One of the very weirdest things about this article is that it takes absolutely no account of how many people were alive. It is couched entirely in averages. In

One of the very weirdest things about this article is that it takes absolutely no account of how many people were alive. It is couched entirely in averages. In fact, the author is so serious about this that he can write "it doesn’t seem that any of the deadliest events in recorded history had a transformative negative impact". This includes the Black Death which he thinks killed 10% of all humans! Killing 10% of humans is a transformative negative impact. You must at least have an opinion of whether and when human life is better or worse than death. It matters whether there are 10 million people on earth or 10 billion! If you think only in averages, then anything before the end of the Malthusian regime is going to have only a short-run impact on welfare: any increase in GDP per capita gets dissipated by the resulting population growth. Not thinking in averages would make the flat line before the Industrial Revolution a lot less flat (though the IR would still show a big hockey stick). The human population 12000 years ago was about 4 million. Around 0 AD it was 200 million.[1] This weirdness is almost invisible to people because they have been trained so hard to think in averages. The same mistake is made by people who argue that the coming of agriculture was a disaster. (People got shorter and less healthy! Sure, but one reason for that is there are many, many more people. Again, if you think they would have been better off dead, then fine, but at least make the argument.) I blame Rawls and Harsanyi. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth?insight=the-world-population-has-increased-rapidly-over-the-last-few-centuries#key-insights https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth?insight=the-wor...