>> I don't care if things are better than ancient times.
The world population living in poverty has decreased from >1.7 billion to 700 million over the past 25 years. So, it's not a comparison to ancient times. We've made considerable progress in just the past couple decades.
There's still a lot of work to be done, and we should celebrate the progress made at the same time.
Yet these statistics don't matter to individuals for whom life is mostly suffering. We're together in our happiness, but alone in our grief. The Gates note here recounts such stories, and even they haven't captured the deep anguish and helplessness that consumes individuals when they have no money to eat (and worse, to feed their children), and when they can't treat family from curable ailments.
Often people seem to use ideas in Factfulness (Rosling) to assuage the guilt of living well and free when there is suffering all around. This is fine, but this also seem to give ammunition to others who argue that people's fates are in their hands alone, minimum wages should be abolished, and being a rickshaw driver is fine - because they need jobs, and it is as good a job as any for people "like them". The reasoning from "things are improving" to "society don't owe individuals succor" seem to be illogical, but reoccuring nonetheless.
Why does a decrease in world poverty matter in a thread about living on $2 a day?
I really don’t care about your stats, make your own post if you wanna talk about them. My point is that folks like you redirect the topic because you’re uncomfortable with reality.
I don’t think we’re anywhere close to “celebrating”
...because it's a thread about people living on $2 per day. Would you say the trend is irrelevant if it was negative and things were getting worse? How is talking about poverty trends irrelevant deflection?
I totally disagree with the sentiment that being change oriented means avoiding positive news.
Aside from the fact that its obviously relevant, maybe it was mentioned because the thread is about an article that opens with some of those same statistics on the reduction of poverty.
> Why does a decrease in world poverty matter in a thread about living on $2 a day
Because if the population living in poverty has decreased by 1 billion in 25 years, then were clearly doing the right things to reduce poverty. If you think reducing poverty is a bad thing because you’d only accept a solution that eliminates it instantaneously, then I’d question your priorities.
Another way of looking at it is that two of richest countries in the world from 300 years ago spent the most of the past 300 years with most of their citizens in extreme poverty. Now that those countries are catching up again, we're seeing these reductions in extreme poverty.
In other words, these improvements are not the result of a valiant effort to fight poverty, but a regression to the historical meaning happening because the effects of colonization are beginning to fade away.
The world population living in poverty has decreased from >1.7 billion to 700 million over the past 25 years. So, it's not a comparison to ancient times. We've made considerable progress in just the past couple decades.
There's still a lot of work to be done, and we should celebrate the progress made at the same time.