Thanks for making the utter bankruptcy of Baudrillard&#x27;s ethics so plain for all to see. Usually it&#x27;s hiding under much more jargon.<p>&gt; More kids are in school? For what? To be a white collar slave? To be a white collar slavemaster (entrepreneur)? Death in menial labor, while undesirable, at least prevents one from fattening the elites&#x27; wallets with their brains.<p>I&#x27;m a strong critic of schooling as its typically done, because it is indeed a conformity machine. But here&#x27;s the thing: it&#x27;s <i>still</i> better than sending all the kids to a salt mine, because that&#x27;s a precondition for us to even be having this discussion. The kids who got sent to salt mines don&#x27;t get to read Baudrillard and comment on HN.<p>&gt; Where are the African and Asian artists?<p>On those continents, respectively. Racist much?<p>&gt; scientists... philosophers... virtually unheard of<p>This has always been the human condition. I guarantee you the fraction of people who appreciated Aristotle during his life was a vanishingly small fraction of the human race.<p>&gt; Similarly, low child mortality just currently means the commodification of children and childhood.<p>This is pretty hilarious, because high-mortality societies are the ones that have large families specifically because children are valued as sources of labor. Some societies <i>didn&#x27;t even name their infants</i> until they got old enough to be out of the highest morality risk -- they were treated as fungible <i>commodities</i> before then.<p>&gt; I&#x27;d also say literacy could have resulted in more healthy attitudes<p>It <i>could have</i> resulted in spontaneous world peace, too. But that kind of navel gazing is not relevant to the question of whether literacy is still better than nothing. It&#x27;s clearly a precondition if you want those great scientists and philosophers to ever have a shot.<p>&gt; people who think everything is great and there cannot possibly be any systemic problems<p>This is a giant straw man. Please find me a single person who thinks the world has no systemic problems.  The presence of problems is a <i>necessary precondition</i> for someone like me to argue that things are getting better. &quot;No problems&quot; implies stasis, not improvement.