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0 pointsmjohn9y ago0 comments

Without knowing the future, I think the best we can do is look at historic trends to give us an idea of what is going to happen in the future. I agree 1800 is an interesting datapoint but probably not that relevant for the present day. Nonetheless, there appear to have been consistent improvements even in the past few decades, and there is still plenty of scope for improvement given almost 10% of the world population are in extreme poverty (about 700 million people).

I think a lot of people answering the survey question:

“All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither getting better nor worse?”

focus on whether their world is getting better or worse, and not the whole world. Most of the improvements in the past few decades have been in developing countries, which have experienced dramatic improvements in standards of living (and developing countries are also home to the majority of the global population). Meanwhile standards may well have been relatively stagnant or declining for many people in developed countries.

If we are talking about whether the world is getting better or worse, expectations based on experiences in India and China are far more pertinent than the recent history of the USA.

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return09y ago· 1 in thread

Predictably, Chinese are the most optimistic in that survey (https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/01/05/chinese-people-are-most...). Obviously everyone's subjective opinion is different and that's what the survey was seeking in the first place.

Why would the experience of the Chinese be pertinent to people of the US or France, however? I don't think their economic regimes are transferable.

mjohnOP9y ago

The point of the article is that objectively the world, as a whole, is getting better, and in some cases improving quite dramatically. Personally, I don't think the survey quoted in the opening paragraph is really that interesting - it's not the least bit surprising that people replied subjectively rather than objectively.

My point about the Chinese experience being more pertinent was regarding these objective measures not how people replied subjectively to a survey question. It's not that the Chinese experience is pertinent to someone in US or France, but that recent Chinese economic development has been more pertinent to whether or not the world has objectively gotten better.

In the future we are also going to see far more reductions in poverty and child mortality in countries like India and China than in the USA, because the USA is so much wealthier. Additionally, if we want to understand how to improve the world in the future, I believe it's more important to look at countries that have recently improved standards of living, like China, rather than countries like the USA that experienced their most significant improvements in standards of living before the 1960s.