As well as the average life span being skewed by those same infant mortality rates. People have been living long and now they're forced to retire later.

besides this, China did a huge job on getting people out of poverty - if you like or not

This writeup is a great argument, here's some highlights I thought were good:

I simply pointed out that we cannot ignore the fact that the period 1820 to circa 1950 was one of violent dispossession across much of the global South. If you have read colonial history, you will know colonizers had immense difficulty getting people to work on their mines and plantations. As it turns out, people tended to prefer their subsistence lifestyles, and wages were not high enough to induce them to leave. Colonizers had to coerce people into the labour market: imposing taxes, enclosing commons and constraining access to food, or just outright forcing people off their land.

Remember: $1.90 [chosen poverty line] is the equivalent of what that amount of money could buy in the US in 2011. The economist David Woodward once calculated that to live at this level (in an earlier base year) would be like 35 people trying to survive in Britain “on a single minimum wage, with no benefits of any kind, no gifts, borrowing, scavenging, begging or savings to draw on (since these are all included as ‘income’ in poverty calculations).” That goes beyond any definition of “extreme”. It is absurd. It is an insult to humanity.

From 1980 to 2000, the IMF and World Bank imposed structural adjustment programs that did exactly the opposite: slashing tariffs, subsidies, social spending and capital controls while reversing land reforms and privatizing public assets – all in the face of massive popular resistance. During this period, the number of people in poverty outside China increased by 1.3 billion. In fact, even the proportion of people living in poverty increased, from 62% to 68%.

But there is something else that needs to be said here. You and Gates like to invoke the poverty numbers to make claims about the legitimacy of the existing global economic system. You say the system is working for the poor, so people should stop complaining about it.

When it comes to assessing such a claim, it’s really neither absolute numbers nor proportions that matter. What matters, rather, is the extent of poverty vis-à-vis our capacity to end it. As I have pointed out before, our capacity to end poverty (e.g., the cost of ending poverty as a proportion of the income of the non-poor) has increased many times faster than the proportional poverty rate has decreased (to use your preferred measure). By this metric we are doing worse than ever before. Indeed, our civilization is regressing. Why? Because the vast majority of the yields of our global economy are being captured by the world’s rich.

It's bewildering why they decided to restate the 1st point as the 3rd point when they could've just said the average retirement age is 10 years lower than it was 100 years ago https://www.statista.com/statistics/319983/average-retirement-age-in-the-us/

The thingeis: the world is getting less free and inequality has been constantly rising in the last decades.

This Steven Pinker BS is advertising complacency, while we should agitate people to fight for a better world.

If you want to be optimistic, look around for the average kindness of everyday live inside communities. The FOSS community, unions, mutual aid in neighborhoods etc. This would lift you up and point in the direction where things could get better.

Holy shit, I thought you were kidding but this whole thread is just full of sad people.

Wealth inequality is higher now than it was back when most of us were serfs who barely owned the clothes on our backs while one family lived in a castle and owned the rest of us?

There's more wealth being transferred in circulation than ever before

There's more food being produced than ever before

Your points are invalid without the context we need better regulation and methods to prevent collapse and waste. We're literally outgrowing by production over our knowledge.

Yeah, mean lifespan is meaningless if the distribution is bimodal. Median would be a more useful average.

Also, significantly less dead babies increasing average lifespan is a very happy way to boost that number

100 years ago, the average american had no idea how common slums were outside the US.

This was and still is very true. The level of the poverty in places like that is astounding and beyond the experience of most anyone in a 1st world country. I grew up in America, in poverty of the level that my single mother was only eating what she could scrounge at work some years so she'd have enough to feed us kids. Yet when I deployed to Panama in the mid 90's for a 2 month military operation, and had to operate in many of the rural areas of Panama during those missions, I had my eyes opened to what real 3rd world poverty looks like. The way I grew up would have been a huge improvement for many of the people I saw there. You can't really understand it until you've seen it with your own eyes.

This meme effectively expired in 2019. COVID reversed out the direction on all of it. About the only thing we haven't stopped backsliding on is "shareholder value".

Hope-posting?

Yep, and now there's not a deluge of dead children dragging the average down, which is objectively pretty great

Look, I feel like "children dead before 10" is a pretty upsetting and relevant statistic.

What’s the 99% of this site that is bs to you? And why are you hanging around if it’s that terrible? Genuinely asking.

Jesus dude... It's ok to acknowledge progress and still realize there's more to be done.

The problem is that the line between “we’ve come a long way” and it’s corollary “therefore why are you upset/why do we have to address [insert issue]?” is razor thin.

Celebrating success is great. Using it as a cudgel to stop further success is not.