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Caros posted:We've also back slid recently, and have serious issues with things like income inequality. But we trend towards progress. Things should, in the long run at least, get better rather than worse. I dunno, it isn't really clear that we're going to see a trend towards progress in the future. If you're talking about the US specifically, it's not clear that the net result of positive strides on certain social issues and negative ones materially is positive, and we've reached a turning point of sorts where future generations can't expect to be materially better off than earlier ones. If you're talking about the world, then the social progress you mention is far from universal and certainly isn't guaranteed to continue (especially with the rising of far right movements throughout a lot of the developed world). edit: It also depends whether by "optimism" you mean "expectation of a good future" or "expectation of a better-but-still-bad future." The latter is reasonable to expect, since the global poor have become somewhat better off, largely due to improvements in technology, etc. But there's no clear path to them actually not being poor, at least as things stand now. The figures OwlOfCreamCheese posted largely represent picking the low-hanging fruit of technological/scientific progress and the resulting increased productivity, but we can't expect that trend to continue, since our current economic "paradigm" is already starting to tear at the seams. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Jul 6, 2018 |
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Jul 6, 2018 16:59
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:
This is using $1.25 a day as the threshold for "poor" (how was this not immediately obvious when you linked the image?) edit: It practically makes sense to define "poor" as the point at which someone cannot reliably afford necessities, like food, shelter, healthcare, childcare (etc) + some modest level of savings/recreational spending. The specific dollar-translated amount for this will obviously vary depending on region, but the vast majority of human beings do not meet this standard and are unlikely to at any point in the foreseeable future. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 04:21 on Jul 14, 2018 |
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Jul 14, 2018 04:17
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enki42 posted:Regardless, by any measure of poverty you can think of, we are improving, albeit not as dramatically as we have reduced extreme poverty. Yeah, but a lot (if not virtually all) of this can just be attributed to advancements in technology/medicine (or the very mixed "benefit" of capitalists profiting through exporting labor to the countries where it costs the least, which is a source of "improvement" that can't continue indefinitely). The point is that it isn't a reason to be optimistic, because it doesn't make any sense to extrapolate a small improvement from "super super poor" to merely "super poor" to "therefore we're on the trajectory to a future that could in any way be defined as good for most people."
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Sep 7, 2018 05:00
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:As opposed to what? Being economically uplifted or whatever (basically what I had in parenthesis immediately after that). It depends whether you're talking about money or material conditions I guess, since globalization is likely responsible for average increase in earnings (though that's likely to only continue until capital runs out of places they can export labor for cheaper). The more important point is the thing I said after that (that these improvements largely represent low-hanging fruit and not a sign of some trend that will continue until a majority of people have a decent quality of life).
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Sep 7, 2018 05:11
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Like, in all of human history has any human ever had a decent quality of life? If you take out things like having access to food and water and access to education and stuff as low hanging fruit? Is there any metric you can compare people's lives for to figure out what was decent? The point is mostly that we live in a world where it's totally possible to live in a world where people can easily afford (or otherwise receive) their basic needs (plus some recreational spending) and not be financially stressed, but we instead live in a world where the vast majority of resources go to a tiny percent of the world population. Most people live lives with some level of constant background stress. Cicero posted:I think maybe you've been spending too much time in D&D. I can assure you that most people are not particularly happy. This is reflected by what polls we have on the subject. I also don't think you're in a position to really make this sort of comment; it's like a white person commenting that they think racism isn't really so bad.
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Sep 8, 2018 18:26
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Again, it's really obvious you can praise his "clarity" only because it's years later and you know what succeeded. I'm not really seeing anything remotely wrong with what OwlFancier is saying. He isn't saying that it's not still worthwhile to push for positive change (since even if the ideal goal can't be accomplished, some people can still be helped); just that there's very good reason to think that it's doubtful that most optimistic goals will actually be achieved. Like, to use King as an example (since he was mentioned earlier), it's simultaneously true that his work (and that of others like him) was worthwhile and had an impact, and that the fundamental issues of racism and racial inequality not only aren't close to being fixed, but aren't even really on that trajectory (see: widening wealth gap between black and white Americans, or de facto segregation being even higher than decades in the past). "We should try and improve conditions" is not mutually exclusive with "but realistically speaking it's doubtful that things like poverty, bigotry, etc will ever be wholly, or even mostly, addressed."
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Sep 9, 2018 00:09
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