It was clear as day i have been talking about how society over the long term has been getting better, you are the one who brought up the issue with that fact.
I have no issues. However, I do have challenges to several elements of your assertion:
1/. You still have not defined what you consider to be better and by what standards or measures you judge society on this.
2/. Even generalising, I have given numerous examples of how society is not only not better, but has actually gotten worse.
3/. You have assumed that your subjective opinion is irrefutable fact, and that your readership not only understands this but also concurs and accepts it as such, which is why I am able to highlight so many issues with it.
4/. You seem to also gloss over how the definitions of poverty and slavery have changed. One factor used in most sources, including those you've cited, is the availability of electricity and the Internet - 140 years ago almost nobody had the former and certainly no-one had even imagined the latter.
That's not true though, poverty has gone from 80% of the worlds population to less than 10% over the course of 200 years.
Actually poverty
went up from only 40% 500 years ago, to almost 80% 200-ish years ago, to 35% for most of thereafter, and only dropped nearer to 10% post-millennium.
As mentioned earlier, increases in technology are generally accompanied by an increase in wealth disparity and an increase in impoverished populations... and we're so very, very advanced nowadays, which is one of the factors contributing to World Bank's forecast increases of both poverty and extreme poverty in the next few years.
I asked you simple question about whether you would prefer to live under serfdom, would you?.
Most of us already do, which is why the question is irrelevant.
The formats have changed, but we are still slaves of the system. As much as 75% of the population now works in a service or service-based role, and only 15%-odd of working people are self-employed. The remainder are serfs to whichever company lords they serve.
I'm fully aware of China, i was born in Hong Kong and lived in Beijing for many years, i understand kind of well how it works over there.
How then is society is 'better' today with **** like that still going on?
You might buy your slaves using Apple Pay or something wonderfully advanced, but it's still slavery...
Yes, that society over the course of a longer timeframe is getting better, i assumed you understood my position
I don't understand your position though, because as the evidence presented to you shows, society is
not getting better.
Society is certainly
changing and, as I have already pointed out twice,
some things have improved.... but others have gotten worse, and we've introduced numerous other problems along the way, so for many reasons, it is
NOT getting better.
Yes, its easier now though, isn't it? Green revolution? machinery? Again, the world is getting better.
How is it easier?
More machinery and more people to feed increases the demand for more work and more produce, which requires more workers working much harder and for lower wages, while supermarket slave-masters command even lower purchase prices, resulting in rapidly farmed crops and poorly raised livestock (battery hens, for example) - The end result is an increase in farmer's bankruptcy and suicides and some seriously poor quality food. The very people we depend upon to provide food for us to conveniently buy from the supermarket in a time-efficient manner are the ones we're destroying with our convenient lifestyle. They are our slaves and we're beating them into the ground.
Tell me how this is in any way 'better'?
We're talking about the state of society and making generalised statements, people don't want to live off the land, its harder, i don't see how that is a contentious point.
But they DO want to live off the land, as evidenced by the large number of private gardens and allotments across the country, by all the garden centres that sell seeds, herbs and crop plants, by all the trends toward more self-sufficient living. Many people take it up because it's less stressful than being an office worker and because they get to escape to the country, get some exercise and be free from all the city ****. One I know gave up her very highly paid job as an actuary in London, to go be a groundskeeper somewhere on a remote farming estate up in Yorkshire.
It's becoming so popular that there's a load of articles like this:
https://grocycle.com/small-scale-farming-ideas/
Even on my own work sites (water utilities), the company is leasing out its spare land to people who want to farm stuff, now and we're encouraging this by supplying them with free sludge fertiliser from the sewage treatment processes. People clearly DO want it, and enough of them want it that corporate moneygrabbers like my lot are jumping on that profitable bandwagon!
For many people, keeping livestock and growing their own veg is more of a hobby than a full-time living, but mainly because of land ownership constraints. Many of those who own larger parcels of land can (and do) self-farm enough to be completely sufficient. Even my own landlady rents out the fields behind our house to a local farmer. Land availability is the biggest issue here, not a lack of people willing to live off it.
We have consensus across the whole globe that living off the land is not easy and less preferable by the very fact hardly anyone does it.
If hardly anyone does it, how come so many of the supermarkets are still even in business, let alone able to keep their shelves as full as they do?
Clearly
someone is farming all that food and supplying the world's convenience stores!!
What historical accuracies have you corrected? I'm not following.
"500 years ago, you starved to death".
"There is less people in poverty, less people ruled by tyranny and people are more free than ever in our history".
"Wealth is distributed more equitably than it was 5000 years ago actually".
"what we do know is that the people at the bottom are much better off than people 5000 years ago".
All assertions with no basis in history, and refuted even using some of your own sources.
If you wanna talk about society on smaller timeframes, thats fine.
Take your pick - You've mentioned 200 years, 50 years and 5000 years ago. I quite readily took these markers that you gave me and sucessfully challenged your assertions regarding them.
My point stands - Across the expanses of time society has
changed in a great many ways, but that does
not mean it's got better...
But i don't understand why you took issue with my initial post making a broad statement that society is getting better over the long term.
Because you don't define what 'better' is, and you are deliberately ignoring all the ways in which it has not, regardless of whichever way you want to look at it, done anything except worsened.
That graph goes from 80% poverty to less than 10% over the course of 200 years, from 1800. Before 1800, poverty was hardly 30% or something, was it? It would have been higher, all the way up to 100%, we all lived in poverty by todays standards if we go back far enough, no?
Actually, the sources within that very article and linked directly from it show poverty in the 1600s at around 40%.
This is precisely why I said earlier that it actually increased to 80% before slowly dropping to 35% around the turn of the millennium and then sharply dropping to 10% in the last decade or so.
But again, you don't even define poverty, let alone factor in how that definition has changed with the development of society.
Poverty was virtually
unknown within the Roman Republic and early Empire. Some men were poorer than others, but so many still had access to the resources for basic standards of life that it did not present an actual problem for society.
I won't even go into the different types of poverty, as defined by the causes (conjunctural, social, structural, economic, political), but you
do have to pin down what poverty actually is and by what means you measure it.
i don't disagree, there is a lot to be done still. Why would i disagree with that.
The problem remains. It hasn't gotten better, it has just changed.
My original point still remains, we've come a long way, society is demonstrably better in terms of freedom and poverty than at any point in history (generally speaking)
You have yet to demonstrate how it is better.
So far you've only shown that there are age-old problems which
you don't have to directly deal with because of your life choices and conveniences, and that you're able to ignore them (perhaps even pretend they don't exist) because they've been foisted onto someone else far away and out of your sight.
I don't like this current narrative that the whole system needs to be torn down though, there does seem to be a lot of people out there that believe that.
Not something I've brought up, so I don't know why you're mentioning it here....
