> Having access to manufactured clothing, some processed food, and fitfully provided or available education and health care does not make those people rich except by comparison to long dead people except in some kind of ‘objective’ bookkeeping.
I think this is very wrong. Obviously there are important relative aspects to poverty too, but the reduction in infant mortality, or the ability to have more than one set of clothes, or to communicate across long distances, are all very real ways that we are much better off than our ancestors in 1870, and similarly for people everywhere.
Infant mortality I agree with simply because there's so much evidence across such a wide range of history that the frequent deaths of young children has been an absolute and not relative scourge for human beings. Communicating across long distances, on the other hand, would be one of those mostly relative things--the experience of migration in human history often involved leaving your past completely behind and not at all always for the worse. Being able to communicate as if distance doesn't matter at all every day 24/7 is right now arguably *eroding* our lives rather than enhancing them, or impoverishing us in complicated ways.
I think it's fair to think that changes in communications over the last 20 years have been net-bad for people, even if I disagree. That the changes in communication since 1870 are net bad I find hard to credit. I expect my ancestors who moved west to Wisconsin or to New York from the Pale in that time were happy to have new opportunities, but "never speak to your family again" is a choice that only a few people want to make.
> Having access to manufactured clothing, some processed food, and fitfully provided or available education and health care does not make those people rich except by comparison to long dead people except in some kind of ‘objective’ bookkeeping.
I think this is very wrong. Obviously there are important relative aspects to poverty too, but the reduction in infant mortality, or the ability to have more than one set of clothes, or to communicate across long distances, are all very real ways that we are much better off than our ancestors in 1870, and similarly for people everywhere.
Infant mortality I agree with simply because there's so much evidence across such a wide range of history that the frequent deaths of young children has been an absolute and not relative scourge for human beings. Communicating across long distances, on the other hand, would be one of those mostly relative things--the experience of migration in human history often involved leaving your past completely behind and not at all always for the worse. Being able to communicate as if distance doesn't matter at all every day 24/7 is right now arguably *eroding* our lives rather than enhancing them, or impoverishing us in complicated ways.
I think it's fair to think that changes in communications over the last 20 years have been net-bad for people, even if I disagree. That the changes in communication since 1870 are net bad I find hard to credit. I expect my ancestors who moved west to Wisconsin or to New York from the Pale in that time were happy to have new opportunities, but "never speak to your family again" is a choice that only a few people want to make.