Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats - BBC

I'm bored, so I'll respond. But where to begin? First, the most basic role of money is to be a medium of exchange. With reasonable overhead and in acceptable time, people need to be able to exchange money for goods and services. Crypto fails this in every practical way. If I want to buy pizza with bitcoin, my overhead exceeds the value of the pizza, the average time to make the purchase is longer than the average time to order, have it made, delivered, and get eaten by my family. (Have you ever SEEN hungry teenagers tear into pizza.) Also if people started trying to buy pizza with bitcoin, you'd quickly run into the problem that the maximum number of transactions per second on the bitcoin network is a fraction of the number of pizzas sold per second. Yes, yes. This is all improvable. I've heard that for years. But these issues are not new, and haven't gone away. OK, what next? You are making a big deal out of the fact that there are poor people in horrible third world countries who want to use crypto to escape authoritarian oversight. At best this is a red herring, I lean towards calling it disingenuous. A far more important use case for crypto is crooks trying to get paid for their ransomware attacks without themselves being caught by law enforcement. And the third world has benefitted far more from payment networks like M-PESA than all of crypto. Besides, the single best way to help the poor people in horrible third world countries is to continue the worldwide economic progress of the last couple of centuries. Few understand how astonishing the improvement in human life is. Watch ▶ this video for a 5 minute video demonstrating how dramatic it is. Moving on, crypto is nowhere near as decentralized as boosters claim. A handful of central players are responsible for owning most crypto, doing most mining, and so on. Moxie, the lead developer behind Signal (great app, BTW), decided to experiment with NFTs. What he found was shocking. First, we are one website hack away from, say, all bored apes turning into pictures of shit. Second, his experiment verifying accidentally pissed off a couple of companies that everyone else uses to get their view of the blockchain. The result? The contents of the blockchain notwithstanding, his NFT disappeared! See link for more details of his experiments. Moving on, all of the defi platforms that you named have something big in common. They are riding on the back of a bubble inflated by fraudulent Ponzi schemes, controlled by a handful of people. They use all sorts of phrases like "arbitrage" and "yield farming". But all those are simply euphemisms that round to "Ponzi". Without the fraud, the whole ecosystem implodes. Because it rests on nothing real. Oh, sure. Defi offers automated trading protocols to allow you to do things like hedge risks. Automated trading strategies have an important role in our world. But they have limits. For example when everyone tries to hedge the same risks with the same trading strategy, it doesn't work. The traditional finance world learned that the hard way on Monday, October 19, 1987, and has had periodic reminders since. It won't work better in the defi world. Another limitation of automation is that if someone figures out how to exploit it, your money disappears arbitrarily fast. Crypto enthusiasts treat the regular heists of large amounts of crypto as teething pains. But actually they are an intrinsic part of the platform that can't be eliminated. Once you eliminate the Ponzi underpinning, crypto trading strategies do what you don't want it to, and don't do what you do want it to. You lose both ways. Moving on, every crypto enthusiast that I have met has an understanding of finance that pays attention to SOME of the stakeholders, and not others. There are a lot of hidden stakeholders in finance, and you ignore them at your peril. The

This is just personal but anytime I feel similar to the OP, I watch something by Hans Rosling [1] or Anna Rosling [2]. Although 10 and 5 years old respectively, I feel the general sentiment is still true - that human progress is slow, in the background and might be ebbing and flowing in your specific sub-population. And when compared to the present, media narrative driven present its hard to see the improvements happening across the global population. It helps me put stuff in perspective - of course mileage may var (and maybe it's just helping me delude myself into getting out a funk but it works!). [1] Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - ▶ this video [2] See how the rest of the world lives, organized by income - Anna Rosling Rönnlund link

Fair point. In defense of my moral model, it's backed up by this idea: are things perfect? No. Is the system working? Yes, and astonishingly well. Is there a better way to get from here to there, where "there" is some improved state of prosperity and development? No. Human nature is what it is, and our systems must exploit our nature rather than combat it. It's all based on measurable positive outcomes, rather than some theoretical idea that being eye-wateringly rich is somehow bad - morally bad, or bad for society. That idea is rooted in the old, pre-growth, pre-industrial paradigm, when all wealth was seized by force in some way. Today, some wealth is from violence, but the overwhelming majority is new money that was created out of nothing but good old human intelligence. Here are some references backing up my idea that the system works. Here's one focusing on the most important metric, human development: link This one is from the World Bank. You have to go into the metrics and countries. There are metrics that aren't of interest here, but some are, like access to clean cooking fuels, or electricity. But it's easy to see that most of it is pointing in the right direction. link Here's a book about all the things that ordinarily fuel existential pessimism: link Here's a book about how innovation progresses exponentially, and what it means for the masses: link Here's that classic video by Hans Rosling giving us some perspective on the progress over the last century: ▶ this video Here's another video on the same thing, by Kurzgesagt: link EDIT: here's another fun one: link

To quote David Mitchell (the comedian, not the author) it would be tempting to take this kind of thing seriously if it wasn't for a damnable sense of perspective. Some thoughts: 1. Much like how the entire centrist media machine feeds off the insanity of the current US administration, somehow this article is at the top of HN. We put it there. (Well, 42 of you did, as of the time I wrote this.) 2. Perhaps the best-kept secret in the world is that it is getting better by almost every measurement. The late, great Hans Rosling was superb at breaking down these dimensions in video form (eg. ▶ this video ) but if you want the real deal, I recommend Steven Pinker's excellent "Enlightenment Now". 3. I couldn't care less that Intel has "stalled" since you can now buy a Raspberry Pi that pwns my first computer by an order of magnitude or three and costs less than $25. Meanwhile, Apple is refocusing on Mac hardware again because so many "poor" people have phones now that they can see a sales ceiling... this means that a huge percentage of the planet has a significant computer on them all of the time. 4. Not only does age and wisdom allow you to observe tech over many cycles, but the older I get the more I realize that tech is nothing outside of its relationship to politics, culture, and ourselves. Look at how young children just assume everything is a screen, now. Tech is now an important aspect of the daily political conversation. In just 15 years we've gone from a society that rents VHS movies to one that feels entitled to comment, upvote and subscribe to everything they watch. It's fucking crazy how much tech has reprogrammed everything from the way we find love to the way we get from A to B. Finally, to the author: sorry a lot of the comments here are negative. They aren't wrong, but we're still working on chilling out and defaulting to presuming that in any given moment, people are generally trying their best in this community. The good news: there's lots to be excited about in this "worst possible timeline" we've fallen into.

On this topic, I highly recommend watching 200 countries, 200 years, 4 minutes: ▶ this video You see how wealth and health have changed over time. In particular you see that there is NO country today which is as badly off as EVERY country was 200 years ago. When you digest the truth of that, and look at it in terms of family stories, impact on society and so on, my impression is that we are like a world recovering from an insane collective trauma that most people have amnesia about. And the more you pay attention, the more ways in which this is obvious. This is not to say that there isn't plenty of trauma today. As the saying goes, "The future is here. It just isn't evenly distributed." But for all the problems we have reason to worry about, there has never been a time when there was a better case for optimism for our future.

Not utopia compared to what? My great grandmother had to have 8 kids so that she could have 4 or 5 adult children. That was less than 100 years ago. My grand parents were the children of subsistence farmers without running water or electricity. They went to high school, worked in factories, and could get broadcast TV in their living room. Electricity and running water became a base default. My parents work in an office pushing papers around. Even the society of their youth seems alien in its antiquatedness of both social mores and amenities. I get paid to think things and can reasonably expect to live essentially disease free until my 70's. Achieving 90 in relatively good health and vitality doesn't seem out of the question. Seems pretty utopic to me. What not-utopia are you talking about? EDIT: Watch: ▶ this video Over the past 200 years, the difference between 1st world and 3rd world has all but vanished. We still have a ways to go, but no utopia is perfect. Even in the movies.

No, something has changed and PG understands it while you don't. As link explains, what you are missing is that what people really want is wealth, not money. And wealth is things of value created by people. As productivity improves, we can create more wealth. One form of that wealth is that we can make more efficient use of fundamentally scarce resources. Which admittedly does not increase them, but does decrease pressure on them. The aggregate effect of these trends over time is truly remarkable. See ▶ this video for a vivid demonstration of how remarkable it is.

I am making a statement about the reasoning that results in current policies. I'm not saying that the policies are well-executed (indeed I think they are not), merely that they have something more than just "reward a well-connected lobby" justifying them. As for African poverty and famine, you're right that measures that protect farmers in rich countries will hurt farmers in poor ones. However the #1 cause of African famine remains corruption and war inside of Africa. And on current economic trends, we'll see economic powerhouses emerging in Africa in near decades. So as sad as our neglect of the interests of over a billion Africans is, it does not seem to be a permanent boot in the face. For perspective, take 5 minutes to watch ▶ this video There are - today - African countries that are better off than any country in the world was 70 years ago. If others continue on trends that have happened elsewhere, things are going to improve fairly dramatically. I agree with you that our agricultural policies create problems. But I'm optimistic about what the future holds for people who are impacted.