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February 2 - February 11, 2024
Progress cannot always be monotonic because solutions to problems create new problems.18 But progress can resume when the new problems are solved in their turn.
If you ignore all the years in which an indicator of some problem declines, and report every uptick (since, after all, it’s “news”), readers will come away with the impression that life is getting worse and worse even as it gets better and better.
Progress can take place when the reversals in a positive trend become less frequent, become less severe, or, in some cases, cease altogether.
A decline is not the same thing as a disappearance.
Something can decrease a lot without vanishing altogether. That means that the level of violence today is completely irrelevant to the question of whether violence has declined over the course of history.
No theory can make a prediction about the world at large, with its seven billion people spreading viral ideas in global networks and interacting with chaotic cycles of weather and resources.
When all these objections are exhausted, I often see people racking their brains to find some way in which the news cannot be as good as the data suggest. In desperation, they turn to semantics.
The incredulous reaction to Better Angels convinced me that it isn’t just the Availability heuristic that makes people fatalistic about progress. Nor can the media’s fondness for bad news be blamed entirely on a cynical chase for eyeballs and clicks. No, the psychological roots of progressophobia run deeper.
The deepest is a bias that has been summarized in the slogan “Bad is stronger than good.”
How much better can you imagine yourself feeling than you are feeling right now? How much worse can you imagine yourself feeling? In answering the first hypothetical, most of us can imagine a bit more of a spring in our step or a twinkle in our eye, but the answer to the second one is: it’s bottomless. This asymmetry in mood can be explained by an asymmetry in life (a corollary of the Law of Entropy).
Though we tend to remember bad events as well as we remember good ones, the negative coloring of the misfortunes fades with time, particularly the ones that happened to us.
As the columnist Franklin Pierce Adams pointed out, “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”
This “ideological rather than accidental innumeracy” leads writers to notice, for example, that wars take place today and wars took place in the past and to conclude that “nothing has changed”—failing to acknowledge the difference between an era with a handful of wars that collectively kill in the thousands and an era with dozens of wars that collectively killed in the millions.
Experiments have shown that a critic who pans a book is perceived as more competent than a critic who praises it, and the same may be true of critics of society.
pessimism has been equated with moral seriousness.
The financial writer Morgan Housel has observed that while pessimists sound like they’re trying to help you, optimists sound like they’re trying to sell you something.
Competition of praise inclineth to a reverence of antiquity. For men contend with the living, not with the dead.”
It’s easy to extoll transcendent values in the abstract, but most people prioritize life, health, safety, literacy, sustenance, and stimulation for the obvious reason that these goods are a prerequisite to everything else.
And here is a shocker: The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being. Here is a second shocker: Almost no one knows about it.
Incredible!
Max Roser’s Our World in Data, Marian Tupy’s HumanProgress, and Hans Rosling’s Gapminder.
The African AIDS dip is a reminder that progress is not an escalator that inexorably raises the well-being of every human everywhere all the time.
One is demographic: when fewer children die, parents have fewer children, since they no longer have to hedge their bets against losing their entire families. So contrary to the worry that saving children’s lives would only set off a “population bomb” (a major eco-panic of the 1960s and 1970s, which led to calls for reducing health care in the developing world), the decline in child mortality has defused
who's worried about that ?
everybody knows that reducing children mortality, all problems are reduced!
Things that can’t go on forever can go on much longer than you think.”
Yes, “smallpox was.” The disease that got its name from the painful pustules that cover the victim’s skin, mouth, and eyes and that killed more than 300 million people in the 20th century has ceased to exist.
we know that . we dont need your bla bla and diagrams to remind us what already is a common knowledge.
Remember that these figures are proportions. The world added almost five billion people in those seventy years, which means that as the
world was reducing the rate of hunger it was also feeding billions of additional mouths.
Not long ago, Malthusian thinking was revived with a vengeance. In 1967 William and Paul Paddock wrote Famine 1975!, and in 1968 the biologist Paul R. Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, in which he proclaimed that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over” and predicted that by the 1980s sixty-five million Americans and four billion other people would starve to death.
“Whoever makes two ears of corn, or two blades of grass to grow where only one grew before, deserves better of humanity, and does more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together.”
Borlaug
Of the seventy million people who died in major 20th-century famines, 80 percent were victims of Communist regimes’ forced collectivization, punitive confiscation, and totalitarian central planning.36
Once the secrets to growing food in abundance are unlocked and the infrastructure to move it around is in place, the decline of famine depends on the decline of poverty, war, and autocracy.
History is written not so much by the victors as by the affluent, the sliver of humanity with the leisure and education to write about
The eras of misery have been mythologized and may even be remembered as golden ages of pastoral simplicity. They were not.”
“if you could afford to buy bread to survive another day, you were not poor.”
In wealthy Genoa, poor people sold themselves as galley slaves every winter. In Paris the very poor were chained together in pairs and forced to do the hard work of cleaning the drains. In England, the poor had to work in workhouses to get relief, where they worked long hours for almost no pay. Some were instructed to crush dog, horse and cattle bones for use as fertilizer, until an inspection of a workhouse in 1845 showed that hungry paupers were fighting over the rotting bones to suck out the marrow.2
After 1750 the epistemic base of technology slowly began to expand. Not only did new products and techniques emerge; it became better understood why and how the old ones worked, and thus they could be refined, debugged, improved, combined with others in novel ways and adapted to new uses.”10
The Enlightenment thus translated the ultimate question ‘How can I be saved?’ into the pragmatic ‘How can I be happy?’—thereby heralding a new praxis of personal and social adjustment.”
In
το ζήτημα είναι αν η εξτριμ φτώχεια θα μπορουσε ναήταν ακόμη χαμηλότερη με ενα δικαιότερο σύστημα !
We live in a world not just with a smaller proportion of extremely poor people but with a smaller number of them, and with 6.6 billion people who are not extremely poor.
“In 1976,” Radelet writes, “Mao single-handedly and dramatically changed the direction of global poverty with one simple
act: he died.”32 Though China’s rise is
Though intellectuals are apt to do a spit take when they read a defense of capitalism, its economic benefits are so obvious that they don’t need to be shown with numbers.
The new conventional wisdom is that the richest one percent have skimmed off all the economic growth of recent decades, and everyone else is treading water or slowly sinking. If so, the explosion of wealth documented in the previous chapter would no longer be worth celebrating, since it would have ceased contributing to overall human welfare.
Economic inequality undoubtedly has increased in most Western countries since its low point around 1980, particularly in the United States and other English-speaking countries, and especially in the contrast between the very richest and everyone else.3
(Gini values generally range from .25 for the most egalitarian income distributions, such as in Scandinavia after taxes and benefits, to .7 for a highly unequal distribution such as the one in South Africa.)
The starting point for understanding inequality in the context of human progress is to recognize that income inequality is not a fundamental component of well-being. It is not like health, prosperity, knowledge, safety, peace, and the other areas of progress I examine in these chapters.
Harry Frankfurt in his 2015 book On Inequality.5 Frankfurt argues that inequality itself is not morally objectionable;
what is objectionable is poverty. If a person
“From the point of view of morality, it is not important everyone should have the same. What is morally important is that each should have enough
Thomas Piketty, whose 2014
