The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it

> To avoid portraying the world in a static way, we have to start 200 years ago, before the time when living conditions really changed dramatically.

What a bizarre and (unintentionally?) result-biasing statement.

Picking 200 years ago is literally choosing what may be the lowest point in global living standards for a millennia -- early industrialization and colonialism had each radically shocked the shape of the societies touched by them, breaking stable, comfortable, familiar lifestyle and community traditions in a race for abstract economic development with little concern for exploitation or local consequence.

Maybe everybody is better off now than they were 200 years ago, but most individuals in the world were much worse off 200 years ago than they were 200 years before that, so the discussion is quite complicated and an analysis like this doesn't tell you that we're doing the best thing now, just that we're seemingly doing much better than when we first really fucked it all up.

This article reads like "see how good you have it", when for most folks the upsetting part these days is around inequality, globally as well as nationally. You're not going to convince folks the world is better when they know what kind of deal they're getting vs others out there. Blame the rise of mass communication if you want, but it's depressingly easy to see what both ends of inequality looks like and dismiss articles like this as "so what".

I dont think 200 years is sufficient. The 19th century is the beginning of the industrial revolution and well into colonial rule by European empires.

I love our world in data but I will say this article is wordy.

> Global poverty is one of the very largest problems in the world today. Is it possible to make progress against this problem? To see where we are coming from, we must go far back in time. 30 or even 50 years are not enough. When you only consider what the world looked like during our lifetime, it is easy to think of the world as static — the richer parts of the world here and the poorer regions there — and to falsely conclude that it always was like that and will always be like that.

> Take a longer perspective and it becomes clear that the world is not static at all. We can change the world. The countries that are rich today were very poor just a few generations ago.

> To avoid portraying the world in a static way, we have to start 200 years ago, before the time when living conditions really changed dramatically.

This could be written “to really see how much progress we’ve made we have to look back 200 years ago.”

The key missing metric is "Happiness/Contentment." While its definition may be somewhat subjective, asking people how satisfied they are with their lives could be a good start. However, it'd be less surprising if that metric might not have the same trajectory as the overall trend of the other graphs.

Minimum wage in 1980 could afford you about 6 big macs per hour; in 2022 that number fell to less than 1 big mac per hour; in the same timeframe, worker productivity has gone up multiple times over. We are being pillaged, and headlines like this seem to be a subtle justification that we should not worry about it too much.

The past is no place to live; when I see atrocity happening when and where I live, I am going to talk about it, and I am going to be thinking about ways we can improve or offset it.

Headline is in poor taste. Yes I fucking love science and all that but it is unproductive and insulting to all those in our current year struggling with inhumane living conditions and progressively decreasing opportunities.

I wish David Graeber was still around to give a rebuttal.

How many hours a week does an adult man in a hunter gatherer band deep in the Amazon or in sub-Saharan Africa work? Anthropologists say usually less than forty hours, which means less than most people here.

Not much money, but they don't pay $2000 a month or more for rent or a mortgage. No taxes. No profit from their labor sent to some class expropriating their surplus labor time. It's a basis of comparison any how.

If our economic system was great you wouldn't have to pay think tanks to tell people how great their lot is.

The most dangerous thing about Capitalism is imho its universal equivalence, its ability to make us covert everything into a monetary value.

In other words, it’s just like a programming language where everything can be implicitly converted to a given top type.

In the progress we certainly made over the last century or so, we certainly also lost other things whose value is not representable in our modern value system.

I think it's important to optimize life for metrics, but I think it's even more important to remember that we (conscious beings) are the ones living, so if we hate it, the metrics are either wrong or not relevant.

Imagine living somewhere and feeling miserable, and everywhere there are billboards and ads everywhere saying "Remember that you are happy! All the metrics are better! Oh you're not happy, you must be confused or wrong in some way."

So what's wrong with these metrics? That they are an aggregate, synthetic measurement attempting to measure something subjective, or at very least measuring qualities that may not be the causal factors for "happiness".

I'm not suggesting that these are the wrong metrics necessarily, but rather that work may need to be done in the soft and squishy world of "self development" or "spiritually", so that people may be able to create happiness and joy, and eliminate aspects of life that do not support that.

For example, learning about nutrition, exercise, healthy detox pathways, emotional health (through whatever lens appeals to each person), relationships, purpose, and more.

I think honestly there is a bit of a crisis of meaning: humans realized it's a rather challenging place to live, so we/they built technology and civilizations, and now many more people are living more "comfortable," "safe" lives, and in the absence of an external threat, are lacking in purpose. Some people think we need some external threat, so risks like damaging the environment are framed as a "war against climate change", because thus far, external threats have been good motivators. However, I'm sick and tired of being motivated and seeing life as a battle, and I know I'm not alone. In this period of objective peace and prosperity, I'd love if more people shifted their focus inward, to discovery fountains of love and creativity, and use that creative energy to shape the world and life towards further connection and play. This won't happen on a mass scale if most people are physically and emotionally unhealthy, fighting with family, fighting with people in war, and avoiding intentional inner development.

For those of you that think this doesn't matter, imagine trying to build something, and all of people you're working with have PTSD, or can't stay motivated for more than 5 mins without scrolling instagram?

Imagine camping on another planet looking up at an "aurora", or creating your dream movie by talking to an AI, or perhaps even living out your wildest dreams through VR, or for those that think this way, "hacking the matrix" and living it for real.

"Hacking the matrix" could be finding new properties of physics that make the impossible possible, it could be learning that we are in a simulation, or it could be something more "mystical", the real point is making a quantum leap in what is possible as a human.

i see this and think: 85% of people in the world struggle to live on less than $1k/month