The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better
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Re: The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better
#2Nice to read something that isn’t hopeless, and isn’t fluff.
Re: The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better
#3If you enjoyed this post, I highly recommend reading Factfulness by Hans Rosling. He spent his later years trying to educate the public on the realities of the world. This book contains a series of tips on how to understand facts.
His TED talks are masterpieces as well.
Re: The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better
#4If we're talking the general state of the world...
The world is going to be much awful-er as climate change unfolds. Climate change is not being addressed seriously currently, at all. And the trend is towards it not being addressed.
The world isn't going to be much better until climate change is addressed - if then.
I think this trumps literally any statistical measure of well-being you could come up with.
Re: The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better
#5If you enjoyed this post, I highly recommend reading Factfulness by Hans Rosling. He spent his later years trying to educate the public on the realities of the world. This book contains a series of tips on how to understand facts. His TED talks are masterpieces as well.
absolutely agree. Hans Rosling was amazing for presenting data in a visual and easy to digest way.
Was very sad when he passed away back in 2017.
Re: The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better
#6>But this fact – that it is possible to change the world and achieve extraordinary progress for entire societies – is something that everyone should know.
Everyone does know that. That the world changes, gets better or gets worse isn't exactly a hot take. What these 'progress studies' are about is ideological in nature. It's using 'the state of the world' which nobody cares about as a means to re-frame local issues, which people do care about.
I mean the article is even quite explicit at the end that what it's really about is selling 'effective altruism' as a belief system. However instead of pretending that this is some value-neutral question of 'data' as if the average European or American citizen doesn't know that Somalia is poorer than France (or could theoretically be less poor) is kind of silly.
Re: The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better
#7If we're talking the general state of the world... The world is going to be much awful-er as climate change unfolds. Climate change is not being addressed seriously currently, at all. And the trend is towards it not being addressed. The world isn't going to be much better until climate change is addressed - if then. I think this trumps literally any statistical measure of well-being you could come up with.
> The world is going to be much awful-er as climate change unfolds. Climate change is not being addressed seriously currently, at all. And the trend is towards it not being addressed.
The world has been getting better, and continues to get better. Unfortunately, I don't have a reference to it, but I recall attending a talk that charted out some kind of measure of wealth/welfare/well-off-ness based on various climate change scenarios. The thing that stood out to me was that even on the worse climate change predictions, future generations will STILL be better off than us. Just not as better off as they would be with better climate change action.
Whether or not the data used in that talk was accurate, I'm optimistic about the future, and I think it will be better, with peaks and troughs on the way there. I'm glad to have been born no earlier than I was, and would prefer to have been born later than I was! The main thing that concerns me is that it's going to be the poorest people in the world that will suffer as a result of climate change. I think that's where climate action should be directed primarily -- aimed at either preventing the great harms that will affect the poorest, or compensating them for the harms that can't be prevented, so that the harms of climate change are spread more fairly among us.
Re: The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better
#8> The world is awful. The world is much better.
A better way to look at this is that we've made significant progress when it comes to solving some of the problems, but we've also created new ones that make it much worse than before. We can now grow enough food to feed the world (although we're doing a terrible job of distributing it to the world). However the food is much less nutritional and much more toxic than before. We can now travel distances in a time that was unimaginable before, but we breathe the poison as a direct result of it.
Re: The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better
#9If we're talking the general state of the world... The world is going to be much awful-er as climate change unfolds. Climate change is not being addressed seriously currently, at all. And the trend is towards it not being addressed. The world isn't going to be much better until climate change is addressed - if then. I think this trumps literally any statistical measure of well-being you could come up with.
The world went through an ice-age while humans were alive and struggling. The world may be warming because of humans, but we have the ability with technology to adapt.
Re: The world is awful, the world is much better, the world can be much better
#10If we're talking the general state of the world... The world is going to be much awful-er as climate change unfolds. Climate change is not being addressed seriously currently, at all. And the trend is towards it not being addressed. The world isn't going to be much better until climate change is addressed - if then. I think this trumps literally any statistical measure of well-being you could come up with.
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