Things have gotten better and progress has been made from times past, it just seems worse now because we have more access to information. We’ve come far, and have further to go!

    • SeabassDan@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      93
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      As well as the average life span being skewed by those same infant mortality rates. People have been living long and now they’re forced to retire later.

      • Scubus@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        18
        ·
        1 year ago

        Plus, while we have extended life, we haven’t made progress with extended life care. So you might live 20 years longer, but those 20 years will be spent in your bed waiting for your nurse to clean your diaper.

    • Guildo@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      48
      arrow-down
      12
      ·
      1 year ago

      besides this, China did a huge job on getting people out of poverty - if you like or not

      • No_@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        34
        arrow-down
        20
        ·
        1 year ago

        Mass producing shit at inhuman factories with deaths by the millions. I guess you’re not poor if you’re just dead.

        • Guildo@feddit.de
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          16
          arrow-down
          3
          ·
          1 year ago

          Look at the statistics. I am not lying. You can complain, but that are facts.

          • Nobsi@feddit.de
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            6
            arrow-down
            14
            ·
            1 year ago

            What statistics? The one the CCP made up? Over a quarter of chinese are still in extreme poverty and a huge amount of chinese still have an income of under 1500 yuan a month.
            Sure, they might have lifted some people out of poverty, but they also put them into poverty in the first place under mao. So celebrating this is kind of self congratulatory.

            • Guildo@feddit.de
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              5
              arrow-down
              4
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              You can google it. It takes just a few seconds. I think you can handle it… If I search it for you, you wouldn’t believe it.

                • Guildo@feddit.de
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  6
                  arrow-down
                  3
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  1 year ago

                  LOL!

                  “Elsewhere in the region, Vietnam has also seen a dramatic fall in extreme poverty rates over a similar period. Another large country, India, had 22% of its population living below the international poverty line in 2011 (the most recent data available). Brazil has 4.4% of its people earning less than $1.90 a day.”

                  How many people has the US lifted out of poverty? How many people has Britain lifted out of poverty? How many has any state in the EU lifted out of poverty? And france isn’t even mentioned in the article. Vietnam is btw. socialistic.

          • Calavera@lemm.ee
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            4
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            Maybe I’m too naive, but even if you hate a country for its economic and political choices, you can still be glad their working class population is getting out of poverty and It’s not like they are getting richer by slaving a whole continent

            • Guildo@feddit.de
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              2
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              Yeah… you can like some things and still hate everything else about it. Not everything is black or white - but some don’t like grey-scales.

      • Nobsi@feddit.de
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        9
        arrow-down
        10
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        What? How did china get people out of poverty?

        Edit: They didnt. After a long journey we found out that china is boasting about how all chinese citizens are now above 1 dollar a day aka. EXTREME poverty(in 2011) Aparrently this is an achievement and not incredibly sad.

        Also Guildo is a CCP Shill.

          • Nobsi@feddit.de
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            5
            arrow-down
            6
            ·
            1 year ago

            Not what Guildo guy was going for but yes, horrible thing and that did improve ehm… statistics.

            • Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              6
              arrow-down
              4
              ·
              1 year ago

              Oh I bet it was and they’ll just ignore the great famine as being some natural thing that just happened and wasn’t due to the policies of the CCP.

              That’s how everyone I’ve met that has talked about the CCP raising people from poverty have posed it.

              • Nobsi@feddit.de
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                5
                arrow-down
                5
                ·
                edit-2
                1 year ago

                " For example, the World Bank draws a higher poverty line for upper-middle-income countries, which tries to reflect economic conditions. It sets this at $5.50 a day. China is now an upper-middle-income country, says the bank.

                About a quarter of China’s population is in poverty, according to this metric. For comparison, this is slightly higher than Brazil.

                And there is widespread income inequality. Last year, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said China still had 600 million people whose monthly income was barely 1,000 yuan ($154). He said that was not enough to rent a room in a city.

                The great leap forward is the reason so many people from extreme poverty died and reversing those changes is not liftig people out of poverty but reversing changes that put people in extreme poverty.".

                Yes, by 1980 third world country standards china has a 0.7 percent poverty rate. Thats ignoring 40 years of development of the rest of the world. And also that china is not a third world country anymore.

                Go move into a Tofu Dreg Highrise and tell me how good it looks from up there.

                • Guildo@feddit.de
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  6
                  arrow-down
                  5
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  You’re talking all the time like China is still a third world country. You have to decide.

        • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          The real answer is probably opening to state controled capitalism and globalization, becoming the factory of the world for a couple of decades.

          • Nobsi@feddit.de
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            3
            arrow-down
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            And reversing most of the things that mao did.
            He killed over 50 million people and caused a braindrain in china that no following leader has managed to fix. The fact that china got everyone over the extreme poverty line in 2020 is sad. A marketleader like china shouldnt have anyone in extreme poverty.

      • intensely_human@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        7
        arrow-down
        18
        ·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, because they finally decided to adopt a free market model, and suddenly “starving people in China” was less of a thing.

    • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      14
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      This writeup is a great argument, here’s some highlights I thought were good:

      I simply pointed out that we cannot ignore the fact that the period 1820 to circa 1950 was one of violent dispossession across much of the global South. If you have read colonial history, you will know colonizers had immense difficulty getting people to work on their mines and plantations. As it turns out, people tended to prefer their subsistence lifestyles, and wages were not high enough to induce them to leave. Colonizers had to coerce people into the labour market: imposing taxes, enclosing commons and constraining access to food, or just outright forcing people off their land.

       

      Remember: $1.90 [chosen poverty line] is the equivalent of what that amount of money could buy in the US in 2011. The economist David Woodward once calculated that to live at this level (in an earlier base year) would be like 35 people trying to survive in Britain “on a single minimum wage, with no benefits of any kind, no gifts, borrowing, scavenging, begging or savings to draw on (since these are all included as ‘income’ in poverty calculations).” That goes beyond any definition of “extreme”. It is absurd. It is an insult to humanity.

       

      From 1980 to 2000, the IMF and World Bank imposed structural adjustment programs that did exactly the opposite: slashing tariffs, subsidies, social spending and capital controls while reversing land reforms and privatizing public assets – all in the face of massive popular resistance. During this period, the number of people in poverty outside China increased by 1.3 billion. In fact, even the proportion of people living in poverty increased, from 62% to 68%.

       

      But there is something else that needs to be said here. You and Gates like to invoke the poverty numbers to make claims about the legitimacy of the existing global economic system. You say the system is working for the poor, so people should stop complaining about it.

      When it comes to assessing such a claim, it’s really neither absolute numbers nor proportions that matter. What matters, rather, is the extent of poverty vis-à-vis our capacity to end it. As I have pointed out before, our capacity to end poverty (e.g., the cost of ending poverty as a proportion of the income of the non-poor) has increased many times faster than the proportional poverty rate has decreased (to use your preferred measure). By this metric we are doing worse than ever before. Indeed, our civilization is regressing. Why? Because the vast majority of the yields of our global economy are being captured by the world’s rich.

    • Aux@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      20
      ·
      1 year ago

      Living conditions of the so called poor today is much better than living conditions of kings just a couple of centuries ago.

  • MonkCanatella@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    119
    arrow-down
    11
    ·
    1 year ago

    the last two are easily debunked. I hate shit like this because it reinforces an idea that time = progress. There are influential and powerful people alive today who would reverse any of these trends if it meant money in their pocket.

      • HubertManne@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        15
        ·
        1 year ago

        I don’t get why they are comparing things to the depression rather than after ww2. 50 years would be a better measure. Also retirement wise people can’t always choose to so income and home ownership in retirment would be more practical.

        • Perfide@reddthat.com
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          11
          ·
          1 year ago

          Well that’s easy, because the statistics wouldn’t paint the view they’re trying to convey. Saying things are better now than they were 100 years ago is as useful as saying things are better than they were 3000 years ago, aka completely useless to say since when you compare to more recent times like 40 years ago you can point to how many things have gotten objectively worse.

          We’ve made a lot of strides on social issues, but everything else? Lmao.

    • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      It’s not about time = progress, it’s about showing that there was progress even if feels like we’re in a shitty downward phase currently. I don’t validate the numbers, just the intention.

      • MonkCanatella@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        It’s fair to want to be optimistic and to want to fight against doomerism. I think OP was misguided at best.

        To be fair, I don’t think I was as clear as I could have been either. It’s just that post just has smells of neoliberalism has fixed the world propaganda. These are the same kinda statistics they use to justify an immoral and unethical economic system. I think a lot of people agree and get slightly triggered seeing these same untrustworthy statistics paraded around.

  • Jesse@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    74
    arrow-down
    14
    ·
    1 year ago

    Jesus Christ this thread. The technicalities aren’t the point. You are allowed to find happiness where you can in an imperfect world that contains suffering. It doesn’t mean you’ll be complacent to injustice. Fighting against injustice can be done without thinking the world is hopeless dogshit. There’s satisfaction that can be justifiably had, through means other than smug superiority at knowing all the depressing truths of the world, or the sympathy of others for your problems. We feed ourselves so much rage and sadness via the internet, can we not have a palate-cleanser like this without chewing it up and spitting it out, and then going back to gorging on more?

    • Prunebutt@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      37
      arrow-down
      10
      ·
      1 year ago

      The thingeis: the world is getting less free and inequality has been constantly rising in the last decades.

      This Steven Pinker BS is advertising complacency, while we should agitate people to fight for a better world.

      If you want to be optimistic, look around for the average kindness of everyday live inside communities. The FOSS community, unions, mutual aid in neighborhoods etc. This would lift you up and point in the direction where things could get better.

      • I_Fart_Glitter@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        15
        arrow-down
        6
        ·
        1 year ago

        Hey OP, this is a book about just that: https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Better/dp/1250107814

        This is a website that goes along with it and has updated stats: https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness-book/32-improvements/

        Basically everything is getting better, despite public opinion to the contrary. The one thing (as this thread is harping on) is climate change, and ya, that’s big, but it is good to acknowledge that most other things are changing for the better in most ways.

        • Maggoty@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          5
          arrow-down
          5
          ·
          1 year ago

          In the US every single one of those indicators is going the other way. It’s only by looking globally that you can say that.

          • I_Fart_Glitter@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            4
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            Well fuck the rest of the world, amirite? U S A! U S A! U S A!

            US income inequality plummeted under Roosevelt (inequality coefficient: 0.59 - 0.47) and began its steady climb under Regan. It leveled out in 2012 under Obama (0.58) and had a slight dip (0.58 - 0.57 - 0.58) in 2020 under Trump. We’re almost back to where we started when Roosevelt took measures to help. The USA has, however consistently been well below the world average for income inequality (0.71- 0.66). https://ourworldindata.org/economic-inequality

            Infant/Child mortality rate hasn’t raised anywhere since 1960 and is lower everywhere than it was in 1950, and yes the USA is still winning:

            https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality

            Extreme poverty is trending downward faster in the US than the world average:

            https://ourworldindata.org/poverty

          • PsychedSy@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            arrow-down
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            The wealth gap between the US and citizens of dirt-poor nations is insane. People live on less in a day than I make in a few minutes. I don’t mind losing a little to help bring others up, and, since it’s not zero-sum, it ends up being a larger plus overall than the minus for us.

            • Maggoty@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              2
              arrow-down
              2
              ·
              1 year ago

              If that’s where it was going I wouldn’t mind but researchers have tracked the missing wages and extra profits to the 1 percent.

              When you think about what people live on in other countries you also have to think about what things cost around them. An apple, for example, is far cheaper for them to buy. That said there are still people in poverty even with that in mind and they should be helped. But that’s not what’s causing the inequality gap in western countries and it’s far overblown as an argument to make Westerners ashamed to complain while they are exploited by the extremely wealthy.

              • PsychedSy@sh.itjust.works
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                2
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                The gap isn’t necessarily bad. It’s the things that cause it (and that the rising tide isn’t lifting all boats) that’s the problem.

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      arrow-down
      8
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Be happy the silent generation won some serious gains that the boomers, X, and millennials are steadily eroding for profit?

      No thanks. That’s called complacency.

      • chumbalumber@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        10
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        Celebrating and taking pride in what has been achieved is part of what motivates people to defend it. Doomposting online does nothing to motivate people and merely depresses them.

        Every inch of progress has been won through a combination of a rhetoric of hope for what could be achieved, and a recognition of the shortcomings of the current system. Having the former without the latter leads to complacency, but having the latter without the former leads to apathy and despair.

        • Prunebutt@feddit.de
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          5
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Considering that most progress in the last few hundred years has been fought for (sometimes violently), like weekends, the 8 hour day, etc. kinda proves you wrong.

          • chumbalumber@lemmy.blahaj.zone
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            5
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            And it was fought for by people who had hope for what could be achieved, and crucially used that to unite working people.

            I’m not arguing for complacency; I’m arguing that labour movements work best when they are pushing for clearly defined goals (like an 8 hour work week), and the labour movement should honour those that gave their lives for the cause in those doomed strikes at Homestead, Blair Mountain, or Pullman.

            • Prunebutt@feddit.de
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              2
              arrow-down
              2
              ·
              1 year ago

              Great, I agree! … But unfortunately, OP used data fragments that IMHO promote complacency (i.e. general “progress”) instead of celebrating victories of social movements.

        • Maggoty@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Celebrating the achievements made in the past while obliterating them in the present is nothing more than white washing the problems people face. Like the record numbers of homeless seniors.

  • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    59
    arrow-down
    8
    ·
    1 year ago

    Wealth inequality is possibly the highest it’s ever been in history.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if food wasted (food that goes straight to the trash) nowadays is also at peak numbers, or close to.

    During the Bolsonaro years (2019-2022), Brazil saw a drastic increase in extreme poverty, made worse by the pandemic. Poor people were literally scavenging carcasses for anything that could still be eaten. We’re still trying to recover.

    Do not take any of those good things for granted, they can be very easily reverted by a small number of psychopath assholes.

    • ThrowawayPermanente@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      12
      arrow-down
      6
      ·
      1 year ago

      Wealth inequality is higher now than it was back when most of us were serfs who barely owned the clothes on our backs while one family lived in a castle and owned the rest of us?

      • Seudo@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        12
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Yes. Modernity made it a lot easier to create wealth out of thin air. However most of the worlds lowest class have it better in pretty much every metric than that family.

      • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Believe it or not, even the richest monarchs didn’t have over a million serfs working directly under them. Even today there are many people who still barely own the clothes they wear

      • Maggoty@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        Yeah actually. It wasn’t until industrialization that work hours and pay got so bad. Most commoners in the middle ages did just fine on what we would consider to be a half day of work and suffered for things out of human control like droughts.

        Not that Feudalism was a better system, just more that people were more scarce, less replaceable, and automation was zero.

    • Torvum@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      13
      arrow-down
      12
      ·
      1 year ago

      There’s more wealth being transferred in circulation than ever before

      There’s more food being produced than ever before

      Your points are invalid without the context we need better regulation and methods to prevent collapse and waste. We’re literally outgrowing by production over our knowledge.

      • lingh0e@lemmy.film
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        17
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        Wealth being transferred is meaningless when it’s amongst the wealthy, and more food is also being wasted than ever before.

        We’re at a point in human civilization where we should be able to provide more for EVERYONE while expecting them to work less, yet here I am one catastrophic car accident or unexpected massive medical bill away from telling my kids we’re homeless. But the very fact that, for now, I have a mortgage and my kids are getting a decent education and three square meals a day means I’m still way ahead of a shitload of people in my country, and I’m filthy fucking rich compared to people elsewhere in the world.

        My wife and I work hard for our family, but I know for a fact that others work WAY harder. Since their labor is considered less valuable than mine they make WAY less than we do. The dumbest thing is that if society does implode, the guys working manual labor for peanuts will be more capable and provide more value than me, an asshole who sits on his ass all day fucking with Excel.

        Our society is fucked.

        • Chunk@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          1 year ago

          Since their labor is considered less valuable than mine they make WAY less than we do

          This is such a sad realization. As a software engineer I didn’t really do anything to deserve the income. I work less hard than a lot of people and I’m valued more, for the sole reason that the computer can scale in a way a hammer cannot. I’m here largely because my parents went to college and encouraged me as a child to be an engineer. I didn’t earn any of this.

      • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        There’s more wealth being transferred in circulation than ever before

        Which, as lingh0e pointed, is meaningless since most of it is coming from and going to the wealthy.

        There’s more food being produced than ever before

        And yet, hunger is still an issue worldwide. What’s the point of producing, say, 100 tons of food if 40 tons go straight to the trash?

        Your points are invalid without the context

        What context? Inequality is rising and you can check that with a quick search for “countryname inequality index per year”. For the food, it’s probably harder to really assess how much of the production is wasted, but it’s a significant number.

        we need better regulation and methods to prevent collapse and waste

        Good luck doing that, as it hurts profits, and the profiteers will spend more money than you and me will ever make in our entire lives combined to fight said regulations.

      • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        It has. That inequality means that a small number of people can drive the price of certain items, such as housing, way above inflation, making it impossible for people who rely on their salaries to buy and own a home, or even manage to pay rent. Being forced to live farther and farther away from where you work, wasting precious time in transit to and back from work (or anywhere you need to be), just in order to have some money, reduces the quality of life.

        There is enough money around to fix poverty in most places and still have rich people enjoying their luxurious lives. Inequality has a very direct impact in the quality of life of millions.

    • aidan@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      10
      ·
      1 year ago

      Wealth inequality is possibly the highest it’s ever been in history.

      What does this mean and why is it a problem?

      Yes there are more rich people now with more money than poor people. But they don’t exactly have the power of Mansa Musa.

      Also, I’d rather my neighbor be a billionaire and me be a thousandaire, than my neighbor be a thousandaire and me be a negativeair

        • aidan@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          3
          ·
          1 year ago

          He didn’t decide? He said his internet service couldn’t be used for a strike at that time. Not defending him, but it’s not like he has any authority over then, he just had authority over the assets he controls.

      • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        What does this mean and why is it a problem?

        It means that the cake is growing, but your share is getting smaller. Companies declare record profits and celebrate by mass firing people. People with big investments are never at risk of losing money due to inflation. Meanwhile, workers’ salaries are in a constant struggle against inflation and cost of living.

        There’s huge amounts of money circulating around, but most of it ends up in the pockets of very few people. To ensure that even more money ends up in their pockets, they invest in new venues that will get more of your money for themselves. Because a very small number of people can simply buy up “everything”, and usually do so for pure speculation, prices rise faster than your salary. Rent and home prices keep going up because of this, people that actually want and need a home don’t have the means to buy them, but a single asshole with money can buy a lot of stuff, drive up prices and fuck everyone who can’t pay.

        If you don’t see a problem with wealth getting more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer hands as time passes, you probably want few people to effectively control the world.

        But they don’t exactly have the power of Mansa Musa.

        They do. Anyone with over 100 million dollars laying around could easily crash some local economies, maybe not in the USA, but definitely in a number of developing countries’ cities.

  • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    50
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    1 year ago

    While “technically” true. We all know the average lifespan was brought down by a high infant mortality. So comparingbthat to when peopke retired is meaningless. That said, it dies seem worse because with more information we realize how much better it could be. 100 years ago, the average american had no idea how common slums were outside the US. And those that knew considered those slum people less than human. So what we have really done is expanded who is considered human, and who matters. That certainly does make it look worse.

    • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      20
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, mean lifespan is meaningless if the distribution is bimodal. Median would be a more useful average.

    • CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      15
      ·
      1 year ago

      100 years ago, the average american had no idea how common slums were outside the US.

      This was and still is very true. The level of the poverty in places like that is astounding and beyond the experience of most anyone in a 1st world country. I grew up in America, in poverty of the level that my single mother was only eating what she could scrounge at work some years so she’d have enough to feed us kids. Yet when I deployed to Panama in the mid 90’s for a 2 month military operation, and had to operate in many of the rural areas of Panama during those missions, I had my eyes opened to what real 3rd world poverty looks like. The way I grew up would have been a huge improvement for many of the people I saw there. You can’t really understand it until you’ve seen it with your own eyes.

    • Godric@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      18
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      Also, significantly less dead babies increasing average lifespan is a very happy way to boost that number

        • Womble@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          The less/fewer distinction is arbitrary Victorian bullshit flying directly in the face of how English is used. The only point of it was to try and make English more like Latin and allow aristocrats who spoke Latin to look down on those without expensive private education.

          Please dont perpetuate it.

            • Womble@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              I do beg your pardon, it was Georgian not Victorian era when this nonsense was dreamed up for no reason other than preference for trying to cram Latin-esque cases into english.

              https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/no-genuine-rule-dictates-the-use-of-less-or-fewer-cs25kv8s5

              The very notion of a neat distinction between fewer and less according to whether the noun is countable or not is a myth. It was invented out of whole cloth by an ill- informed 18th-century pedant called Robert Baker in his book Reflections on the English Language (1770). He proposed this distinction not as a hard-and-fast rule of grammar, moreover, but as a tentative suggestion with caveats (“I should think . . . it appears to me . . . ”) that you won’t find in modern style guides.

              The wiki article on it notes that

              The Cambridge Guide to English Usage notes that the “pressure to substitute fewer for less seems to have developed out of all proportion to the ambiguity it may provide in noun phrases like less promising results”. It describes conformance with this pressure as a shibboleth and the choice “between the more formal fewer and the more spontaneous less” as a stylistic choice.

              i.e. it is a shibboleth for saying “I am educated unlike you uncultured lot who use natural sounding language”

                • Womble@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  arrow-down
                  1
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  You cant say “the worst” when talking about an uncountable group, you have to say “the least good” because I prefer that and it makes me sound smart by correcting you. Apparently that is sufficient for it to be understanding language and for you to be wrong.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      12
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      This meme effectively expired in 2019. COVID reversed out the direction on all of it. About the only thing we haven’t stopped backsliding on is “shareholder value”.

    • Godric@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      27
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      Yep, and now there’s not a deluge of dead children dragging the average down, which is objectively pretty great

      • ledtasso@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        I have noticed lately people on the Internet starting sentences more with “Look.” Is it just me or is this becoming more of a trend? (Not trying to judge or anything, just wondering if I am going crazy)

      • droans@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Yeah if I had to choose how to bump up the life expectancy, reducing child mortality would definitely be my first choice.

        • JackbyDev@programming.dev
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          I feel like you’re just excited to share a fact about a common misconception rather than actually paying attention to what’s being said. Infant mortality is still a bad thing. While it’s true folks lived about as long less infant mortality is still a net improvement.

          • merc@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            I’m paying attention. I feel like you just want to point out that it’s a common misconception rather than engage with the fact that dying at 51 is very different from child mortality.

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, in particular the “average age of death” might be 51 if the average includes a lot of people who died as children. OTOH, the average person dying at 51 is fundamentally different in how you think of it.

        • Seudo@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Life expectancy at, is used by academics when relevant. Average at birth, adulthood and even once they’re over the hill have utility. Like identifying outliers.

          Regardless, the average person is going to use average as a nebulas concept occasionally informed by science but hearsay and superstition on an average day.

      • aberrate_junior_beatnik@midwest.social
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        32
        arrow-down
        8
        ·
        1 year ago

        Posting a bunch of context-free statistics without any citations is not what I’d call hope-posting.

        There are hopeful trends in the world: the resurgence of unions, successful environmental protest, public opinion changing against police, etc. They inspire hope because they point to the possibility of a better world. Statistics like these just point to how bad the world used to be, and in contrast, how good the current world is. It’s a way of saying “be thankful for what you have”, a sentiment easily weaponized against progress and protest.

        • Godric@lemmy.worldOP
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          14
          arrow-down
          7
          ·
          1 year ago

          I think we can take a moment to be grateful for what we have while still recognizing we have further to go.

          We’ve made progress this last century, and we’ll make progress this next one as well if we keep fighting for it.

          Perhaps a hundred years hence, two people on the internet will be looking at how life is in the current year, comparing how much better they have it.

              • Nudding@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                6
                arrow-down
                2
                ·
                1 year ago

                Not really any way to overcome the adversity of the 10 generations that came before you polluting the world to the point of civilizational collapse. Nice quote though.

                • ℛ𝒶𝓋ℯ𝓃@pawb.social
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  2
                  arrow-down
                  3
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  Where there is life, where there is Will, there is hope. We should already be extinct twice by now. And by all probability in the known Universe we should never have existed at all.

              • intensely_human@lemm.ee
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                6
                arrow-down
                4
                ·
                1 year ago

                Yes they are! Many people’s identity is wrapped up in the idea of saving people who can’t save themselves. If you go around suggesting people have some power to save themselves, these people need to find a new identity.

  • BallShapedMan@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    16
    ·
    1 year ago

    If you like this post maybe read The Progress Paradox. It goes in much more detail than this meme, it then poses the question but then why aren’t we happy. Without giving answers it does point to possible paths. It’s a good book.

  • metapod@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    19
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    1 year ago

    The environmental problems are critical, though. And it’s what ultimately will decide the fate of our species. There is room for optimism in some aspects of our society, but that is not an indication that in the end everything will be alright.

    • ParsnipWitch@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      1 year ago

      And the climate change will help them. They are basically a team just that one of them doesn’t know about the partnership and the other didn’t choose it…

      • Rednax@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        I think the point of this post is not to hide the problems we face. More that the struggle against them is not fruitless.

        • ParsnipWitch@feddit.de
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          I don’t criticise the post, I like it a lot.

          With students I like to use Gapminder as an example in statistics. And there sometimes I get the same reaction you see here in the comment section. Some people feel if you are showing the gains that means you want to stop improvement or that you don’t take the struggles of people seriously.

          I have no idea about psychology, so I don’t know what’s the reason.

          The opposite is true, also. If you don’t say something 100 % positive, people tend to assume you are in opposition. ;)

  • migo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    17
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    1 year ago

    The extreme poverty one is laughable especially when criteria to define extreme poverty is ridiculous. Extreme poverty in places where you earn less than $1.90 but can still have subsistence farming and community doesn’t make sense - also if living in San Francisco and earning $2/day isn’t extreme poverty… I don’t know what is.

    Poverty shouldn’t be tied to capital but to standards of living - that would be a completely different story.