And we are meeting many diseases that we've never seen before, we're faced with ever-more serious famine events, there ae possibly more people living in internal and cross-border refugee camps than has ever been the case before.
We aren't seeing more famine events, we're seeing fewer, and we have more adaptable, more capable, more experienced agencies to deal with them. We have, of course, more than enough capacity to entirely prevent them, so I'm not pretending for a moment that we've done enough yet.
Yes, we have more people living in cross-border refugee camps - that's because we've realised that refugee camps are a good way of dealing with refugees. We have more people in them because we used to be very poor at implementing them.
Yes people in India are living longer, but that also means that at least as big a proportion are living in poverty than, say, 30 years ago. Whether they have better access to food and medicine than they did depends on whether they have money to purchase them.
No, it doesn't. We've switched from measuring poverty as an absolute to measuring it relative to the local average income specifically because there are so relatively few people living in absolute poverty now. Simple medicines that didn't even exist thirty years ago are despatched in state-sponsored programmes; simple medicines which weren't available in the third world are now available for a pittance. Some medicines, yes, are still unfortunately more difficult to get a hold of, but the situation is unquestionably better.
An increasing number of them don't even have access to regular, let alone permanent electricity or clean water.
Whether the absolute number is growing or shrinking is debatable, but the proportion is decreasing, certainly for clean water.
Similarly, our poor are growing in numbers because of the decline in high-manpower activities in favour of small companies that employ small numbers.
Our poor are increasing because we've changed the definition of poor. In real terms, the baseline is higher than it ever was. Moving from labour intensive economies has a tendency to increase the proportion of the moderately well off as it introduces the band of skilled workers between owners and labourers. It requires social and legal protections after that to prevent the increased financial power of the elite pushing labour prices back down and compressing the labour market again, and that's not being universally implemented yet, but the advent of social media and instant communication makes it easier for labour movements to organise and co-ordinate to leverage their power in these economies.
As you say, there is an economic cycle which can have a devastating impact on those whose national economies hit the top of the cycle and begin their way down the other side.
Devastating? It doesn't need to be, we aren't managing it particularly well - we attempt protectionist policies which simply delay the start but not the magnitude, leading to a precipitous rather than gradual decline.
I'm not suggesting that we haven't improved our conditions but that has often been patchy, in terms of a global 'collective' picture.
It really hasn't, there are very, very few areas of the world where the worst off aren't significantly better off than they used to be. The inequalities, to a degree, are growing as financial power becomes so excessive that it starts to impact on the legal and political frameworks that are supposed to insulate against them, but the whole frame of human experienced has shifted upwards on the 'quality of life' scale.
Where one part of the global community has experienced improving conditions, another has experienced worsening conditions.
Only relatively - pretty much everyone is better off.
O.
