Is The World Getting Better, Or Is It Only Stock Markets?

     A recent article in the financial section of a news source was highly optimistic regarding stock markets. The article stated there are two things that are almost always true; the world keeps getting better and yet people keep thinking it is getting worse.
    When viewed through a narrow prism, the world is getting better. The financial world, where money and power rests, cannot see beyond its sanitized world of easy and quick money. In the natural world, the world that ultimately matters, things are not getting better.
     The stock market can go up 100,000 points from here, and it still does not mean real wealth is being created. Real wealth is not the wealth that people see in a bank or brokerage statement. It is the wealth of the world that no one man or woman possesses.
        The stock market will keep going up as long as more money flows into it than flows out. Since governments around the world have ensured that saving money by putting it into a savings account is completely unrewarded, the only asset classes that governments and the federal reserve want inflated are the stock and housing markets. If they have created a bubble, and if that bubble bursts, it will be the people that do not have the luxury to rideout protracted downturns that will be most affected.
         The real wealth of the world is not getting better. Putting aside mass poverty, political instability, nuclear weapons proliferation, and the increasing rise of religious fanaticism, violence and intolerance, what is the world's state of affairs?
           Coral reefs are disappearing at alarming rates. Rainforests are being cut and destroyed at alarming rates. Important coastal and other habitats are being lost to development. More and more species are nearing extinction. Biodiversity is being lost. Widespread environmental degradation continues. People may think they are divorced from the natural world, and that all that matters is the world of business and finance, but the truth is otherwise.
            Think this picture is too pessimistic? Then consider this regarding the oceans - besides the daily overfishing, the huge amount of contaminants that are dumped daily, the increasing ocean acidification, the trawlers that daily scrape the seafloor and destroy it, the ghost nets and human debris that kills marine life, the radioactive water pouring into the Pacific Ocean daily from Fukushima, the collapse of many fisheries, the extinction and near extinction of species, including some marine mammals and seabirds, and more - there is another huge, insidious destroyer. Every single day, thousands of tons of plastics, styrofoam and other non biodegradable material enters into the oceans. Most of the plastic and other oil based material breaks down into small particles that do not degrade and are virtually impossible to remove. Marine life and seabirds eat this plastic. It is in the food chain. It is everywhere. It is contaminating and destroying the oceans and its life. Companies refuse to change how things are wrapped, knowing full well that in most places in the world, there is no way to properly dispose of plastic and oil based packaging materials. Every bag of chips, candy and so on consumed in those places mostly likely will enter into the oceans. No serious effort is being made on any level to stop this daily poisoning of the oceans.
        In the world of rising stock markets, there is euphoria.
        In the world on which all life depends, the natural world, things are not getting better. They are getting worse.