I’m really worried about the state of the US despite being a white male who was I’ll coast right through it. I’ll also accept “I don’t” and “very poorly” as answers
I don’t agree with the premise. The world on average is better than it has ever been and it just keeps getting better every year. It’s understandable that heavy consumption of news might make it seem otherwise but virtually every metric you’d use to track this shows that things have been improving and keeps doing so.
As an overall metric, but some things have definitely gotten worse. The planet is on fire for instance. That’s getting worse and we haven’t even gotten into the really bad part.
As of 2022, more than half of the US’ power was renewable. Within the country, Texas was the state with the 2nd highest solar generation and the single highest wind generation. Even if it isn’t perfect, we are making a lot of progress on climate despite all of the pushback and anti-science rhetoric.
What about climate change? Murder rates going down is nice, but murders impact individuals. Climate change impacts civilizations.
Pretty big topic but it’s improving in most regards. Things may seem bleaker but that’s because oil lobbyists have changed strategies from denying climate change outright to trying to convince people that it’s hopeless. This in and of itself is progress.
Here’s a smattering of other facts:
- global co2 emissions have more or less flattened out over the last decade or so. Co2 emissions per capita peaked in 2012 or so and have been declining. Since most population decline is coming from the rich polluting nations and most population growth from developing nations we can expect this trend to accelerate.
- the USA passed one of the biggest climate bills ever in 2020 and it is somewhat hard for it to be reversed. Here’s a video that I think summarizes the good and the not so good of this bill.
- many countries have realistic goals to ban ice cars, while evs are far from a perfect replacement they are undeniably significantly better for climate change than ices. There are also knock on effects, as car manufacturers phase out ice production emerging markets will have a harder time getting ice cars, and as such will almost certainly develop less car dependent infrastructure. This also applies to essentially all infrastructure projects.
It is not too late, and for the first time, we are actually starting to win.
A little context on point one: annual CO2 emissions have more or less flattened out, but that means that the growth has stopped. We’re still emitting more CO2 per year than ever in history. (And it’s hard to say how durable that trend is, since it occurred over the years during which the pandemic drastically curtailed some of the top-emitting activities.) That’s a long, long, long way from net-zero.
The decrease in per-capita emissions from rich nations is consistent with the pattern observed for many pollutants. As economies gain wealth through polluting activities, the rising standard of living causes people to demand less pollution, and improving technology can meet the demand. The trick that we need to pull off here is for the wealthy nations to spread that technology as rapidly as possible to developing nations, so that they can increase their own standard of living without going through the polluting phase.
This year we deployed a CURE for sickle cell! Cured a congenital disease with gene editing. It’s hard to do and crazy expensive, but the end of suffering from this disease is actually in sight.
The mRNA vaccine tech that got a boost from Covid is now being used to cure certain melanoma cancers. This is a potential sea change in the fight against cancer.
More and more of our energy is coming from fully renewable sources. We are behind (way behind tbh) but humanity is actually moving the right direction at this point. We could honestly be seeing peak carbon in the next few years. The climate will change, probably already has, but we might actually survive this.
We’ve got problems, lots of them, and some pretty nasty. But you are almost certainly better off living today than just about any time in human history.
The world is better than it ever has been since the 1970s. You are too young to know what it was like during the Cold War. We are not even under daily nuclear threats like was used to be. There isn’t a wall across Europe with two Superpowers pointing weapons at each other. Life is really good right now compared to the past.
I am also old as fuck. We’re in a proxy war with one nuclear power and a new cold war with another. Just because the government and the media aren’t scaremongering us about these facts doesn’t change them.
CNN, Jan. 24, 2023: The Doomsday Clock moves to 90 seconds to midnight, signaling more peril than ever
Also, climate change.
The world is better than it ever has been since the 1970s MY ASS.
The boomers & gen-xers are gaslighting you, folks.
Gen X / Xennial cusp here. I’m as dismal as everyone else. We’re fucked. I’m fucked. I’ve worked my ass off to get nothing. I have no hope and can’t figure out why I keep trying.
My future is uncertain, I have no end of life care, no insurance, no retirement, and no prospects.
Gaslighting? No. I do wish someone would leave the gas on in my apartment though.
You’re deluded. Climate change and global fascism on the rise. More slavery than ever. We’re not getting off this rock. Seas will rise, life will collapse and forests will burn. No one is coming to save us. The world is headed for annihilation unless Capitalism is abolished globally.
We’re at almost 100 comments, and so far only two mention capitalism. Capitalist realism is a fuck.
I realize that it is materially better than it has ever been and it continues to improve, despite very obvious issues and inequalities.
and while things might be getting worse in the smaller scale, the general trend is improvement
ex. A lot of the current issues are related to a little global pandemic we had recently
The provisional count of all US deaths involving COVID-19 was 48,615 compared to over 200,000 during the same time period in 2022. Of those 98.4% of the deaths were elderly Americans. The pandemic is long over.
I also rejoice that the largest generation of terrible people will all be dying off in the next 20 years, and the millennials will be taking over control.
Every generation has its psychopaths and psychopaths tend to pursue power. I wouldn’t put my hopes in millennials any more than in boomers. I’m happy to be wrong on this though.
Yeah, this is exactly what’s wrong with constantly demonizing boomers and attributing every shitty thing they’ve ever done to leaded gas and paint chips. Populations tend more conservative as they get older and they have for centuries. Even if a minority of individuals actually change their minds, people who were politically apathetic when they were younger tend to be more conservative when they do start voting when they’re older, skewing the whole generation more conservative. There’s already plenty of conservative millennials out there, and even more of them among the ranks of the non-voters.
Remember, boomers are the generation of hippies. Actual, literal hippies who, despite whatever imperfect motives you may ascribe to their movement, achieved greater social revolution in their time than any attitude shifts that have occurred during millennials’ peak social years. And that was only with ~30% of boomers participating in the movement. The rest of them went on to vote for Reagan and kick off helicopter parenting and satanic panic and music censorship and the whole bit.
Anyone who thinks millennials will be somehow immune to this pattern is in for a rough next few decades.
In the past we could say that humanity is still doing terrible things but becoming better in the larger picture.
Back then it was hopeful to think like this because the things we did were terrible but not long lasting.
The problem now is that the terrible things we are capable of are now world changing and can affect us globally … climate change, nuclear war, AI technology, biological experimention (or even biological warfare)
50 years ago we had the capability of making decisions or choices that could cost the lives of millions … now our decisions and choices are capable of affecting the survival of our species on this planet.
You might think that if you listen to Steven Pinker, The World’s Most Annoying Man.
Yeah, I liked that book but I’m not sure I should believe anything that comes out of his mouth.
A friend of mine had an interesting basis for dismissing Pinker.
They saw a discussion panel which included Pinker and noticed that in all the discussion and Q&A he didn’t express a single thought that wasn’t already in his book or speech.
The basis is that any person intelligent and thoughtful enough to be an academic let alone a public intellectual has myriad thoughts and ideas that don’t make it into publication and should spill over in conversation. They reasoned that Pinker is just a clever nerd that got lucky in academia, and I’ve always figured that they’re right (having never thought of that way of thinking about it myself).
Incidentally I’ve seen Penn (of Penn and Teller) reason similarly about how dumb Trump is.
It does, but it’s accomplished that over the past century by prioritizing short term growth, long term consequences be damned.
As those debts are starting to come due to collect, while it is still accurate to say that there’s been an unprecedented good run, that doesn’t mean the fast approaching wall ahead that has everyone else worried is a mirage either.
Both can be true.
Overshoots a bitch. Soon the land will be unable to feed the people and our artificial fertilizer will no longer work. It was fun while it lasted!
We’ve had market corrections. We’re coming up on some global population correction for sure in the next century or so. I guess we’ll all find out if that’s the Great Filter, or if it’s something else we haven’t found yet.
Is it getting worse? How do we measure the goodness or badness?
One measure of economic indicators suggests we are relatively stable.
I’m sure there are a variety of measures that are up and down.
With some ways of looking at things, the world as a whole is getting better, rather than worse.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190111-seven-reasons-why-the-world-is-improving
I’m pretty sure long covid and climate chaos will put a stop to that soon enough but we’ll see. For now, some stuff is getting worse and some stuff is getting better.
Who should listen to oligarchs like Bill Gates? Philanthropy Is a Scam
He’s also the first one to be somewhere to lobby where a government decides to move away from windows, because it’s gonna hurt his stock value
He was also a major factor in denying the global south the IP-free vaccine production they had been promised.
