"The world is getting worse" is a belief perpetuated by the media and repeated by many people to explain their own unhappiness. However, many important indicators show things are getting better globally https://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7272929/global-poverty-health...
The world itself never gets better or worse. Facts or data about the world are not value-laden. We impose our values and judgments of the world and decide whether things are getting better or worse.
We might make judgments to this end that misalign with our values or misunderstand the data, but that doesn't mean a judgment like "the world is getting worse" will ever be wrong. It will always true in some respects and not true in other respects.
I'm genuinely curious; did you truly not understand the intent of author in the comment you are replying to?
When someone says the "world is worse", I automatically know they mean a value judgment "for them" or "for humans" or "for animals" and not some scientific, objective measure on the "Planet Earth Goodness Scale".
A valid criticism in this case is that they are clearly valuing humans above other species because the world is objectively worse for the Rusty-patched bumble bee, to pick an example, which is critically endangered.
I don't know, but Steven Pinker (the loudest proponent of this claim) says such sincerely, and besides him, most ordinary people are moral/value realists and think there are genuine answers to these types of questions.
Yes, but that is still value laden. You cannot objectively compare 2 different domains like the benefit of improved healthcare vs the cost of destroyed ecosystems.
Doesn't this just shut down conversation instead of nuance and clarity? It's definitely one way to address the ambiguity in a question like "is the world getting worse over time?" but doesn't seem useful: dismissing the question entirely discourages learning and discussion rather than adding to it. Instead, we could think of what most people (or an imagined reasonable person) might mean by that question, and how the media and scientific communities define and engage it.
For others, there's possibly quite a large room for cherry-picking data. I'm very happy if the following can be proved to be negligible ( or wrong ):
>Extreme poverty falling
I'm not sure how the math ($1) can already be an adjusted for inflation / price variances. Probably should be using the income / wealth equality instead.
>People in developed countries have more leisure time
But not in developing countries. Following the links, I find our working levels stay pretty much the same above the 2000h line. Also I'm interested in how much we compare to pre-industrial level.
>Smoking is down, but not so much in developing countries
>Homicide rates have fallen dramatically, but only counting US and EU
>The share of income spent on food has plummeted in the US
No mention of developing countries. World-wide the homicide rates looks to be about the same-ish ?.
>People have been getting taller for centuries
There are more to nutrition than height, and world-wide looks like it has been same-ish since 1970.
>More people in the world live in a democracy now
50/50 on this one, mainly cause I'm not sure if the democracy index is measured objectively, or they just extend to whatever countries on good terms with the US.
>Tech & Moore's law
I'm skeptic of more tech leads == better life, particularly when more people reported more internet time ~= decreased mental health.
These are mostly international statistics, and a lot of the progress being made is first China and now Africa and India catching up with the west. And that's great.
In the United States, however, things have been going somewhat backwards since the mid 70's. The millennial generation is poorer than their parents were at the same age. Civil rights are beginning to get rolled back. The political situation is fraught.
There are also, as others have pointed out, a number of red flashing danger signs coming from the environment. The earth is limited, and we're treating it as if it's infinite.
So, from my point of view, here, the "world is getting worse" belief has some justification.
If anyone is curious about more data why the world (for humans) isn't actually getting worse, there is a whole book written about it (with lots of data points described and discussed): Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker
> A commonly-held lay public perception holds that the world is in terrible shape; for some, 2016 was the "worst year ever" and the year that liberalism died. In contrast, Pinker argues that life has been getting better for most people. He sets out 15 different measures of human wellbeing to support this argument, with the most obvious being the uncontroversial fact that, statistically, people live longer and healthier lives on average than ever before.
> It argues that the Enlightenment values of reason, science, and humanism have brought progress; shows our progress with data that health, prosperity, safety, peace, and happiness have tended to rise worldwide; and explains the cognitive science of why this progress should be appreciated.
There are many metrics. I was mainly interested to know which ones would be selected. The whole thread is about using data instead of widely held beliefs...
