HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

There are lots of things to worry about. There are lots of promising possibilities.

Here is a talk from Hans Rosling talking about long term global economic and poverty trends that gives an optimistic outlook. 4min.

https://youtu.be/jbkSRLYSojo

And while that is promising, the question for me comes down to happiness which is different than prosperity. I'm just starting to think more about that.

Fair point. In defense of my moral model, it's backed up by this idea: are things perfect? No. Is the system working? Yes, and astonishingly well. Is there a better way to get from here to there, where "there" is some improved state of prosperity and development? No. Human nature is what it is, and our systems must exploit our nature rather than combat it.

It's all based on measurable positive outcomes, rather than some theoretical idea that being eye-wateringly rich is somehow bad - morally bad, or bad for society. That idea is rooted in the old, pre-growth, pre-industrial paradigm, when all wealth was seized by force in some way. Today, some wealth is from violence, but the overwhelming majority is new money that was created out of nothing but good old human intelligence.

Here are some references backing up my idea that the system works.

Here's one focusing on the most important metric, human development: http://hdr.undp.org/en/dashboard-human-development-anthropoc...

This one is from the World Bank. You have to go into the metrics and countries. There are metrics that aren't of interest here, but some are, like access to clean cooking fuels, or electricity. But it's easy to see that most of it is pointing in the right direction. https://databank.worldbank.org/source/world-development-indi...

Here's a book about all the things that ordinarily fuel existential pessimism: https://www.amazon.com/Fewer-Richer-Greener-Prosperity-Popul...

Here's a book about how innovation progresses exponentially, and what it means for the masses: https://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Future-Better-Than-Think/dp...

Here's that classic video by Hans Rosling giving us some perspective on the progress over the last century: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

Here's another video on the same thing, by Kurzgesagt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvskMHn0sqQ

EDIT: here's another fun one: https://ourworldindata.org/human-development-index

That doesn’t jibe with these videos from Hans Rosling:

https://youtu.be/jbkSRLYSojo

https://youtu.be/hVimVzgtD6w

⬐ tsimionescu

Here are some critiques of the famous poverty graphs:

https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-...

⬐ sethammons

I read your link. Did you watch the videos? The criticisms in the paper you linked accurately state things like GDP != poverty and the best measures start in 1981. There are many ways to measure things. Yes, we are missing good data. But we have others and all the data aligns. People are doing better. In the videos, they are about life expectancy, child mortality, average income, and gdp. Things are looking better all the time.

Yes, bad things are happening. But the trends are in the right direction.

> Three hundred years ago, full-time wives did about 60 hours/week of housework.

This is a woeful underestimate before labor saving machinery. Here is a talk about the $3500 Shirt and the fact that women spun thread in any idle time: https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-... Here is a Hans Rosling visualization of wealth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

I remember a story about historian couple (sadly I can't find it) who tried to live like the 1880's.

The husband basically came home completely exhausted every single day. The wife, however, literally broke down because the housework was completely relentless. She was completely busy maintaining the household every single waking moment.

Big families weren't just because of lack of birth control.

⬐ logfromblammo

I would be very surprised if anyone in my household did more than 15 hours/week of housework. We did a lot more with babies and toddlers around, but they can clean up their own messes now, and have been trained to poop, pee, and vomit into the approved receptacles.

A lot of the stuff people do as routine housework simply doesn't need to be done more often than quarterly.

Perhaps those people doing 60 hours/week in 2019 don't have the temperament to just sit on ass and enjoy all the machine-assisted, low-maintenance living?

Throw the clothes in the washing machine, and push the start button. Push the start button on the carpet-cleaning robot. Push the start button on the floor-mopping robot. Move clothes from washer to dryer and push start button. Put ingredients in bread machine and press start. Put entire meal in microwave and push start button. Put dishes in dishwasher and push start button. Hop on motorized treadmill and push start. Flop in massage chair and push start. Have problem; push button; no problem.

People have more time now, and they invent new things to do to fill it. If you only want to do 10 hours a week in housework, all you need do is lower your standards to whatever the machines do for you without supervision. Toss out some ant/roach bait and buy some spray-can air freshener. Avoid filth-producing pets or babies in your home. Substitute chemical engineering or electrical engineering for elbow grease. If you do almost any revenue-producing activity in lieu of housework, you will be able to pay for a pill-swallow, spray-on, or button-press solution to any routine housework problem.

⬐ bhandziuk

Fold clothes and distribute them to the appropriate closets/dressers when the machine finishes, dislodge the carpet cleaning robot when stuck, fill the mopping robot with water and soaps, cook a decent meal that's not a microwave meal, put the dishes away in the cabinets and wash all the dishes which cannot go in the dishwasher (pots/pans, knives)

There's a lot more happening that you give credit for even when doing the minimum.

⬐ logfromblammo

> Fold clothes and distribute them to the appropriate closets/dressers when the machine finishes...

Hanging a garment on a hanger is easier than folding it. Small clothes can be thrown into a "CLEAN"-labeled basket or bag. The laundry-person need not be responsible for restocking everyone else's wardrobes. You are inventing requirements for the task that are non-essential.

Essential laziness is rearranging your life such that the most labor-intensive parts of a task are unnecessary. The only thing that prevents the 3-pile method of wardrobe management (clean, dirty, and worn-but-smells-okay) is social pressure. And if you stop caring so much about what other people think of your lifestyle, but still care a little bit, you can replace the dresser with some postal-style plastic tote bins on a wire shelf: socks, underwear, jersey shorts, tee shirts. All your going-out clothes can go on hangers. No more folding.

A decent meal need not be haute cuisine. If you break your kids (or yourself, for that matter) of the "different foods can't touch" thing, you can make a lot of good stuff in a programmable pressure cooker/slow cooker. That's a single pot that doesn't exactly wash itself, but it is halfway to an autoclave already. Put plain water in it, select high pressure cook, and hit the start button. Pot sterilized. Add ingredients; beep beep boop, start. Dinner is done.

And maybe your dishwasher needs an upgrade. We put pots, pans, and knives in it all the time. The cast iron doesn't go in there, but that is all seasoned such that it just gets rinsed out and re-oiled, and is then clean.

Stop valuing things for the extra effort put into them, and start seeing human-required labor as an evil that should be destroyed. If you're doing 60 hours/week of housework, you aren't spending 1 hour/week thinking about whether all that "work" actually needs doing, or not.

⬐ bhandziuk

Knives don't go in the dishwasher because they dull faster and I'd rather spend time washing them than time sharpening them. Post and pans in the dishwasher is just a waste of space. By putting one pot in there I can not put 6 plates. The pot is easy to clean, the plates are annoying.

I have to put things away because there's no room for the pile method. I share 4 ft of closet and a 4 drawer dresser with my wife. The rest of our bedroom is mostly bed area.

I cook meals because I'm lazy. Cooking cost less money. Microwavable meals mean I need to work more to pay for those meals which is something I don't want to do. Cooking saves me time in life by costing me less money.

My life is arranged around laziness but it is different laziness than yours.

⬐ logfromblammo

You can optimize for time, or you can optimize for money. It's very rare to be able to do both.

Can you explain to me how a dishwasher makes knives dull, because I had not heard of this before now.

⬐ bhandziuk

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/4873/do-knives-...

Also, if you have wood handles it'll ruin the wood.

⬐ logfromblammo

It looks like no one in that thread could dig up any experimental evidence for it. Manufacturer recommendations are not to be trusted.

This looks like a job for some identical knives, some knife-use simulator robots, several dishwashers with a standardized typical load, hand-washing sinks, a pile of dishwasher detergent, a pile of hand-wash detergent, and an objective measurement device for knife sharpness.

My essential laziness (and lack of research grant money) prevents me from conducting the experiment myself, however. I'll just take my chances with the dishwasher.

⬐ DoreenMichele

To some extent, the conclusion of the book agrees with you that a lot of what we do these days is make work. It's more complicated than that because women get a lot of social pressure to meet high standards that men don't get,* and also because the high standards we expect have helped push infant mortality rates down compared to what they once were. So it certainly isn't all make work.

I have first-hand experience with the fact that a man's unreasonable expectations can make a woman's life pretty miserable, but people on HN never seem to interpret such remarks as testimony trying to elucidate the problem space and it leads to crazy personal attacks, treating me like I'm an idiot, etc. Suffice it to say that there are a lot of forces at work that make it quite hard for a woman who is married with children to just say "Oh, well, I don't really feel like doing 60 hours of women's work a week. I think I'll just do less."

* https://theconversation.com/men-do-see-the-mess-they-just-ar...

⬐ PhasmaFelis

I agree in general, but just a nitpick: When the $3500 Shirt article first went around in 2013, I saw several complaints that it was describing a very high-quality shirt. Typical peasant work wear was still very labor-intensive, but took a fraction of the time described.

I see the article says the math was updated in 2016, though, so I don't know how true that is now. And obviously that was only a part of a woman's overall workload, anyway.

⬐ DoreenMichele

The book is called "More work for mother" because a lot of labor saving devices saved male labor by making the work physically less demanding and allowing it to thus be shifted to the wife.

Three hundred or so years ago, most couples were literally working to put food on the table and keep people clothed. They did so by raising their own food and sewing their own clothes, etc. Standards of living were generally lower.

Over the course of that 300 or so years (because I probably read the book around two decades back), cash money became more common and so did working for cash money instead of laboring to grow your own food, make your own clothes, etc. So labor saving devices shifted a lot of household tasks to women in order to free men up to go get a paid job. This made sense so women could be home with the children since they are the ones that get pregnant and also produce milk.

Men used to pull up the rugs and beat them one or more times per year. Then we invented vacuum cleaners and women took over cleaning the rugs.

Women and men were both often very overworked, but it's possible that the historian couple saw the wife collapse in part because a lot of what we classify as women's work today was handled by male labor at one time and in part because standards of living were generally far lower back then. Trying to maintain anything resembling our current standards without modern labor saving devices is crazy on the face of it. If, on top of that, you expect the woman to do a lot of chores that would have been male labor at one time, yeah, you are going to run someone into the ground.

Back when I used to read such things, studies typically found that women with children were chronically short of sleep whether they had paid jobs outside the home or not. People generally underestimate how much work homemakers are doing. Friends and neighbors routinely demand "favors" because they see a homemaker as someone who has nothing but leisure time on her hands, not someone busy cooking, cleaning, buying groceries, etc all day long.

In my marriage, I also saw evidence that my husband had no real appreciation nor respect for the amount of work I did as a full-time wife and mom. It is one of the reasons we are divorced.

So I'm abundantly familiar with the fact that most of the world underestimates how much work women typically do, dismisses it as "not real work" because you are just supposed to be thrilled to pieces to be home with your children, etc. But the book in question was a serious history book and was remarkably even-handed, which is one of the reasons I mention it relatively frequently. I don't like works that hate on men, that act like women are merely victims of the so-called Patriarchy, etc.

⬐ Spooky23

Definitely agree with most of the key points, but I do question the notion that men did all of the heavy labor.

Maybe in upper-class homes, but in the poorer families (which were most people), "women's work" was physically demanding... laundry was outright dangerous, for example.

⬐ DoreenMichele

but I do question the notion that men did all of the heavy labor.

There is no point at which I suggested that. In fact, I made some effort to try to guard against such an interpretation.

But let me reiterate some of my main points in nutshell form:

1. Men and women both worked physically hard. (I stated that previously as: Women and men were both often very overworked.)

2. Some tasks that are currently viewed by a lot of modern peoples as "women's work" would have been "men's work" about 300 years ago, such as cleaning the rugs.

3. It would be super easy to run someone into the ground by having one person try to maintain our current high standards for quality of life via manual labor.

4. I can see that easily being made worse by not doing your due diligence and determining that some of our current "women's work" was "men's work" when it was all done by manual labor.

It in no way requires any inference that women did no heavy labor to see that just piling more and more work on a woman without in some way making those tasks more manageable simply would not work.

⬐ Spooky23

> It in no way requires any inference that women did no heavy labor to see that just piling more and more work on a woman without in some way making those tasks more manageable simply would not work.

Certainly don't mean that -- I think if anything the physical toil that women traditionally did in my grandparent's lifetime, especially given the challenges of health, etc is very much under-realized.

Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson talks in depth about the life of ranch families in the Hill Country of Texas, and about the deep impacts that things like electrification had on those families. Personally, I found it moving and it painted a picture of life that family lore, etc just didn't capture.

To quote David Mitchell (the comedian, not the author) it would be tempting to take this kind of thing seriously if it wasn't for a damnable sense of perspective.

Some thoughts:

1. Much like how the entire centrist media machine feeds off the insanity of the current US administration, somehow this article is at the top of HN. We put it there. (Well, 42 of you did, as of the time I wrote this.)

2. Perhaps the best-kept secret in the world is that it is getting better by almost every measurement. The late, great Hans Rosling was superb at breaking down these dimensions in video form (eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo ) but if you want the real deal, I recommend Steven Pinker's excellent "Enlightenment Now".

3. I couldn't care less that Intel has "stalled" since you can now buy a Raspberry Pi that pwns my first computer by an order of magnitude or three and costs less than $25. Meanwhile, Apple is refocusing on Mac hardware again because so many "poor" people have phones now that they can see a sales ceiling... this means that a huge percentage of the planet has a significant computer on them all of the time.

4. Not only does age and wisdom allow you to observe tech over many cycles, but the older I get the more I realize that tech is nothing outside of its relationship to politics, culture, and ourselves. Look at how young children just assume everything is a screen, now. Tech is now an important aspect of the daily political conversation. In just 15 years we've gone from a society that rents VHS movies to one that feels entitled to comment, upvote and subscribe to everything they watch. It's fucking crazy how much tech has reprogrammed everything from the way we find love to the way we get from A to B.

Finally, to the author: sorry a lot of the comments here are negative. They aren't wrong, but we're still working on chilling out and defaulting to presuming that in any given moment, people are generally trying their best in this community. The good news: there's lots to be excited about in this "worst possible timeline" we've fallen into.

⬐ rorykoehler

Re Rosling: I have a feeling that we are improving immensely at the base of maslows pyramid but there is plenty of sabotage occurring further up. The march towards authoritarianism in much of the world is one that jumps out.

⬐ FranzFerdiNaN

Remove China from the numbers and Pinker and Goslings points pretty much disappear. Both aren’t a secret, they are well known and criticized a lot for their use and abuse of numbers.

⬐ oblio

I'm pretty sure India also has a positive outlook.

And if we remove those countries we're removing half the world's population...

⬐ AstralStorm

The point is that developed world has stalled. Which is probably true on some measures but we do not know why. There should be slower but incremental improvement as there is room for that still. A plenty of room in fact.

Life expectancy is still gaining though and flattening. That is the main variable encompassing almost everything. Including normalized per income is flattening. Income per capita has flattened somewhat, but it might be a natural sigmoid the China, Russia and such have yet to reach. So that's about it.

⬐ HeadsUpHigh

>Life expectancy is still gaining though and flattening. That is the main variable encompassing almost everything.

There are big breakthroughs coming on this front. Look up the work of David Sinclair, aging is a tough nut to crack but not impossible.

⬐ zasz

Child malnutrition rates in India are worse than in some parts of sub-Saharan Africa, actually: https://www.deccanherald.com/state/top-karnataka-stories/mal...

Impressive GDP growth aside, persistent malnutrition suggests that for huge chunks of the Indian population (a shocking _seventy_ percent of women are anemic), something's not working. Who cares what GDP growth is? What's it really measuring if people still aren't getting enough to eat?

⬐ dfrage

The number of calories lower class Indians are consuming is dropping, which your link has got to in part be reflecting. It's a mess.

⬐ peteforde

Except, wait... tell us why we'd remove China (or any other part of the world that seems less important to you) again?

⬐ baybal2

> 4. Not only does age and wisdom allow you to observe tech over many cycles, but the older I get the more I realize that tech is nothing outside of its relationship to politics, culture, and ourselves. Look at how young children just assume everything is a screen, now. Tech is now an important aspect of the daily political conversation. In just 15 years we've gone from a society that rents VHS movies to one that feels entitled to comment, upvote and subscribe to everything they watch. It's fucking crazy how much tech has reprogrammed everything from the way we find love to the way we get from A to B.

I think you caught the idea better than anybody else. The tech industry is no longer about the tech itself, and much more about everyday world around us. The tech ate the world — sure.

I can't remember the last project in our engineering company where we ever bothered with the product spec wise, and we haven't done anything like a PC or a smartphone in years. We almost solely work on "gadgetising" existing everyday stuff now — household appliances, toys, all kinds of vending machines, ad displays and installations, EV stuff, aircraft and rapid transit infortainment.

The essence and the shape of thing is way more important these days than what's inside. Things are definitely changing that way. Prime majority of our biggest clients these days are companies whose business had zero things to do with tech just few years ago, but is all about it now.

⬐ kashyapc

> Perhaps the best-kept secret in the world is that it is getting better by almost every measurement. [...] The late, great Hans Rosling was superb at breaking down these dimensions in video form [...] but if you want the real deal, I recommend Steven Pinker's excellent "Enlightenment Now"

Indeed. Thanks for plugging the inimitable Rosling (I'd also strongly recommend his excellent book, "Factfulness") and Pinker. Rosling has incredible anecdotes from the real world, and Pinker is methodical and rigorous. Each book is a companion to the other.

(Me brags: A few months ago I've had the pleasure of meeting Steven Pinker in person and even have a small chat about his book, the late Rosling, and other topics.)

And I hope Hans Rosling's exhilarating enthusiasm rubs off on many folks. I was so enthralled with Rosling's work that when I was in Sweden earlier this year, I took a train to Uppsala (where Rosling lived and worked) and spent a day there just to breathe some inspiring air. Rosling was a force of nature.

PS: Yes, for all the "positivity bias" that Rosling and Pinker are accused of, they repeatedly acknowledge that there's still a long a way to go, and never claim that everything is hunky-dory. As Rosling puts it: "Things can be both bad and better".

On this topic, I highly recommend watching 200 countries, 200 years, 4 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

You see how wealth and health have changed over time. In particular you see that there is NO country today which is as badly off as EVERY country was 200 years ago. When you digest the truth of that, and look at it in terms of family stories, impact on society and so on, my impression is that we are like a world recovering from an insane collective trauma that most people have amnesia about. And the more you pay attention, the more ways in which this is obvious.

This is not to say that there isn't plenty of trauma today. As the saying goes, "The future is here. It just isn't evenly distributed." But for all the problems we have reason to worry about, there has never been a time when there was a better case for optimism for our future.

⬐ marchenko

In particular you see that there is NO country today which is as badly off as EVERY country was 200 years ago.

I tend to believe that this argument is generally true, but some researchers have argued that it is very sensitive to the specific endpoints chosen. In his preface to A Farewell to Arms, economist Greg Clark argues (about the world circa 2007):

> "Prosperity, however, has not come to all societies. Material consumption in some countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, is now well below the preindustrial norm. Countries such as Malawi or Tanzania would be better off in material terms had they never had contact with the industrialized world and instead continued in their preindustrial state. Modern medicine, airplanes, gasoline, computers—the whole technological cornucopia of the past two hundred years—have succeeded there in producing among the lowest material living standards ever experienced. These African societies have remained trapped in the Malthusian era, where technological advances merely produce more people and living standards are driven down to subsistence. But modern medicine has reduced the material minimum required for subsistence to a level far below that of the Stone Age."

Clark also argues that:

>"Indeed in 1800 the bulk of the world’s population was poorer than their remote ancestors. The lucky denizens of wealthy societies such as eighteenth-century England or the Netherlands managed a material lifestyle equivalent to that of the Stone Age. But the vast swath of humanity in East and South Asia, particularly in China and Japan, eked out a living under conditions probably significantly poorer than those of cavemen. The quality of life also failed to improve on any other observable dimension. Life expectancy was no higher in 1800 than for hunter-gatherers: thirty to thirty-five years. Stature, a measure both of the quality of diet and of children’s exposure to disease, was higher in the Stone Age than in 1800. And while foragers satisfy their material wants with small amounts of work, the modest comforts of the English in 1800 were purchased only through a life of unrelenting drudgery. Nor did the variety of material consumption improve. The average forager had a diet, and a work life, much more varied than the typical English worker of 1800, even though the English table by then included such exotics as tea, pepper, and sugar"

A lot of present arguments seem to center on the shape and AUC of the progress curve, and whether that has any implications for predictions based on historical data.

⬐ btilly

This is also true.

With relatively fixed technology, the human population tends to expand to the carrying capacity of the land.

Agriculture did not make life better. What it did is make that carrying capacity a LOT higher. At the cost of great increases in how much work was needed, risk of plague, and so on. This topic is covered in some detail in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel.

When, as in the 1200s, the climate moved to increase that carrying capacity, life improved. When, as in the 1300s, climate made life harder, we had mass famine after mass famine (and by coincidence, also the Black Death).

Technology has increased the carrying capacity many-fold. And also changed the incentives for large families. We can look back and laugh about how wrong Malthus was, and say that it is clear in hindsight that the English should have ignored his analysis and intervened in the Irish Potato Famine back in the 1800s. But his theories were grounded in the universal truth of what life had been like in agricultural societies for thousands of years.

I wish all of this was more widely understood.

⬐ DiffEq

"there is NO country today which is as badly off as EVERY country was 200 years ago" - I can name a few middle east countries that are worse off...and some African countries as well.

I think something else that needs to be considered is that all these years since 1945 Germany was held in check. This is increasingly not the case anymore and no matter how modern and progressive we think we are Germany always seems to have a penchant for starting wars. This time around, with them in control of the entire EU, it won't be so pretty and it is likely we will not last through it.

⬐ btilly

Really? Watch the video. Note where the top-right corner started 200 years back, and where the bottom-left corner ended when the video was taken. And yes, the world has continued to improve since.

The world has improved more than most realize. More than I did until I watched that video more closely.

⬐ carapace

Yay! Pattern match!

> we are like a world recovering from an insane collective trauma that most people have amnesia about

This is the conclusion I have reached as well.

There is a scene in a David Lynch movie where the main characters arrive at the scene of a car accident moments after it has occurred. There is a car upside-down, with a wheel still spinning, and a girl is wandering around dazed and bleeding from a head injury, with no idea what has happened to her.

I think humanity has been in the situation of that girl.

I think it might have been the Younger Dryas ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas with or without the possible comet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi... )

In any event, we do seem to be on the cusp of a Golden Age if we can avoid our worst pitfalls (war and ecological destruction, mostly I think)

Amen.

Hans Rosling did a great job explaining all that progress.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

My favorite video of his is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo.

⬐ neogodless

Also my favorite - over 100 years of improvements in health and wealth.

I think it makes sense for a community to own its local roads, the last mile. But I don't think government control makes sense for highways, except perhaps where there is no competition. There are many ways to get to most places.

Even with a monopoly, there is a price level where the road makes the most money. You can't raise prices above that without losing money.

Even then, it is possible for communities to have contracts with road providers that pay a provider for each mile travelled but that give the community the proceeds of the surge pricing. And certainly communities have to agree to connect to and use a road for it to be profitable.

And we certainly don't want to have a situation like that privately owned bridge connecting the US and Canada where there are no other bridges nearby. But I pay an even higher bridge toll to drive to Queens.

I'm all for maximizing the benefits. That is the reason we should have to pay to use roads, especially at peak times. Because we waste a lot of time on them when they are free.

It's not about collecting the most money for the government. It's about maximizing the flow of traffic when demand is highest.

And yes, its hard to eat in places without strong markets and property rights. And things have improved greatly over the last 30 years where people now have more rights and markets set the prices for food rather than political decisions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

The more accurate prices are, the more sensible our decisions can be and the more opportunity there is, especially for the poor.

Not utopia compared to what?

My great grandmother had to have 8 kids so that she could have 4 or 5 adult children. That was less than 100 years ago.

My grand parents were the children of subsistence farmers without running water or electricity. They went to high school, worked in factories, and could get broadcast TV in their living room. Electricity and running water became a base default.

My parents work in an office pushing papers around. Even the society of their youth seems alien in its antiquatedness of both social mores and amenities.

I get paid to think things and can reasonably expect to live essentially disease free until my 70's. Achieving 90 in relatively good health and vitality doesn't seem out of the question.

Seems pretty utopic to me. What not-utopia are you talking about?

EDIT: Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo Over the past 200 years, the difference between 1st world and 3rd world has all but vanished. We still have a ways to go, but no utopia is perfect. Even in the movies.

⬐ eli_gottlieb

>I get paid to think things and can reasonably expect to live essentially disease free until my 70's. Achieving 90 in relatively good health and vitality doesn't seem out of the question.

No, you'll probably start suffering from diseases of affluence well below that. Sooner or later, heart disease, lung disease, diabetes, cancer, and pals crop up among basically everyone who doesn't carefully optimize their lifestyle to maximize health.

In fact, the same principle applies to most of the rest of your lifestyle: it all seems very nice because you're discounting the incredibly careful and difficult-to-duplicate optimization of everything from personal habits to major life choices.

Your entire life (our entire lives, really: it's me too) is essentially golden handcuffs. This is a major step up from handcuffs made of rusty saw-blades that cut and give you tetanus whenever you move, but you're still actually handcuffed.

⬐ andrepd

We are better than we were the generation before. Big deal. That's precisely the point: we aren't at the end game, there is still far ahead to push forward to.

⬐ None

None

⬐ knieveltech

Sex trafficking, international terrorism, homelessness, racism, crushing poverty, wage theft, mass shootings, income inequality, food deserts...are you for real?

⬐ drcross

Try walking alone unarmed across any city late at night from any era over 100 years ago and you took your life in your hands. Just because mass media is bringing you stories of the miseries of the world does not mean they are more prevalent. The majority of the world has been lifted out of poverty in the past 200 years to something unrecognizable and the pockets of turmoil that still remain will be fixed as time goes on.

⬐ knieveltech

Delightfully faith-based assertions regarding the future. You'll note we were discussing the near total lack of semblance between modern society and any number of utopian ideals. Apologetics aren't making the comparison any more flattering.

⬐ llamataboot

and the people that grow your coffee beans? How long do they live for? There is a tension between believing that a rising tide will lift all boats (eventually, someday) and that part of the prosperity of much of the West is directly built upon the back of a system that disenfranchises most of the developing world -- depending upon it for cheap and disposable labor, waste dumping sites, etc.

⬐ Swizec

The people who grow my coffee beans also live much better than they used to. We're enjoying a before unseen period of peace and prosperity. Globally.

Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

Over the past 200 years, the difference between 1st world and 3rd world has all but vanished. We still have a ways to go, but no utopia is perfect. Even in the movies.

⬐ llamataboot

I take your point, and it is one interpretation. There is another interpretation as well. Here, I'll trade you videos. From a now-ethereum venture capitalist, so not just a hippie dippie leftist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkQCy-UrLYw

it's short, ten minutes

⬐ TeMPOraL

Compared to Star Trek. That we are doing better than previous generations only inspires confidence that we could do even better in the future.

It took the west a long time to figure out the stable government structures. I saw one theory that civilisation started around the Med because it was easy to get about by boat and was slow in Africa because it was pretty hard to get about before jet aviation. I figure that now they've got internet they'll catch up.

Hans Rosling's thing is interesting showing Africa catching a bit towards the end https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

⬐ cb18

Interesting video, but the two axis graph he presents is not a particularly good method for understanding the development of the world. Especially when one of those axes is average life expectancy from birth, which is mostly an illustration of the fact that we figured out how to significantly reduce infant mortality. Yes we figured that out likely due in part to the growing prosperity in society but there are I believe better ways for understanding development and prosperity around the world.

Maybe some nations just express their prosperity in different ways. For example the awe-inspiring artifacts of the ancient cultures in Europe and other areas. While maybe ancient cultures in the South Pacific were content to just chill on the beach, or cross the seas, or on Easter Island, do that Easter Island thing.

It took the west a long time to figure out the stable government structures.

What do you mean by that?

Those 'cultures around the med' were basically the longest lived in the history of the world. In many ways they are still living.

Europe has enjoyed great prosperity in for over 2500 years. Waxing and waning in terms of breadth perhaps. But not hard to find throughout the historical record.

⬐ tim333

I mean that in the UK say, we only moved to a constitutional monarchy and had a bill of rights in 1689. And there have been glitches like Hitler and Franco coming to power. Europe has only really been stable and fully democratic government structure wise since Franco died in 1975.

Ok, well - maybe I'am going offtopic now but what I'd like to have is a _query language_ based on gesture. I.e. something to analyze data with. This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo gives an idea of what I'd like to have, but of course in this case the data "transformation" are pre-scripted and the speaker goes through a sort of coreography. Imagine being able to play with data interactively by moving stuff around in space around you.

No, something has changed and PG understands it while you don't.

As http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html explains, what you are missing is that what people really want is wealth, not money. And wealth is things of value created by people. As productivity improves, we can create more wealth. One form of that wealth is that we can make more efficient use of fundamentally scarce resources. Which admittedly does not increase them, but does decrease pressure on them.

The aggregate effect of these trends over time is truly remarkable. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo for a vivid demonstration of how remarkable it is.

⬐ sfk

The price of really valuable goods (housing, education, health care) is steadily rising. Cheap trinkets in the form of silly websites, iPhones etc. are just a distraction from the fact that the majority of the population is worse off than 20 years ago.

⬐ adventured

The standard of living the US achieved circa 1968 / 1974, is unlikely to ever be matched again anywhere on earth by a large nation. The minimum wage at the time was equivalent to roughly $35-40,000 per year today.

A big part of the reason for that, was every US competitor got destroyed in WW2. The US inherited an open runway, and acquired over 50% of all global manufacturing at the peak accordingly.

As major countries, like Britain / France / Germany / Japan got their feet back under them, that competition drained the easy income and wealth off the top of the labor force in America. The rise of China, Brazil, India, etc and the opening up of the Soviet bloc has further stressed the US labor market, by increasing competition.

The peak that you're referring to that America has been coming down off of, was temporary and would not normally have existed had it not been for WW2. It was a fluke.

That massive concentration of income and wealth the US acquired due to WW2, has been gradually redistributed due to competition. People in Estonia, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Czech, Slovakia, Brazil, China, Australia, Canada, etc. etc. have seen massive increases in their standards of living the last 40 years.

⬐ None

None

⬐ refurb

The standard of living the US achieved circa 1968 / 1974, is unlikely to ever be matched again anywhere on earth by a large nation. The minimum wage at the time was equivalent to roughly $35-40,000 per year today.

The highest (adjusted for inflation) minimum wage in the US was in 1968 and comes out to $10.71/hr in 2013 dollars [1]. That's about $21,500 per year.

Where did you get the $35-40K number?

[1]http://money.cnn.com/interactive/economy/minimum-wage-since-...

⬐ btilly

According to http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/MEHOINUSA672N the median US income adjusted for inflation is up over the last 20 years.

The median worldwide income is up a lot more, but I do not have an easy graph for that.

⬐ vacri

Didn't you just say that 'money' is not the same as 'wealth'?

⬐ dredmorbius

Modulo a few not incontroversial assumptions, inflation adjusted monetary income is a proxy for real wealth.

The inflation adjustment is supposed to proxy for all the various utils your dollars (or shekels or yuan or rupees) can buy.

In practice, most people will accept this at least for a base point of argument as alternative measures tend to be even more controversial. Even those who have profound issues with money, price, value, inflation, wealth, and more. Such as myself.

⬐ foobarqux

That's household income, women started entering the workforce in the 70s so that many households started becoming two-income. Male median income is flat.

That is what has happened.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

So Kay says “... rich countries got rich and why poor countries stay poor” and Gates says that's false. I think if you actually look at the data numerically then Gates wins eg. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo#t=238

I am making a statement about the reasoning that results in current policies. I'm not saying that the policies are well-executed (indeed I think they are not), merely that they have something more than just "reward a well-connected lobby" justifying them.

As for African poverty and famine, you're right that measures that protect farmers in rich countries will hurt farmers in poor ones. However the #1 cause of African famine remains corruption and war inside of Africa. And on current economic trends, we'll see economic powerhouses emerging in Africa in near decades. So as sad as our neglect of the interests of over a billion Africans is, it does not seem to be a permanent boot in the face.

For perspective, take 5 minutes to watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo. There are - today - African countries that are better off than any country in the world was 70 years ago. If others continue on trends that have happened elsewhere, things are going to improve fairly dramatically.

I agree with you that our agricultural policies create problems. But I'm optimistic about what the future holds for people who are impacted.

Here's another visualization focusing on the last 200 years. Doesn't focus on population growth as much as life expectancy, but a far cooler visualization in my book!

Starts about 30 seconds in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

A discussion came up on one "local" forum and one guy was saying that captalism "forced millions of people into poverty in the last 100 years". This link was given as a counterargument and I think it's a pretty awesome visualisation.

⬐ iguvnbiugb

http://searchyc.com/submissions/rosling?sort=by_date

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2073553

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2048229

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2040859

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2021752

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1973202

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1957024

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1954315

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1906265

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1774797

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1774186

Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

Concisely sums up everything good about free-market capitalism.

The original video link (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo) was submitted 5 days ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1954315). Then a slightly different url (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=j...) was submitted 10 hours ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1973202)

It seems quite unfair to me that the person who submitted this content first, and did so without linking to their own blog, gets none of the recognition and karma. While 100% of sthomps submissions (http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=sthomps) are links to his own blog, where he mirrors or links to the original content.

I just said it (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1974170) but I'll say it again: I think this is a flaw in HN's ranking scheme. If the original link isn't upvoted quickly, it never gets on the front page. After that, the rewards (recognition, traffic, and karma) go to people who mirror the original content or simply link to it from their own websites.

⬐ mike-cardwell

How would you improve the ranking system?

⬐ blahedo

If there were a "dup" button that let you actually mark what's a duplicate of what, you can try all sorts of things to shift karma and points around.

EDIT: I fleshed this idea out a bit and submitted it as an Ask HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1975950

⬐ tibbon

I would final duplicate content and automatically merge likely submissions together. Spread the karma between the first 3 submitters in a 50/35/15 manner, so that the latter two still have incentive to spread the link outside of HN.

⬐ mike-cardwell

That sounds easily abusable to me. People would just submit a duplicate article when they see an article gaining upvotes.

⬐ chroma

I don't know of a complete fix, but a start would be to rank based on upvotes in the past hour (or 2 hours, or whatever works best) instead of since submission. This would allow links submitted days ago to end up on the front page if they were recently upvoted a lot. The new algorithm could be put on an alternate front page (similar to http://news.ycombinator.com/classic) until it was tweaked to get the desired result.

Since detection of duplicates and content mirrors is currently done best by humans, I think another aspect of the solution is cultural. If we want to stop this sort of thing, people need to point out mirroring/linking and flag submissions. If we do it enough, the incentives will change to discourage this behavior.

⬐ eru

Sounds like a good solution that would also decrease the asymmetry between first submission, new submission and up-voting. (There's one asymmetry that we'd like to keep: Who gets the karma, but the asymmetry of those actions on ranking aren't as interesting.)

⬐ sthomps

I totally agree with you. In terms of not getting the original content not getting the recognition it deserves, this is exactly right. We write a lot of original content, that unless it gets many votes very quickly, does very little on HN. And often someone may link to it, or re-blog later on and get credit.

When it comes to videos, especially TED talks, etc... we try and put up really high quality stuff that our readers will appreciate. Is it fair that we can get traffic off of other people's work sometimes? Probably not. TED talks, and this video from today are a tremendous amount of work and we should probably not always link to our blog.

I will say, however, that on HN, I have more than just this one account. My other "dummy" accounts are used to submit others content etc... Although this account can start doing that as well. Anyways, thanks for the comment, it is very true.

⬐ forza

A year or so ago Swedish national television made a documentary about Hans Rosling. It's is available on youtube with subtitles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_7howQzatw

⬐ stretchwithme

Thanks!

⬐ tshtf

For those who haven't seen it, his TED Talk is excellent: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_y...

⬐ stretchwithme

Thanks!

Amazing visualization demo...