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> What I do see is that life today should be markedly better than it was about 500 years ago, but that it has largely flattened out within the last 100 years.

> What I do see is that life today should be markedly better than it was about 500 years ago, but that it has largely flattened out within the last 100 years. The article shows a chart of total world GDP (in constant 1990 dollars), and this states that since 1900 total world GDP has gone up by a factor of approximately 40. The previous 100 years (1900 to 1800) grew by at most a factor of 10, and in the 300 years prior to that (going back to 1500) GDP merely tripled. I could definitely understand if you were trying to formulate an argument that this sort of exponential growth cannot be sustained, but your time frame for any "flattened out" phase is completely wrong.

AnimalMuppet 11y ago
mjevans' view is also not supported by an objective look at the last 100 years. Antibiotics? Not dying is kind of a big deal. It makes life "markedly better" when you are actually alive. Cars? Yeah, they had cars 100 years ago. How fast could you drive? How safe were the cars (and the roads)? How often did the cars need maintenance? How was the air conditioning in the cars 100 years ago? How good was the radio? Computers? The internet? The web? Hacker News? 100 years ago, you could buy a newspaper, and do your math by hand (maybe with a slide rule and a book of tables). Overall human knowledge? Not remotely comparable. Overall human life expectancy? Much worse 100 years ago. I don't see any rational way to say that how good life is "has largely flattened out within the last 100 years." That's not a defensible statement, not merely in terms of GDP, but also in terms of average peoples' experience of life.