Climate change, political extremism/division, and technology all made insane leaps from 2006 to 2026, as did many other things like economic inequality (in the first world anyway). Like yes, between 1986 and 2006 the Internet was invented, but between 2006 and 2026 it became an inescapable, completely integrated part of life on a worldwide scale.
China actually saw a worse growth of inequality in the same period, for what it’s worth. Not sure about the rest of the third world, although inequality was insanely bad there to start with. You might not need that caveat, it’s just a bad story all around.
I know that a lot of improvements were made to worldwide extreme poverty in the 1980-2010ish range but I’m not an expert on that so I wanted to include a disclaimer that my perspective is skewed by what I’m exposed to.
Well, there’s more than one dimension here. There’s distribution of wealth and distribution of income, as well as absolute wealth and income. Poverty itself has gone way down, globally. Poor countries are able to start exporting stuff and get way richer. Ones that really have it rough benefit from the existence of aid programs, as well.
In China specifically, things began to get super unequal starting around 2000, but the economy’s growth has been so fast it probably more than offsets it as seen by the average person. At least on the eastern side of the country.
I should point out that historically, wealth pretty reliably self-accumulates until a war breaks out. It’s not like an exclusively modern trend, either.
Climate change, political extremism/division, and technology all made insane leaps from 2006 to 2026, as did many other things like economic inequality (in the first world anyway). Like yes, between 1986 and 2006 the Internet was invented, but between 2006 and 2026 it became an inescapable, completely integrated part of life on a worldwide scale.
China actually saw a worse growth of inequality in the same period, for what it’s worth. Not sure about the rest of the third world, although inequality was insanely bad there to start with. You might not need that caveat, it’s just a bad story all around.
I know that a lot of improvements were made to worldwide extreme poverty in the 1980-2010ish range but I’m not an expert on that so I wanted to include a disclaimer that my perspective is skewed by what I’m exposed to.
Well, there’s more than one dimension here. There’s distribution of wealth and distribution of income, as well as absolute wealth and income. Poverty itself has gone way down, globally. Poor countries are able to start exporting stuff and get way richer. Ones that really have it rough benefit from the existence of aid programs, as well.
In China specifically, things began to get super unequal starting around 2000, but the economy’s growth has been so fast it probably more than offsets it as seen by the average person. At least on the eastern side of the country.
I should point out that historically, wealth pretty reliably self-accumulates until a war breaks out. It’s not like an exclusively modern trend, either.