“Something of enormous global significance is happening almost without notice. For the first time since agriculture-based civilization began 10,000 years ago, the majority of humankind is no longer poor or vulnerable to falling into poverty. By our calculations, as of this month, just over 50 percent of the world’s population, or some 3.8 billion people, live in households with enough discretionary expenditure to be considered ‘middle class’ or ‘rich.’ About the same number of people are living in households that are poor or vulnerable to poverty. So September 2018 marks a global tipping point. After this, for the first time ever, the poor and vulnerable will no longer be a majority in the world. Barring some unfortunate global economic setback, this marks the start of a new era of a middle-class majority.”
Source: Homi Kharas and Kristofer Hamel at Brookings Institute. Related: A schema for how the Enlightenment transformed the modern world, from Explaining Postmodernism.
Hello Mister Hicks
The important thing is not to die too stupid, and to have accomplished something good in your life.
You can be happy and totally stupid.
To take an extreme, lots of Nazis were happy, Goebbels after visiting an extermination camp, wrote a love letter to his wife. So it is possible to be happy, while being a total scumbag.
The pursuit of happiness can involve the extermination of people.
You come home, you find your children, your wife who has prepared a good meal, you are happy. You have just participated all day in a traffic of children, of underage girls, while having killed a few people.
You can be poor, unhappy and not too stupid and do great things, killing Nazis for example, or child traffickers.
Best!