular markets, but overall, especially in developed countries, it isn't getting any worse: inflation-adjusted price per square foot doesn't change over time, and average house size grows together with inflation-adjusted income. There are a couple exceptions (UK, Australia, Canada) but there are also opposite exceptions (Italy).

Environmental pollution especially in developed countries is now way lower than in any point in the living memory, plus quite a bit more. In developing countries, it's hit and miss.

Democracy only went down recently because it was forced upon many countries simply due to their defeat in the Cold War, those countries never been democratic before, never had any internal impulse to become democratic, and their peoples despised democracy and wanted this chaos to end as soon as possible. Reversal from artificial, externally forced democracy made vast majority of them happier. In many cases, their entire culture, religion and language itself precludes sustainable democracy. "Freedom" is not the universal desire of all people, time to get over it.

[hpaavola]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index shows that average democracy index has not been going downwards for 15 consecutive years.

[Kbelicius]

Where? It says that world average in 2006 was 5.52 and in 2022 it was 5.29. That is clearly a downward movement.

[hpaavola]

"has been going downwards for 15 consecutive years" that was the claim. It's not been going down for 15 consecutive years as there has been ups and downs during the past 15 years. The overall trend is down, but going downwards for 15 years in a row is not true.

[inexcf]

You ignored the "15 consecutive years". Not that it matters much, but it went from 5.52 to 5.55 to 5.46 to 5.55 and then down to 5.29 since 2016. It was a bit of a pedantic point but it's 6 consecutive years.

[hpaavola]

Actually, the index went up last year. So 0 consecutive years of downwards trend.

[411111111111111]

I haven't read the book but my assumption would be that they're thinking at larger sample sizes than you're currently thinking off.

The last 50 decades have probably been the golden years of western civilization and democratic freedom, despite the evidence of decline within the last few years

[foldr]

If the claim is only true over spans of time on the order of lifetimes, then it’s not much comfort.