Knowing that poverty and child mortality have actually fallen is what makes people think the future can improve.

Added to korrents 7 Sept 2026 · How quotes work · Something wrong? Tell us

Where this collides

• Supports

  Blanket fatalism about the world is unhelpful to anyone who wants to improve it.

  Saying fatalism is unhelpful is only useful if it can be undone, and the evidence Ritchie offers for that is the survey: 17% of people who knew nothing about historical progress thought the world would improve, against 62% of those who did.

Shared subject first, then similar wording. They may agree or disagree.

• A common-sense utopia is much closer to the present day than it is to the best futures actually available to us. WMWilliam MacAskill3 Aug 2025
• Falling birth rates make a society less able to be hopeful, because nihilism creeps in when people have no stake in the future. DHDavid Heinemeier Hansson26 Aug 2026
• Roughly half of the possible outcomes of advanced AI development would be good or great for society. MSM.G. Siegler15 Sept 2026
• A world where altruists followed expected-value estimates would be one where nearly all of them helped distant strangers instead of the people around them, and that world would be worse. HKHolden Karnofsky18 Aug 2011
• The good old days are mostly an illusion: by almost every measure that can be counted, life today is better for almost everyone than it was fifty or a hundred years ago. JBJeff Bezos14 Dec 2023

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