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According to Human Development Index, life expectancy, literacy, education, standard of living, and GDP per capita are slowly increasing worldwide, although faster in some countries than others. The world population is increasing with 2.2 percent per year, expecting to reach nearly 9 billion by the year 2050. There is also an ongoing technology development, sociocultural evolution as well as economic development.
25 years ago in China, over 600M people were living on < $1/day. Today this number is 180M … meaning 420M+ people are now above this level.
Between 1999 and 2004, 135M people worldwide rose from < $1/day to above this level. This is more people, more quickly than at any other time in history.
In South Asia, the number of people without clean water has halved since 1990.
In 1975, 75% of people aged 15-25 were literate. Now the rate is almost 90%.
In 1970, the fertility rate in East Asia/Pacific was 5.4 and now is 2.1
Almost half of all humans live in countries with growth of more than 7% per year (which doubles the economy every decade).
However, there can be problems even with just using numerical averages to compare material standards of living, as opposed to, for instance, a Pareto index (a measure of the breadth of income or wealth distribution). Standards of living are perhaps inherently subjective. As an example, countries with a very small, very rich upper class and a very large, very poor lower class may have a high mean level of income, even though the majority of people have a low "standard of living". This mirrors the problem of poverty measurement, which also tends towards the relative. This illustrates how distribution of income can disguise the actual standard of living.
Likewise Country A, a perfectly socialist country with a planned economy with very low average per capita income would receive a higher score for having lower income inequality than Country B with a higher income inequality, even if the bottom of Country B's population distribution had a higher per capita income than Country A. Real examples of this include former East Germany compared to former West Germany or North Korea compared to South Korea. In each case, the socialist country has a low income discrepancy (and therefore would score high in that regard), but lower per capita incomes than a large majority of their neighboring counterpart. This can be avoided by using the measure of income at various percentiles of the population rather than a highly relative and controversial overall income inequality measure.
Popsicle indexThe Popsicle Index is a quality of life measurement coined by Catherine Austin Fitts as the percentage of people in a community who believe that a child in their community can safely leave their home, walk to the nearest possible location to buy a popsicle, and walk back to their homes.
Originally posted by grindhouzer
Statisticly, it may seem this way, however, being happy wont stop what the UNIVERSE has in store for earth....
Just Look at all the natural events like earthquakes and hurricanes lately....Something is happening to the earth.
That Map of the world will soon all be red....
Originally posted by OmegaLogos
you are mistaking pure numbers [ie 1000 people is greater than 100 people] as a clear indicator of better than using a PERCENTAGE based analysis. 1000 people may be more than 100 people but if happy /not happy RATIO is the same then there is no better. Can you please show explicitly how that ratio has changed for the whole planet since the start of ww2 [i.e. within living memory = contemporary to our time]
Personal Disclosure: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics! :duh
But to say that it's getting better doesn't fit. At least not for me and for a majority of the people that I know.
Originally posted by Hefficide
In 2001 I had quite a good career
Originally posted by LiveForever8
Everything's Amazing & Nobody's Happy
Another thread on the subject: The Good News Is The Bad News Is Wrong
Originally posted by backinblack
But know both the husband and the wife have to work, sometimes long hours, just to TRY and buy a home.
Family life is gone thanks to the greedy bankers
And why do you assume you need a whole house? 2 years ago I visited a man in India. He had no sofa for me to sit on. But he made me some tea. And he had no TV. No Internet. He had one room for his whole family. He did have a mattress. But he was happy. His smile was radiant. He did have toothpaste, apparently.
Originally posted by backinblack
Why are you rambling on about India.??
Home ownership is dropping because it's near impossible to buy..
Looking at the last 5000 years you will see a super-steep curve upwards in terms of