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?
No, that's not true at all. If wages are stagnant and goods are getting cheaper, then you are getting richer. I see this "stagnant wages" meme brought up all the time, but I don't see why nobody ever talks about cost of goods. Ex: Even the poorest today in the US can afford amazingly complex cellphones and computers, which was unthinkable 25 years ago (if we were to somehow make one of the same capacity)
Because the wages are stagnant in real (that is, inflation-adjusted) terms, which means that the cost of goods is already considered.
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!
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.
As a meta point, financial statistics that don't account for inflation are so utterly meaningless and bankrupt the thing to do if you have this concern is to go check and report back if they are crap. The default assumption should be that they do account for inflation.