[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.