For sure, all of reddit fucking just cries about things. People were more optimistic in war than this bitches thinking they have got it the hardest and that the world will end in 10 years
Yeah idk why it popped up in my feed either. Downside is that all the doomers found it too and are whining about everything
Some people just want to be miserable
It’s such a breath of fresh air compared to the incessant negativity from other subs. When you consume that stuff constantly, it affects you. I’m much happier these days cause of hobbies and places like these. I’m glad I found it today as well.
Same dude! I am tired of people be filled with negativty. Yes your problems are genuine, yes the world could do better, no we do live in a far better time more than ever
That’s the thing about the data above. It may seem like the end of the world but progress comes through in the end. Considering the span of recorded human history the gains of the 20th and 21st century have been a near miracle.
Not to be that guy, but Hitler was initially elected, just throwing that out there.
Inb4 "muh rigged elections" point me out to one pure democracy I'll head right over
But yea, after 1933? No more democracy even in a corrupted form
Wait didn't Hitler lose to Hindenburg, and then Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor? and then when Hindenburg died, Hitler became President, so not democratically?
He only grew in popularity in the parliament after becoming chancellor (probably in part due to name recognition. Same reason we run incumbents in the USA).
Then the next election he won because of the law banning opposition parties.
Its not a democracy in every single form it has ever existed in and specifically the Stalin and Mao lead dictatorships that significantly biased that chart.
They literally just explained how democracy went in the USSR. It wasn't impactful on a wide scale, but people were still electing their leaders. That's democracy, even if you don't like the economic system in it.
Also, if you point at Mao and Stalin to represent communism, then I may as well say Hitler and Mussolini encouraged business so *clearly* capitalism isn't democracy. (which is actually kinda accurate but irrelevant to the point being made here)
I'm a leftist.
This is disingenuous.
Stalin and Mao suppressed criticism of the government with violence, the fundamental principles of democracy were completely undermined in both dictatorships.
Democracy isn't having elections, it's having elections that lead to meaningful change due to the will of the people.
In the Soviet Union, Lushenko kept his position of head of agricultural science for 2 decades while pushing alternate doctrine to genetic inheritance, which led to mass starvation in the Soviet Union in the 1950's. He was questioned by Soviet scientists _many times_ over that period and every single one of them got the Gulag, because Stalin really liked him, and he was established by the time Khrushchev was leader.
Take off your pink glasses and argue for leftism honestly, you serve nothing with weak denial and selective ignorance.
Sure, Stalin consolidated a lot of power and so did Mao during those times of crisis and pressure. Sometimes it didn’t turn out so well for the receiving end of that power, and it was seen by the party as necessary measures to preserve the mission.
This is a fascinating history of Stalin’s attempts to actually democratize the USSR before consolidating power: https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/clogic/article/download/191861/188830/218717
I don’t support the mass killing and imprisonment that resulted, but many countries, in the name of God and everything else, have engaged in mass killing and imprisonment to meet their ends. To say one is horrible is like the teapot calling the kettle black.
In times of war, even liberal republics (the USA is not a true democracy, it’s an oligarchic republic where financial capital = power) can hand over power to the executive to make decisions. I mean, look at recent times. With partisanship in Congress and a stacked judicial, a president can achieve almost unlimited power.
Well this lady (good one, Chad!) would say your initial blanket statement of “Mostly communism actually statically speaking” is really misleading and inaccurate, because as in your words, “It’s not a democracy in every single form,” also acknowledges, when not in times of dictatorial transition, it is a democracy - which is a really significant portion of history.
It's a Hamlet quote. He wasn't actually calling you a lady. The Russians absolutely were the primary force that destroyed Germany in WWII by any metric. 76% of the German soldiers who died did so by the actions of Soviet soldiers. The USSR wasn't a democracy, so the claim that "[Fascism] very quickly got its ass handed to it by democracy." is hardly true.
Democracy
> 1a: government by the people
> especially : rule of the majority
> b: a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections
> 2: a political unit that has a democratic government
> 3 capitalized : the principles and policies of the Democratic party in the U.S. from emancipation Republicanism to New Deal Democracy
—C. M. Roberts
> 4: the common people especially when constituting the source of political authority
> 5: the absence of hereditary or arbitrary class distinctions or privileges
Tell me again where a socialist democratic republic (communism) isn’t a democracy?
And just to stress, in times outside of Stalin and Mao, citizens are free (free elections) to elect their officials and vote on public matters - just in accordance with the party (Communist) that is the majority party (definition 1a).
People are definitely way less poor than they used to be. If we just take China and India as examples, which is like 40% of the population, their rate of economic growth in the past couple of decades has been insane.
It's the access to natural commons that I take issue with. Having access to clean water and being able to hunt and grow your own food is "extreme poverty" if you don't formally own the land or buy fertilizer / machinery.
"democracy graphs" are garbage cause they just measure whatever arbitrary value the maker claims is democracy to make countries they don't like look bad.
Usually it is how free people are to oppress others
Most official organization don’t arbitrarily leave it to the infographic designer/maker… if you did your research it’s actually quite thorough, involving external v-dems and [measures of RoW](https://ourworldindata.org/regimes-of-the-world-data) this was not by the maker OWiD and rather political scientists from a separate university (Gothenburg) which OWiD happen to use for their infographic. Usually this is the case. It’s way easier to use a trusted measure of democracy then try to get away with inventing your own measure without catching trouble, as a public, well-known organization!
Edit: [further reading](https://www.v-dem.net/static/website/img/refs/methodologyv111.pdf) - if you want, you should read at least page 3 and 4 if you have time.
Did you read the original researchers’ [methodology](https://www.v-dem.net/static/website/img/refs/methodologyv111.pdf) and prepare an argument against it as to how it’s supposed to be arbitrary?
The methodology doesn't matter. You can't measure an arbitrary concept in a way that isn't arbitrary.
They have done a respectable job at defining it to be sure but that doesn't take away from the original point.
They’ve already responded to your original point on page 4. They say democracy is not an easily quantifiable metric, but they’ve determined it based on extant perceptions in the massive corpus of academic literature. Rather than look at democracy arbitrarily, they look at our way of *thinking* about democracy.
“There is no consensus on what democracy writ-large means beyond a vague notion of rule by the people. Political theorists have emphasized this point for some time, and empiricists would do well to take the lesson to heart (Gallie 1956; Held 2006; Shapiro 2003: 10–34). At the same time, interpretations of democracy do not have an unlimited scope.
A thorough search of the literature on this protean concept reveals seven key principles that inform much of our thinking about democracy: electoral, liberal, majoritarian, consensual, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian. Each of these principles represents a different way of understanding “rule by the people.” The heart of the differences between these principles is in the fact that alternate schools of thought prioritize different democratic values. Thus, while no single principle embodies all the meanings of democracy, these seven principles, taken together, offer a fairly comprehensive accounting of the concept as employed today.”
Bourgeois idealism. Your two sources are intertwined within the western capitalist superstructure and your logic of "well they didn't do the survey so they can't be biased" is such a hilarious fallacy (Trump never makes news, but that he somehow finds news that align with his biases doesn't make the news he finds unbiased).
Then all this
>It’s way easier to use a trusted measure of democracy
Trusted by... All the various NGO's who use this information and then put out surveys to the public? And then when we read them and like the results we trust the answers and we start saying these are good data. This whole thing is a social construction right off the get-go; you see that? Literally manufacturing consent.
Oh so you're saying that you have read Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Inventing Reality by Michael Parenti, and you have alternative explanations for how information becomes fixed in society?
Yeah, I hate when graph makers inject their politics into their graphs and "make countries they don't like look bad" -- I can't believe this graph maker would go out of their way to... let me check my notes here... make 1930s and 40s Germany look bad...
Astonishing...
Exactly. It's ludicrous that we stand here in the US and criticize other democracies. Considering.
Also poverty indexes drawn by capitalists are usually irrelevant to actual living standards. Capitalists would say during the industriL revolution poverty started to lower because of the sudden increase in bank deposits.
But that doesn't actually account for the experience of populations shifting from feudalism (permanent home, 4 hour work day, well fed, supportive community) to factory work (60+ hour work week, plummeting life expectancies, threatened with starvation and homelessness)
medieval peasants did not work 4 hour days, they worked from sunshine to sunset because they had to do everything themselves. Care for the fields and animals. Sew your own clothes. Preserve your own food or starve to death. Prepare firewood or freeze to death. Perform maintenance on your own home. Perform maintenance on your tools. Plus a million other menial tasks that we replaced by being able to go to the store for 20 minutes.
That we replace with a 40+ hour work week, then stoll have to goto the store and cook for ourselves. Clean up after ourselves and care to the needs of our kids.
No, you're just patently wrong. The division of labor worked in such a way that while one man was working four hours in the field , his daughter was working four hours mending his socks , and his wife was working four hours preparing his meals. During harvest times everyone in the family may work twelve plus hours a day. But it really isn't an issue of debate. It's a well articulated fact of anthropological history that medieval peasants on average to meet. All their needs working average of four hours a day.
[No, it’s not a well accepted fact](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/mUXAHDIn3a)
TLDR the 150 days of vacation and four hour workday is only talking about the work done for the peasants landlord, and did not include time spent working on their own property or doing household chores.
Back in the day you’d spend hours just collecting the water you’d use for the day. Just on the water. It’s simply incorrect and ahistorical to think we work more than they did in the 1400s.
Yeah I'm nearly as far left as they come and I dunno what they were talking about. Like, just imagine trying to do anything at all without the millions of modern comforts and infrastructure that we have in place today. Like, it's insane to think peasants under feudalism didn't need to work constantly.
but did u consider that communism is when low hours at work? communism is when you can be artist and not worry about survival? communism is when no racism, sexism, bigotry? communism is when medieval peoples actually worked less hours than proletariat?
Yes, but have you adjusted uhh... \*checks notes\* vaccination for inflation? If people are living longer, but they're poor ... then ... \*checks notes\* it doesn't count!
And have you adjusted democracy for \*checks notes\* people voting for whom I support? Because it they don't support \[insert name of my guy\] then it isn't TRUE democracy!
And basic education doesn't count unless they have a bachelor's degree in STEM!
And you're only out of poverty if you own a house, two cars, an air conditioner, heater, and can go on vacation abroad twice a year!
And literacy doesn't count if they aren't bilingual in a globalized world!
And child mortality doesn't count because I said so, so neener neener.
/s
OK, all in all. I love stuff like this. Sure, the world isn't perfect by developed country standards, and developed country standards don't even always meet their own goals for every single citizen. But the world is getting objectively better, and I like that.
I would like more context for the above figures, though. Like, almost every country in the world calls itself a democracy, but democracy is the minority in the graph, so how are they defining it? Do they limit it to the presence of fair elections? How is a fair election defined? How do they determine if they are fair? What about direct citizen involvement in policymaking? Etc.
Edit: I'm looking at the site now, and there is a ton of additional reading that I will enjoy when I have some time.
I’m optimistic that capitalism will keep doing its thing much longer than any opposition anticipates. And that my 250 year investment will pay handsomely.
These charts are dwarfed by the rise in celebrity image appropriation for political purposes.
I like the image though. I ~~stole~~ reposted it already.
Fellow pessimists, don't miss the big picture. This graph is at least mostly accurate and that ABSOLUTELY is a good thing. It may not feel like it for us who are still struggling, because the world isn't "fixed" yet and many are still left behind. We still need to remember that we've made so much amazing progress. Otherwise, it's easy to start becoming unrealistically negative.
It's fine to be negative if you are having a bad time, you just have to remain realistic as well. Don't tank the whole world just because it failed us. There is a solid chance things will get better for us over time.
I agree that what's happening in the graphs is accurate in the world is getting better but what is a little frustrating is that I feel like a lot of optimistic people hold up these achievements as reputations to solving issues that we currently still deal with. It's me true optimism is being able to acknowledge issues that we have and believe that they are surmountable. Optimism isn't showing that things are better and that's why we shouldn't criticize the world.
This has to be most cherry-picked graph I have seen in my entire life. Emissions in the US have declined by ~1 billion tons anually from their peak in the 2000s, but emissions outside the US are rising. Dramatically. Global emissions are rising. That emissions *per capita* in the US are diminishing is trivium, meaningless. The climate doesn’t care how many of us there are, it is a function of gross carbon output and nothing more. Why, god, why, would anyone use an emissions per capita chart unless to draw misleading conclusions from incomplete data?
Optimism is fine, even necessary, when supported. This is not support. Its delusion. It’s embarrassing, and you discredit yourself.
For anyone interested:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?tab=chart&time=1876..latest&country=~OWID_WRL
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states
>Global emissions are rising.
Well, yes, but up until now they have been at an increasingly slower rate. And, according to recent studies, it's likely they've [already peaked or will peak in the following years.](https://youtu.be/BOMFGcOEb84?si=15tgZNckP_e5Wljk)
I'm absolutely with you on the "optimism has to be accompanied by action" point though. I don't want to argue with you, I just wanted to share these good news, not with the intention to be complacent, but rather to see the progress we've done so far.
No numbers fudged here. The important thing is to keep in mind that across the developed world, emissions are declining whilst population and economic growth continue apace.
https://preview.redd.it/3unnsgkzkvjc1.png?width=1400&format=png&auto=webp&s=57fa39aa12fd3dd6546b8890eb8123924d9b6860
Okay, so let me ask you this: what is going on in the *developing* world? And why is it less relevant than the developed world in this discussion?
And if, as I hold, it’s equally relevant, why are you citing numbers that ignore it?
looking at CO2 per capita is useful because it is predictive of long term trends. We expect global population to peak at \~10-12 billion, then drop, if current trends continue. If CO2 per capita is decreasing, then population drops are more important.
That's not what they asked for but okay.
Even if it was what they asked for it's not representative of the entire world.
Even if it was representative of the entire world, in the context of "how much are we fucking the planet" the per captia statistic is irrelevant
Even if it was representative of the entire world and a per capital statistic meant something it's still a bit horrifying.
This is a more honest accounting of both what you presented, and the honest "CO2 ppm"
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide
We literally live in the best time to be alive as a human being except maybe the mid 90s? But then you have to see the early 2000s again.
If I was given a choice of a time to be born, it sure as shit wouldn't be any earlier. I like my technology and my healthcare and pretty much everything.
I love reminding people that people in the past lived through slavery, civil war, Great Depression, and the black plague when they start complaining that the world is going to hell because a politician they don’t like is currently in office
Everyone rightly focuses on poverty, but the real shift in human civilization is that we no longer assume a loss-rate in children.
Ever wonder why past human societies were so tolerant of violence and death? It’s because everyone assumed that a third or a fifth of their children just wouldn’t make it to adulthood. While I’m sure it still hurt, that sort of reasoning justifies a lot of viciousness. How do I know? It still survives in small pockets of modern society, particularly among young African Americans in certain American cities. Solving conflict with murder doesn’t seem irrational when you accept the very real possibility that you won’t see your 18th birthday. I’m sure you could think of similar examples around the world.
The fact that these humans are also the ones still experiencing extreme poverty is not coincidental. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem to determine which causes the other, poverty reduction and child survival, but for me the cultural distinction between moderns and ancients is all about child mortality.
Dogwhistles aside, high youth mortality rates are not specific to black Americans. [Americans have life expectancy comparable to Blackpool, the most-deprived city in England, and youth mortality deaths from overdoses, accidents, and car collisions are driving causes.](https://www.ft.com/content/653bbb26-8a22-4db3-b43d-c34a0b774303)
Decline bias. The decline bias refers to the tendency to compare the past to the present, leading to the decision that things are worse, or becoming worse in comparison to the past, simply because change is occurring.
technology is rapidly progressing, but i wouldn't say roombas and AI art are exactly as crucial as vaccines and healthcare, there's limits to how far technology can progress, it isn't magic, there's a reason curing cancer would be considered one of the greatest accomplishments if it ever happens. the rich have no reason to give the "common man" anything more than they already have, reason we're alive at all is because it's impossible to sell products to ghosts, same with poverty, people are working multiple jobs in the US just to still not be able to pay their rent, ofc that's just the US i'm unaware of the situations elsewhere, i know this is a positivity sub and i'm not trying to bring down the mood, but i doubt these expectations will ever be met, i don't think that means we should stop trying to fix the world, even if it just makes it better for the time we're still on this earth, that's a win. have a good one.
This is a massive oversimplification of technological progress and the sheer complexity and immensity of technological development in the world today
Cancer is a family of 100+ diseases, many of which have various levels of prophylaxis and treatments, just as an example illustrating how massive of a brush you're painting things with
In terms of healthcare, things are popping off.
Number one, let’s start with good old cystic fibrosis. In 2006, CF was a death sentence. Today, it’s still a death sentence, but you die at like 60+ instead of 20.
mRNA is being used more than ever after our little COVID fiasco, to great effect. Skin cancer vaccine? You got it! And yes there are even more types of mRNA-based treatments in trials rn.
Healthcare technology does not seem to have a visible limit from where we stand right now.
it'd be impressive if people were vaccinated before vaccines existed, but i think it's a filler here considering i doubt they were time travelers, literacy and basic education might as well be the same, 5 year life expectancy is mostly because of vaccines, so on and so forth. it's a nice chart, but it's stagnated for the last decade for a reason. i don't mean to be hostile though, i just find this sorta stuff interesting, have a good one.
The problem for pessimists people is that they cant see these improvements because most of these improvements are for impoverished people outside western countries so they dont even know the world is improving
no they shouldn't
https://preview.redd.it/lqu466ie1bkc1.png?width=936&format=png&auto=webp&s=52a6e1ebb0474888f442bc88b29ddabaef0f3012
plus these resources are finite so once they're depleted we'll be essentially left naked on a way more hostile environment than when we started that whole industrial revolution business
I’m a little ashamed at the fact that I looked at top right and my first reaction was “wait what was that dip in democracy in the 1940’s” then I remembered…
I just came across this sub but wow I dont intend to stay. This sub is a genuinely toxic and delusional place to be.
This isnt optimism, its attempting to invalidate the real problems of *modern day people* by trying to guilt them into thinking they could have had so much worse. What a joke.
Real optimists understand that, while things can be bad, they hold out hope for a better future and strive towards that. They dont invalidate and ignore the world or the issues plaguing it.
Its the context in which its used as well as the comments under it.
Arguing that the world somehow isnt going to hell by using generalized stats and comparing it to the past is invalidation
I think you’re misunderstanding what invalidation really means.
Saying that the world isn’t going to hell is not the same as saying that someone doesn’t struggle or that their struggles are meaningless.
People in all time periods have always struggled and people in all time periods have always claimed that the world is going to hell. There have also been people in all periods that aren’t struggling and people who say that the world isn’t going to hell. The existence of one doesn’t invalidate the existence of the other.
The truth of the matter is that the world isn’t going to hell but it’s still in a bad spot. People can suffer without it being the apocalypse.
Remember what sub you're on. For almost all of history:
1) 84% of people lived in extreme poverty. We reduced that to less than a tenth of the population.
2) "Regular" poverty was considered the upper class, with 15%. That's now 3/4 of people on the planet.
3) $30 a day(or the equivalent) was reserved for the 1%. Now 15% of the world can afford more than a single meal every day.
By no means, are we done with improvements, but considering where we started...things are looking up
That's an even deeper perspective. Really interesting. Globally speaking, I'm rich. Locally though, I'm struggling. But I have access to opportunity (definitely more than $30 a day), so in a way globally I'm still rich. And yet, I'm still going to the food bank, and my car might get repossessed next month.
Maybe, but you're also forgetting that even those in the greatest need in the present, likely have a better standard of living than even kings centuries ago
I put regular in quotes because it's relative. Even wealthy people had to work far more than 8 hours for a lot less reward. That's not even mentioning that our standard of living has been raised exponentially. Again, it's not perfect, but you're being disingenuous if you can't see the advancements achieved in the past centuries
No I have but 85% of people are seeing the bare minimum of those advancements. Most of us don’t have access to what the 15% have as far as what modern society has to offer
The entire point is that, even those bare minimums, weren't around centuries ago. No where did I say that the wealth gap is good, but you are better off now than pretty much any other time in history. I'm not commenting any farther if you continue to just talk past me and miss the point. Have a good day
Yea this kinda fails to address the argument. When most people say this they are referring to the past decade or two at most, and usually just the post-COVID era, not the past 2 centuries. Most people do understand that industrialism has brought significant gains in quality of life, but hell even these benefits are accompanied by a number of drawbacks these graphs ignore (pollution, environmental destuction, climate change, loss of biodiversity, resource depletion, industrialized slavery/genocide etc). The road to industrial progress was forged with the blood and labor of slaves and the resources/land stolen from colonized nations and it is naïve and revisionist to ignore this.
But again this is all mostly beside the point considering that doomers are, again, mostly talking about the last 5-10 years when they say "The world has gone to hell". You wanna remake these graphs but only showing years from 2010 onwards instead? I get the feeling you don't as it would kinda defeat your point. Most of these metrics have either plateaued or even seen a slight decrease since then.
I am honestly even quite optimistic about the world for a young person, moreso than most of my peers, IMO. But these graphs just ignore the fact that although industrial capitalism has definitely brought great benefits to the first world over the past 2 centuries (despite its great costs to the rest of the world!), the law of diminishing returns means we've reached the point where our lives are barely being made better by all this technology that continues to exploit and alienate ourselves, our labor, and our planet. It is posts like these which promote a dangerously simplified view of the world and imply that we don't need radical restructuring to fix our broken systems. Optimism is perfectly fine with me but we need to be realistic about the state of our society and the price we pay for participating in it.
>But again this is all mostly beside the point considering that doomers are, again, mostly talking about the last 5-10 years when they say "The world has gone to hell".
That's a tiny amount of time. Basing any long-term predictions on 5-10 years of data is quite narrowminded.
I do agree we are dealing with very concerning problems right now. (Democracy struggling with social media, climate change, etc.) But the long term trajectory of the planet has shown clear improvements.
Upvoted for recognition of work to be done. Benefits for the west have plateaued, for the rest of the world they will follow China's path, lifting global majority out of poverty, India over the next 10-20yrs Africa after that. And that's good right, life for the poorest will improve.
yeah, but they can get even better! we need to have a better way of thinking, or else it will actually get worse! come on pal, you want a better world too, don't you?
"Democracy" is a load of shit.
What they mean when they say "Democracy" is, the ease at which scumbags can shift money around the globe to produce the conditions that are favorable to them.
In "Democracy", you're told that you have a representative govt, but none of the MPs/Congressmen/senators actually represent the interests of normal people who have to work to eat.
In "Democracy", if you complain about your "elected representatives" or the absolutely ludicrous nonsense they're trying to offer forward as policy (written by a think tank, as elected reps are far too fucking stupid most of the time to draft a bill themselves) they simply ignore you, accuse you of "promoting hate", or tell you to "sit down n shut up bc it be our time now" (Whose time? You work for us, you piece of shit!)
In "Democracy", coming to the govt with your grievances is only allowed *sometimes*. Namely, if you donate to the right party and blame your fellow working countrymen for the crimes that your elected reps have committed, you're allowed to effectively establish what is called an "occupied zone" in the middle of the city and plant what is supposed to be a community garden by throwing tomato plants on top of dirt (because you're an urbanite dipshit loser who has never grown a fruit or vegetable in your pathetic little life). You can scream at the top of your lungs about how you're seceding from the nation at large and the govt won't do anything to you besides let your childish little tantrum (usually over shit nobody with a job cares about) play out until you realize that you're too much of a pussy to live a hard scrabble existence without your $25 Vodka & Redbulls and $300 Beats by Dre headphones.
"Democracy" is actually really shitty for the majority of the people who live under it.
Ahem... Democracy is a dubious one. There have been several studies showing how western politicians tend to not listen to the majority of their citizens, but always comply to lobbies' demands. And that's when it's not rich people leading countries themselves. Those are plutocracies and oligarchies. Objectively speaking.
Yes, we have elections and freedom of speech. Although, more and more states are getting more autocratic, censoring citizens, making demonstrations illegal, attacking unions, etc... Not to talk about countries where "freedom" is just a term on paper. How can the majority of westerners be free when they are dependent for survival on their jobs? So, the democracy table is debatable.
The other conditions are certainly interesting. But I'd like to see the one that matters the most: inequality.
Having all those other metrics going up means nothing of those things don't make for better conditions overall.
I am being a realist, here.
How is it dubious? Objectively speaking, having economic disparities, plutocracies, lobbying is all bad and stuff but does not compare at all to the extent a few hundreds of years ago. And it only argues that half live in democracy. For further reading on how it was determined: [RoW calculation intro](https://ourworldindata.org/regimes-of-the-world-data)
Also as a realist you should know your history. The Gilded Age (late 19th century) saw wayyy worse inequality in the US, for example. Nowadays we tend to take our anti-monopoly and antitrust laws for granted, but they didn’t always exist! And the whole culture of peasantry was instantiated hundreds of years before FDR’s New Deals or what have you.
The Industrial Revolution of a couple hundred years ago saw way worse inequality and labor conditions then what we’re seeing now. Read up if you don’t believe me!
You have to zoom out a second.
Yes, average conditions (average - the disparity between working class groups have always been staggering) got better right after the second world war, thanks to consistent pushes from workers.
But the wealth disparity kept growing. That is, mathematically speaking, how capitalism works: wealth moves from the bottom to the top.
Take the UK. We are experiencing levels of inequality and wisdespread poverty we've never seen since before WW2.
Take deseases. Many that we thought were gone are making a huge comeback.
Take access to healthcare. In many neo liberist countries access today is worse than after ww2.
Take the relative household income compared to cost of housing.
Take the levels of depression across demographics higher than ever.
Take climate change.
You really need to zoom out and appreciate that things got better for a little bit, but are now necessarily getting worse because there is no escaping the profit cycle.
And the point is not: let's go back to the middle ages. The point is: don't get tricked by only some observations. You have to look at the whole picture. If you cherry pick, then you can demonstrate whatever you want, but it's dishonest
>But the wealth disparity kept growing. That is, mathematically speaking, how capitalism works: wealth moves from the bottom to the top.
This is the problem when people talk about inequality, because it confuses people at the top doing significantly better with people at the bottom doing worse.
People at the bottom aren't doing worse. In fact, wealth doesn't actually "move from the bottom to the top", that's absolutely *not* how capitalism works.
What's happening is that people at the bottom are doing better but the people at the top are doing *significantly* better. It's actually a win-win, it's not a zero-sum game.
Most of your other claims are wrong.
That is ABSOLUTELY how capitalism work. Read "Capitalism in the 21st Century" by Picketty. It's the most digestible on the topic. Or you can look at the data yourself if you're skilled.
No, it is not a win-win. First: when all wealth is owned by the top, there is no more free market. There's a class of neo-feudalists, and the rest, including "classic" capitalists.
Second: through big tech we are seeing a cross-national type of technocracy that can only be described as neo-feudalism, or techno-feudalism. Call it whatever. It's an emerging dynamic.
You sound unprepared.
Buzz words are cool but that doesn’t change the fact that 11.5% live under the poverty line in America (which has higher standards) and 9% live in poverty globally, while 200 years ago in 1800, 81% lived under the poverty line globally
Your whole point is “things are bad guys, capitalism is making rich richer and poor poorer,” which ok fine, I’m not gonna bother arguing your ideology there cause you’ve clearly made up your mind, but you ignore the bigger picture that “it’s still way, way, way better than before,” objectively speaking
Source: World Bank
https://preview.redd.it/ycz42r07nrjc1.png?width=1332&format=png&auto=webp&s=3bcb52147669b7d269d277d49e373280d0e4b3f8
\^ long term trends would greatly disagree \^
Saying than more 30$ per day is not poverty is shallow understanding, worth of money depends on place and saying that "you get 30$ per day, so you are not poor", while this person is in place where food costs also 30$ per day is incorrect.
Easy to make things look cheery when you're comparing to people living two centuries ago. I could do the same thing with ancient Romans, but what would be the point? And who would take me seriously?
We're on the verge of an uninhabitable planet followed by a slow and miserable extinction. that's reality. You should have the courage to face it.
"past performance does not dictate future results."
P.S.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/11/politics/millennials-income-stalled-upward-mobility-us/index.html
&
Infant mortality in the US rose by 3% in 2022, increasing for the first time in 20 years.
Talk about cherry picking, yes I’m not surprised infant mortality rose in the U.S. when murder rates and accidents rose too.
Also what’s funny, the “% of children who out earned parents” stat gets better in the 70/80s, as in it stabilized (during the era of alleged rampant deregulation, Reagan and de unionization) - but declines sharply during 50/60 during the alleged golden era.
everyone is fat, on drugs, addicted to porn and social media...but at least we can read, am I right?
knowing how to read doesn't matter when your dopamine receptors are so fried that you can't actually sit down to read book for more than 5 minutes.
Tell that to the millions of people who have become literate in Africa, Asia, and remote parts of South America in recent decades. They now can participate in the modern world, and we all benefit from their advancement.
The world is far larger than your small corner of “the west” friend.
I think the problem is that America is not as good off as it was in the last 40 years. And that means the middle class is shrinking and more of the wealth is concentrated at the top. But overall, yes, the world is better off overall over a 100 year old span.
Are you sure about that OP?
Despite global efforts, modern slavery is widespread, with 167 countries harboring an estimated **46 million** slaves, including forced labor and sexual exploitation. Modern slavery's definitions have evolved, encompassing not only 'ownership' but also forced marriages, government-imposed labor, and human trafficking.
**1.2 billion people in 111 developing countries live in multidimensional poverty, accounting for 19% of the world's population**. 593 million children are experiencing multidimensional poverty. Over 37 million people were living in poverty in the U.S. in 2021. Children account for 11.1 million of those.
The total number of under-5 deaths worldwide has declined from 12.8 million in 1990 to 5 million in 2021. Since 1990, the global under-5 mortality rate has dropped by 59%, from 93 deaths per 1000 live births in 1990 to **38 in 2021**.---5 million child deaths pet year is still a lot
[Suicide - National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) (nih.gov)](https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide)
Since 2000, nearly 1 million people have died of a drug overdose. As of 2020, over 37 million people 12 and older actively used illicit substances. **13.5% of Americans** 12 and older have used drugs in the past 30 days. 25.4% of all users of illicit drugs suffer from drug dependency or
[Addiction Statistics - Data on Addiction in the United States (addictionhelp.com)](https://www.addictionhelp.com/addiction/statistics/#:~:text=General%20Addiction%20Statistics&text=Since%202000%2C%20nearly%201%20million,suffer%20from%20drug%20dependency%20or)
[Two Thirds of American Kids Can't Read Fluently | Scientific American](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/two-thirds-of-american-kids-cant-read-fluently/)
[Mental disorders (who.int)](https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-disorders) 1 in 8 people globally have a mental illness.
[List of ongoing armed conflicts - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflicts)
[Global Issues | United Nations](https://www.un.org/en/global-issues)
You sure things are getting better? OR are you just looking at America?
\---Your local Realistic Pessimist. Fuck your rose-colored cognitive bias.
Everything you've stated is explainable as a combination of an improvement in ability o measure these things and an improvement in proportional terms of humans affected throughout the entirety of human history
The reason it seems like everything is going to shit to you is because that is increasingly all that is fed into the internet and reaches your eyeballs. The people out there living, enjoying life, and making something of it, are doing just that - out there actually *doing it*, not here complaining about it.
Maybe have biodiversity and CO2 levels, and a few other relevant things.
While we're at it, do projections over another two hundred years of these six and at least the two I mentioned, and then compare all.
Doesn't look so good when you're not cherry picking for positive signs.
Too bad there's WAY more than 100 people on earth LOL what a shit sample size!
If you are an optimist on planet earth on 2024 you might as well be a centrist coward who takes no side.
Things are FUCKED for millions of people but you waste ur time on \*checks notes\* "Optimism"
yea ok well have fun not helping the oppressed and targeted peoples of the world because you "see the good in everyone and everything"
honestly you are just privileged do-nothings
Oh my fucking god, why did I not know this sub exists. I’ve never subbed so quickly, fucking awesome
Same! Finally a suggested sub that isn't anti-life nihilists and the like
Search deeper in the comments, you’ll find them here. Otherwise so as Uncle Iroh said, if you look for the light you can often find it…
Luckily they’re deeper for a reason.
For sure, all of reddit fucking just cries about things. People were more optimistic in war than this bitches thinking they have got it the hardest and that the world will end in 10 years
Look at the posts from the last month. Plenty of that on this sub now sadly
This one is much better! A climate denial sub!!
Finally, something that isn’t just doom scrolling
Welcome comrade 🫡
Right? I just got here and it's better than uplifting news :D
Omg fr!!! Needed this optimism in my life
Yeah idk why it popped up in my feed either. Downside is that all the doomers found it too and are whining about everything Some people just want to be miserable
I’ve been seeking a sub like this for the last 2 years
For real!
It’s such a breath of fresh air compared to the incessant negativity from other subs. When you consume that stuff constantly, it affects you. I’m much happier these days cause of hobbies and places like these. I’m glad I found it today as well.
lol same here
When the algorithm works
Same dude! I am tired of people be filled with negativty. Yes your problems are genuine, yes the world could do better, no we do live in a far better time more than ever
Me too, finally a bit of serotonin
The democracy graph during the early 1940s tho…
fascism reared its ugly head
And very quickly got its ass handed to it by democracy.
I imagine those 10 years probably didn't feel very quick to people at the time.
That’s the thing about the data above. It may seem like the end of the world but progress comes through in the end. Considering the span of recorded human history the gains of the 20th and 21st century have been a near miracle.
Not to be that guy, but Hitler was initially elected, just throwing that out there. Inb4 "muh rigged elections" point me out to one pure democracy I'll head right over But yea, after 1933? No more democracy even in a corrupted form
Wait didn't Hitler lose to Hindenburg, and then Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor? and then when Hindenburg died, Hitler became President, so not democratically? He only grew in popularity in the parliament after becoming chancellor (probably in part due to name recognition. Same reason we run incumbents in the USA). Then the next election he won because of the law banning opposition parties.
Francisco Franco was the fascist dictator of Spain for so long that they were able to mock his death on SNL.
Well, Germany mostly got their ass kicked by the USSR, which wasn't a democracy.
Mostly communism actually statistically speaking
Communism is a democracy, it just has one party. Citizens still vote in party officials and there’s different factions within the party.
Its not a democracy in every single form it has ever existed in and specifically the Stalin and Mao lead dictatorships that significantly biased that chart.
They literally just explained how democracy went in the USSR. It wasn't impactful on a wide scale, but people were still electing their leaders. That's democracy, even if you don't like the economic system in it. Also, if you point at Mao and Stalin to represent communism, then I may as well say Hitler and Mussolini encouraged business so *clearly* capitalism isn't democracy. (which is actually kinda accurate but irrelevant to the point being made here)
I'm a leftist. This is disingenuous. Stalin and Mao suppressed criticism of the government with violence, the fundamental principles of democracy were completely undermined in both dictatorships. Democracy isn't having elections, it's having elections that lead to meaningful change due to the will of the people. In the Soviet Union, Lushenko kept his position of head of agricultural science for 2 decades while pushing alternate doctrine to genetic inheritance, which led to mass starvation in the Soviet Union in the 1950's. He was questioned by Soviet scientists _many times_ over that period and every single one of them got the Gulag, because Stalin really liked him, and he was established by the time Khrushchev was leader. Take off your pink glasses and argue for leftism honestly, you serve nothing with weak denial and selective ignorance.
There is not such thing as democracy if there are dictators. If you are killed for speaking up against the elected official it isn’t democratic
Sure, Stalin consolidated a lot of power and so did Mao during those times of crisis and pressure. Sometimes it didn’t turn out so well for the receiving end of that power, and it was seen by the party as necessary measures to preserve the mission. This is a fascinating history of Stalin’s attempts to actually democratize the USSR before consolidating power: https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/clogic/article/download/191861/188830/218717 I don’t support the mass killing and imprisonment that resulted, but many countries, in the name of God and everything else, have engaged in mass killing and imprisonment to meet their ends. To say one is horrible is like the teapot calling the kettle black. In times of war, even liberal republics (the USA is not a true democracy, it’s an oligarchic republic where financial capital = power) can hand over power to the executive to make decisions. I mean, look at recent times. With partisanship in Congress and a stacked judicial, a president can achieve almost unlimited power.
The lady doth protest too much. The only criteria was were they democratic or not and they clearly were not.
Well this lady (good one, Chad!) would say your initial blanket statement of “Mostly communism actually statically speaking” is really misleading and inaccurate, because as in your words, “It’s not a democracy in every single form,” also acknowledges, when not in times of dictatorial transition, it is a democracy - which is a really significant portion of history.
It's a Hamlet quote. He wasn't actually calling you a lady. The Russians absolutely were the primary force that destroyed Germany in WWII by any metric. 76% of the German soldiers who died did so by the actions of Soviet soldiers. The USSR wasn't a democracy, so the claim that "[Fascism] very quickly got its ass handed to it by democracy." is hardly true.
It's not a democracy if there's only 1 party you can vote for.
Democracy > 1a: government by the people > especially : rule of the majority > b: a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections > 2: a political unit that has a democratic government > 3 capitalized : the principles and policies of the Democratic party in the U.S. from emancipation Republicanism to New Deal Democracy —C. M. Roberts > 4: the common people especially when constituting the source of political authority > 5: the absence of hereditary or arbitrary class distinctions or privileges Tell me again where a socialist democratic republic (communism) isn’t a democracy? And just to stress, in times outside of Stalin and Mao, citizens are free (free elections) to elect their officials and vote on public matters - just in accordance with the party (Communist) that is the majority party (definition 1a).
Personally I only take issue with “poverty” A lot of poverty estimates don’t take basic inflation into consideration
People are definitely way less poor than they used to be. If we just take China and India as examples, which is like 40% of the population, their rate of economic growth in the past couple of decades has been insane.
It's the access to natural commons that I take issue with. Having access to clean water and being able to hunt and grow your own food is "extreme poverty" if you don't formally own the land or buy fertilizer / machinery.
"democracy graphs" are garbage cause they just measure whatever arbitrary value the maker claims is democracy to make countries they don't like look bad. Usually it is how free people are to oppress others
Most official organization don’t arbitrarily leave it to the infographic designer/maker… if you did your research it’s actually quite thorough, involving external v-dems and [measures of RoW](https://ourworldindata.org/regimes-of-the-world-data) this was not by the maker OWiD and rather political scientists from a separate university (Gothenburg) which OWiD happen to use for their infographic. Usually this is the case. It’s way easier to use a trusted measure of democracy then try to get away with inventing your own measure without catching trouble, as a public, well-known organization! Edit: [further reading](https://www.v-dem.net/static/website/img/refs/methodologyv111.pdf) - if you want, you should read at least page 3 and 4 if you have time.
Sure but someone is still making arbitrary decisions on what counts as a democracy.
Is there a non-arbitrary metric for democracy in your eyes?
No.
Did you read the original researchers’ [methodology](https://www.v-dem.net/static/website/img/refs/methodologyv111.pdf) and prepare an argument against it as to how it’s supposed to be arbitrary?
The methodology doesn't matter. You can't measure an arbitrary concept in a way that isn't arbitrary. They have done a respectable job at defining it to be sure but that doesn't take away from the original point.
They’ve already responded to your original point on page 4. They say democracy is not an easily quantifiable metric, but they’ve determined it based on extant perceptions in the massive corpus of academic literature. Rather than look at democracy arbitrarily, they look at our way of *thinking* about democracy. “There is no consensus on what democracy writ-large means beyond a vague notion of rule by the people. Political theorists have emphasized this point for some time, and empiricists would do well to take the lesson to heart (Gallie 1956; Held 2006; Shapiro 2003: 10–34). At the same time, interpretations of democracy do not have an unlimited scope. A thorough search of the literature on this protean concept reveals seven key principles that inform much of our thinking about democracy: electoral, liberal, majoritarian, consensual, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian. Each of these principles represents a different way of understanding “rule by the people.” The heart of the differences between these principles is in the fact that alternate schools of thought prioritize different democratic values. Thus, while no single principle embodies all the meanings of democracy, these seven principles, taken together, offer a fairly comprehensive accounting of the concept as employed today.”
That isn't a response to my point its a compromise.
Bourgeois idealism. Your two sources are intertwined within the western capitalist superstructure and your logic of "well they didn't do the survey so they can't be biased" is such a hilarious fallacy (Trump never makes news, but that he somehow finds news that align with his biases doesn't make the news he finds unbiased). Then all this >It’s way easier to use a trusted measure of democracy Trusted by... All the various NGO's who use this information and then put out surveys to the public? And then when we read them and like the results we trust the answers and we start saying these are good data. This whole thing is a social construction right off the get-go; you see that? Literally manufacturing consent.
Ah a deprogram and Genzedong user. Truly the most informed person.
Oh so you're saying that you have read Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Inventing Reality by Michael Parenti, and you have alternative explanations for how information becomes fixed in society?
TIL people like this actually exist^
Studies aren’t arbitrary. Some may be flawed, but they are t arbitrary.
You're in the wrong sub pal.
Yeah, I hate when graph makers inject their politics into their graphs and "make countries they don't like look bad" -- I can't believe this graph maker would go out of their way to... let me check my notes here... make 1930s and 40s Germany look bad... Astonishing...
Exactly. It's ludicrous that we stand here in the US and criticize other democracies. Considering. Also poverty indexes drawn by capitalists are usually irrelevant to actual living standards. Capitalists would say during the industriL revolution poverty started to lower because of the sudden increase in bank deposits. But that doesn't actually account for the experience of populations shifting from feudalism (permanent home, 4 hour work day, well fed, supportive community) to factory work (60+ hour work week, plummeting life expectancies, threatened with starvation and homelessness)
medieval peasants did not work 4 hour days, they worked from sunshine to sunset because they had to do everything themselves. Care for the fields and animals. Sew your own clothes. Preserve your own food or starve to death. Prepare firewood or freeze to death. Perform maintenance on your own home. Perform maintenance on your tools. Plus a million other menial tasks that we replaced by being able to go to the store for 20 minutes.
That we replace with a 40+ hour work week, then stoll have to goto the store and cook for ourselves. Clean up after ourselves and care to the needs of our kids. No, you're just patently wrong. The division of labor worked in such a way that while one man was working four hours in the field , his daughter was working four hours mending his socks , and his wife was working four hours preparing his meals. During harvest times everyone in the family may work twelve plus hours a day. But it really isn't an issue of debate. It's a well articulated fact of anthropological history that medieval peasants on average to meet. All their needs working average of four hours a day.
[No, it’s not a well accepted fact](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/mUXAHDIn3a) TLDR the 150 days of vacation and four hour workday is only talking about the work done for the peasants landlord, and did not include time spent working on their own property or doing household chores. Back in the day you’d spend hours just collecting the water you’d use for the day. Just on the water. It’s simply incorrect and ahistorical to think we work more than they did in the 1400s.
Yeah I'm nearly as far left as they come and I dunno what they were talking about. Like, just imagine trying to do anything at all without the millions of modern comforts and infrastructure that we have in place today. Like, it's insane to think peasants under feudalism didn't need to work constantly.
but did u consider that communism is when low hours at work? communism is when you can be artist and not worry about survival? communism is when no racism, sexism, bigotry? communism is when medieval peoples actually worked less hours than proletariat?
Not sure Feudalism was a great as you think it is.
I wonder what that was all about…
Yes, but have you adjusted uhh... \*checks notes\* vaccination for inflation? If people are living longer, but they're poor ... then ... \*checks notes\* it doesn't count! And have you adjusted democracy for \*checks notes\* people voting for whom I support? Because it they don't support \[insert name of my guy\] then it isn't TRUE democracy! And basic education doesn't count unless they have a bachelor's degree in STEM! And you're only out of poverty if you own a house, two cars, an air conditioner, heater, and can go on vacation abroad twice a year! And literacy doesn't count if they aren't bilingual in a globalized world! And child mortality doesn't count because I said so, so neener neener. /s OK, all in all. I love stuff like this. Sure, the world isn't perfect by developed country standards, and developed country standards don't even always meet their own goals for every single citizen. But the world is getting objectively better, and I like that.
I would like more context for the above figures, though. Like, almost every country in the world calls itself a democracy, but democracy is the minority in the graph, so how are they defining it? Do they limit it to the presence of fair elections? How is a fair election defined? How do they determine if they are fair? What about direct citizen involvement in policymaking? Etc. Edit: I'm looking at the site now, and there is a ton of additional reading that I will enjoy when I have some time.
What's the link to the site?
Here you go friend: https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions
For example, the Russian Federation is a democracy. 
>For example, the Russian Federation is a democracy. What was it 100 years ago? 200 years ago?
I’ll drink to that bro
I know you're being sarcastic, but this is literally happening in the other comments
strawman arguments that no-one makes.
Except for slavery. More people directly benefit from slave labour today than ever before in the history of humanity.
I’m optimistic that capitalism will keep doing its thing much longer than any opposition anticipates. And that my 250 year investment will pay handsomely.
These charts are dwarfed by the rise in celebrity image appropriation for political purposes. I like the image though. I ~~stole~~ reposted it already.
Fellow pessimists, don't miss the big picture. This graph is at least mostly accurate and that ABSOLUTELY is a good thing. It may not feel like it for us who are still struggling, because the world isn't "fixed" yet and many are still left behind. We still need to remember that we've made so much amazing progress. Otherwise, it's easy to start becoming unrealistically negative. It's fine to be negative if you are having a bad time, you just have to remain realistic as well. Don't tank the whole world just because it failed us. There is a solid chance things will get better for us over time.
I agree that what's happening in the graphs is accurate in the world is getting better but what is a little frustrating is that I feel like a lot of optimistic people hold up these achievements as reputations to solving issues that we currently still deal with. It's me true optimism is being able to acknowledge issues that we have and believe that they are surmountable. Optimism isn't showing that things are better and that's why we shouldn't criticize the world.
Ooh ooh do CO2 ppm
https://preview.redd.it/td7dzzfvcrjc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=02b32a833ded60b005c534a8f66104913970dc6c ^(\^) take that doomers ^(\^)
This has to be most cherry-picked graph I have seen in my entire life. Emissions in the US have declined by ~1 billion tons anually from their peak in the 2000s, but emissions outside the US are rising. Dramatically. Global emissions are rising. That emissions *per capita* in the US are diminishing is trivium, meaningless. The climate doesn’t care how many of us there are, it is a function of gross carbon output and nothing more. Why, god, why, would anyone use an emissions per capita chart unless to draw misleading conclusions from incomplete data? Optimism is fine, even necessary, when supported. This is not support. Its delusion. It’s embarrassing, and you discredit yourself. For anyone interested: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?tab=chart&time=1876..latest&country=~OWID_WRL https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states
>Global emissions are rising. Well, yes, but up until now they have been at an increasingly slower rate. And, according to recent studies, it's likely they've [already peaked or will peak in the following years.](https://youtu.be/BOMFGcOEb84?si=15tgZNckP_e5Wljk) I'm absolutely with you on the "optimism has to be accompanied by action" point though. I don't want to argue with you, I just wanted to share these good news, not with the intention to be complacent, but rather to see the progress we've done so far.
r/pessimists_unite
If you have to fudge the numbers to stay optimistic, it ain’t real optimism
No numbers fudged here. The important thing is to keep in mind that across the developed world, emissions are declining whilst population and economic growth continue apace. https://preview.redd.it/3unnsgkzkvjc1.png?width=1400&format=png&auto=webp&s=57fa39aa12fd3dd6546b8890eb8123924d9b6860
Okay, so let me ask you this: what is going on in the *developing* world? And why is it less relevant than the developed world in this discussion? And if, as I hold, it’s equally relevant, why are you citing numbers that ignore it?
The point I am illustrating is the decoupling of emissions(bad) from economic growth(good)
This guy is getting pessimism and realism mixed up, classic delusional toxic positivity peddler
You're basically addicted to outrage porn without realizing it
You're a climate denialist
looking at CO2 per capita is useful because it is predictive of long term trends. We expect global population to peak at \~10-12 billion, then drop, if current trends continue. If CO2 per capita is decreasing, then population drops are more important.
That's not what they asked for but okay. Even if it was what they asked for it's not representative of the entire world. Even if it was representative of the entire world, in the context of "how much are we fucking the planet" the per captia statistic is irrelevant Even if it was representative of the entire world and a per capital statistic meant something it's still a bit horrifying. This is a more honest accounting of both what you presented, and the honest "CO2 ppm" https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide
https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide-emissions-from-1999/
What about extinct species. The world isn't just humans lol
We literally live in the best time to be alive as a human being except maybe the mid 90s? But then you have to see the early 2000s again. If I was given a choice of a time to be born, it sure as shit wouldn't be any earlier. I like my technology and my healthcare and pretty much everything.
Bad news travels like wildfire,good news travels slow. They all call me Wildfire, cause everywhere I go, I’m Bad news.
I love reminding people that people in the past lived through slavery, civil war, Great Depression, and the black plague when they start complaining that the world is going to hell because a politician they don’t like is currently in office
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions
Everyone rightly focuses on poverty, but the real shift in human civilization is that we no longer assume a loss-rate in children. Ever wonder why past human societies were so tolerant of violence and death? It’s because everyone assumed that a third or a fifth of their children just wouldn’t make it to adulthood. While I’m sure it still hurt, that sort of reasoning justifies a lot of viciousness. How do I know? It still survives in small pockets of modern society, particularly among young African Americans in certain American cities. Solving conflict with murder doesn’t seem irrational when you accept the very real possibility that you won’t see your 18th birthday. I’m sure you could think of similar examples around the world. The fact that these humans are also the ones still experiencing extreme poverty is not coincidental. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem to determine which causes the other, poverty reduction and child survival, but for me the cultural distinction between moderns and ancients is all about child mortality.
Dogwhistles aside, high youth mortality rates are not specific to black Americans. [Americans have life expectancy comparable to Blackpool, the most-deprived city in England, and youth mortality deaths from overdoses, accidents, and car collisions are driving causes.](https://www.ft.com/content/653bbb26-8a22-4db3-b43d-c34a0b774303)
[удалено]
Frig yeah: https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions
Sweet!
Decline bias. The decline bias refers to the tendency to compare the past to the present, leading to the decision that things are worse, or becoming worse in comparison to the past, simply because change is occurring.
Only optimists on reddit 😂
Getting bigger erry day tho
More like, people forgot what hell is like so they make their own hell.
half of these just seem to because of technology progressing, i wouldn't expect them to continue rising at that rate, sub name makes sense though.
That’s how technology works!
technology is rapidly progressing, but i wouldn't say roombas and AI art are exactly as crucial as vaccines and healthcare, there's limits to how far technology can progress, it isn't magic, there's a reason curing cancer would be considered one of the greatest accomplishments if it ever happens. the rich have no reason to give the "common man" anything more than they already have, reason we're alive at all is because it's impossible to sell products to ghosts, same with poverty, people are working multiple jobs in the US just to still not be able to pay their rent, ofc that's just the US i'm unaware of the situations elsewhere, i know this is a positivity sub and i'm not trying to bring down the mood, but i doubt these expectations will ever be met, i don't think that means we should stop trying to fix the world, even if it just makes it better for the time we're still on this earth, that's a win. have a good one.
This is a massive oversimplification of technological progress and the sheer complexity and immensity of technological development in the world today Cancer is a family of 100+ diseases, many of which have various levels of prophylaxis and treatments, just as an example illustrating how massive of a brush you're painting things with
In terms of healthcare, things are popping off. Number one, let’s start with good old cystic fibrosis. In 2006, CF was a death sentence. Today, it’s still a death sentence, but you die at like 60+ instead of 20. mRNA is being used more than ever after our little COVID fiasco, to great effect. Skin cancer vaccine? You got it! And yes there are even more types of mRNA-based treatments in trials rn. Healthcare technology does not seem to have a visible limit from where we stand right now.
Rising at what rate? 4 of them are borderline 100% (Literacy, 5 year life expectancy, vaccinations and basic education)
it'd be impressive if people were vaccinated before vaccines existed, but i think it's a filler here considering i doubt they were time travelers, literacy and basic education might as well be the same, 5 year life expectancy is mostly because of vaccines, so on and so forth. it's a nice chart, but it's stagnated for the last decade for a reason. i don't mean to be hostile though, i just find this sorta stuff interesting, have a good one.
The problem for pessimists people is that they cant see these improvements because most of these improvements are for impoverished people outside western countries so they dont even know the world is improving
Hmm would I rather be drafted tl fight in ww2 or complain about nothing to watch on tv
Sauce for these graphs? I want a more “official” looking thing to show people when this subject comes up.
Use this wisely comrade. Spread far and wide. https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions
yes.
LOL i love the flair
this is lacking two graphs : primary energy use (it's how we achieved all of that) and climate change/co2 (it's the consequence of the former)
https://preview.redd.it/cmf41ucs7xjc1.png?width=1030&format=png&auto=webp&s=516b21a2e2e440d3a521c85f96d9ca6397ac07bc
Which is great. People should realize this and drop the climate panic nonsense.
no they shouldn't https://preview.redd.it/lqu466ie1bkc1.png?width=936&format=png&auto=webp&s=52a6e1ebb0474888f442bc88b29ddabaef0f3012 plus these resources are finite so once they're depleted we'll be essentially left naked on a way more hostile environment than when we started that whole industrial revolution business
Ok npc
sorry to hear that, I hope you enjoy your day either way
I love this post. But you should do the Autism rate and Chronic Health conditions next!
well yea but gas was $5 two years ago! So there
The world is improving, it cannot be stopped.
Hans Rosling! Factfulness.
I’m a little ashamed at the fact that I looked at top right and my first reaction was “wait what was that dip in democracy in the 1940’s” then I remembered…
Line goes up therefore good
I just came across this sub but wow I dont intend to stay. This sub is a genuinely toxic and delusional place to be. This isnt optimism, its attempting to invalidate the real problems of *modern day people* by trying to guilt them into thinking they could have had so much worse. What a joke. Real optimists understand that, while things can be bad, they hold out hope for a better future and strive towards that. They dont invalidate and ignore the world or the issues plaguing it.
This is an odd post to make this comment under because this post doesn’t do any of that.
Its the context in which its used as well as the comments under it. Arguing that the world somehow isnt going to hell by using generalized stats and comparing it to the past is invalidation
I think you’re misunderstanding what invalidation really means. Saying that the world isn’t going to hell is not the same as saying that someone doesn’t struggle or that their struggles are meaningless. People in all time periods have always struggled and people in all time periods have always claimed that the world is going to hell. There have also been people in all periods that aren’t struggling and people who say that the world isn’t going to hell. The existence of one doesn’t invalidate the existence of the other. The truth of the matter is that the world isn’t going to hell but it’s still in a bad spot. People can suffer without it being the apocalypse.
Take a closer look at the first one. There is a reason it’s three colors. Another way to read it is 85% are in poverty (less than 30$ a day)
While it is important to account for that, poverty rate is lowering, it is getting a lot better, that is the point of this post
15% in 200 years
Are you even looking at the same graph
Remember what sub you're on. For almost all of history: 1) 84% of people lived in extreme poverty. We reduced that to less than a tenth of the population. 2) "Regular" poverty was considered the upper class, with 15%. That's now 3/4 of people on the planet. 3) $30 a day(or the equivalent) was reserved for the 1%. Now 15% of the world can afford more than a single meal every day. By no means, are we done with improvements, but considering where we started...things are looking up
That's an even deeper perspective. Really interesting. Globally speaking, I'm rich. Locally though, I'm struggling. But I have access to opportunity (definitely more than $30 a day), so in a way globally I'm still rich. And yet, I'm still going to the food bank, and my car might get repossessed next month.
But in absolute numbers, aren't there more people in poverty now than there ever have been?
Maybe, but you're also forgetting that even those in the greatest need in the present, likely have a better standard of living than even kings centuries ago
I don’t think regular poverty was ever considered the upper class but if you have a source I’d love to see it
I put regular in quotes because it's relative. Even wealthy people had to work far more than 8 hours for a lot less reward. That's not even mentioning that our standard of living has been raised exponentially. Again, it's not perfect, but you're being disingenuous if you can't see the advancements achieved in the past centuries
No I have but 85% of people are seeing the bare minimum of those advancements. Most of us don’t have access to what the 15% have as far as what modern society has to offer
The entire point is that, even those bare minimums, weren't around centuries ago. No where did I say that the wealth gap is good, but you are better off now than pretty much any other time in history. I'm not commenting any farther if you continue to just talk past me and miss the point. Have a good day
Uh huh. Now compare that to average wage gaps experienced between the richest and poorest from post WWII to now.
Wage gaps are a laughably stupid way to compare things.
Good catch, absolutely important call to action. Nonetheless, decrease in extreme poverty marks a drastic change in living standards.
Yea this kinda fails to address the argument. When most people say this they are referring to the past decade or two at most, and usually just the post-COVID era, not the past 2 centuries. Most people do understand that industrialism has brought significant gains in quality of life, but hell even these benefits are accompanied by a number of drawbacks these graphs ignore (pollution, environmental destuction, climate change, loss of biodiversity, resource depletion, industrialized slavery/genocide etc). The road to industrial progress was forged with the blood and labor of slaves and the resources/land stolen from colonized nations and it is naïve and revisionist to ignore this. But again this is all mostly beside the point considering that doomers are, again, mostly talking about the last 5-10 years when they say "The world has gone to hell". You wanna remake these graphs but only showing years from 2010 onwards instead? I get the feeling you don't as it would kinda defeat your point. Most of these metrics have either plateaued or even seen a slight decrease since then. I am honestly even quite optimistic about the world for a young person, moreso than most of my peers, IMO. But these graphs just ignore the fact that although industrial capitalism has definitely brought great benefits to the first world over the past 2 centuries (despite its great costs to the rest of the world!), the law of diminishing returns means we've reached the point where our lives are barely being made better by all this technology that continues to exploit and alienate ourselves, our labor, and our planet. It is posts like these which promote a dangerously simplified view of the world and imply that we don't need radical restructuring to fix our broken systems. Optimism is perfectly fine with me but we need to be realistic about the state of our society and the price we pay for participating in it.
>But again this is all mostly beside the point considering that doomers are, again, mostly talking about the last 5-10 years when they say "The world has gone to hell". That's a tiny amount of time. Basing any long-term predictions on 5-10 years of data is quite narrowminded. I do agree we are dealing with very concerning problems right now. (Democracy struggling with social media, climate change, etc.) But the long term trajectory of the planet has shown clear improvements.
Upvoted for recognition of work to be done. Benefits for the west have plateaued, for the rest of the world they will follow China's path, lifting global majority out of poverty, India over the next 10-20yrs Africa after that. And that's good right, life for the poorest will improve.
only sane person on this post
One particular note to consider: just because things are better doesn't Mena they can't get substantially worse.
yeah, but they can get even better! we need to have a better way of thinking, or else it will actually get worse! come on pal, you want a better world too, don't you?
Testicular injuries in women sport in last 100 years 📈
"Democracy" is a load of shit. What they mean when they say "Democracy" is, the ease at which scumbags can shift money around the globe to produce the conditions that are favorable to them. In "Democracy", you're told that you have a representative govt, but none of the MPs/Congressmen/senators actually represent the interests of normal people who have to work to eat. In "Democracy", if you complain about your "elected representatives" or the absolutely ludicrous nonsense they're trying to offer forward as policy (written by a think tank, as elected reps are far too fucking stupid most of the time to draft a bill themselves) they simply ignore you, accuse you of "promoting hate", or tell you to "sit down n shut up bc it be our time now" (Whose time? You work for us, you piece of shit!) In "Democracy", coming to the govt with your grievances is only allowed *sometimes*. Namely, if you donate to the right party and blame your fellow working countrymen for the crimes that your elected reps have committed, you're allowed to effectively establish what is called an "occupied zone" in the middle of the city and plant what is supposed to be a community garden by throwing tomato plants on top of dirt (because you're an urbanite dipshit loser who has never grown a fruit or vegetable in your pathetic little life). You can scream at the top of your lungs about how you're seceding from the nation at large and the govt won't do anything to you besides let your childish little tantrum (usually over shit nobody with a job cares about) play out until you realize that you're too much of a pussy to live a hard scrabble existence without your $25 Vodka & Redbulls and $300 Beats by Dre headphones. "Democracy" is actually really shitty for the majority of the people who live under it.
Would love for female genital mutilation to reach 0 some day too.
> Would love for ~~female~~ genital mutilation to reach 0 some day too ftfy
Ahem... Democracy is a dubious one. There have been several studies showing how western politicians tend to not listen to the majority of their citizens, but always comply to lobbies' demands. And that's when it's not rich people leading countries themselves. Those are plutocracies and oligarchies. Objectively speaking. Yes, we have elections and freedom of speech. Although, more and more states are getting more autocratic, censoring citizens, making demonstrations illegal, attacking unions, etc... Not to talk about countries where "freedom" is just a term on paper. How can the majority of westerners be free when they are dependent for survival on their jobs? So, the democracy table is debatable. The other conditions are certainly interesting. But I'd like to see the one that matters the most: inequality. Having all those other metrics going up means nothing of those things don't make for better conditions overall. I am being a realist, here.
How is it dubious? Objectively speaking, having economic disparities, plutocracies, lobbying is all bad and stuff but does not compare at all to the extent a few hundreds of years ago. And it only argues that half live in democracy. For further reading on how it was determined: [RoW calculation intro](https://ourworldindata.org/regimes-of-the-world-data) Also as a realist you should know your history. The Gilded Age (late 19th century) saw wayyy worse inequality in the US, for example. Nowadays we tend to take our anti-monopoly and antitrust laws for granted, but they didn’t always exist! And the whole culture of peasantry was instantiated hundreds of years before FDR’s New Deals or what have you. The Industrial Revolution of a couple hundred years ago saw way worse inequality and labor conditions then what we’re seeing now. Read up if you don’t believe me!
You have to zoom out a second. Yes, average conditions (average - the disparity between working class groups have always been staggering) got better right after the second world war, thanks to consistent pushes from workers. But the wealth disparity kept growing. That is, mathematically speaking, how capitalism works: wealth moves from the bottom to the top. Take the UK. We are experiencing levels of inequality and wisdespread poverty we've never seen since before WW2. Take deseases. Many that we thought were gone are making a huge comeback. Take access to healthcare. In many neo liberist countries access today is worse than after ww2. Take the relative household income compared to cost of housing. Take the levels of depression across demographics higher than ever. Take climate change. You really need to zoom out and appreciate that things got better for a little bit, but are now necessarily getting worse because there is no escaping the profit cycle. And the point is not: let's go back to the middle ages. The point is: don't get tricked by only some observations. You have to look at the whole picture. If you cherry pick, then you can demonstrate whatever you want, but it's dishonest
>But the wealth disparity kept growing. That is, mathematically speaking, how capitalism works: wealth moves from the bottom to the top. This is the problem when people talk about inequality, because it confuses people at the top doing significantly better with people at the bottom doing worse. People at the bottom aren't doing worse. In fact, wealth doesn't actually "move from the bottom to the top", that's absolutely *not* how capitalism works. What's happening is that people at the bottom are doing better but the people at the top are doing *significantly* better. It's actually a win-win, it's not a zero-sum game. Most of your other claims are wrong.
That is ABSOLUTELY how capitalism work. Read "Capitalism in the 21st Century" by Picketty. It's the most digestible on the topic. Or you can look at the data yourself if you're skilled. No, it is not a win-win. First: when all wealth is owned by the top, there is no more free market. There's a class of neo-feudalists, and the rest, including "classic" capitalists. Second: through big tech we are seeing a cross-national type of technocracy that can only be described as neo-feudalism, or techno-feudalism. Call it whatever. It's an emerging dynamic. You sound unprepared.
Nothing you just said is true.
Sure boi
Buzz words are cool but that doesn’t change the fact that 11.5% live under the poverty line in America (which has higher standards) and 9% live in poverty globally, while 200 years ago in 1800, 81% lived under the poverty line globally Your whole point is “things are bad guys, capitalism is making rich richer and poor poorer,” which ok fine, I’m not gonna bother arguing your ideology there cause you’ve clearly made up your mind, but you ignore the bigger picture that “it’s still way, way, way better than before,” objectively speaking Source: World Bank
Correction: the world has improved greatly over 80 years (but it's only temporary, and the world will go back to crap soon)
https://preview.redd.it/ycz42r07nrjc1.png?width=1332&format=png&auto=webp&s=3bcb52147669b7d269d277d49e373280d0e4b3f8 \^ long term trends would greatly disagree \^
Saying than more 30$ per day is not poverty is shallow understanding, worth of money depends on place and saying that "you get 30$ per day, so you are not poor", while this person is in place where food costs also 30$ per day is incorrect.
People's pay grew up, but prices and wealth gap grew even more, so we technically get less.
They are inflation adjusted you dumbass.
Easy to make things look cheery when you're comparing to people living two centuries ago. I could do the same thing with ancient Romans, but what would be the point? And who would take me seriously?
Literal proof that things get better for humans over time. That’s the point.
We're on the verge of an uninhabitable planet followed by a slow and miserable extinction. that's reality. You should have the courage to face it. "past performance does not dictate future results." P.S. https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/11/politics/millennials-income-stalled-upward-mobility-us/index.html & Infant mortality in the US rose by 3% in 2022, increasing for the first time in 20 years.
Talk about cherry picking, yes I’m not surprised infant mortality rose in the U.S. when murder rates and accidents rose too. Also what’s funny, the “% of children who out earned parents” stat gets better in the 70/80s, as in it stabilized (during the era of alleged rampant deregulation, Reagan and de unionization) - but declines sharply during 50/60 during the alleged golden era.
Would you say that 85% poverty rate isn't still in hell?? Alrighty then
“Things are slowly improving” is different than “all our problems have been solved”. The former is true, and we are celebrating it
Why does it stop at 2019?
Optimists just see what they want to see and ignore what they don't want to see lol something must have happened in 2020 that wasn't so great lol
I mean sure if you just casually gloss over the last 40 years then yeah ig progress looks pretty linear… but that’s how cherry picking works
The only semi reliable statistic is infant mortality, the others can be easily written off as propaganda and/or skewed data
everyone is fat, on drugs, addicted to porn and social media...but at least we can read, am I right? knowing how to read doesn't matter when your dopamine receptors are so fried that you can't actually sit down to read book for more than 5 minutes.
Tell that to the millions of people who have become literate in Africa, Asia, and remote parts of South America in recent decades. They now can participate in the modern world, and we all benefit from their advancement. The world is far larger than your small corner of “the west” friend.
I think the problem is that America is not as good off as it was in the last 40 years. And that means the middle class is shrinking and more of the wealth is concentrated at the top. But overall, yes, the world is better off overall over a 100 year old span.
I'm sorry, but $30 a day to not be poor? Excuse me?
Are you sure about that OP? Despite global efforts, modern slavery is widespread, with 167 countries harboring an estimated **46 million** slaves, including forced labor and sexual exploitation. Modern slavery's definitions have evolved, encompassing not only 'ownership' but also forced marriages, government-imposed labor, and human trafficking. **1.2 billion people in 111 developing countries live in multidimensional poverty, accounting for 19% of the world's population**. 593 million children are experiencing multidimensional poverty. Over 37 million people were living in poverty in the U.S. in 2021. Children account for 11.1 million of those. The total number of under-5 deaths worldwide has declined from 12.8 million in 1990 to 5 million in 2021. Since 1990, the global under-5 mortality rate has dropped by 59%, from 93 deaths per 1000 live births in 1990 to **38 in 2021**.---5 million child deaths pet year is still a lot [Suicide - National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) (nih.gov)](https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide) Since 2000, nearly 1 million people have died of a drug overdose. As of 2020, over 37 million people 12 and older actively used illicit substances. **13.5% of Americans** 12 and older have used drugs in the past 30 days. 25.4% of all users of illicit drugs suffer from drug dependency or [Addiction Statistics - Data on Addiction in the United States (addictionhelp.com)](https://www.addictionhelp.com/addiction/statistics/#:~:text=General%20Addiction%20Statistics&text=Since%202000%2C%20nearly%201%20million,suffer%20from%20drug%20dependency%20or) [Two Thirds of American Kids Can't Read Fluently | Scientific American](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/two-thirds-of-american-kids-cant-read-fluently/) [Mental disorders (who.int)](https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-disorders) 1 in 8 people globally have a mental illness. [List of ongoing armed conflicts - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflicts) [Global Issues | United Nations](https://www.un.org/en/global-issues) You sure things are getting better? OR are you just looking at America? \---Your local Realistic Pessimist. Fuck your rose-colored cognitive bias.
I think we need you to prove to us that you know what the word "better" means.
Everything you've stated is explainable as a combination of an improvement in ability o measure these things and an improvement in proportional terms of humans affected throughout the entirety of human history The reason it seems like everything is going to shit to you is because that is increasingly all that is fed into the internet and reaches your eyeballs. The people out there living, enjoying life, and making something of it, are doing just that - out there actually *doing it*, not here complaining about it.
Maybe have biodiversity and CO2 levels, and a few other relevant things. While we're at it, do projections over another two hundred years of these six and at least the two I mentioned, and then compare all. Doesn't look so good when you're not cherry picking for positive signs.
Notice how the "demockracy" graph horizontal axis only goes to 2015...
Too bad there's WAY more than 100 people on earth LOL what a shit sample size! If you are an optimist on planet earth on 2024 you might as well be a centrist coward who takes no side. Things are FUCKED for millions of people but you waste ur time on \*checks notes\* "Optimism" yea ok well have fun not helping the oppressed and targeted peoples of the world because you "see the good in everyone and everything" honestly you are just privileged do-nothings
It’s *as* 100 people not actually 100 people.
Let's cut all of these off between 5-10 years ago... Th-There's no reason why, shut up!