"If I wanted to convince you of the reality of human progress, of the fact that we as a species have advanced materially, morally, and politically over our time on this planet, I could quote you chapter and verse from a thick stack of development statistics.
I could tell you that a little more than 200 years ago, nearly half of all children born died before they reached their 15th birthday, and that today it’s less than 5 percent globally. I could tell you that in pre-industrial times, starvation was a constant specter and life expectancy was in the 30s at best. [Note: This is average life expectancy, old people did still exist in olden times] I could tell you that at the dawn of the 19th century, barely more than one person in 10 was literate, while today that ratio has been nearly reversed. I could tell you that today is, on average, the best time to be alive in human history.
But that doesn’t mean you’ll be convinced.
In one 2017 Pew poll, a plurality of Americans — people who, perhaps more than anywhere else, are heirs to the benefits of centuries of material and political progress — reported that life was better 50 years ago than it is today. A 2015 survey of thousands of adults in nine rich countries found that 10 percent or fewer believed that the world was getting better. On the internet, a strange nostalgia persists for the supposedly better times before industrialization, when ordinary people supposedly worked less and life was allegedly simpler and healthier. (They didn’t and it wasn’t.)
Looking backward, we imagine a halcyon past that never was; looking forward, it seems to many as if, in the words of young environmental activist Greta Thunberg, “the world is getting more and more grim every day.”
So it’s boom times for doom times. But the apocalyptic mindset that has gripped so many of us not only understates how far we’ve come, but how much further we can still go. The real story of progress today is its remarkable expansion to the rest of the world in recent decades. In 1950, life expectancy in Africa was just 40; today, it’s past 62. Meanwhile more than 1 billion people have moved out of extreme poverty since 1990 alone.
But there’s more to do — much more. That hundreds of millions of people still go without the benefit of electricity or live in states still racked by violence and injustice isn’t so much an indictment of progress as it is an indication that there is still more low-hanging fruit to harvest.
The world hasn’t become a better place for nearly everyone who lives on it because we wished it so. The astounding economic and technological progress made over the past 200 years has been the result of deliberate policies, a drive to invent and innovate, one advance building upon another. And as our material condition improved, so, for the most part, did our morals and politics — not as a side effect, but as a direct consequence. It’s simply easier to be good when the world isn’t zero-sum.
Which isn’t to say that the record of progress is one of unending wins. For every problem it solved — the lack of usable energy in the pre-fossil fuel days, for instance — it often created a new one, like climate change. But just as a primary way climate change is being addressed is through innovation that has drastically reduced the price of clean energy, so progress tends to be the best route to solving the problems that progress itself can create.
The biggest danger we face today, if we care about actually making the future a more perfect place, isn’t that industrial civilization will choke on its own exhaust or that democracy will crumble or that AI will rise up and overthrow us all. It’s that we will cease believing in the one force that raised humanity out of tens of thousands of years of general misery: the very idea of progress.
Changing Humanity's "Normal" Forever
Progress may be about where we’re going, but it’s impossible to understand without returning to where we’ve been. So let’s take a trip back to the foreign country that was the early years of the 19th century.
In 1820, according to data compiled by the historian Michail Moatsos, about three-quarters of the world’s population earned so little that they could not afford even a tiny living space, some heat and, hopefully, enough food to stave off malnutrition.
It was a state that we would now call “extreme poverty,” except that for most people back then, it wasn’t extreme — it was simply life.
-via Vox, March 20, 2023. More from the article below - and I highly encourage you to read it.
What matters here for the story of progress isn’t the fact that the overwhelming majority of humankind lived in destitution. It’s that this was the norm, and had been the norm since essentially… forever. Poverty, illiteracy, premature death — these weren’t problems, as we would come to define them in our time. They were simply the background reality of being human, as largely unchangeable as birth and death itself...
Between 10,000 BCE and 1700, the average global population growth rate was just 0.04 percent per year. And that wasn’t because human beings weren’t having babies. They were simply dying, in great numbers: at birth, giving birth, in childhood from now-preventable diseases, and in young adulthood from now-preventable wars and violence...
But that nearly flat line of population growth, century after century, hides an untellable story of misery and suffering, one of children dead before their time, of families snuffed out by starvation, of potential and of people that would never have the chance to be realized. It was a story, as the writer Bill Bryson has put it, of “tiny coffins.”
It was only with the progress of industrialization that we broke out of [this long cycle], producing enough food to feed the mounting billions, enough scientific breakthroughs to conquer old killers like smallpox and the measles, and enough political advances to dwindle violent death.
Between 1800 and today, our numbers grew from around 1 billion to 8 billion. And that 8 billion aren’t just healthier, richer, and better educated. On average, they can expect to live more than twice as long. The writer Steven Johnson has called this achievement humanity’s “extra life” — but that extra isn’t just the decades that have been added to our lifespans. It’s the extra people that have been added to our numbers. I’m probably one of them, and you probably are too...
The progress we’ve earned has hardly been uninterrupted or perfectly distributed... [But] once we could prove in practice that the lot of humanity didn’t have to be hand-to-mouth existence, we could see that progress could continue to expand.
Current Progress "Flows Overwhelmingly" to the Developing World
The long twentieth century came late to the Global South, but it did get there. Between 1960 and today, India and China, together home to nearly one in every three people alive today, have seen life expectancy rise from 45 to 70 and 33 to 78, respectively. Per-capita GDP over those years rose some 2,600 percent for India and an astounding 13,400 percent for China, with the latter lifting an estimated 800 million people out of extreme poverty.
In the poorer countries of sub-Saharan Africa, progress has been slower and later, but shouldn’t be underestimated. When we see the drastic decline in child mortality — which has fallen since 1990 from 18.1 percent of all children in that region to 7.4 percent in 2021 — or the more than 20 million measles deaths that have been prevented since 2000 in Africa alone, this is progress continuing to happen now, with the benefits overwhelmingly flowing to the poorest among us.
Vanishing Autocracies
In 1800, according to Our World in Data, zero — none, nada, zip — people lived in what we would now classify as a liberal democracy. Just 22 million people — about 2 percent of the global population — lived in what the site classifies as “electoral autocracies,” meaning that what democracy they had was limited, and limited to a subset of the population.
One hundred years later, things weren’t much better — there were actual liberal democracies, but fewer than 1 percent of the world’s population lived in them...
Today just 2 billion people live in countries that are classified as closed autocracies — relatively few legal rights, no real electoral democracy — and most of them are in China...
Expanding Human Rights
All you have to do is roll the clock back a few decades to see the way that rights, on the whole, have been extended wider and wider: to LGBTQ citizens, to people of color, to women. The fundamental fact is that as much as the technological and economic world of 2023 would be unrecognizable to people in 1800, the same is true of the political world.
Nor can you disentangle that political progress from material progress. Take the gradual but definitive emancipation of women. That has been a hard-fought, ongoing battle, chiefly waged by women who saw the inherent unfairness of a male-dominated society.
But it was aided by the invention of labor-saving technologies in the home like washing machines and refrigerators that primarily gave time back to women and made it easier for them to move into the workforce.
These are all examples of the expansion of the circle of moral concern — the enlargement of who and what is considered worthy of respect and rights, from the foundation of the family or tribe all the way to humans around the world (and increasingly non-human animals as well). And it can’t be separated from the hard fact of material progress.
Leaving a Zero-Sum World Behind
The pre-industrial world was a zero-sum one... In a zero-sum world, you advance only at the expense of others, by taking from a set stock, not by adding, which is why wars of conquest between great powers were so common hundreds of years ago, or why homicide between neighbors was so much more frequent in the pre-industrial era.
We have obviously not eradicated violence, including by the state itself. But a society that can produce more of what it needs and wants is one that will be less inclined to fight over what it has, either with its neighbors or with itself. It’s not that the humans of 2023 are necessarily better, more moral, than their ancestors 200 or more years ago. It’s that war and violence cease to make economic sense...
Doomerism, at its heart, may be that exhaustion made manifest.
But just as we need continued advances in clean tech or biosecurity to protect ourselves from some of the existential threats we’ve inadvertently created, so do we need continued progress to address the problems that have been with us always: of want, of freedom, even of mortality. Nothing can dispel the terminal exhaustion that seems endemic in 2023 better than the idea that there is so much more left to do to lift millions out of poverty and misery while protecting the future — which is possible, thanks to the path of the progress we’ve made.
And we’ll know we’re successful if our descendants can one day look back on the present with the same mix of sympathy and relief with which we should look back on our past. How, they’ll wonder, did they ever live like that?"
-via Vox, March 20, 2023
--
Note: I would seriously recommend reading the whole article--because as long as this post is, this is only about half of it! The article contains a lot more information about the hows and whys of human progress, and it also definitely made me cry the first time I read it. Some warning for fatphobia at the full article, and also I really wish there was more of an Indigenous and anti-colonial analysis to this article - but it's still pretty damn good.
ETA: Apparently this is behind a paywall now. Rip. Anyway:
Paywall Free Link Here
So, this article is from March 2023 - but although the world now has more wars than the world did then, and although Trump's election has foreclosed some of the most optimistic climate futures and made life a great deal more harrowing for a great many people - just about everything in this article still holds true.
In fact, a number of statistics now, in July 2025, are actually better than they were in 2023 - especially the ones related to poverty, clean water, sanitation, food access, electrification, and life expectancy in the developing world.
(Warning for some brief but significant fatphobia at the link, as well as Western-centrism. It could really use an active analysis of colonization - but the vast majority of what it said still holds true, and is still so, so good.)
A lot of things are hard right now. A lot of people are scared and hopeless - and not for no reason.
But do not let revisionist, rose-tinted stories of the past erase the extremely real progress that humanity has made. And - I firmly believe - that we will continue to make.
"crochet can't be made by machines" went from being a cool fun fact to being a call to action of "so if you see mass manufactured crochet in Target, that was made by a person and they were underpaid and you should boycott it" which is true, it was made by a person, but EVERY item of clothing you own (that you did not purchase from a company using ethical labor) was made by a person being underpaid (at *best*.)
Sewing machines are operated by *people*. Knitting machines are operated by *people*. Yes lots of the process is automated but you cannot tell a machine "make me a t-shirt" or "make me a knit cardigan".
Higher awareness of fast fashion, and the true human labor and abuse behind it, is GREAT, but let's not pretend that the crochet hat in target is THE problem. Every article of clothing in target is the problem. "All clothes are made by people" is the jumping off point here into understanding this issue it's not just crochet it's the whole thing ahhhhHHHHHHHHHH
There's always a moment of intense cultural whiplash whenever I realize I'm talking to someone who thinks "legal" and "illegal" are meaningful categories and ascribes innate goodness to following the law. It's like meeting a space alien.
Like ppl will say things to me like "But that's Against The Law 😱" or "but they Broke The Law 😱" like sinners in the hands of an angry God and idk what to do w/ that
i want to put my thoughts behind this: this was supposed to be a piece for pride month, titled "you were loved". the sky is the color of the aroace flag (just upside down)!
basically, i wanted to show an aroace person — an old aroace person, to be precise. being aroace myself, i am always told that i will forever be lonely and miserable if i don't get a partner. so showing grace, who is aroace to me, as old and happy and fulfilled and oh so loved by his best friend, was really important to me <3
Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.
And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”
And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”
And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them.
and you may say, "Spacey, there are lots of characters who have the dehumanized living weapon thing going on. you can diversify and you can enter into a larger number of fandom envrionments that could benefit from your sicko genius brain. maybe even fandoms where the source material doesn't suck unbelievable amoutns of ass!"
but no. is not. the SAME.
is there another character with the sexy murder strut of the Winter Soldier. no. is there another character with such a cool and badass and iconic design who is inhabited with such phsyicality and swagger. NO. THERES NOT. is there another character whose appearance is framed with such Paralyzing dread like a looming revenant or horror movie monster whose motif in the score is an eerie shrilling created by stretching and warping the sound of human screams into something metallic and mechanical??? and whose combat gear includes a chest harness and leather straps and a muzzle-like mask hinting at his characterization as a violent animal in need of domination and control??? and who rips cars to pieces and throws a guy into a jet engine???
he's the mutilated undead corpse of a human being whose personhood and identity have been brutally torn and scraped out of what's left of his body and he has an adorable emo pout and the biggest wettest saddest eyes in existence because he is so confused about everything except how to kill large numbers of people incredibly violently
Bucky Barnes is The poor little meow meow. No one does it like him. No one can do it like him. No one will EVER do it like him.
People who said that Zooble gonna think that Caine was locked by his parents, you were right. My congratulations!
Isn't it strange that YouTube gave me a true story about a child that was kept by his own parents in a small closet for about six years after I drew this part of the comic? I was terrified. I feel doubly sorry for Caine. It just COULDN't help but affect his mind (I don't care that he's an AI. HE HAS FEELINGS)
Perhaps a mix of horror and tragedy. The horror behind it is a bit like an alternate/changeling deal where you have some Eridian-shaped thing that doesn't make noise. It doesn't sing, it doesn't echolocate, it just moves around like you would.
But the tragedy is interesting because now Eridian!you, in this theoretical circumstance, cannot speak. Cannot join the thrums. You cannot even see without the aid of other Eridians or anything else that makes sound.
Combine the two and you have some equivalent of the Invisible Man, except more immediately repulsive. This inaudible individual cannot survive or navigate without being with other eridians, but other eridians either mistake them for features of the caves and ignore them, or react to them in horror as described above.
Seems quite versatile, depending on if you want an immediately unnerving monster, or a doomed protagonist.
No notes, nothing to add. I love this idea so much I almost couldn't wait until monday.
I feel like there are no socialist organizations at the moment that consider the non-citizens as truly equal to citizens. A lot of the organizations people will name, of course, see these people as charity cases...as a matter of treating them kindly rather than considering how to give them proper support and equal standing.
I don't know. I feel like the world is largely anti-immigrant and hostile to stateless people, to the point that advocating for their rights is political suicide almost everywhere. From the poor to the very rich, everyone seems to hate the displaced.
I hope I don't ever have to hear "racism is an American thing" and "there's less racism in Europe" ever again 😭 the fact that it wasn't enough that people just had regular experiences with racism to be believable, it took seeing literal white supremacist riots?? Okay. No more "they're European so their politics-" are the og source of racism, yes. 👍🏾
Heyyyy besties, was anyone gonna tell me that Hunter Schafer's character in Euphoria loves and namedrops PMMM or was I just supposed to stumble upon that factoid on TV Tropes myself
