[quote=Arraya][quote=davelj][quote=Arraya]Sure, Dave, global utilitarianism,”the greatest good for the greatest number of people”, is where we are headed.
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You say that in jest, but the fact remains that overall standards of living are rising quite rapidly in the developing world – which is most of the world on a total population basis. It’s just rising, to a certain extent, at the expense of the middle class in the developed world, which is a pretty small minority of the world’s population. I think what really bothers you is that while all of this is going on wealth continues to concentrate in the hands of the world’s top 1%, a group that’s becoming farther removed from either of the other two groups. But this doesn’t change the fact in my first sentence.[/quote]

With the gargantuan mosaic of global statistics, one could see many pictures, depending on how you tilt your head and squint our eyes.[/quote]

How about one simple metric as defined by the World Bank (whose mission is “Ending Global Poverty”): Poverty. Poverty has declined markedly around the world in just the past 20 years. I recall reading somewhere a while back that in the early-19th century, 75% of the world’s population lived on less than $1 a day (adjusted for inflation) and that this figure had fallen to 20% as of a few years back. I’m not saying that this is the perfect metric, but I don’t think you have to squint very hard to see that the lot of the average person around the globe (if not in the U.S. specifically) has improved quite a lot over the last several decades. In fact, you’d have to do a lot of squinting and tilting of the head to view the contrary.