donlever wrote: ↑Wed Nov 03, 2021 8:21 pm
The WEF has been gathering for 50 years as a group under the guise of making the world a better place. The ruling elite. Yet the planet gets more fucked up every year. If they really wanted to make things better the power and money is there.
Globalisation has helped improve the world in remarkable ways though.
As recently as 1950, roughly three quarters of the world's population lived in extreme poverty. Today it is one eighth.
It has even started to fall in absolute numbers, peaking just above two billion people in the 1970's and today being less than one billion.
In other words, extreme poverty has been more than halved in absolute numbers over the past fifty years, and as a proportion of world population the change is so dramatic it is hard to even believe it.
More and more children have access to education...
Life expectancy keeps rising...
All in all the world keeps getting better. Even war casualties has a relatively positive long term trend.
It is often hard to discern these patterns, because news media tends to focus on th ethings that go wrong, things we need to address.
Positive news is usually flying under the radar. "No one died today" is a boring headline, and "Another record harvest!" is only considered interesting in communist government controlled media or rural Iowa.
This gives us a bias towards thinking that things are constantly getting worse, when in reality all the evidence points to the opposite.
We are also stuck in a worldview of the 70's, where we believe that most of the world's population is still living in poverty with no access to schools, safe drinking water or health care. That was true in the seventies, but the world has changed dramatically in the last fifty years.
Globalisation might seem like a losing game for those belonging to the richest 10% on earth (basically the US, Canada, Western Europe and Australia), but for the vast majority it has been a godsend. And it hasn't even been bad for us. The living standard today is by many measures way higher than it was in the 70's even in these countries. Not by every measure, and some groups have fallen behind, but in general.
People live longer, have better housing, more cars, more electronics, can afford better food, more people have college degrees, etc, etc.
And yet most people feel that things are getting worse and somehow you are getting cheated and robbed. It's weird.
But I guess it has a lot to do with psychology. If your life got 20% better, but your neighbour's life got 50% better you get upset.
Or if your life is the same, but the poor people down the street are catching up, that's even worse.
I recommend that you read Factfulness by Hans Rosling. It's an eye opener.
And if you still don't believe me, check out this graph from his book and then tell me the world isn't getting better:
