Yes it is golden age as long as you disregard percentages and trend.
"Some 805 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life. That's about one in nine people on earth."
http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats
Economy seems like a boiler ready to explode, rich-poor chasm is widening like hell.
Global peace doesn't look very rosy either.
Not to mention what's happening on the environmental front.
All in all, sorry but I cannot feel the joy of "us humans doing well". We don't. Some technical sectors are doing well - that's all. Socially, ethically, politically we're still at middle ages and speeding backwards.
My 2 cents (which is most than millions of people can spare ;-) )
805 million means the number is down more than 100 million over the last decade, and 209 million lower than in 1990–92. In the same period, the prevalence of undernourishment has fallen from 18.7 to 11.3 percent globally and from 23.4 to 13.5 percent for developing countries.
That's insane, I had no idea there was any improvement, let alone that much! I just casually assumed the number would be growing along with our total global population, but to know it's actually decreasing as population increases? Wow.
If you're in the mood for good news, 2012 was estimated to be the most peaceful year (percentage of humans to dies by violence) in human (and hominid) history. Slight regression in 2013 & 2014, but still.
The world is big and there are lots of problems, especially when you think of suffering on the scale of millions, but a lot of things are getting better. If you visit some places that are behind on care for orphans, you'll be struck by how foreign it is to see small children begging, stealing and fending for themselves. It doesn't exist in many many places, but you don't have to look more than 2-3 generations before you'll find widows and orphans being a big, huge societal problem. Supporting widows and orphans was often synonymous with charity, "righteousness," and similar. That holds true from the early 20th century back to the beginning of written records.
China is a big part of the high speed exodus from absolute poverty, for all that is wrong with it politically.
The instinct to reject the notion that we are improving on the grounds that there is a lot left to do doesn't come from a bad place. Each life is an entire world of potential, suffering, happiness and love. That makes it hard to quantify. A million people hungry is an unfathomable amount of suffering. Empathy and solidarity are some of our most redeeming qualities. In my opinion, so is exploration. All that said, it's important to know the achievements that have been achieved. There's a bad way of knowing them, self congratulatory nationalism is a terrible one. There are also a good ways. If nothing else, we need to know if we should keep going.
For these things the videos by Hans Rosling are a classic, all of them are great and shine a completely different and positive light on where we stand:
Even if it is so (and we can talk for hours on the validity of this or that data) how do you find the fact that there are enough damned means of production to feed everyone and it's been so for decades now? Also how do you like the fact that there are now about 50-60 MILLION people in US that get food stamps. Or the fact that the wages for most of the western world are falling for 30 years now?
...
Whatever.
Unfortunately, it is a basic ecological principle that an increase in food results in an increase in population, and humans are not exempt from that. Yes, we have enough food to feed everybody. We have (usually) had enough, not just for decades, but for ten thousand years—ever since agriculture took off, and even more so since the industrial revolution and the Haber process.
However, food production is not enough to eliminate starvation. If you simply transport food to people in an area that can’t support a population increase, all you’re doing is ensuring that there will be more people there to starve in the next generation, and continually increasing costs of transporting food there.
You need to establish local economy and agriculture, or it’s not sustainable. And if such infrastructure can’t be put in place, you need to get people out of there.
Of course, I don’t know how to do that, nor do I know how to solve the economic problems you mention, but that is what needs to be done.
When I said “food production is not enough to eliminate starvation” I did not mean “we don’t produce enough food to eliminate starvation”, I meant “producing more food is not enough to eliminate starvation”. So yes, I agree and already stated that the problems are economic.
Suppose this principle did not hold. Then how would the human population of Earth continue to grow? In other words, what would all the new people be made of?
Population won't grow forever, not because of lack of food, but because (most) people would have better things to do than care for 6 kids, and 6 kids won't have positive effect on their wealth (it's already the case in the developed world - check out natural growth in Europe or Japan).
People may indeed limit themselves to having only two, one, or even no children at all, but that will only lead to extinction of such self-limiting groups. Besides these, there also are people that see nothing more important (but not necessarily better) than leaving behind their own kind as offspring. Unless some effect kicks in, like a social drive that instill in the masses the idea of breeding less as it's in western culture, or a government-enforced program to artificially control the demographic dynamic as in China, these kind of people will prevail in the long run. And that's a good thing, I think.
> People may indeed limit themselves to having only two, one, or even no children at all, but that will only lead to extinction of such self-limiting groups.
This is not "if" this is "when".
But it will take centuries, a lot things can change in the meantime, so we don't know what will happen in the end, but assuming constant growth when the growth in devleoped countries is over already is weird.
Prognoses for world population already show the growth stopping in next few decades.
I think you should look at these things in perspective, by no means is our society perfect, in relation to literally any point in history before maybe the fall of the Soviet Union, this world was objectively worse. Global conflicts are operating on much smaller scales, the environmental front has a hell of a lot of people fighting to improve current conditions, the economy isn't a boiler ready to explode. We are NOT in the middle ages in ANY of those sectors, to even suggest that tells me you've actually got 0 idea of what this world or what historically we looked like. We aren't burning witches or beheading people, we aren't accusing mentally ill people of being possessed by the devil. We have medicine, we have food, we can communicate with people around the world instantaneous. People are moving away from separated communities and becoming a global entity.
Look buddy, in the end our perspective on the world is what you decide it is and while we aren't living in the Garden of Eden our world is pretty top notch presently and in relation to any point in human history the world is great and only getting better.
So remove your pessimist spectacles and try and enjoy life and think optimistically, you only get one whip around and would you rather spend it disappointed and grumpy at the world or hopeful and excited?
>My 2 cents (which is most than millions of people can spare ;-) )
Also that was probably the snarkiest smug comment and it makes me think you like the smell of your own farts
I'm not well versed enough in world hunger problems to talk about it, but on the Global Peace side, we are currently in the least violent period in the last 2000 years.
The wealth gap can be misleading too, since the quality of life for those at the 'bottom' is often better than it ever has been on just about every metric you care to consider.
Every age has its little people whose entire contribution to public discourse is to complain about how dreadful everything is. They add nothing good to the world. They don't feed the hungry or clothe the homeless the way creative people operating within the framework of capitalism, the rule of law and global trade have been doing for the past several hundred years. They just complain about how awful everything is.
I'm not sure why they consider this a worthwhile thing. Clearly they are capable of identifying problems, but aren't capable of doing anything about them. As such, they should get out the way of the people who are actually solving them. A hundred years ago such people were complaining that capitalism and global trade were evil and destructive, and they and their fellow-travelers attempted several more-or-less violent approaches to overthrowing them, which held back human development by decades and destroyed tens of millions of lives.
Despite those abject failures, the same anti-empirical wingnuts are back today, when capitalism, the rule of law and global trade have created an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity--exactly as their irrational predecessors predicted would never and could never happen. But they don't let anything so Enlightened as mere empirical reality prevent them from continuing their litany of complaint and opposition to progress.
Seems some people complain as a survival strategy: enough whining will persuade others to resolve problems & supply needs, if only to shut that person up.
Of those things, especially if you compare it with, say, a century ago, only the environment is really in trouble. Which is bad enough, of course, but when looking at hunger and peace, we are actually doing pretty well.
There is a shitload of good things going on in the world. You just have to pull your head out of the negativity echochamber present in a lot of Internet communities, most notably parts of reddit.
Yes the world isn't perfect and theres still a shit ton wrong, regardless we're better off than we've ever been before except perhaps on the environment.
If you want to get a negative one just try to fight for something that goes against the status quo. I.e. try to exersise your civil rights for what you might consider an edge-cause (which constitutes the majority of the causes civil rights are supposed to be about).
”The poor are collectively unseizable. They are not only the majority on the planet, they are everywhere and the smallest event speaks of them. This is why the essential activity of the rich today is the building of walls — walls of concrete, of electronic surveillance, of missile barrages, minefields, frontier controls, and opaque media screens.“
— John Berger “Ten Dispatches About Endurance in the Face of Walls” (October 2004)
A bit into the article I had the strangest feeling I was reading a dark Orwellian story.
OMG - is _that_ how Japanese employees spent their lives?! I wonder what the suicide rates are over there.
"The Spiegel has turned into yellow press lately" that's your very own personal opinion but the way you serve it (as absolute truth) is yellow.
Not to add in various other mishaps in your argument (eg "kind of "left"", thanks for unveiling ...). In short that's nice propaganda (albeit not very effective here).
1. No, there are a lot of sources, that report the same. SPON (Spiegel Online) turned from being a good source for news into click-bait (~beginning 2014). The editorial staff changed: Didn't the editor in chief come from Germany's most famous yellow press gazette (die Bild) [1]?
2. You have a basically American audience on HN. I underpinned "kind of left" with the "basic income discussion", which -with no doubt- the Spiegel has a (very) positive stance for it (just search Google, the German terminology is "(bedingungsloses) Grundeinkommen").
3. No, it's not my opinion v.s. your's (that would be deficient)
I admit that I didn't know about the Bild connection (and yes it does speak volumes). Btw, Bild editors can be accused of anything but leftism and you said that there was significant controversy with Spiegel. Maybe there is still hope for the medium.
Still this particular piece is well written and (seems) quite well researched.
There are a lot of going on but the point is to single out symptoms from root causes. Otherwise we will wallow trying to deal with symptoms forever.
Dunno if anyone has yet mentioned one of the basic contradictions inherent in capitalism which could very well be at the root of what we experience. Means of production are private (factories, etc) and the owners as almost all players in capitalism take care to maximize _their_ profit and not society's well being. That maximization involves dumping down workers wages (another commodity in capitalism). Interestingly enough, workers are also consumers so dumping their wages erodes their purchasing power. And that's just one of the contradictions that stem from having a social mode of production driven by private interest.
The name of the most prominent economist that pointed out this and other contradictions some decades ago is Marx (which interestingly enough is never mentioned when capitalism crisis are on the table).
>Means of production are private (factories, etc) and the owners as almost all players in capitalism take care to maximize _their_ profit and not society's well being.<
No one forces you to purchase what's "produced". If you purchased a Windows computer - and so helped Mr. Gate's well being - that was your choice! The list of examples is long. As to "Windows" - whether society is better off ...
Though for a time, because of crapware subsidies, often computers with Windows installed would be cheaper than the identical computer without it. I think this is no longer the case but TBH I haven't actually checked in a while. In that case, "forcing" is probably too strong a word, but I'm being asked to pay if I want to avoid helping Mr. Gate's net worth (I think his well-being was plenty taken care of before I started making any purchasing decisions). I'm not sure to the degree this changes any of the reasoning above, but it was at least a little strange.
I'm not tremendously impressed with Marx's analysis.
Here is my initial premise. Across the entire economy, current consumption is paid for by current production, with any difference buffered by available filled stockpiles and empty stockpile capacity.
If you eat an ear of corn, someone has to grow an ear of corn, and transport it to you. If that person grows more corn than other people want to eat, it has to be stored somewhere until those people get hungry again. And the transportation and storage themselves consume resources.
This is the economic gradient. Goods and services are brought to market by producers, and taken away by consumers. In order to make this worthwhile--remember that bringing something to market is not a zero-resource operation--the consumers must give the producers something of greater value to them than whatever it is they produced.
Because this is sometimes tricky, we all agree for convenience that everyone always wants "money"--whatever it may be--more than whatever it is that they produce.
This works just fine when all producers are also consumers.
Now introduce industrial capital. Now a producer can, via the multiplying effect of capital, potentially single-handedly satisfy the entire worldwide demand for a good or service, at lower cost than any other producer who lacks the required capital. Again, this still works fine, so long as that person can manage to somehow consume all those resources.
But then we run into a problem. What if that person cannot manage to spend that much? The excess has to be stockpiled, according to the premise. Without the convenient fiction of money, that super-producer would have to start filling warehouses with goods and services. (We will pretend for the moment that services can somehow be stockpiled.) But even then, until the imbalance is rectified, that guy will simply keep filling warehouses that can never be emptied. Those resources are lost to everyone else. The super-producer simply has everything he could possibly need or want, and there's nothing anyone could possibly give him in trade without first tricking him into thinking it is better than anything he already has. With money, the problem of warehouse space is solved by reducing all that surplus to a number, which is stored in a computer.
But then we run into another problem. The value of the money is determined via continual market recalculations by the amount currently in circulation. Warehoused money might as well not exist. The super-producer has to keep moving it around, or prices will adjust to accommodate the fact that it is not being spent. He therefore gets less in exchange for his production. Then, whenever he goes to buy something, prices rise again temporarily. So the super-producer "invests" his money stockpile, which is a fancy way of saying that he moves it around from being owned by him in his own name to owned by him in a fictional business name. Or it approximates virtual warehouse space for his owned physical goods and for his owned services. The point is that investment is not consumption.
Whenever someone produces at a level that far exceeds their level of consumption, someone else's production is essentially being thrown into an economic black hole.
That's the problem with Capitalism. It can concentrate wealth so much that the owner cannot possibly consume it all, over his entire lifetime, or even in the lifetimes of his heirs. And until someone in the line of inheritance can become creative enough to embark upon some consumption megaproject, the concentration of capital sucks the life out of the productive economy.
Marxism solves this problem by diluting the concentration right at the source, by distributing the capital production in the hands of more spenders. But then there are no megaprojects without re-concentrating that wealth via government.
The capitalist solution to this problem is to give rich people more expensive things to consume. If, for some reason, they don't want to consume, the system fails. And nowadays, rich people are mostly investing rather than spending. If they do not change their ways, and quickly, the traditional release valve is to take back ownership of resources by force.
Interesting point of view.
Just some notes on the rich spending: (I don't have time to find refs but that should be pretty easy) numbers show that rich spend a tiny proportion of their money compared to other classes. So they are effectively hoarding. Also they invest mostly at the only place that can give them returns over 3%(?) nowadays which is stock markets, etc (1). Real investments in industry/services that would translate to jobs are sparse in Western world. That's also part of the problem for Westerners debt problem which could be seen as a way to mitigate the effect of industry and services (real production that is) going to Asia (mainly).
So, I'm afraid that if you expect things to change via rich themselves changing their ways (e.g. see the light and start redistributing their own wealth) you're gonna wait for long. After all just imagine being one of them. Why invest in the declining west with worker wages say 50% more expensive than in China? Never mind that competition will inevitably do the same thing to undercut you and this will end only when both of you are out of customers. In some ways, as a rich man, you can see the customers/labor as a dwindling common source where the tragedy of the commons apply under the rules of the capitalism.
(1) That's not to put a distinction between good industrialists that create jobs and bad bankers that create hot air. For one thing they largely are the same people and even if they were not they still have to play the game to stay ahead of competition.
Oh, I don't think they will change. There's nothing really in it for them. As I said, they not only have everything they want, but they have exhausted their imaginative ability to want things that do not yet exist.
You can sell a rich man a luxury yacht. You can't sell him a one-room habitat on the Moon, for other people to visit and live in, because it hasn't yet occurred to him that doing so might one day lead to more luxurious yachts. They are instead saving up their money to afford the next thing they want, the thing that doesn't exist yet, because no one seems willing to consume resources on research that other people might just copy and use for free.
If the rich don't start buying (not just investing in) costly megaprojects to employ them, the poor folk will simply build the default megaproject--war. And that will be used to redistribute some of the wealth and start over.
And as I said earlier, hoarding money is different from stockpiling actual goods and services. Hoarded money is ignored until someone actually tries to spend it, and then it triggers inflationary distortions. A stable economy requires that most of its money circulate continuously, rather than stagnating in pools.
"Some 805 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life. That's about one in nine people on earth." http://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats
Economy seems like a boiler ready to explode, rich-poor chasm is widening like hell.
Global peace doesn't look very rosy either.
Not to mention what's happening on the environmental front.
All in all, sorry but I cannot feel the joy of "us humans doing well". We don't. Some technical sectors are doing well - that's all. Socially, ethically, politically we're still at middle ages and speeding backwards.
My 2 cents (which is most than millions of people can spare ;-) )