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The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

nytimes.com

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Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#141

Post by interpol_p »

Houshalter wrote: post #133
interpol_p wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can putting those numbers side-by-side in such a way mislead people on the social impact of those events? Murder is rare, but it has a very high impact on society and the surrounding people. It creates an environment of stress and fear. Car accidents do the same to a much lesser extent. Smoking related diseases are somewhat more expected, they aren't so sudden. People have time to adjust, receive medical attention, a…

You absolutely should ignore mass shootings. Paranoia about terrorism has created the NSA and TSA, and all sorts of other nonsense. People watching airplane crashes on the news think that airplanes are incredibly dangerous and drive instead. The raw numbers are important. People are actually surprised when you give them statistics like how rare murders actually are, or how rare shark attacks are, etc. That wouldn't b…

I absolutely agree that the raw numbers are important and they are quantifiable way to assess risk. But I very much dislike that they are directly compared to each other. The social impact of murders seems so different to death by smoking related disease that a comparison of the two numbers could be meaningless in determining which one is more "important" to reducing total death and suffering. They both seem incredibly important, despite one being much larger.

> You absolutely should ignore mass shootings. Paranoia about terrorism has created the NSA and TSA, and all sorts of other nonsense. People watching airplane crashes on the news think that airplanes are incredibly dangerous and drive instead.

The problem is we don't ignore mass shootings or airplane crashes. We are not ignoring them right now and they are affecting us deeply. And maybe we will never be able to ignore them. If that is the case (and I'm not saying it is) then there may be benefit to solving such things which is larger than the numbers would have us believe.

> The news actively misinforms people about risks. It creates irrational fears and behaviors. The "social impact" you are talking about exists because of the news misinforming people. It's an effect, not a cause. If the news reported on every traffic crash instead, mass shootings wouldn't have any impact on our society or people's behaviour.

I'm not sure I agree. A mass shooting is vastly more terrifying than a traffic crash, and seeing every traffic crash would simply numb people to traffic crash reports — not terrify them. We are almost becoming numb to mass shootings, which is a scary thing in itself.

I believe the "social impact" would exist regardless of the news. Social media already does a better job spreading this information as-it-happens, and events which are terrible and random will continue to be propagated by the humans who witness them. We can't rely on humans not to speak about such things as a solution to reducing the terror they cause because it is unlikely to happen. It would be best to formulate a solution which accounts for this reality.

> Our goal should absolutely be to minimize death and suffering. Everything else is secondary and subjective. We should strive to be more rational and consistent, not embrace our irrational fears of rare things.

I agree with you but my position is just that there isn't a direct path from the raw numbers to how we should attempt to minimise death and suffering.

Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#142

Post by tim333 »

crdoconnor wrote: post #117

>One survey found that two-thirds of Americans believed that the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has almost doubled over the last 20 years. Curious that the author attempts to attribute this to media sensationalism rather than, say, an increase in American poverty. Or perhaps not, since Kristof is a fierce critic of the anti-sweatshop movement.

Looking at the data for American poverty it hasn't budged that much https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#M...

Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#143

Post by aianus »

mazerackham wrote: post #135
aianus wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, so instead of starving to death they can live long boring lives full of grueling work enriching assholes who don't even let them have internet access or freedom of mobility within their own country. There's a good reason the vast majority of rich Chinese people move to the West. It's an awful place to live if you have a choice.

Haha have you been to China? It's really not as bad as you are imagining. The controls on internet access is not as extreme as portrayed in western media. I'm not sure where this mobility issue is coming from. If you're talking about poor factory workers being constrained, well poor people everywhere have a hard time being mobile. Although at least in China's case, they have some of the world's most developed high sp…

> Haha have you been to China?

No, and I have no intention to. My girlfriend spent the month of August there visiting her family and complained non-stop about how much she hated it and wanted to come home (and she's a well-off Canadian immigrant from Shanghai).

> The controls on internet access is not as extreme as portrayed in western media.

I write software for a living and it still took me hours to find and set up a VPN + traffic obfuscation solution so I could get my girlfriend on Facebook while she was there. Play Store and Google didn't work at all. Foreign sites that aren't blocked entirely barely function. Even developers at top Chinese tech firms routinely download XCode from sketchy Chinese versions of Dropbox because downloading them from Apple is too slow [1]

> If you're talking about poor factory workers being constrained, well poor people everywhere have a hard time being mobile.

I was referring to the Hukou system (aka the caste system of China) [2]

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/09/21...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou_system

Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#144

Post by Drumline »

interpol_p wrote: post #137
Drumline wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respect the general thrust of your position in that we as a society must evaluate things like death on all axes including social impact. But until thing like social impact become less nebulous and more quantifiable I will continue to base my opinions on the the "raw" numbers because at least I can compare apples to apples.

I'm not suggesting we ignore "raw" numbers. Just that we should realise they are not directly comparable, as they are not all measuring sudden or violent terminations of life.

They are directly comparable as they both measure preventable deaths. If some types of death weigh more heavily on society than others, if there is some sort of X factor to be considered then how do we determine what it is?

Should we say deaths from murders are 1.5x important as smoking deaths? 2.5x?

This line of reasoning, while a tad ghoulish, is important because decisions have to be made, governance has to be picked, and taxes have to be spent. If it turns out we have no rational systematic way of determining a multiplier I believe it's reasonable to go with the information we have which are the basic facts about what's killing us.

Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#145

Post by tim333 »

mazerackham wrote: post #98
sharetea wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And most of them are sadly going to go right back into extreme poverty since factories are leaving China, capital is are outflowing, rich people are escaping. Then they realize the farm they left has been commandeered to build empty apartments, their environment polluted to where they will fall victim to diseases. There is no secret to the communist China's playbook. They opened to the world a vast amount of workers,…

Do you have any sources to back up what you're saying, or is that your hypothesis? Also, from your tone it sounds like that is what you hope will happen. I hope that not to be the case.

The hypothesis seems dubious. Their manufacturing is less competitive because wages have risen like ten fold. It's like saying the Chinese will return to poverty because they have become too wealthy.

Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#146

Post by interpol_p »

Drumline wrote: post #144
interpol_p wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not suggesting we ignore "raw" numbers. Just that we should realise they are not directly comparable, as they are not all measuring sudden or violent terminations of life.

They are directly comparable as they both measure preventable deaths. If some types of death weigh more heavily on society than others, if there is some sort of X factor to be considered then how do we determine what it is? Should we say deaths from murders are 1.5x important as smoking deaths? 2.5x? This line of reasoning, while a tad ghoulish, is important because decisions have to be made, governance has to be pic…

We may some methods for quantifying how impactful a death is. A brief search led me to [1, 2] which uses "years of potential life lost before 75 years (YPLL75)"

I think it's quite important not to treat all deaths as equal. It's just a gut feeling on my part, as I don't have the qualifications to make any serious statements about this. But I feel the long awaited death of an elderly relative is vastly less impactful than the sudden death of a child. I feel as though a murder has far more negative consequences for society than the death of a smoker from disease (one obvious one is the amount of resources that must go into finding and prosecuting, incarcerating the murderer.)

So when we compare ~16,000 murders to ~500,000 deaths from smoke-related disease, we also have to compare the toll of 16,000 murder investigations. Thousands of prisoners being entered into the prison system. Thousands of appeals and court cases. As well as the cultural and social impact of having so many humans bear witness to murder and the stress of sudden, violent, loss of loved ones; this is much harder to quantify but should not be ignored.

[1] http://uwphi.pophealth.wisc.edu/publications/other/measuring... [2] http://uwphi.pophealth.wisc.edu/publications/issue-briefs/is...

Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#147

Post by crdoconnor »

tim333 wrote: post #142
crdoconnor wrote: post #117

>One survey found that two-thirds of Americans believed that the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has almost doubled over the last 20 years. Curious that the author attempts to attribute this to media sensationalism rather than, say, an increase in American poverty. Or perhaps not, since Kristof is a fierce critic of the anti-sweatshop movement.

Looking at the data for American poverty it hasn't budged that much https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#M...

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/hunger-the-us-historic-highs

Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#148

Post by zurn »

ekianjo wrote: post #68
dredmorbius wrote: post #30

Yes, a vast number of the world's poorest population have been raised out of nominal abject poverty, this is true. What Kristof doesn't state, however, are these facts: 1. Those people live almost entirely in China and India. 2. The rise in nominal wealth has come from a tremendous increase in energy consumption. 3. Both nations have extreme environmental problems, including the worst air pollution situations in the…

> And finally: the foundations of modern economic wealth, vast quantities of nonrenewable resources, tapped at uttelry unsustainable rates, are quite simply not sustainable. Without looking to this basis, effectively the fuel in the tank, observations of altitude or velocity tell little. the fuel in the tank has been increasing a lot actually in the past 20 years. Did you notice that the US became the first producer…

Increase in fossil fuels exploitation doesn't count as improvement as it's making things much worse (climate change)!

Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#149

Post by pierre »

aianus wrote: post #125
mazerackham wrote: post #21

Another big secret, is that the source of a lot of poverty being lifted is because of China. That's right, that terribly communist government suppressing its people and free speech, is actually responsible for lifting 500 million people out of poverty over the last 30 years. That is definitely a big secret of american media, and something that it neglects to report on, in favor of free speech violations, naval exerci…

Great, so instead of starving to death they can live long boring lives full of grueling work enriching assholes who don't even let them have internet access or freedom of mobility within their own country. There's a good reason the vast majority of rich Chinese people move to the West. It's an awful place to live if you have a choice.

Don t forget theyr internet is RIAA Free. They get services better than netflix for video, free games, .... They may not have access to some foreign website but they get access to a lot of unknown services in the us.

Re: The Most Important Thing: Decline in poverty, illiteracy and disease

#150

Post by mazerackham »

aianus wrote: post #143
mazerackham wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha have you been to China? It's really not as bad as you are imagining. The controls on internet access is not as extreme as portrayed in western media. I'm not sure where this mobility issue is coming from. If you're talking about poor factory workers being constrained, well poor people everywhere have a hard time being mobile. Although at least in China's case, they have some of the world's most developed high sp…

> Haha have you been to China? No, and I have no intention to. My girlfriend spent the month of August there visiting her family and complained non-stop about how much she hated it and wanted to come home (and she's a well-off Canadian immigrant from Shanghai). > The controls on internet access is not as extreme as portrayed in western media. I write software for a living and it still took me hours to find and set up…

I can see why your girlfriend would hate it so much, she's coming from Canadian, one of the highest standards of living in the world. You can't expect to go to China, and find that same level of comfort. It was a third world country 20 years ago! It's dirtier, it's poorer, and it's WAYY more crowded. It's polluted, and everyone speaks Chinese. I find it sad that she hated it though, sounds like deep down, she hates a part of herself as well.

As for the VPN access, I also write software for a living, and it took me 5 minutes to get set up with a VPN. It was simply enough that my parents could figure it out as well. I get that the Play Store and Google don't work there, I was referring specifically to the fact that for most intents and purposes, a regular Chinese person could use the internet for most of its glory (porn, games, social, news, shopping).

Hukou is unfortunate and controversial issue there. In some ways it makes sense though, you have a massive population and you want to moderate the effects of massive migration. In other ways it's cruel and unfair. I don't know what to do about that, but I don't know if the U.S. has proven a better method. The fact of the matter is that no government has been in the situation China is in right now. To me, that makes it hard to judge.

Overall, I still find your argument that "it's an awful place to live" uncompelling.

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