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As a simple check, the average person (in the world) today is better off than the average person 50, 100, or 1,000 years ago. Even though are population has inc

As a simple check, the average person (in the world) today is better off than the average person 50, 100, or 1,000 years ago. Even though are population has increased significantly, our wealth has increased even more. I will have to do a research on this. It's a very interesting claim and you didn't provide any sources. I'm not convinced. I think we've been heavily "borrowing from the future" i.e. even current rates of consumption/household growth are not sustainable, again - I got these conclusions and trends from Diamond. Also forget for a second about words like "wealth" and "dollars" and look at basic resources instead: fish, meat, oil, wood and minerals. Currently we're consuming them at the rate faster than they can regenerate, I hope we can agree here. To me, that's an indication that technology isn't keeping up. Look up the rising numbers of meat and fish consumption in China and compare them to agricultural output of the world (all these facts are googlable).

smanek 18y ago
I'm simply using dollars as a universally understood metric for wealth (where wealth is the 'value' of actual goods and services). Obvious data that supports my claim (that life is better for the average person today than it was 100 years ago) is that the average worldwide life expectancy has increased from 31 years in 1900 to over 65 years in 2006 (http://www.who.int/global_health_histories/seminars/presentation07.pdf http://www.who.int/global_health_histories/seminars/presenta...). If memory serves, child mortality rates, homicide rates, and per capita energy production all paint a similar picture. Even though there are some limited basic resources (land, water, etc), we are always learning to use them more efficiently. Our yield for most crops, per acre, has increased over ten fold in the last 100 years. Look into Norman Borlaug's Dwarf Wheat and the Green Revolution for proof.
- old-gregg 18y ago
  Ok, you're supporting the claim that technology is winning the race. May I ask a hypothetical question: if all countries had social/economic systems identical to US, with full access to US technology, democracy, political stability, etc (kinda imagine them all being US states), do you honestly believe the whole world would enjoy the same standard of living we do?
  - asdflkj 18y ago
    The whole world would probably enjoy much higher standard of living than we do now. Do a thought experiment, and remove any 1st-world nation from the world, and see whether it would help or hurt everyone else. In my mind, it would hurt every time, so adding more 1st-world nations would therefore help every time. There's no reason to suppose that our current proportion of rich societies to poor ones has any special significance. Yes, it would help some large groups of people if the US were gone, but this is not because US profits from them. If anything, US loses wealth roughly in proportion to its brutality. Besides the obvious example of Iraq, there is also the "war on drugs" and its effect on the Latin American nations. Actually if everyone was 1st-world, I suspect there would be less of this pointless aggression, because US citizens aren't as able to dehumanize people who aren't poor.
davidmathers 18y ago
"I will have to do a research on this." Angus Maddison is the man with the data. http://books.google.com/books?id=UNgbMMwlgmcC&printsec=frontcover http://books.google.com/books?id=UNgbMMwlgmcC&printsec=f...
anamax 18y ago
> Also forget for a second about words like "wealth" and "dollars" and look at basic resources instead: fish, meat, oil, wood and minerals. The US has more forested land, more wood, than it did 100 years ago. Yes, it has fewer 1000 year-old trees than it did 100 years ago but it's unclear which direction that trend is going. The US also has more meat than it did 100 years ago. That's because meat and wood, unlike fish, are both farmed. However, farmed fish will take care of that. As far as minerals go, there's a pretty obvious place to look for large amounts of them when the current natural caches become expensive. And, in many cases, we don't actually care about the "minerals", we care about what we can get from the mineral, such as iron. We're pretty good and getting better at reclaiming such materials when it makes economic sense (and we shouldn't try when it doesn't, even if we're pretty sure that it will later).

smanek 18y ago

I'm simply using dollars as a universally understood metric for wealth (where wealth is the 'value' of actual goods and services). Obvious data that supports my claim (that life is better for the average person today than it was 100 years ago) is that the average worldwide life expectancy has increased from 31 years in 1900 to over 65 years in 2006 (http://www.who.int/global_health_histories/seminars/presentation07.pdf http://www.who.int/global_health_histories/seminars/presenta...). If memory serves, child mortality rates, homicide rates, and per capita energy production all paint a similar picture. Even though there are some limited basic resources (land, water, etc), we are always learning to use them more efficiently. Our yield for most crops, per acre, has increased over ten fold in the last 100 years. Look into Norman Borlaug's Dwarf Wheat and the Green Revolution for proof.

old-gregg 18y ago
Ok, you're supporting the claim that technology is winning the race. May I ask a hypothetical question: if all countries had social/economic systems identical to US, with full access to US technology, democracy, political stability, etc (kinda imagine them all being US states), do you honestly believe the whole world would enjoy the same standard of living we do?
- asdflkj 18y ago
  The whole world would probably enjoy much higher standard of living than we do now. Do a thought experiment, and remove any 1st-world nation from the world, and see whether it would help or hurt everyone else. In my mind, it would hurt every time, so adding more 1st-world nations would therefore help every time. There's no reason to suppose that our current proportion of rich societies to poor ones has any special significance. Yes, it would help some large groups of people if the US were gone, but this is not because US profits from them. If anything, US loses wealth roughly in proportion to its brutality. Besides the obvious example of Iraq, there is also the "war on drugs" and its effect on the Latin American nations. Actually if everyone was 1st-world, I suspect there would be less of this pointless aggression, because US citizens aren't as able to dehumanize people who aren't poor.

davidmathers 18y ago

"I will have to do a research on this." Angus Maddison is the man with the data. http://books.google.com/books?id=UNgbMMwlgmcC&printsec=frontcover http://books.google.com/books?id=UNgbMMwlgmcC&printsec=f...

anamax 18y ago

> Also forget for a second about words like "wealth" and "dollars" and look at basic resources instead: fish, meat, oil, wood and minerals. The US has more forested land, more wood, than it did 100 years ago. Yes, it has fewer 1000 year-old trees than it did 100 years ago but it's unclear which direction that trend is going. The US also has more meat than it did 100 years ago. That's because meat and wood, unlike fish, are both farmed. However, farmed fish will take care of that. As far as minerals go, there's a pretty obvious place to look for large amounts of them when the current natural caches become expensive. And, in many cases, we don't actually care about the "minerals", we care about what we can get from the mineral, such as iron. We're pretty good and getting better at reclaiming such materials when it makes economic sense (and we shouldn't try when it doesn't, even if we're pretty sure that it will later).