Evidence for Abundance (opens in new tab)

One of the graphs struck me as odd - percent of per capita disposable income spent on food, falling. The problem with that is inequality - it's been widely discussed that most of the gains of the last decade have been made by the richest, while wages for the poorest have stagnated. But that means the percent of disposable income spent on food by the poorest might not be falling at all?

It turns out USADA do have that graph as well (in fact it's the one right below the one in the article, taken from http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics...) http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/detail.a... - for the lowest quintile of the US population, the % of disposable income spent on food has gone up from 32% to 34% from 2006 to 2014.

The abundant future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed?

> NOTE: This is not to say that there aren't major issues we still face, like climate crisis, religious radicalism, terrorism, and so on.

The author felt compelled to include this disclaimer because people are afraid that by pointing out the good trends, that we are taking our eye off the ball in eradicating problems. As if by pointing out any promising trends in poverty, that this is equivalent to saying that we should stop trying to eradicate poverty. As if we declared mission accomplished!

I think this explains the aversion to good-news reporting, not that we over-emphasize the negative because of evolutionary bias. We always feel we need to add a disclaimer: but there is more work to do!

If I've learned one thing from this, it's that the worst places on Earth are in Sub-Saharan Africa. That's some staggering poverty which has really resisted major change after what appears to be a major shift in the early 80's.

Guinea worm is a great victory, but like Smallpox it's not emblematic of a general trend. You should not look at a chart of guinea worm infections and draw conclusions about rates of Malaria, VHF's, HIV, etc.

What has clearly and drastically improved is the standard of living in the US and Western Europe, which should shock no one at all.

Does the first chart account for inflation seeing as it's defined in terms of US dollars?