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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

#211

Post by astazangasta »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #140
astazangasta wrote: post #139

This article is deceptive because it speaks of raw numbers rather than percentages. While the number of people living on less than a dollar a day went up throughout the 20th century, this was because populations were exploding over the same period. At the same time, the fraction of people living on less than a dollar a day plunged dramatically. In fact, this trend slowed after 1990 - since then this rate has declined…

That particular chart seems to show significantly lower numbers than most I've seen. Sub 10% since 1985. This one shows 20% as of 2010. And over 40% in 1990. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/USAID_Pr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty Also from that article. "n 1990, the percentage of the global population living in extreme poverty was 43.1%, but in 2010, that percentage had dropped d…

Different definitions of extreme poverty might change the percentages; however, in all of these it ought to be clear that the rate of poverty declined throughout the twentieth century, it did not go up mid century as Kristof implies.

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

#212

Post by danharaj »

cbd1984 wrote: post #207
danharaj wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Without private ownership, resources cannot be traded to their highest utility. The language of economics is designed so that this is tautologically true and all empirical evidence that this is false is euphemized away with the term 'externality' or 'market failure'.

This post alone shows enough misunderstanding of economics to discredit you on the subject.

Good thing I don't depend on being a credible expert in economics; neither do many purported experts in economics.

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

#213

Post by Houshalter »

interpol_p wrote: post #141
Houshalter wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 incredib…

You are correct that not all deaths are equal. Someone dying of cancer at 60 is losing maybe 20 years of life, while someone dying at 20 is losing their entire adult life. That's the concept of Quality Adjusted Life Years, which is sometimes used instead of just regular statistics.

But even so, the QALYs lost to smoking is orders of magnitude larger than that lost to murders. And car accidents don't discriminate based on age too much

>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.

It's not numbness. It's just loss of interest/novelty. People aren't becoming numb to mass shootings, they just aren't as interesting or novel. They are still afraid of them. Emergency responders who see accidents every day still buckle their seat belts. More than the general population.

Anyway I am not saying that we can get the news to stop reporting on mass shootings or make people uninterested in them. I am saying that we can correct perceptions that they are more likely than other risks. We can educate people better. We can fight our own biases and strive to be more rational.

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

#214

Post by webXL »

danharaj wrote: post #202
webXL wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Externalities can only exist with public goods, such as the commons or air pollution. The more public goods, the more chances of externalities. Market failure is a subjective term that assumes a problem can be always be solved fairly (no one is made worse off). That euphemism tends to be used by those who believe "free market" (no such thing) solutions are inferior to state-imposed solutions, which often involve forc…

> Market failure is a subjective term that assumes a problem can be always be solved fairly (no one is made worse off). That euphemism tends to be used by those who believe "free market" (no such thing) solutions are inferior to state-imposed solutions, which often involve force and/or benefit the ruling class. There's plenty of empirical evidence to support that. Market failure is defined as a situation in which mar…

How am I not forthright about my assumptions? I started this all off by simply stating that privately owned resources can be traded to their highest utility, and you seem to have a roundabout way of challenging that claim. Empirical evidence would be the most direct way.

And while state-enforced property rights have enabled many other technological advancements and objectively moral outcomes, this does not give the state the moral high ground to use force for its own arbitrary purposes. On the micro scale, just because my authority allows my children to claim their own space, clothes, etc. doesn't necessarily mean that authority can always lead to good outcomes in every interaction they have with each other. It's just a means to an end, like the state.

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

#215

Post by Turing_Machine »

x5n1 wrote: post #153
ekianjo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> we have uranium for the next 10 000 of years at least. No we don't. If you keep up with energy demand it's more like 300-1000 years.

Yes, we do. We have enough for billions, with a b, of years.

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/cohen.html

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

#216

Post by dredmorbius »

baddox wrote: post #128
Asbostos wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The side with the real power - the voters. You can blame businesses or activists or interest groups or governments or whatever but America still has a democracy and American people actually do choose the outcomes they get. You personally might not want them, but most of your fellow Americans either do want them or succumb to some personal greed to make them happen.

I disagree very much. The fact that concentrated interests win out over dispersed interests is not some failure of the population to educate itself and vote hard enough. It's an extremely basic game theoretical inevitability.

Exactly. See Mancur Olson, "The Logic of Collective Action".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action

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

#217

Post by Qwertious »

ef4 wrote: post #104
Max_Horstmann wrote: post #6

Since this is HN, here's a question: what role could technology play in eliminating extreme poverty by 2030?

Really disruptive tech: telepresence that's finally almost as good as the real thing. I expect luddite attempts to ban it as soon as they realize it means that everyone in the world is now free to work with anyone else, borders be damned. It would lead to massive economic growth as whole countries that have lacked access to high-productivity jobs suddenly gain access. This is really just the technology version of a s…

Never going to happen due to speed-of-light delay. Play TF2 on a server that's in a different continent if you don't know what I mean.

Nothing will stop it working in relatively local areas (i.e. for anywhere within 1000 K's you'll be fine), but where you actually live will never be completely abstracted.

It'll massively increase productivity if it's accepted by society, though, I agree with that - everyone can now work in a CBD without the insane commute times.

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

#218

Post by andyfleming »

manachar wrote: post #203
andyfleming wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the sea turtles with tumors in Hawaii? There is some concern that humans are to blame, right?

Yes, and I actually just had dinner with some humans working on figuring it out. One possibility is that an invasive species of seaweed is throwing their diet out of whack. Humans can keep helping by gaining greater understandings of the impact our actions have on everything around us (negative externalities if you want economic-speak).

Fair enough. I'm not sure why I was downvoted. I'm not suggesting regulation or the EPA is bad.

I saw a turtle with tumors, in person, and a local suggested that it was suspected that some sort of runoff was the cause of the issue. My thought was that there may not be enough regulation and accountability.

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