haxxiy said:
Yes, that's an all-time low. I honestly think you haven't internalized how much death and suffering there used to exist in this world. Take the year 1800, for instance, when we got to a nice round 1 billion people, while child mortality in pre-industrial times was 50%. With an average of 45 births per 1000, that alone gets us to 22 million dead children in that single year, which beats the number you quoted (even if we were to take it at face value), adjusted per total population and per year, by a factor of over a hundred. That's without even getting into the millions of adults who passed before their time that year from disease, hunger, etc. Another thing to show how uncalibrated your pessimistic bias is, estimate how much of a % change in extreme poverty, hunger, and illiteracy you think there has been in the past 20 years ---a period that includes both a pandemic and a large recession, mind you---, and then look up the answer online. I'd bet you'd be surprised. There's no "shit hitting the fan" anywhere, and if anything, that sort of thinking is prone to paralyze otherwise intelligent people from engaging in useful political and social action because they imagine everything is horrible and that there will be some sort of karmic civilizational comeuppance coming soon. |
I'm of the reverse opinion, comparing to 200 years ago is setting the bar low and leads to no sense of urgency to fix very real problems we have today. But perhaps it needs to get real bad first before people start taking action. People not being able to imagine how horrible it can get is what leads to inaction.
Over 320 million in acute hunger, oh well in the 1800s many more people starved to death.
Economic sanctions killing 560K yearly (half of those under the age of 5), oh well the plague killed far more.
Unbridled growth from the industrial revolution (also responsible for 15-22 million deaths WW1, 70-85 million WW2) has led to where we are now. Sure many good things came from the industrial revolution, but also capitalism which is now ruining the world. Capitalism is much older yet the industrial revolution cemented industrial capitalism which we are stuck with now.
