Good news at last: the world isn’t as horrific as you think
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
But I see it from the point of view of Earth as a whole. What I see is this:
The Earth loses 18.7 million acres of forests per year, which is equal to 27 soccer fields every minute, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)[1].
75% insects have disappeared in last 27 years[2]. They are in serious trouble[3]. This made me depressed most in recent time.
Glaciers are shrinking at high rate.
Climate scientists can't sleep at night because they know much more than we do[4].
Many species are disappearing. Giraffes are endangered now, last Male Northern White Rhino just dies. Many more will be in next few decades.
We can talk about how better current time is compared to 200 years ago only because we are selfish. Earth is not just a rock in space, it's the whole ecosystem. Just like cancer cells spread and destroy our body, we do the same to this beautiful planet.
[1] https://www.worldwildlife.org/threats/deforestation
[2] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/oh-no/54...
[4] https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a36228/ballad-of-the-s...
Pinker's book was a little bit bizarre: upset that people had not been persuaded by the deluge of graphs in Better Angels of Our Nature, he decides to provide us with yet more graphs.
What the analysis seems to miss is that life does not happen in the aggregate. While the story around the world has been one of improving health, wealth and prosperity, there are individuals around the world who have not felt the benefit.
Pinker and Rosling's solution seems to be to call these people ungrateful, whining, or "social justice warriors".
Interestingly, the very people the "social justice warriors" claim to fight for reaped the most benefits of the social and economic progress. Well-deserved, of course, since they started way behind. But it makes you wonder, why the SJWs are as unhappy about the state of our society as they ever were? A cynic would say, they are afraid of losing their metaphorical jobs. I'd rather believe that they just lack the insight into just how much worse the life was not so long ago.
Overall well-being of the planet? Hell no.
I've heard from friends with mental health problems that one of the hardest things to deal with can be other people telling them that objectively their life is good ("you have family, friends, success in work - what have you got to be unhappy about?")... so on top of feeling depressed they're also emoting wrongly.
Surely if a person feels that the sky is falling that would be a measure of low well-being. In which case the 'objective measures of human well-being' are badly chosen or (more realistically, and something that will cause massive cognitive dissonance in lots of readers here): not everything can be measured objectively. Experience happens subjectively, behind the eyes, and can never be usefully measured. Which is why when someone tells you they're unhappy you have to decide whether to believe them, or just tell them that they're wrong.
Personally I think trying to objectively measure how good life is now compared to other times is embarrassingly futile. Your internal philosophy makes a huge difference to how you handle life, it's perfectly possible for a person to have a non-miserable life in a society with high infant mortality rates and a life expectancy of 40, with hostile tribes nearby who might need to be fought at any time. Expectations (norms) along with cultural and psychological frameworks would make the experience for someone native to that time and place very different than it would be for somebody who was dropped from the modern Western world into a similar situation. Of course the same example native person might also live unhappily. But to presume that their subjective life experience should be ruled by abstract measurements is... unimaginative.
I can never find any reference to it online but years ago I remember Gordon Brown (UK PM at the time I think) talking on TV about quality of life, saying "one thing we've found is that people report being happier when they hear birds singing... so we're looking into using recordings of birdsong to increase happiness levels". LOL it's like, dude... you're really not getting it are you?
I have not studied his claims but he makes a forceful argument in his book.
"I call it the overdramatic worldview. It’s stressful and misleading. In fact, the vast majority of the world’s population live somewhere in the middle of the income scale. Perhaps they are not what we think of as middle class, but they are not living in extreme poverty. Their girls go to school, their children get vaccinated. Perhaps not on every single measure, or every single year, but step by step, year by year, the world is improving. In the past two centuries, life expectancy has more than doubled. Although the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress."
Sure, a lot of people lead reasonably comfortable lives and we have never had the quality of medicine or convenience that we enjoy today (in most of the world).
But there are still massive problems, such as the rapid (and rabid) rise of the far-right in Eastern Europe, as well as deteriorating USA/Russia/China relations, which could very well escalate to armed conflict if they're not careful. I'm sure there were plenty of optimists during the cold war as well, but the simple fact is that some high-powered people are currently playing a very dangerous game.
Not to mention the rapidly increasing stress levels in modern society, the complete erosion of privacy and rising levels of mental health issues, partly due to our "busybusybusy must be busy!" culture.
And that's before we get into things like accelerating climate change, which has the potential to go into a complete runaway that we cannot stop, potentially leading to a situation similar to the Permian-Triassic extinction event, within just a few hundred years.
Saying that there "are still massive problems," is a language structure admission that in fact things are obviously better.
What you're describing is a paradise compared to any number of well known periods of time in the past, including as recently as the 1950s or 1970s, much less the WW1 or WW2 time frames.
The far right in Eastern Europe, in terms of fasicsm concerns, is a trivial joke compared to the recent past in all regards. Spain as one example of real political problems in Europe, had a four decade fascist dictatorship as recently as 1975. Ceausescu ruled Romania as a brutal dictator for decades.
The worst of free Eastern Europe today is a bastion of liberalism by comparison to the recent past. Eastern Europe was almost entirely under the authoritarian boot of the USSR just 30 years ago. The people there were not only hyper poor, but they also had few rights at all.
Today Romania has a higher GDP per capita than Russia and is one of the fastest growing economies on earth.
Czech and Slovakia now have the economic per capita output of Portugal. Their economies are solidly five times larger than they were in 1991.
Deteriorating relations with Russia? See ~1948-1990.
China? See: Korean War, Mao era in general.
The West is getting along extraordinarily well with China compared to the past. The dispute today is trade, not who is going to nuke each other or when the next war begins.
Things have gotten dramatically better.