To be fair, some improvements have been made, even at the feet of these giants, driven by government action and populist initiatives. This has been at the cost of concentration and increases in pollution and poverty in the poorest nations. The future looks bleak today, as the divide grows and progressive progress has all but halted.
I don't know what great inventions and technological leaps we are going to see in 2030, 2040, or 2050, but what I do know is that the benefits and wealth from them will be captured by the same class that is capturing everything today.
Seeing the film again I notice the way it portrays the untouchable wealthy classes (briefly) and then the rest of us. (I should read the book [1] because I was intrigued by little scenes like the one with the old people in the library — if you even remember that bit.)
[1] "Make Room! Make Room!" by Harry Harrison
Progress, or even the status quo as it is today is rejected by half of the population.
Poverty is way down globally. Poor nations are far from where they need to be, but we've lifted a billion or so people out of abject poverty in my lifetime.
Don't let a determination to believe everything is bad force you to ignore when things get better.
Humans used to have to labor all to avoid starvation. There were few choices and most of us we died in the town where we were born. Compare to today -- now, we have incredible freedom, cheap and delicious food, cheap ubiquitous entertainment, are more or less immune to the elements, and have tons of free time. But all of this freedom and plenty has forced us to make choices, and it turns out people aren't good at making choices. We struggle to not gorge ourselves on food or waste years of our lives on insipid entertainment. We would like to exercise, eat right, read books, learn things, contribute meaningfully to our areas of interest -- but most of us don't. Worse, we have no excuse for our choices because we are almost completely free.
This dynamic leads to a situation where people hate modernity. Partly because making choices is hard and partly because our freedom makes it clear that our bad choices are our own fault. And so people long for a return to un-freedom. Many of us would rather be poor and starving than to have to make choices and face our own inadequacies.
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ursulakleguinnatio...
What's worse is that people know that whole ecosystems and stable climate patterns are slipping away and will likely never come back.
The ruling class will bring the violence soon enough.
Because I’m really curious what you mean when you say we’re more free than ever. Free time especially is what eludes most people of my peer group; endless tv shows to stream is meaningless without free time for example.
Billions didn't.
USSR census population in 1989 was only 286 million total, while the Holodomor and the Cambodian genocide combined were between 4.4-8 million.
And the Holodomor (and broader famine in the rest of the USSR) looks suspiciously similar to the failure mode of the British government with the Irish potato famine and the Indian famines under British rule, each of which played a part in those people wanting independence, as does the Chinese great leap forward's 15-55 million.
Even with those, and the Chinese famine happened so soon into a transition away from agrarian society that to me it seems more like a tragedy than a consequence, it's still not billions.
No, what saved billions from starvation is fertiliser, and policies of subsidising over-production so that the bad harvest years food is merely expensive rather than insufficient.
If it was "capitalism", then the Lassiez faire British empire wouldn't have had the Irish potato famine nor would the East India Company have been in charge for so many famines in India.
Really, they're getting better and better at this, they have tons of practice and their population control tools are getting better.
Specific countries may be failing to improve, but if you're from the USA remember that your country is 4.25% of the world, and very few of you were ever in abject poverty in the beginning of that timeframe.
Global abject poverty as a standard is roughly "sleeping rough" in western terms (more precisely, it's 2.15 US dollars of purchasing power per day), and the number of people worldwide at that level has gone from 1930 million in 1994 to 1510 million in 2004 to 806 million in 2014 to 693 million today.
I have good news and bad news. The world doesn't stand still. There are some iterations that destroy the structure of society, after which a new structure must be built. The oligarchies of today will meet their end at some point. And, no amount of preemptive effort can prevent that. That's as the good news go, in as much as they are good news.
These are not my ideas exclusively. If you want to hear them from people that has dedicated a fair amount of time at exploring this subject and gathering data, I recommend these books:
- Capital in the Twenty-First Century, for an overview of historical change. You will find that the author agrees with you in many accounts.
- The Collapse of Complex Societies, by Josph A. Tainter.
- Principles for dealing with the changing world order.
The bad news is that the most likely iteration coming around the corner is human's lost of control of our societies in favor of machine intelligence. It's not going to be as "peaceful" as the rise of the post WWII world order, but I hope that we survive.
But expenses expand to fill the available budget, so the actual cost of living is higher, as people earn more to spend more to get more.
(If you wish you had more free time but don't negotiate a pay cut in return for shorter work hours, it just means you value the money more than your time.)
"nearly 38 percent of the world's population lived on less than 2.15 U.S. dollars in terms of 2017 Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) in 1990, this had fallen to 8.7 percent in 2022"
How do you know how good things "could be"? Just because you can imagine something doesn't mean it's possible
What is actually interesting is while the plutocrats and oligarchs have more leg room and better food on their private jet, the airplane itself doesn't move that much faster than me in coach.
You simply underestimate the financial mass of the mass market. These plutocrats and oligarchs only exist as part of a system with an even bigger mass market.
This time is not different.
Continuously making good choices is really difficult, especially when we have so many incredibly alluring distractions. Having some guard rails is a good thing for almost everyone.
Look at who funds them. Look what they do, instead of what they say.
That is blatantly wrong. Better is always possible and the people who steal and cheat the system are the ones who deny that better world for us all.
The Hitlers, the Putins, the Kochs and Epsteins and Madoffs of the world have made the world far worse than it needs to be for the absolutely worst personal reasons.
However, when both 'choices' are openly supporting a live-streamed genocide, then any 'meaning' in the choice is only for people willing to endorse Nazi-level crimes.
... Not Godwinning here, that's just a simple fact; backed up by basically every human rights organization, and the UN, and billions in unguided bombs, etc.
That's why turnout for the Dems was so much lower, as polls and protests had unambiguously promised would be the case. That and the economy, which Democrats insisted is great even as people struggle to survive. Dumb strategy, but the strategists still got paid so...
Democrats used to say, "Not everyone who votes for Trump is a racist - but they all decided it wasn't a dealbreaker"... Well, genocide is quite a bit worse than racism - even if you try to relabel it as 'sparkling ethnic cleansing lite', or 'deserved', or whatever.
And here we are wondering why the future feels fucked up... Smh
That's why turnout for the Dems was so much lower, as polls and protests had unambiguously promised would be the case. That and the economy, which Democrats insisted is great even as people struggle to survive. Dumb strategy, but the strategists still got paid so...
Regardless of the Democrat's strategic mistakes, you can't avoid the responsibility of voters, who are supposed to be well informed, well educated, and difficult to fool. Democratic shooting ourselves in the foot is a collective sin.
Yes, I'm referring to the genocide of Palestinians. It's not something I, or other American voters, could overlook.
> you can't avoid the responsibility of voters
No, and I don't, but when corporate media acts in lockstep with the duopoly's oligarch owners (hey, guess who owns corporate media) then voters can't take the full blame.
Look at corporate media folding themselves into conniptions trying not to acknowledge that Americans response to the assassination of a mass murdering CEO was glee, right across the political spectrum. Look at how they've twisted the 'conflict' (aka genocide) in Gaza.
I'll say it one last time: If Democrats had wanted to win this election, they could have. Easily. All the numbers, all the polls, all the world was telling Biden and Harris for the last year: Stop arming Israel. Stop vetoing ceasefires. Just do the absolute bare minimum so we can hold our noses and vote for you, as is tradition...
Dems refused point blank. Trump's presidency isn't on voters, it's on the Dems themselves; and any analysis which misses this fact isn't worth a pig's fart.
Due to the laws of diminishing returns, the inventions aren't going to be that great and in fact actively destructive as we are basically running the world on innovation, rather than creating innovation for the world.
What is interesting is that expensive iPhones are really not that great for society in the first place. It is not that they have iPhones and we don't. Rather, it is that we have iPhones and that is how we are controlled and the return isn't worht it.
The problem with revolution in today's society is that it will be a revolution against a system that provides little trivial comforts, rather than a revolution against a system causing starvation. Thus, it will take much more work to revolt, as it is a revolution against technology itself.
Can't happen. As soon as significantly many people stop working, the remaining will be offered larger salaries to keep working. That is why revolution against the modern power structure is so hard: because there are economic incentives against revolution for the working class.
A decrease in poverty in this case though is traded by an increased addiction to what the oligarch provides. Is an entire society in a dystopia that provides the basic physical comforts but strips us of meaning in life a good end? I think not.
Democrat or republican; both support the oligarchy in separate ways because both support the advancement of technology. And increasingly powerful technology supports oligarchy and that power structure cannot be stopped by democracy because democracy functions within technology.
China just rolled out a police drone, even though china has more than enough people to train for that job.
This is where my dystopian nightmare begins. Autonomous weapon systems, so targeted and unlimited in reach and capability, that no number of civilians thrown into the frey will make a difference. A single machine gun could have stopped the french revolution, and yes, i think humans are very much capable of pressing that button.
Unfortunately, I don't think the issue of Palestinians are important driving issues to American voters. I wish I have a source to point to but this is based on what I read.
Dems refused point blank. Trump's presidency isn't on voters, it's on the Dems themselves; and any analysis which misses this fact isn't worth a pig's fart.
I have said it before, collective responsibility and sin. There's no get out of jail free card for everyone. People made their decisions and now they have to lie with it. You can blame it on the oligarch or the media or whatever you want but it doesn't absolve voters of anything.
The only people who can truly sleep at night with a good conscious are people who voted Democrats and campaign workers who's working hard to execute strategies.
I wish I had engaged with my family more on political issues as they all voted for Trump in a battleground state. I won't be making that mistake again.
It's not necessary to know how good things could be. Part of the meaning of life is to work towards a good you think could be, and the modern oligarchy strips us of that right.
It is unfortunate that we didn't have a Luigi Mangione a few years ago, and maybe a few copy cats. Not because escalating to that type of accountability dynamic is something to be celebrated, but rather because the wide outpouring of understanding is the type of unifying pressure relief valve our society desperately needs, instead of being divided and conquered by different flavors of authoritarianism.
Housing is the biggest culprit. It has gone up something like 5x in the last 20 years, while salaries have increased maybe 20%.
What people actually pay for it, though, in terms of mortgage payments as a share of income, is at basically the same level (6%) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MDSP
As long as people buy houses on credit, high house prices only reflect that mortgages are cheap.
I'm a software developer but I work in a factory making minimum wage now.
I can barely afford rent. I certainly don't feel like bourgeois.
20 million targeted by both race and religion would have been a bigger thing than the actual literal holocaust.