It's not an oxymoron. An analysis of the long-term and even medium-term trends to the human condition shows that thing have tended to consistently improve over time. As just one example, consider how the share of humanity that lives in extreme poverty has declined:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/worl ... y-absolute
coincidentally there's actually a pretty good video by fellow YouTuber Unlearning Economics(will call him U.E for short) who actually goes into detail regarding this piece of data you mentioned(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo2gwS4VpHc), Jason Hickel(an economic anthropologist) explains it better than I can in this article(
https://newint.org/features/2019/07/01/ ... iscontents) , though for brevity purposes his more important take is when he talks about the GDP graph being intrinsically flawed stating that "
It’s a compelling narrative, but it suffers from a number of crippling flaws. For one, the good-news story relies on an extremely low poverty line of $1.90 per day. This might not seem a problem at first glance; we’re used to hearing this figure, as it’s been normalized over the past few decades by the World Bank and the United Nations. But, remarkably, there is no empirical basis for the $1.90 line in terms of its ability to satisfy basic human needs. It is arbitrary and meaningless as a measure of global poverty. In fact, we have mountains of evidence showing that people who live just above this line remain crushingly poor in every respect, with terribly high levels of malnutrition, infant mortality, and low life expectancy."
there's also the added part where he mentions a paragraph later that "
The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) says that there are 815 million people in the world today who do not have access to enough calories to sustain even ‘minimal’ human activity; some 1.5 billion are food insecure and cannot get enough calories to sustain ‘normal’ human activity; malnutrition is suffered by 2.1 billion. And the FAO says that these numbers are rising. In other words, the $1.90 line peddled by Gates and Pinker would have us believe that there are fewer poor people than hungry and malnourished people, and that the number of poor is decreasing even while the number of hungry is rising."
furthermore, he points out some essential missing pieces for the data "
the data set is woefully incomplete, as it focuses almost exclusively on Western countries. For the entire continents of Asia and Latin America, it includes data for only three countries each prior to 1900. For Africa it includes no data at all prior to 1900, and for only three countries prior to 1950.".
I also disapprove of anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers, but I don't see how their stupid behavior and the damage it causes compares to the much stronger trends towards improvement of the human condition. Since the start of the pandemic, COVID denialists might have caused hundreds of thousands of needless deaths (mostly their own), but the scientists who developed the COVID vaccine and the agencies that disseminated it prevented tens of millions of deaths. The actions and ideas of the stupid few should not loom larger than those of the smart and responsible many when gauging how the pandemic bodes for human progress.
admittedly i'm pretty bad when it comes to explaining myself, but i suppose what i meant when it came to them is that covid denialists are a pretty good example of how we'd react when it comes to climate change, our general response for climate change as is has been one of downplaying, misinformation by fossil fuel companies and little to no action by most governments. i appreciate the scientists who developed the covid vaccine as much as you, but the truth is we can't exactly ignore the amount of people who refuse to get the vaccine or wear a mask, you can call them a minority(but they are a loud, sizeable one) and yet these same people are government officials, politicians, influential figures and celebrities(joe rogan comes to mind), don't make the mistake of underestimating these folk or the damage they can do- their existence means there's always a chance for the virus to mutate into becoming vaccine-resistant or worse.
Also, what do you think about Steven Pinker's writings about the positive trends in the human condition, particularly those about the reduction in violence levels?
can't say too much considering i haven't read it yet, but if you want my general opinion on the violence part most of what i'm saying isn't exactly a case of mean-world syndrome i'm suffering from, these are actual events/processes ongoing in civilization, and when a widespread number of people(including us) are experiencing anomie, breakdown of the social ties to other folks and communities, alongside a resurgence in the far-right reactionary element(white supremacists, nationalists, fascists and the like) as a result of life becoming a lot more difficult in the coming years and people wanting something to blame(as January 6th has demonstrated), i'd say he's not looking at the big picture.
but also believe that the actions you support to overcome it are dishonest.
how so?
Moreover, I challenge whether keeping the population is a state of exaggerated fear has been leading to productive solutions to real problems. For example, Americans are awash in news reports of violent crimes, and to such and extent that they tend to grossly overestimate crime rates. This has been the case for many years, yet no changes have been made to the educational, social services, policing, or criminal justice systems that have substantially reduced crime rates. There seems to be no value-add to exaggerating the scope of the crime problem.
im not fearmongering here, i'm trying to warn people, this article(
https://time.com/6138650/violent-crime- ... hat-to-do/) talks a little about how we could take certain steps to alleviate the crime problem, noting the herculean task in getting people to work together and commit to various strategies in spite of our politics. that said, i don't disagree with you in that news outlets, especially conservative types like Fox news or sky news australia have a tendency for fearmongering, their ability to manipulate the truth is almost unprecedented(as their unfortunate success at turning CRT as something to be afraid of and in some cases angry against has shown).
Also, you misquoted something I said. You summed up my argument with the phrase "everything is ok," when in fact, I wrote "Everything is not getting worse." It might look like a small mistake, but the statements have very different meanings. For the record, I actually don't think that "everything is ok."
apologies for the misunderstanding, so what would your general overview of the world be described as?
It is not a fact that everything is getting worse. Look at my data on the decline of extreme global poverty. For all the talk about how the "middle class is dying" in rich countries over the last generation, a much larger number of humans living in poor countries have vastly increased their own wealth and opportunities over the same period, and in many cases, they escaped the sort of day-to-day miseries that 99% of people in rich countries still never experience.
already responded with the video and article, though there is another article critiquing pinker's ideas.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transf ... -show-why/R.I.P Ziba.
