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The world is more equal than you think
(economist.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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Yes, the boomers were among the wealthiest generation that has ever lived. (Though, let's not forget that at the times you're talking about, this really only applied to straight white men, for women, minorities etc, well, they have a very different perspective on those golden years you're talking about.) Globally though, first world boomers were among the very richest in the entire world. As the charts in the article show, the richest in the world, then as now, things are (relative to the global poor) going down for them.
Things can both be getting worse for us, as we are among the wealthiest on the planet (are you making the clothes or wearing them? How many of your friends have a phone vs how many of them have lost limbs mining the cobalt that they need?) while getting better for the vast majority of people.
USAID etc are not the engines of economic development among the world's poorest. They generally exist to mitigate horrific problems (think war based starvation, HIV etc) which tangentially affect poverty but really, the big stars are places like India and China which have risen literally billions out of poverty with focused development etc.
Yes, our pampered lives are probably not going to be as easy as our parents. But compared to almost everyone else on the planet, my God we have a sweet deal.
boomers? Im talking silent generation and greatest generation to. Maybe even moreso for them. The gap between richest and poorest in the first world is that much worse just for the obscene levels of wealth some have. An india and china were helped by aid in the past but you would need to look before 2000 for that. Its like. Oh don't worry about you rising hours of work and loss of time off and that we never really got proper health care going while a small part of the population gets more and more extravagantly rich because you know in the grand scheme of things a few places that were worse off have gotten kinda sorta almost lives like yours. I mean except when living in india near an ocean sounds great to a first worlder except that no one in his right mind would swim in it because of the waste spewed into it by the global corp who has made quality of life so much better.
Not if you're talking about ubiquitous running water... (in the 1930s to 50s, only 70% of urban homes had indoor plumbing, while a scant 20% of rural ones, where about half the population lived, did.)
Again, this has nothing to do with the world.
Okay and the revocation of aid now is not going to stop their development. No idea what you're trying to say.
No, literally for most of the world, life has gotten better. That's the entire point.
If they are impressively ignorant, sure. If you are a middle class person, hell, even poor, in the first world, would you swap places with a random Indian or Chinese person? If you have any understanding of those countries, the answer would be a hard no.
Ok so I know indians who have lives as nice as mine or better and are in my field and you are the one who said many of these gains were in india and china. So you are saying for most of the world but for much of the world they did not see these awesome gains talked about. As for aid im saying that means what we have seen might effectively have stopped and there are many places that could still be doing better. silent generation and greates generation in a city had running water and electricity for most of their lives. Yeah you could point to very rural greatest or it not being available when they were very young but overall its a constant improvement track. The obscenely rich getting massively more rich while first world middle class goes lower and heck even the big gains with first world success stories like china and india are stagnating. Again the point to small gain in dollar terms in places making a massive difference in quality of life while the overall wealth gap goes way lopsided is better than the small bit not happening but way worse than a well run world would be at with a more equitable total way of living.