Critical Thinking: War, Peace, Inequality, & Prosperity
Put yourself to the Test:
Watching this animated world map, try to guess which years are years of peaceful prosperity, and which are the years mired in war.
Can you see which is which?
Next, can you see how inequality corresponds to prosperity?
The point of this exercise is to challenge our inner hypothesis of what are meaningful proxies for quality of life, of what are causes and causal agents for changes in quality of life, by putting out assumptions to a test.
As yourself, regarding your hypotheses, the age old question:
How does that work?
How do you explain the rise in standard of living, the decrease in premature death, and the increase in prosperity, in terms of inequality?
The goal is to experience the realization that one cannot clearly see which are years of war or peace, and that inequality is, depending on how it is defined, perhaps inversely correlated with prosperity. At the very least, a brazen simplicity is not to be found.
