I think the air quality is far better today than it was in the 30-40 years ago. I moved to Los Angeles in the late 80s and in the first six months didn't even realize that there were mountains all around us. I just couldn't see them because of the smog. I can see the mountains clearly today.
Yes, but that's an entirely different problem I would say.
The parent complained about having to work more when the tools get more efficient, insinuating that the fruits of advancement go only to the business owner. I commented only on that.
Lol. Nobody is choking on smoke. The earth is fine. Humans may make life slightly more difficult for themselves in the next century or two due to global warming, but those difficulties will be more than offset by advances in technology, even under pessimistic assumptions.
This link is the parents speaking, nonetheless another data point [0}
I'm respiratorily at risk to particulate matter in the air (partially my own fault for cigarette smoking for many years, partially happenstance via a house fire/smoke inhalation), and the air quality has been a bastard in ON Canada this summer. It certainly has affected my outdoor activities.
Localized toxic pollutants in air (smoke etc.) and water have been significantly reduced compared to 100 years ago.
However we have been too slow to reduce the CO2 emissions that are causing climate change exactly because it doesn't have an immediate local toxic effect.
> At the same time, the drop in global poverty after 1995 is the largest observed, despite the low correlation with GDP per capita. This implies a “lost opportunity”, for even faster poverty reduction could have been achieved if measures had been taken to contain increasing within-country income inequality
Which I feel this is the topic at hand.
Income inequality clearly impacts both local and global poverty.
Production efficiency also has a positive impact, you can produce and serve more people for cheaper. Yes, but that implies the efficacy of production benefits people equally, otherwise there are "lost opportunity" in poverty reduction.
This is what the "outrage" is here. It doesn't seem like AI support benefits the merchants or the workers, but exclusively the executives and shareholders.
And this is the challenge that face AI. At face value, it's great technology, that could help everyone, but will it benefit everyone equally, or will there be losers here?
If we want AI to be more positively received, that question needs to be addressed seriously.
That this even needed to be said on a forum like HN baffles me. I suspect it's a result of decades of mainstream political/cultural doom-and-gloom propaganda.
This quality of life metric is purely economic, but it is easy to read it as general life quality- personally, I'd swap now for 1820s homesteading out west in a heartbeat even though that would register as 'extreme poverty' on the economic scale.
Well, for a start, it's safe to assume you're not a woman or a minority. And even if you're a young healthy white male, your quality of life would be significantly worse in the 1820s. Not only would you lose access to a lot of the everyday conveniences of life today, you're also far more likely to die a young and painful death from any number of disease.
Conveniences don't make life worth living, and a long life doesn't mean a good life. Do you really think people, on average, enjoyed their lives less back then? I don't
Well, enjoyment or happiness is tricky to measure because happiness = reality - expectation. So people in the 1820s might've been "happy" enough because they simply didn't know a better life like today's was a possibility. There's no reason to think they were happier than today's population though. And certainly, you as someone who experienced today's conveniences will not be happy long term if all those were taken away suddenly.
I've spent the best years of my life living in the woods and in wall-less huts w/ no water, plumbing or electricity. Imho our modern conveniences don't make life any richer, and in many cases take away the pleasure of things we take for granted. If I had medical problems I would probably feel differently.
Uh huh. What were you wearing? Did you sew your own clothes and grow your own cotton for those clothes? There's a surprising amount of "on the grid" work that afforded you the ability to live "off the grid".
There's also a big difference between living in a part of the world where the woods provide a relatively temperate climate. Try living out in the forest to Papua New Guinea with 100% humidity.
By the way, try to make sure you don't accidentally get bitten by a rabid animal because the cure for rabies wasn't invented until the 1880s.
I feel like you are probably taking a lot of things for granted. Clothes, food, equipment, vehicles, etc. Heck, even just the ability to choose to live in a hut in the woods.
If you are jumping in a time machine to move your consciousness to a body in 1820 USA you are rolling dangerous dice because you have a significant chance of living the horrible life of a slave.
The US government passed Homestead Acts back in the 1800s where they gave away plots of land, called homesteads, (like 10% of the country) for free. It's a lifestyle, for sure, but living off land you don't own isn't what I was referring to. I think the last homesteads (free land) were given away in the 1980s.
While quality of life has improved percentage wise for a small percentage of the earth's inhabitants, it is also a completely unsustainable way of living - it's a quality of life built on fossil fuels and debt. It's all a complete facade - if fossil fuels and access to effectively free money were wiped out tomorrow, quality of life would revert almost overnight... The fragility of it all is just extraordinary.
As somebody with a degree in economics who did research in this area, I strongly disagree. I cannot stress how important is to not equate poverty data with quality of life. Let me give you an example of how economic statistics can be misleading. In colonial India, economic production and GDP skyrocketed. Forests were razed, waterways were privatized, communal granaries were destroyed, etc. Agricultural production increased massively, yet hundreds of millions of Indian people starved and died.
It is absolutely not clear-cut that poverty has actually decreased on a long term scale. The real wage evidence shows less poverty and higher incomes during precolonial times in several countries. The datasets are woefully incomplete and flawed prior to 1900. Furthermore, the global poverty line is still set at $1.90 (!), and reexaming the decrease in poverty using more realistic costs of living results in very little change. Compounding on that, the vast majority of poverty reduction in the last century has been in China, a non-capitalist country. Removing them from the dataset results in almost no change in global poverty in the last 50 years. I can go on.
> the vast majority of poverty reduction in the last century has been in China, a non-capitalist country
Can't it also be said that the vast majority of poverty reduction has been in China...once they began to adopt capitalist economic principles in the last 40 years ?
The median quality of life is MUCH higher today than 100 years ago. And bottom 1%-tile quality of life might be 1000 times better. All thanks to advance in technology and increased productivity.
The mean quality of life can be skewed by outliers. I wonder if there are median quality of life indicators with the box-diagram of Upper and Lower Fence values based on the Inter Quartile Range
Not sure, sounds like that is a baked measurement intended to superficially mollify people. Medicine and health costs more than ever. Inequality higher than ever. Sure, we can buy cheapish bread and occasional circuses, but is that a valid measure of life?
Actually, economists are now saying that the 20th century was an anomaly in terms of QoL and we're reverting back to U shaped distribution of wealth.
It will be very interesting times when all that 20th century earned Baby Boomer wealth moves to the next generation and accelerates the shift even faster.
What about quality of life compared to 50 years ago? I guess it depends on country but I feel like my parents generation lived better life compared to mine.
My parents bought a house and went on multiple family vacations every year and never really were too concerned about money, saving up a decent amount for retirement. My mom was a teacher in a poor inner city school and my dad was a low level insurance salesman. My mom never had to worry about student loans, they were easily paid off. I think trading fiscal peace and security for an iPhone is a bad trade.
