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Comment by cryptonector | Hacker News Reader

> Saying that we are slightly better than the 1800s isn't the win people seem to think it is.

We're not "slightly" better than in the 1800s. We are way way way better than in the 1800s. World-wide.

Sure, that's still not the win you think it is when the material conditions of the average person is pretty awful all around. I laid out a small percent of that in my original comment. and that's not even considering the poverty "first world" countries rely upon from the heavy exploitation of the "3rd world" from slavery conditions, to coups and death squads funded by US corporations, to stealing their resources.

The thing is, the US has clearly gotten way better in the past 50+ years, while the past 30 years is maybe debatable. But if we're looking at past 30 years globally, there's no sane way to argue it hasn't gotten way. It's been an absolutely amazing past few decades in terms of reducing global poverty. We've seen something like a billion people lifted out of poverty—child mortality, clean drinking water, education, basic nutrition. We've a long ways to go, but if you're argument rests on ignoring over a billion people having their lives transformed in this way, I'm not sure you're on the side of the poor.

That's nice, you should fly down to the global South and tell them how good they have it.

Dude, chill. They're not merely some abstract rhetoric device for arguing about American policy. They're real people, and you can ask them how they feel about infant mortality dropping, starvation rates dropping, clean water access shooting up, education access increasing. You don't even have to fly down--loads of them now have internet access (and electricity!)

Yes, the US has done a bunch of really bad stuff, but a higher percentage of people having food and water and medicine is actually good. And yes, those real human beings tend to agree.

> that's still not the win you think it is when the material conditions of the average person is pretty awful all around.

What? This is nonsense.

> and that's not even considering [...]

This is changing the subject, which one should probably take as conceding the previous point. Even granting all of this I'm pretty sure that life today almost everywhere on this planet is much less brutish for humans than it was 200 years ago, let alone 400, 2,000, 10,000, or 100,000 years ago.

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