Has the world become a better place to live in?

[Mr Rayon]

In what ways has the world significantly changed in the last few decades? I've noticed where I come from we've had better and more entertaining advertisements and movies have better special effects but in my opinion the story telling has gotten worse. But in terms of the world's economy, health care, poverty and living standards has the world become a much properous and better place to live in the last few decades? What exactly has changed and what changes are going to be made as we head into the future?

[michel123456]

post cancelled

Edited December 28, 2010 by michel123456

[jimmydasaint]

Hoh, Hoh, Hoh, Ha, Ha, Ha, HAH!

 

Improved?

 

The Technology has improved.

 

And the rich get rich and the poor get poorer. The rich stay healthy whilst the poor get the worst standards of healthcare possible, by hard-pressed doctors with quick -fix cures using paracetamol or penicillin IV.

 

If you are rich then rejoice!

 

The world is yours to enjoy!

Edited December 28, 2010 by jimmydasaint

[Marat]

The differing rates of scientific and social progress over differing historical eras is an interesting topic. For someone who lived between 1880 and 1960, the experience of progress would have been enormous in terms of the increase in personal wealth, the technological advances with the widespread introduction of cars, telephones, radios, televisions, air travel, etc., which had either not existed at all at the beginning of this period or only existed in rare prototypes.

 

But if you contrast with that the experience of someone living from 1910 to 1990, the progress seems much less dramatic. Cars, radios, telephones, air travel, were all present both at the beginning and at the end of this period, only in more modern and widespread forms. The computer age was just dawning, but a person 80 years old in 1990 would probably not notice it much.

 

While there certainly has been great technological progress in our own era, it would have been minimal, and the stagnation would have been astonishing, if it had not been for the microchip and the attendant computerization of everything. But in a field where computerization still hasn't had much of an impact, such as medicine, the picture of stagnation is bleak, since the last major disease to have been overcome was polio almost 60 years ago now, while cancer, diabetes, renal disease, multiple sclerosis, cystic fibrosis, etc. are stuck where they were decades ago.

[TonyMcC]

I am far from rich - but do rejoice at being alive in the present time.

I have had a heart operation - free.

I need 7 different drugs which I get - free.

I have an internal examination of my gullet every other year because I am at above average risk of cancer - free.

I have very regular health checks and blood tests - free.

I live with my wife on a modest pension, to which I contributed 6% of my salary, and never go hungry or cold and can afford to run a family car.

My wife is diabetic and gets regular health checks - free.

My wife has a medical condition (CLL) which is monitored regularly - free

My wife requires quite a lot of medication which she gets - free.

On the other side of the coin my father died in 1948 at age 39 of meningitis, which today rarely kills.

This left my mother in extreme poverty - I know what it is to be really hungry and clothed in rags and cast offs. Todays people living on benefits live in luxury by comparison.

Looking at things over the last 20 or 30 years, there may seem to have been little progress, but looking over the last 60 or 70 years it can be seen there has been a great deal of improvement in the lot of the common man.

[jackson33]

On the other side of the coin my father died in 1948 at age 39 of meningitis, which today rarely kills.[/Quote]

 

Tony; Your situation is terribly hard to read and not to be sympathetic of and I hope it improves. In your Dad's time life expediency was around 46-48 at the time of birth and he and all people lived entirely different lives. For instance he was a child during the 1918/19 Great Influenza Epidemic, where an estimated 50 Million folks died around the world and the stories I could tell on what all Polio meant to people in the 1930-40's...

 

I don't think (not sure where your from), medical assistance was denied you father or would have been for you today, true in the US anyway. The odds in 1948 of being cured of meningitis were very low....

 

 

) The use of penicillin therapy for pneumococcal meningitis began in the mid-1940s, with combined systemic and intrathecal administration, and resulted in a fatality rate of 49 percent. Modern treatment with "meningeal" doses without concomitant intrathecal drug administration began with the 1949 report by Dowling et al of a study in which 21 patients with pneumococcal meningitis were treated with 1 million units of penicillin intramuscularly every two hours, with a resulting improvement in mortality to 38 percent.[/Quote]

 

http://scienceweek.com/2005/sc050211-3.htm

 

Now for all the things you have listed as "for free". Sorry but they were NOT free and somebody has paid for everything, just not you. Again I'm sympathetic about your Heart Condition and your wife's CLL, but people are not left to die in most the civilized world for 100 years and are treated by medical people who have been trained to treat anybody in need. As for poverty, well it happens and is very common today in a third of the Worlds population, probably much more if your in Europe and far worse than you remember your own.

 

I wish you luck and hope you don't take my comments wrong, but this idea that Government can provide for all human needs has got to come to an end, they can't...

 

 

But in terms of the world's economy, health care, poverty and living standards has the world become a much prosperous and better place to live in the last few decades? What exactly has changed and what changes are going to be made as we head into the future? [/Quote]

 

Voltman; I've been around for over 70 of those years and many things have changed, some good, some bad and some things have remained the same. Yes, the percentage of people that are prosperous has increased, diagnosis, treatments and medications have prolonged life.

 

Communications and entertainment do reach more people and for a good share of them education has improved. Homes, transportation, water and food quality are all better and in most cases by far...In terms of the economy, most the World has in some manner tried Capitalism, with various degrees of, allowing more people access to cheaper and better products or some services.

 

The future, will depend on their societies and what they consider, for the better. To me and many of the older people those changes aren't looking all that great. Dependency on all things, is relatively new, you go to a store to buy most needs, local government provide others and with four times the people in the world, from the turn to the 20th Century to today any disruption of so many things (weather, money-economy, transporting (supplies), communications and so on) could be devastating.

 

Kind of off your topic and not directly opposed to abortion, I've kind of wondered from time to time just what a few of those millions of brains, might have meant to the future.

[TonyMcC]

Jackson33 - Thank you for your kind thoughts and comments. However I am very content with my life and not seeking improvement. I tried to highlight the fact that today, although I and my wife have the sort of problems associated with old age, we are well cared for by the "system".

My father was in fact well cared for by the "system" current in his time - 6 months in hospital and treated with penicillin - but what was available in knowledge, techniques etc. were not of today's standards (nor could be expected to be).

I realise that all the medical care we receive has to be financed and in that sense is not really free. However during my working life I paid quite a lot of tax and even now I pay income tax etc. out of my pension.

I suppose I was using my own life experiences to illustrate the fact that there has been a vast improvement in the lives of ordinary people over my lifetime (and yours).

Edited December 29, 2010 by TonyMcC

[CaptainPanic]

I am not sure that the world became a better place to live in.

 

Human rights, justice systems and police are there no longer to protect the people - they exist now to protect the economy.

Governments no longer serve the people - the people now serve the governments.

Non-violent opposition, such as wikileaks, which I see just as journalism, is described as "treason".

 

So, while the average citizen gets more goods as a direct effect of the prospering economy, we lost much of our freedom. We live in the big brother world that was described by George Orwell... and it seems that most governments see the book '1984' as a guideline rather than a warning. One democracy after the other silently fails and the people living in such a country often only have a choice between parties they don't really want. Today, around the globe democratic elections depend on misinformation and lies.

 

I am not sure what I would rather have now: more goods and more luxury, or a government that actually listens to its people rather than eavesdropping on its people... More goods are fun, and lull me into a sense of comfort. But I guess I would much rather simply be trusted by my government.

[Mr Skeptic]

Everything has gotten better, including our bigger and better Big Brother. And that will continue -- newer and better toys for us people, and computerized recording techonlogy for our ever-vigilant Big Brother. And less of a discrepancy in power of countries with a lot of people, with China and India becoming more powerful.

[michel123456]

I think it would be interesting to have a history cursus about human condition a few decades from now. I believe a small percentage of humanity living in privileged countries today enjoy a life into a "pays de cocagne" without having full conscience of it. The tremendous majority of human kind was and is still living under abominable conditions. So yes the world has become a better place to live in, but not everywhere, and not for everyone.

 

What exactly has changed and what changes are going to be made as we head into the future?

In the country I live today, part of Europe, it was not surprising 70 years ago to encounter bare foot inhabitants in the villages, since shoes were a luxury. Many houses outiside towns had no bathroom till 50 years ago. In Belgium, at the right core of Europe, I remember farms in the villages without electricity, it was in the 60'ies. I remember as a child visiting a family in France, they were so rich they had 2 cars, it was unbelievable. The first tv I remember at home was black & white, into a piece of furniture with a key hidden by my parents, and emissions of the national channel began at six IIRC and ended around eleven. They are uncountable examples. These are not only technological, but also social, since technology has been spead all around, and not reserved only for Kings.

 

What changes are going to be made? I don't know, but new generations must be extremally carefull. Over-developement increases the gap between "normal people" (the huge majority) and the few "privileged" ones. It is both injust and dangerous.

Edited December 30, 2010 by michel123456

[Shadow]

[Mrs Zeta]

The world is a better place if you believe it to be a better place. There are problems as always, everywhere and with everything, but it is how you see these problems that matters. We now have a different life based on technological developments, but people like me who have seen enough technology and modern life tend to escape to the country and live a simple life, at least for part of the year.

 

Whether I am packed like a sardine (literally) in a train in central London, or living in a scorpion-infested hut (literally) in my farm in Italy, makes no difference to me. Both lifestyles have good and bad points, equally.

 

It is what you do with your life that makes the difference. Somebody said: "You cannot change reality, but you can change the eyes that see reality".

Edited January 1, 2011 by Mrs Zeta

[lemur]

If you are rich then rejoice!

 

The world is yours to enjoy!

When exciting media advances occur, I believe they tend to be used to accentuate social-class differences simply because people that spend more money are the target consumers for the new technologies. Since higher social-classes tend to consume their own status by circulating ideologies of wealth-differences and how good they have it compared to "those miserable suffering masses," we tend to become more conscious of social-economic deprivation during times of media-evolution, imo. Really, the basic material conditions of the global economy don't change much. One thing that has been changing, however, is the amount of services available as automation and IT replaces industrial and managerial labor. Instead of increasing free time, investors have sought to continue maximizing profit and re-investing in consumerism, which is possible because people are willing to continue consuming more new goods and services. I don't think this increasing service-dependency makes the world a better place to live in, but people who enjoy consumerism probably believe it does.

[jimmydasaint]

When exciting media advances occur, I believe they tend to be used to accentuate social-class differences simply because people that spend more money are the target consumers for the new technologies. Since higher social-classes tend to consume their own status by circulating ideologies of wealth-differences and how good they have it compared to "those miserable suffering masses," we tend to become more conscious of social-economic deprivation during times of media-evolution, imo. Really, the basic material conditions of the global economy don't change much. One thing that has been changing, however, is the amount of services available as automation and IT replaces industrial and managerial labor. Instead of increasing free time, investors have sought to continue maximizing profit and re-investing in consumerism, which is possible because people are willing to continue consuming more new goods and services. I don't think this increasing service-dependency makes the world a better place to live in, but people who enjoy consumerism probably believe it does.

 

I see that you have directly answered the points raised by the OP. Well done. However, I was pointing out something far more fundamental. There is actually a widening divide between rich and poor. You have also answered that by what I may call 'serendipitous consumerism'. In my opinion, the world has become a worst place for the 'have-nots' of this world, and consequentially, the poor have poorer health. One of the reasons is that it is cheaper to buy products for your household which are high in oils and fats and are highly processed so that you can satisfy hunger pangs.

 

I have been poor in the past, and have also had the privilege of teaching children of disadvantaged backgrounds.

 

There is a world of difference between rich and poor that technology cannot address per se.

 

You can read about this here:

The divide between rich and poor is greater after 13 years of Labour rule than at any time since the Second World War, according to the Government’s own report into inequality.

 

It concludes that Britain remains a nation riven by class “from cradle to grave”, despite programmes costing billions of pounds in the past decade designed to narrow the gap.

 

Social mobility measured by both income and profession is low, with worrying signs that the class divide now opens up among children as young as 3. Differences in educational attainment among pre-school children are so stark that researchers believe that each extra £100 a month in household earnings when children are very young is worth a month of cognitive development.

Link to article

or read the original analysis which used net household incomes, wages and educational outcomes, amongst other factors, to compare different socio-economic classes. Academic article

 

If you look at gaps in health, due to many factors, of course, the divide is clear again:

 

The gap between the health of the rich and the poor is greater now than at any time since records began, research has shown.

 

Government initiatives over the past few decades have done little or nothing to close the gap between the life expectancy of poor people compared with those who are wealthy.

 

A review of deaths between 1921 and 2007 showed inequality between the rich and poor has been increasing, especially in relation to premature deaths.

 

People in the most deprived areas are much more likely to die younger than those in the richest, and things are no better than during the economic depression of the 1930s, the study found.

 

Writing online in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), researchers from the Universities of Sheffield and Bristol, said: "The last time in the long economic record that inequalities were almost as high was in the lead up to the economic crash of 1929 and the economic depression of the 1930s," researchers said.

Newspaper Article

 

It is quite possible for people to spend their whole lives in a 'middle class bubble', never going to the 'rough' side of town, for obvious reasons. Nevertheless, you cannot ignore the possibility that two thirds of the world are struggling to find a meal to last them for the day, whilst the remaining third are torturing themselves about which i-phone to buy, and losing the pounds they accumulated over Christmas (I include myself, in a shamefaced way, in the latter category).

 

The world's 4.4 billion adults, note the bank's researchers, now hold $194.5 trillion in wealth. That's enough, if this asset stash were shared evenly across the globe, to guarantee every adult in the world a $43,800 net worth.

 

But the world's wealth, of course, isn't evenly divided. And this study helpfully breaks down the arithmetic of our staggering global unevenness.

 

We've got, at the wealth spectrum's uppermost reaches, just over 1,000 billionaires and another 80,000 "ultra high net worth individuals" worth over $50 million each. We can add into this wealthy summit another 24 million adults worth between $1 million and $50 million.

 

At other end of the global spectrum sit three billion people - more than two thirds of the world's adults - whose wealth averages less than $10,000. About 1.1 billion of them have a net worth of less than $1,000.

 

"Our analysis," the Credit Suisse study says in a whopping understatement, "finds some stark differences in the distribution of wealth."

... Meanwhile, the world's richest 1 percent - adults who have at least $588,000 to call their own - hold 43 percent of the world's wealth.

(emphasis is my own)

 

Link to peoplesworld

Edited January 1, 2011 by jimmydasaint

[lemur]

I see that you have directly answered the points raised by the OP. Well done. However, I was pointing out something far more fundamental. There is actually a widening divide between rich and poor. You have also answered that by what I may call 'serendipitous consumerism'. In my opinion, the world has become a worst place for the 'have-nots' of this world, and consequentially, the poor have poorer health. One of the reasons is that it is cheaper to buy products for your household which are high in oils and fats and are highly processed so that you can satisfy hunger pangs.

I used to subscribe to the general ideology that "the gap between rich and poor" was a problem to cause all problems, but I'm afraid I became so interested in issues of economic resource distribution and social class distinctions that I'm aware of how short-sighted it is to reduce everything to a "gap between rich and poor." Then, to make a long story short, it turns out that the reason that this ideology of redistribution of money to "close the gap" is so popular is because it promotes the ability of investors to make money. If those investors are poor, the poor will get more money. Otherwise, it will not be the poor who ultimately benefit from "closing the gap."

 

The long explanation is that when money is redistributed in any way, it becomes available as potential revenue for businesses and investors. When there are many poor people in an economy, it's like having a lot of dry sponges you can't squeeze anything out of. Then, when people with money don't really want to spend either, it causes revenues and investment income to decrease. Thus the class who has the most the gain from increasing revenues and investment income promote redistribution of money from haves to have-nots because they know that the have-nots are likely to spend instead of save it. Hence, it's not so much about alleviating poverty as it is about increasing business revenues.

 

If poverty-alleviation was the concern, the government could simply mandate that businesses provide necessities and/or credit to poor consumers. It could also promote greater competition within the free market to cause producers to drive down their prices until prices affordable for the poor were reached.

 

I have been poor in the past, and have also had the privilege of teaching children of disadvantaged backgrounds.

 

There is a world of difference between rich and poor that technology cannot address per se.

My observation is that there are really class-mindsets that chain people to their social class status. Poor or working class people, for example, tend to have a servant mentality because this is likely to get them into a position where they can earn money. Middle-class, on the other hand, tend to rely on sophisticated status-affirming cultural activities to sensitize themselves and each other to social-discomfort causes by "inappropriate" behavior and expressions. This results in a form of gatekeeping where it requires a lot of social skill and tolerance to interact successfully (i.e. make others comfortable) in middle-class social situations, including workplaces.

 

If you look at gaps in health, due to many factors, of course, the divide is clear again:

Right, but these gaps are due to classism at the level of treatment and self-care. People take care of themselves less carefully because they don't see themselves as worth it the way middle-class people often do.

 

It is quite possible for people to spend their whole lives in a 'middle class bubble', never going to the 'rough' side of town, for obvious reasons. Nevertheless, you cannot ignore the possibility that two thirds of the world are struggling to find a meal to last them for the day, whilst the remaining third are torturing themselves about which i-phone to buy, and losing the pounds they accumulated over Christmas (I include myself, in a shamefaced way, in the latter category).

I don't think food is usually so much the problem for poor people as is avoiding eviction from a rental domicile. If someone is homeless already, they can often get meals from a soup kitchen, church, or other charity, but they have to try to figure out a way to make their way to a better situation, which can be nearly impossible.

 

 

[Doc. Josh]

The world has indeed improved over time as far as medical advancments,technology,(travel kinda) lol. I think we have lost our way in a personal touch. Everything is to please the masses and its a like a big processing plant. next...next...next... That hometown america feeling is gone i think.