I think William Gibson say something like, "The future is here it's just unevenly distributed."

We have made great strides, but in the U.S. social mobility is lower now, life expectancy is down, so if you have to be born to a poor family, being born earlier might be better.

If you had the power to choose when to be born, you might also have the power to choose where to be born. In which case you might want to choose someplace other than the U.S.

There are few better places for social mobility than the US. If you are poor, but smart and ambitious, being in the US is the best thing that could happen to you.

Perhaps not: https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobi...

The metric used here is an incorrect metric of social mobility. It compares father-son income correlation (which depends mostly on inheritance taxation and many other factors), while a better idea would be to compare the percentage of high achievers who started from humble beginnings.

Indeed, US education system is somewhat strange, to say the least. However, all these metrics are almost designed to present the US in bad light.

How about "the percentage of millionaires who were born in a poor family"? I bet this is where US shines. Rich people in most other countries are mostly from old money.

Denmark. Consistently tops ease of doing buisness and social mobility charts.

I used to live in Denmark. Ease of doing business -- well, there are good things (streamlined and transparent bureacracy) and there are bad things (taxes make you uncompetitive, especially if you plan to hire people). Access to capital -- can't even compare.

Regarding social mobility -- well, you can live a good life in Denmark, but living great life is different. Janteloven is still very much a thing.

That's not what social mobility means. Social mobility is the relationship between the wealth of parents and the (eventual) wealth of children.

How would the world be today if the government pulled all the brightest engineers off working on optimizing advertising tech at FAANG companies and paid them equally to solve these larger societal problems such as homelessness, reversing climate change/pollution, solving cancer, creating unlimited nuclear energy to replace fossil fuels, terraforming Mars for the humans, etc? I can only wonder... Thoughts?

Not significantly different to how it is today. Potentially much worse. It's solipsistic to think that more engineers and software developers would help with some of these social problems.

Sociology, economics and politics are difficult, valuable and all too often completely overlooked by people who have the luxury of being able to solve for x in their day job.

I suspect you'd make more progress on those particular problems by funneling the same amount of money into paying all the lobbyists to stay home and play Fortnite.

You'd be better off redirecting a portion of the funding that supports their work to people with actual expertise in the fields you mentioned. Particularly when it comes to solving social problems, many of which we have answers for that aren't implemented because their expense is politically untenable.

I think that's a horrible idea. It would lead to a lifeless, technocratic society.

In many ways we've already tried that, for example in urban planning, and it failed miserably.

For a counter point, as applied to urban planning, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_Am...

Social problems are best solved from a grassroots perspective, and they require negotiation, compromise, and HN hates this one, wait for it... politics (both official politics, and everyday interpersonal politics.)

Most people don't want to live on Mars. But they do like soap operas. If only people would donate their Netflix money to cancer research and donate the time saved from not using Facebook to do voluntary work.

It would be... dystopian. A lot of the work we do at FAANGs or similar startups is designing (i.e. manipulating) people into doing what we want them do. Imagine Obama or Trump having all those people and technology working to advance their agenda. That’s not a country I’d want to live in, even though I voted for one of those people.

I like the book "The Rational Optimist" by Matt Ridley which covers a broad range of topics like these.

Some observations are quite surprising, for example using coal and then oil for energy replaced huge amounts of manual labor and might have eliminated slavery, deforestation and hunting whales for whale oil.

> Although unfortunately not solved, we've made great strides in regards to child mortality, extreme poverty, war, violence, health, freedom, literacy...

What great strides do you think America/the developed world have left to make?

A book that echoes the sentiment: https://www.amazon.com/Enlightenment-Now-Science-Humanism-Pr...

It's an amazing read as well, much like Pinker's other works.