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Another way to look at it is that it's life by hockey sticks. Literally. We have 8 billion people alive today. Which is about 7.5 billion more than before the p

Another way to look at it is that it's life by hockey sticks. Literally. We have 8 billion people alive today. Which is about 7.5 billion more than before the population hockey stick was a thing. Not only life, but the good life. 90% of people today live a much better life than lords and kings lived 500 years ago.

guenthert 4y ago
> Not only life, but the good life. 90% of people today live a much better life than lords and kings lived 500 years ago. Indeed, but lets not forget that this luxury lifestyle is possible only by exploiting non-renewable resources, i.e. by stealing from future generations. I doubt history (if there will be one) will look kindly on us.
- orangepurple 4y ago
  Considering how cheap fossil fuels are it's a miracle that 37% of electricity generated globally is done so without using fossil fuels and there is nothing but progress on this front. https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
- credit_guy 4y ago
  But we are moving quite fast towards using renewable resources. For example the top 6 materials produced by the world industries are: coal, oil, natural gas, concrete, steel and fertilizers. By 2050 the first 3 will be a tiny fraction of what we are consuming today. Concrete is not made of renewable materials, it's made primarily of sand, gravel and cement, which in turn is made out of limestone. All those can be considered as essentially infinite resources. Steel is one of the most recycled materials (in the US more than two thirds of all manufactured steel is recycled). Fertilizers are currently made primarily out of fossil fuels (natural gas), but that's a historical accident (fossil fuels only contain carbon and hydrogen, not nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus; they are simply the feedstock for hydrogen). Once we can produce green hydrogen, we'll remove fossil fuels from the fertilizer manufacturing process. Bonus: next most produced material is plastics. Produced from fossil fuels today, can be produced from green hydrogen and carbon captured from CO2.
- dash2 4y ago
  Nelson used to plant acorns because he was worried that Britain would not have enough oak trees to build ships. It turned out that we learnt how to build metal ships.
Firmwarrior 4y ago
I dunno about that, man, you could get a lot of food and shelter as a lord or king 500 years ago. I guess lords and kings didn't have anything as entertaining as a $30 smartphone from Wal-Mart though. Lords could get killed by any of a variety of Malaria-like diseases back in the day, too, so maybe they weren't that much better off than a sub-Saharan African today..
- glennonymous 4y ago
  Oh come on. Surely you can think of a few things other than iPhones and malaria medicine we have, that were completely unavailable to kings and queens of old. (Although “smart phones” admittedly encompasses a LOT of things.) How about air conditioning and central heating? Modern dentistry and medicine of all sorts? Refrigeration? Air travel? The light bulb? A much better than king-sized variety of entertainment options on demand? Indoor plumbing, for God’s sake?
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Other than the entertainment one, substantially less than 90% of people have access to those. Even for the entertainment part, lords and kings had plenty of options (like not woeking 12 to 16 hour days). But moreover they (and many lower stations) had security, free time, and a lack of precarity that is unavailable to roughly 90% of the population today. This is worth far more than better circuises and ranks about as highly as things like medicine and refrigeration.
  - jahewson 4y ago
    Hey, the Romans had central heating https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocaust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocaust
  - Firmwarrior 4y ago
    I have all sorts of great stuff, although to be fair, like many of the other commenters here I'm in the top income percentile of the most powerful country on the planet today What about the people living horrible lives out in rural India or Africa, though? I think they fall under the 90% of people that the comment above was talking about
mxkopy 4y ago
> 90% of people today live a much better life than lords and kings lived 500 years ago. I'm not sure this is true. For one, you can't really compare lives, and for two, happiness seems to be determined by social factors in ways that would make this untrue. Being able to play music whenever I want is a power that kings could only dream of, but if they had it they would get bored of it probably pretty quickly. If I could trade all my modern comforts for a minor lordship in the medieval era I would do so in a heartbeat. I'd have good friends, no need to worry about political plots, a good social circle, access to whatever resources I needed, plenty of time to do things I want - a lot of the population doesn't have these things, and modernity doesn't give them to you.
- bckr 4y ago
  > If I could trade all my modern comforts for a minor lordship in the medieval era Does this take into account the difference in medicine between the two time periods?
  - mxkopy 4y ago
    Yeah. I'd rather have a deathbed that came really quickly with me remembering a good social life than one in which I'm remembering all the times I almost died but didn't.
- credit_guy 4y ago
  > I'd have good friends, no need to worry about political plots. You'd have to worry about what you leave to your kids. "Prime and Prejudice" comes to mind. If you didn't have a male heir, your estate might go to some distant relative. Even if you had, your kids who were not your first born son would only inherit a tiny fraction of your wealth. One or two generations down the line, their offspring will be destitute.
  - mxkopy 4y ago
    Still, I'd have plenty of time to worry about those things. In fact that would probably be my "job" - developing, maintaining, and expanding the estate that I would eventually leave to my kids.
quickthrower2 4y ago
In terms of health, I agree, mainly due to vaccines, discovery of various essential nutrients, etc. In terms of lifestyle, I am not so sure.
parineum 4y ago
The author does look at it that way. > not only has the human population grown like gangbusters, but the level of affluence per person has soared by an even larger factor. The impact on our planet scales as the product of these two He just spins it as a bad thing. He has, essentially, 3 actual graphs (GWP, extinction rate, CO2 emissions). The others are all subsets or proxies of those three or based on too few data points and fit to a curve that flatters his point. This population explosion apocalypse is as old as time and each version of it fails to come true.
socialist_coder 4y ago
And 100% of people will live much worse lives 100 years in the future, all because we're blind to see the somewhat obvious result of all this hockey stick growth...
bullen 4y ago
Fitting username, when you pay the debt to the past, with debt from the future and completely ignore the present, things inevitably look great; until they don't for eternity.

guenthert 4y ago

> Not only life, but the good life. 90% of people today live a much better life than lords and kings lived 500 years ago. Indeed, but lets not forget that this luxury lifestyle is possible only by exploiting non-renewable resources, i.e. by stealing from future generations. I doubt history (if there will be one) will look kindly on us.

orangepurple 4y ago
Considering how cheap fossil fuels are it's a miracle that 37% of electricity generated globally is done so without using fossil fuels and there is nothing but progress on this front. https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
credit_guy 4y ago
But we are moving quite fast towards using renewable resources. For example the top 6 materials produced by the world industries are: coal, oil, natural gas, concrete, steel and fertilizers. By 2050 the first 3 will be a tiny fraction of what we are consuming today. Concrete is not made of renewable materials, it's made primarily of sand, gravel and cement, which in turn is made out of limestone. All those can be considered as essentially infinite resources. Steel is one of the most recycled materials (in the US more than two thirds of all manufactured steel is recycled). Fertilizers are currently made primarily out of fossil fuels (natural gas), but that's a historical accident (fossil fuels only contain carbon and hydrogen, not nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus; they are simply the feedstock for hydrogen). Once we can produce green hydrogen, we'll remove fossil fuels from the fertilizer manufacturing process. Bonus: next most produced material is plastics. Produced from fossil fuels today, can be produced from green hydrogen and carbon captured from CO2.
dash2 4y ago
Nelson used to plant acorns because he was worried that Britain would not have enough oak trees to build ships. It turned out that we learnt how to build metal ships.

Firmwarrior 4y ago

I dunno about that, man, you could get a lot of food and shelter as a lord or king 500 years ago. I guess lords and kings didn't have anything as entertaining as a $30 smartphone from Wal-Mart though. Lords could get killed by any of a variety of Malaria-like diseases back in the day, too, so maybe they weren't that much better off than a sub-Saharan African today..

glennonymous 4y ago
Oh come on. Surely you can think of a few things other than iPhones and malaria medicine we have, that were completely unavailable to kings and queens of old. (Although “smart phones” admittedly encompasses a LOT of things.) How about air conditioning and central heating? Modern dentistry and medicine of all sorts? Refrigeration? Air travel? The light bulb? A much better than king-sized variety of entertainment options on demand? Indoor plumbing, for God’s sake?
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Other than the entertainment one, substantially less than 90% of people have access to those. Even for the entertainment part, lords and kings had plenty of options (like not woeking 12 to 16 hour days). But moreover they (and many lower stations) had security, free time, and a lack of precarity that is unavailable to roughly 90% of the population today. This is worth far more than better circuises and ranks about as highly as things like medicine and refrigeration.
- jahewson 4y ago
  Hey, the Romans had central heating https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocaust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocaust
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  I have all sorts of great stuff, although to be fair, like many of the other commenters here I'm in the top income percentile of the most powerful country on the planet today What about the people living horrible lives out in rural India or Africa, though? I think they fall under the 90% of people that the comment above was talking about

mxkopy 4y ago

> 90% of people today live a much better life than lords and kings lived 500 years ago. I'm not sure this is true. For one, you can't really compare lives, and for two, happiness seems to be determined by social factors in ways that would make this untrue. Being able to play music whenever I want is a power that kings could only dream of, but if they had it they would get bored of it probably pretty quickly. If I could trade all my modern comforts for a minor lordship in the medieval era I would do so in a heartbeat. I'd have good friends, no need to worry about political plots, a good social circle, access to whatever resources I needed, plenty of time to do things I want - a lot of the population doesn't have these things, and modernity doesn't give them to you.

bckr 4y ago
> If I could trade all my modern comforts for a minor lordship in the medieval era Does this take into account the difference in medicine between the two time periods?
- mxkopy 4y ago
  Yeah. I'd rather have a deathbed that came really quickly with me remembering a good social life than one in which I'm remembering all the times I almost died but didn't.
credit_guy 4y ago
> I'd have good friends, no need to worry about political plots. You'd have to worry about what you leave to your kids. "Prime and Prejudice" comes to mind. If you didn't have a male heir, your estate might go to some distant relative. Even if you had, your kids who were not your first born son would only inherit a tiny fraction of your wealth. One or two generations down the line, their offspring will be destitute.
- mxkopy 4y ago
  Still, I'd have plenty of time to worry about those things. In fact that would probably be my "job" - developing, maintaining, and expanding the estate that I would eventually leave to my kids.

quickthrower2 4y ago

In terms of health, I agree, mainly due to vaccines, discovery of various essential nutrients, etc. In terms of lifestyle, I am not so sure.

parineum 4y ago

The author does look at it that way. > not only has the human population grown like gangbusters, but the level of affluence per person has soared by an even larger factor. The impact on our planet scales as the product of these two He just spins it as a bad thing. He has, essentially, 3 actual graphs (GWP, extinction rate, CO2 emissions). The others are all subsets or proxies of those three or based on too few data points and fit to a curve that flatters his point. This population explosion apocalypse is as old as time and each version of it fails to come true.

socialist_coder 4y ago

And 100% of people will live much worse lives 100 years in the future, all because we're blind to see the somewhat obvious result of all this hockey stick growth...

bullen 4y ago

Fitting username, when you pay the debt to the past, with debt from the future and completely ignore the present, things inevitably look great; until they don't for eternity.