• Phoenixz
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    11 months ago

    This is something more lemmies should see… I keep being told that 200 years ago, people only worked 15 hours per week, water was like beer and everything was peachy for everyone! It’s… Frustrating.

    • Anticorp@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I think you might have missed that people didn’t retire earlier, they straight up died in their 50’s.

        • Anticorp@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          That’s exactly what it says. It says “the average American died at age 51”.

          • angrystego@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            I mean the graph we’re talking about, the one with retirement. If the retirement age was higher and you count in the data from the other graph, that makes it even worse. It means that many people worked their asses off right to their death, without being able to retire at all.

    • NataliePortland
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      11 months ago

      Hi neighbor. Thanks for the input. This is a community for optimism.

    • Phoenixz
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      11 months ago

      Take the general point: life today is a hundred times better than hundred years ago

    • owenfromcanada@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      This isn’t a sharpshooter fallacy–that would mean the good things OP is noting are made “good” after they happen.

      If you think this is an unfounded optimism because there are a lot more bad things (or that things have gotten worse over the last two centuries), there’s an argument to be had there, but this isn’t it.

      • Maven (famous)@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I do think the bottom one is misleading. One of the reasons there’s less global poverty is because the standards for what counts as being impoverished on these studies has gone down… Not living conditions going up. They just redid the studies in a way to make it look better for the stats.

        It’s a good thing to have less poverty but having less purely because you decided people can live on less now is misleading at best.

        Nothing against OP, I just hate that specific stat every time it gets thrown around.