i prefer laughing to crying.
and, it confuses and pisses off the architects of late stage capitalism!
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Actually, just a minor threat.
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From a selective eyeballing of the graph here with a bit of poetic license, http://ourworldindata.org/data/growth-and-distribution-of-prosperity/world-poverty/ called “Absolute number of people living in extreme poverty, 1820-2011 – Max Roser”. That site is quite transparent about sources and assumptions.
My guesswork reading of this is that the extreme poor are mostly subsistence farmers, largely in the developing world. And that it’s the same people in the same numbers over the last 2 centuries. When population grows above what the subsistence farming can support the new people leave for the cities and climb out of extreme poverty. But the same number of people stay in subsistence farming and are just as borked as ever.
What’s not clear to me is why the graph shows a dramatic rate of reduction in numbers in the last decade. It looks like the biggest changes are happening in East Asia, which basically means China. So the current downslope is all about China converting farmers into factory workers.
btw. Look at that World Bank graph above that I originally replied to. A classic case of mistaking percentages for totals. The graph trends down so looks highly optimistic, “Yay, Capitalism!” But the callout shows that the non-China total numbers are completely static. 1.1b in 1981, 1.12b in 2008. This is a really common example of lying with stats that the neo-optimists are particularly fond of.
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Not really, none of those work better than “Christ, what an asshole”.
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What’s that?
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Option D in this set of reactions to the crises. Eco-Modernists, Technotopians, Post-humanists. “Technology/Innovation/Progress will save us.”
http://howtosavetheworld.ca/2014/11/29/see-no-evil-the-morality-of-collapse/
The neologism, “Neo-optimists”. First seen here in one of Bruce Sterling’s rants.
http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/487/Bruce-Sterling-Jon-Lebkowsky-Sta-page05.html#post103
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Thanks, very thorough answer. I think I really dislike this sort of labels though.
Good - so it’s all working out as planned? Heh heh heh !
Their mobile phone batteries are half charged.
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Always having some reserves is a good policy in general, not merely for survivalists.
Details like this can save your posterior.
I have to deal with people running in trouble all the time because they did not keep their batteries topped up or another kind of not maintaining “the slack”. More forward-thinking and trouble-expecting would do everybody a lot of good.
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“That’s a hell of an act, what do you call it?”
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Seems that graph just measures earnings. It’s meaningless unless you factor in how much those earnings can buy locally.
For example, a person in a rich western country may have an income of $xx, yet not afford to eat, whilst a person in a developing country might earn $x but be quite comfortable…
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i prefer:
“pardon me, but i can smell your bung hole”
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I tend to like “I was not always as you see me now,” which I have convinced myself I might have made up myself. Age’ll do that.
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I keep looking at the caption first. Like I’m going to get something from there.
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I’m no economist, but I think the numbers clearly show that from 1981 to 2011 impoverished people migrated from South Asia to Sub-Saharan Africa.
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