The State of the World

There are various “angles” through which we can look at the world to see how things are going and where we are headed:

1. Average and median material standards of living (“real GDP per capita”).
2. Socio-economic indicators (crime rate, war, condition of women and minorities, etc.).
3. Freedom and equality of opportunity.
4. Physical health and well-being.
5. Mental health and general “well-being” of populations.
6. The state of the natural world (oceans, forests, animals, etc.).
7. Geopolitical tension and risk.
8. Etc. (many others!)

We further look at these various “indicators” with 2 different angles: long run trends and short run variations. “Short run” for a typical economic analysis would be the outlook for 0–2 years or maximum 0–4 years because it essentially pertains to asset management strategies, macro policy, and business outlook and planning. However, when seeking to assess the state of the world as a whole, it is reasonable to see the “short run” as longer than 4 years and the “long run” as truly very long run, with the “big picture” in mind.

The economic and socio-economic picture

The short run outlook seems OK, with generally low and falling unemployment rates, positive growth rates, lots of innovation in many directions, and social order that seems to be holding up. There are elements of risk that are special to this political cycle, with a marked rise of nationalism and geopolitical “tough talk” from many great military and economic powers such as the USA, Russia, and China.

Yet the threat of all-out military conflict seems slim, as modern war is much more in the form of controlling information and perceptions and influencing political outcomes. Note that this has always been the case, but “back then” this “perceptions war” was also in conjunction with explicit military conflict. Although there are always on-and-off tensions with Iran and North Korea, terrorism, and many others, the true hotspot is probably Russia with Eastern Europe, but even that one seems “manageable” and containable.

Most of the 20 countries that make up 80% of the world economy (measured with total GDP PPP) have good or improving labour market conditions and are not in crisis. The world typically does not go down in flames without economic pressure in the bulk of the countries with the world economic activity, which is roughly the top 20 or 30 GDPs of the world. Economic and financial pressure can often be seen in the main indicators such as job markets, economic growth, government debt, interest rates, or inflation.

The rest of the world (not in this list) is also improving quickly in terms of material standards of living. Economically speaking, the world is fine and improving, at least as far as material standards of living are concerned.

In a “big picture” long run view, the human material world is probably in the best position it has ever been, with falling famines, falling rates of extreme poverty, falling rates of disease, rising reading and writing literacy, falling crime rates and murder rates on a very long run trend, less war than ever, and so on.

Indeed, crime and murder rates were astronomical for much of human History. Humans as they exist in their current biological form at birth have existed for at LEAST 50 000 years absolutely for sure and probably more like 100 000 years. For 80%-90% of that History, humans were organized in small tribes of hunter-gatherers in which murder was extremely high due to tribal war, infanticide, and other life difficulties. Life AFTER agriculture represents roughly 10% of human history and was, on average, atrocious for the masses, as displayed by a very sharp drop in average height (relative to hunter-gatherers), a sharp increase in cavities, a drop in life expectancy, a rise of States and their organized brutality, and many other problems.

In short, human life has been a very long struggle of war, mass-murders, extreme brutality, slavery, and very low empathy for “others” outside the immediate tribe or country, much less for non-humans. In fact, excluding perhaps the last 200 years, I can safely say that the average individual of elephants and dolphins and many other animals had significantly better lives than the average human. This is truly a no-brainer for anyone who has studied in depth both human history and animal life.

You are reading this and so you are self-selected right from the start: your view of your own life and your own surroundings is most probably disconnected by orders of magnitude to the daily drudgery of the masses in your own country and even more disconnected from the daily lives of people in poorer countries… and light years away from what animals endure every day under our “management” (you are so disconnected from this that you are currently wondering why I am even talking about this here)…

So. We are now doing better and better in terms of material life conditions, and we are killing and raping less and less, as well as seeing improving access to food, clothes, shelter, and so many other goods and services that are life-changers, from laser-correction of eyesight to life-saving vaccines and surgeries, basic appliances and infrastructure such as toilets, fridges, stoves, washers and dryers, lights, cars, waterways and sewers, drinkable water under the tap, planes and trains, and the list stretches to infinity.

From what I can see, although there are many remaining issues regarding poverty, inequality, mental health and anxiety, and more, the overall trend seems clear and will continue: materially speaking, we are improving our collective lot considerably and we are in a less brutal world than before.

Many people don’t agree with this “rosy picture” and say that the world is in an awful state. I actually agree with them, if you look at things in absolute terms. The issue is NOT to ask if the human world is currently “doing well” or not in absolute terms, because we have no basis of comparison! The only comparison we have for our collective material conditions and security-related issues such as crime, murder, and rape is our own history. Compared to our own “post agricultural” history of the past 10 000 years, we are doing MUCH better than before, that is absolutely clear. If one wants to be creative and ponder comparisons against other large mammals, then we were almost always worse off than MANY species and may be still worse off than many to this day (if you remove what we do to them from the comparison, obviously).

As we discuss what follows, keep in mind the big picture… humans existed as they are at birth for at least 50 000 years and we are in a post-agricultural Era since about 10 000 years… Earth is 5 billion years old… so “humanity” represents less than 0.001% of Earth’s life… and a typical human life lasts less than one second in geological terms…

Social norms and brutality

Social norms are a truly fascinating thing.

As recently as 1952, the total genius, inventor, and innovator Alan Turing was “convicted” of homosexuality and was “dry castrated” for his “treatment” in his own country, the “light of democracy”, the UK! That’s 66 years ago.

From 1920 to 1933, you were a criminal to produce, sell, or consume alcohol in the USA. One year before 1920 or after 1933, it was all good. In 2017 you were a criminal to smoke weed in Canada. In 2018 you are all good.

As recently as 1800, you could buy a person (slave) in public auctions in the USA, after which this “person” became your property, which you could essentially “use” as desired. The “Founding Fathers”, indeed visionaries and admirable men in many respects, were themselves slaveholders, so the “freedom” and the “pursuit of happiness” they talked about was not really for “those people…”

How do you feel about that today? OH! Perhaps you are a rare extreme racist to the point of being convinced that this was the right order of things… ok… so perhaps you would find it odd if your yet-to-be-married daughter left the house and was thus exposed to rape, which would be considered “fine and legal” due to the fact that your daughter would not be the property of a man and no longer under the ownership of the “man of the house.”… yup. That was all normal stuff for about 8000 years. I kid you not.

A bit further away, in the times of the romans, about 2000 years ago, it was a normal sight to walk around and see, in the not-so-distant horizon, fields of crucified people… still alive… stuck to their poles with nails in their hands and feet… and birds eating them alive. All standard stuff.

Up until the 1700s, people were regularly burned alive, beheaded, boiled alive, hanged, or tortured to death in public… for disagreeing with the King or the Pope.

The Crusades were a period from roughly 1000 to 1400 during which “hope” was delivered to the lost souls that did not believe in the “true God” (the one of Catholics)… and led to the greatest mass-murders of History. All for the “cause” of whatever they were crazy enough to cling to that made them think they were the good guys…

After this, insane blood, gold, and power hungry Europeans “discovered” the Americas and essentially wiped out the entire population (and animals) that were there. Note that the ones that WERE there before were probably no better, as the Aztecs were totally insane with brutality as well, as was the case for many others of the Americas.

All this seems far away, and indeed, brutality/cruelty has been on a very long run downward trend for a few hundred years… but many pockets resist. Public stonings, hangings, and beheadings still exist in many countries today (yes, you read that right), although these are now seen less and less favourably due to information circulating faster and wider today due to smartphones and Internet. There is also remaining slavery both for actual slaves and, more widespread, sex slavery where young women are taken and sold and used for the income they generate from “clients.”

The good news is that MOST socially-accepted, legal, and globally practiced types of cruelty and brutality are gone. What I mean by this is that there are STILL many cases of surreal cruelty, but these are 1) seen as bad, 2) generally denounced, and 3) made less and less possible by social norms or explicit laws.

Where we stand now and where we are going

Alright. So we are getting better at being a bit nicer to each other. We kill less. There is less and less arbitrary rule of kings that can just walk into your house and do what they want with you, your kids, and your spouse. There is better and better material standards of living, literacy is improving, information and education is becoming more and more widespread and accessible. There are less wars and significantly less all-out and institutionalized injustices. Lets just say that this time is the “best” since the beginning of agriculture. For sure.

There are MANY remaining issues… the list is endless… the condition of women, poverty and inequality, desertification, etc. But we are making general progress in all these areas.

Some “sectors” that have made little or no progress are:

1. The natural world and the life conditions of “food and clothes” animals.
2. Poverty and insecurity in MANY low and medium income countries.
3. The condition of women, especially in Africa and the Middle East.
4. Potential social tension due to income and wealth inequality.
5. The life conditions of test animals in labs.

I think a general goal going forward could be that we generally seek to decrease suffering in all sentient beings and improve well-being and “happiness” in all sentient beings. Especially in humans, and that is OK.

The issues we face as a human civilization are twofold. One is of a material nature and relates to the natural world, the other is ethical.

The size and growth of our population and the pressure this necessarily has on the natural world must be looked at with total awareness of the facts and consequences. I am NOT one of those who think we need “depopulation” or anything like that. But we must face the fact that we were at the MAX 400 million only 1000 years ago and always less than that before that time, we were 1 billion 200 years ago, we were less than 2 billion 100 years ago, we are now 7,5 billion and will be more than 9 billion in 30 years, and 11 billion in 70 years… all this with growing consumption of what is ultimately the natural world. We are OK with all this and we are producing food enough that the rate of people stuck in starvation is at an all-time low. But this is at the expense of “others” and it is “showing up” clearly in a broad range of indicators that all point in the same direction: us! The good news is that there are solutions to 1) improve our health, 2) decrease pressure on the natural world, 3) reduce suffering in ourselves AND in animals.

The ocean is filling up with plastic to a point that has become systemically important. We are literally emptying the stock of fish from the ocean because wild catches are faster than the natural reproduction cycles of wild fish, and that is with the current population, so it will only get much worse. Cattle grazing is causing deforestation and enormous methane pollution, again with the current population. The oceans are becoming more and more acid, and it seems we are currently overseeing the “6th mass extinction” of Earth’s long lifespan…

http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/earth-s-sixth-mass-extinction-has-begun-new-study-confirms/

As an example, 100 years ago there were 5 million elephants in Africa. They are now 500 000, which is 10% of what they were. There were 60 million wild buffalo in the USA 500 years ago… They are 500 000 today if we include those that are raised for meat and only about 20 000 wild… that’s MUCH less than 1% left! I could go on like this for pages… yes, PAGES.

We sure are “taking over” and making sure everything in sight is pounded into extreme submission or extinction. We did it with humans and we are doing it with the entire animal and plant world.

There are some species that have large numbers… Oh yeah. They are PLENTIFUL… Cows, pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, and others… and they are all stuck in a hell that is truly beyond your worst nightmares… and we don’t give a shit. This brings me to the second category of issues we must collectively ponder.

As discussed above, the first category of issues we have is that we are putting incredible material / chemical pressure on the natural world to the point of disrupting entire spheres of life and complex systems.

The second category of issues we must face is ethics.

Power, freedom, and responsibility

We have tremendous power. Our rate of technological innovation is fixing many of our human problems and allowing better lives for the human masses. Our technological advantage has enabled us to rise to top predator by ORDERS of magnitude. As a species, we are free, because we literally have no “hard defining traits” that fix us in a specific role within specific boundaries, as is generally the case for animals. We can do whatever we want. We have extreme power and freedom, and it shows in all spheres of life, from our “occupation” of the planet to the amazing music, art, science, transport, communications, and production capacity we display.

Yet we have ZERO ethics.

Look at what we do to each other. Yes, this aspect HAS indeed been slowly improving, and that’s a good sign. But look at what we do to others on this planet.

I am NOT worried a second for Earth, by the way, or even “life on Earth.” We could blow ourselves to pieces and there will be no trace of humans in a small geological heartbeat such as 100 million years, and probably much less. Earth is 5 billion years old — it has seen it all, so it’s not particularly stressed about us.

I am concerned that we have all this power and all this freedom, and we literally have NO sense of responsibility. This lack of responsibility is causing us to build ourselves a world and a life that is suboptimal in many respects, and it doesn’t have to be that way, provided we take a step back and ponder what the heck we’re doing individually and collectively.

The reason we have no sense of responsibility is we never give a shit unless there is very direct and clear price to pay for us personally… and there IS no price to pay for what we are doing. Zero. Ever. Today and tomorrow and next week and next year, we will wake up, go to work, go to the groceries, watch movies and read blog posts and life will simply continue as always. We will worry about jobs and promotions and relationships, but never about larger questions, because those larger ethical debates relate to what is happening outside of our immediate daily life, and we usually don’t give a shit unless something impacts us very directly, such as taxes or laws or street crime or supply disruptions at the grocery store (that’s rare!).

We get “fixed” by surgeons. We take pills to help with problems. Plastic in the ocean? Oh well. So sad. Want a beer? The emptying of fish from the oceans? “Solved” with farmed fish. The acidification of oceans will have a large effect in only 100 years, so “who cares” (right?). The unreal atrocities we do to those animals stuck in our food and clothes supply? Wah.. what? Zero direct consequence to us personally (until you see it and acknowledge reality completely). Elephants getting their entire faces sawed off while they are still breathing… for their tusks… so sad… well, there’s a market for that, you know… bear bile farms in China that are literally entire lives of torture and so it goes. Dogs and cats sold and killed on-the-spot in public markets, or boiled alive…We plunder and kill and torture humans and non humans and as long as “we don’t know / see it / live with direct consequences”, there is no price to pay, NOTHING happens. Literally.

THIS is the second issue we must face as humans now. We must care EVEN when there is no price to pay for what we are doing. I sure hope Millennials have more courage and wisdom than what has been seen of humans up to now. Dear Millennials, you must save the world. Nothing less.

We have spent and still spend tremendous resources on power and freedom, and that’s OK. But we are like a 9 year old boy with a gun, no rules, and no parents. It’s time to grow up and build a broader view of ethics and personal responsibility, and stop being so fascinated by our power and freedom. “With great power comes great responsibility” as the saying goes. Time to show some ethics and responsibility, as otherwise we are simply moving blindly with progress without a broader vision of the life and world we want. Time to change.

If I may suggest a few things: 1) use less plastic… 2) try a few documentaries… for eating to make a better world in all 3 spheres (health, the natural environment, and animal welfare):

1. Food Choices. (Netflix)
2. Forks Over Knives. (Netflix)
3. Food Inc. (Netflix)
4. Cowspiracy. (Netflix)
5. Vegucated. (YouTube)

If you want information about animals in our food and clothes supply, brace yourself to discover “the Truth” and watch the docs below. Warning: once you “know”, you can’t “unknow” it… and the truth is hard to discover… but necessary… be warned: these are hard to see… they show the unfiltered truth of what lies behind the food we eat…

1. Farm to Fridge.
2. Lucent.
3. Meet Your Meat.
4. Death on a Factory Farm.
5. Dominion.

Last but not least, there is the controversial “Earthlings” documentary, which has caused quite a stir, but the facts shown in there are undeniable… and are incredibly hard to see, as many other of these documentaries.

There are TONS others… unfortunately… Ponder all this. Regards.

Me in Wyoming, USA

Pascal Bedard