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A lot of technological innovation does not necessarily make individual lives better, but it does allow more people to live.
by jeffdavis 9y ago
A lot of technological innovation does not necessarily make individual lives better, but it does allow more people to live.
- dredmorbius 9y agoIs that, of itself, a good thing, or not? Is the "of itself" qualification, of itself, a reasonable one?
- tikhonj 9y agoHah, I just read an article from the SEP related to that: "The Repugnant Conclusion"[1]. I think it was actually on the front page of HN a few days ago. In essence, it's a tricky ethical question: is having more people with a lower quality of life preferable to fewer people with a higher quality of life? Any immediately intuitive answer to that question leads to some highly unintuitive conclusions. [1]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/
- dredmorbius 9y agoRelated, the Malthusian trap, and the paradox of good and bad fortune (in a system which can respond through population growth and decline, and per-capita wealth and decline). As Gregory Clark puts it in A Farewell to Alms: what's virtue is vice, and vice virtue. That is: increasing prosperity leads to larger populations and less to go around (food, resources, etc.). Calamities such as famine, plague, wars, etc., reduce populations and spawn an increase in per-capita wealth. This is generally, though not universally, seen to apply to pre-industrial civilisations only.