By 800 bce, Greece had recovered from the collapse of the Late Bronze Age. By 600 bce, it had broken out of the low “premodern normal.” Over the next 300 years, Greece reached peaks of population and consumption unequaled until the early twentieth century. Every available proxy measurement trends in the same direction. The levels of urbanization and infrastructure track other evidence. And meanwhile, at least in the city of Athens, it appears that income inequality was low. The evidence now seems incontrovertible: the ancient Greek world had an exceptionally long efflorescence, prosperity was not monopolized by the elite, and economic growth was closely correlated with the explosion of culture once described as miraculous.
To your point though, it was also a period of significant population growth.
And, well, so what? Even if I bought that, much of that is due to it extracting wealth from the rest of the world; not some virtue of its own. And most people only gain minor benefits from it, I don’t benefit from some right guy having nicer toys than the rich guys in some other country. Much less the people in other countries we’ve been exploiting to support our lifestyle.
Your argument is like some British guy at the height of their empire looking at Britain’s prosperity and declaring it to be due some innate virtue of the British, instead of them leeching off their conquests.
Income inequality is an incredibly myopic way to determine that an ancient society was “more equal” than our own.
Brett Devereaux has a fascinating breakdown of what Greek city states were like, which dispels this anachronistic myth that they were more democratic or egalitarian than us:
Classical Greece is a bad example, but there do seem to have been times and places with less inequality than America today. Heck, Denmark today is a good example.
I can’t pick “a time” because most times have had some people living in shitty societies. But some of the Pacific Northwest indigenous people did pretty well. (Not all, again, a variety of societies.) For that matter, before the plagues of Europe, some of the north eastern indigenous people of what’s now America seem to have done pretty well, too.
But it’s hard, because I’m probably in the top tenth of the US population, so I’m doing okay here and now. A bit worked about the future, gotta admit
Sorry for not explicitly phrasing in form of a question! Do you appreciate that the fact that an item you wouldn’t be happy with now was the very same item that caused you your greatest happiness in a past time? That your new object being objectively “better” is a poor metric of the happiness it caused?
Yes. Also. And then, historically, often by how we interact based on local limitations of resources compared to population increase demands. Wars over shelter, over hunting and grazing grounds. Over resource availability in general. Cancer has become more of an issue of course, but for the simple reason that it increases with age. Bacterial infections, and many viral ones, are interesting in that for much of the period of civilization advancement and population increase they increased. Crowded conditions, close proximity to crowded livestock with crossover events, and poor infrastructure for sanitation and such. Really the big advancements there are only within roughly a century. And current leadership seems intent on reversing many of those gains. But that would be hijacking the hijack of a hijack!
Sure, because now I’m older and when you’re a kid everything is fantastic and new and wonderful, and you feel great; and when you’re older, you’ve seen a lot of stuff, and your back hurts, and you are worried about bills. So the past is always rose tinted.
Well, you’re talking about the hedonism treadmill now. But that argues against your point even further. If we can only change long-term happiness through a constant rate of improvement, then we had better make sure there is a strong excess of knowledge workers on top of the basics.
I think the hedonism treadmill is somewhat overplayed and certainly doesn’t apply to all forms of happiness. Even just mathematically speaking, more years of high quality lifespan obviously generates more per-capita happiness than less. Modern medicine (only enabled by having a large population of knowledge workers) has made great improvements here and I expect more to come.
And how was that accomplished? Through medical research across the globe, and increasing automation that reduced the need for back-breaking human labor. As well as uncountable smaller developments like sunscreen and OSHA regulations and banning asbestos and…
Correct. We’re talking about a much worse than Thanos level of decline if trends continue.
Again, each generation in South Korea is about a third the size of the previous generation. This has not yet caused a reduction in their population because they experienced extreme growth in the near past. But as soon as the new fertility rate filters through their demographics, then they will experience Thanos snapping his fingers and eliminating 2/3 of the population… and then repeating that every 30 years, forever.
Not every nation is South Korea. But some are getting close, and virtually all are moving in that direction. And we have an actual example of how bad things can get, so it’s important for everyone else to ensure they can’t get that get that bad.
That’s right. Or rather, that’s one of the things I’ve been arguing about.
Obviously there are some jobs, like barbers, that don’t experience much productivity increase over time. As a fraction of the population, you need just as many if the human population was 8,000 vs. 8 billion.
On the other hand, there are jobs where all benefits are trivially replicated to the entire population, like movies or video games. You could not have these things (even if the equipment was still around) in the way they exist today with only 8,000 people.
And then there are jobs where it’s somewhere in between, like farming. At any given instant in time, you need so many farmers to produce so much food. But the larger number will innovate more over time, because this innovation is knowledge work, and every individual contribution benefits everyone.
My Google Fu isn’t sufficient to answer that question. Hating to be morbid, but that’s not my top criterion. (I care more about maternal mortality, if we are taking childbirth. And mortality 5-80 than 0-5, for that matter.)
I think there might be some bias towards our own familiar timeline here. If you could be born in any decade of the 20 or 21st century, which would you pick? Would you swap times with the boomers here? Or vice versa? Or with your own kids?
I was thinking the same thing, reading this. Happiness isn’t the right metric, because we pretty much adjust to current conditions, whatever they are. But some change can still make our lives overall better… or not. I do agree not every new technology necessarily improves our lives, but on balance it’s very positive.
It’s not just agriculture. Israel is able to specialise in (according to AI) cybersecurity, software development, telecommunications, and semiconductor manufacturing only because it has a lot of other countries to trade with: hundreds of millions or billions of people to sell those things to, and from whom to buy the raw materials and other products and services that they don’t specialise in producing. That’s a major reason increased trade can make both countries richer, it’s a major reason for common markets like the EU (which Switzerland has access to).
I would put money on an increased population increasing productivity more than linearly, because it allows for increased specialisation, as well as a higher rate of innovation.
Yes, I’d call it a developmental issue. This varies a lot between country: we are seeing massive entry into the middle class, with “Middle class” defined as people spending $12 per day. That’s $4380 per year which is solidly middle-income country level.
Some people’s eyes will pop out at such a characterization, but that only underlines the harshness faced by lower income countries where average output is under $1000 per year.
We are seeing rapid increases in the world standard of living due to advances in India and China. Sanitation has increased massively in India, even overthe past decade or so:
The World Health Organization’s Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) tracks the progress nations are making towards improving access to safe sanitation. JMP data shows that in 1990, only 18% of India’s population were using toilets [15]. By 2011, the percent of people with a toilet almost doubled to 35% [15]. This pace of improvement increased dramatically over the past decade. By 2015, 57% of Indians had a toilet, while 29% were defecating in the open [1]. In 2020, the percent of Indians with a toilet had risen to 71% [1].
Smartphones:
NEW DELHI: During the lockdown, the number of smartphones in rural India surged more than double, as per the latest Annual Survey for Education Report (ASER). In 2018, around 36 per cent of households had a smartphone, which increased to 74.8 per cent in 2022, said the report.
My point above was that the transformation from lower income to middle income (still poor by advanced country standards) is a big deal which vastly increases the potential for immigration backing eldercare over the next 20 years or so.
Honestly, I don’t think ceterus paribus will get you that conclusion. There are a lot of preconditions for broad and ubiquitous societal innovation that is readily perceptible within a lifetime. In most places we didn’t have that prior to 1870 and in all places we didn’t have that prior to 1500.
I would say all else being equal if you have two agricultural states one of which has an agricultural research service and the other which does not, the one with the agricultural research service will innovate faster.
While that is lower than our current population there is no way you can describe a population of 1 billion humans as a low population in absolute terms.
We can not continue to grow our population endlessly without limit. Eventually we run out of planet.
Or, to look at it another way: in 1970 we were sending people into space and inventing transistors and the basis for our modern computers. Yet we “only” had about 3.5 billiion people in the world. So… apparently we can have an advanced, innovating society/civilization with only half our current population.
So the population dropping back to that shouldn’t screw up innovation, productivity, etc. But it would put a lot less stress on the planetary ecosystem that sustains us.
It’s unfair to compare the US as a nation to most other nations because most other nations are so very much smaller than the US. It’s more useful to compare the US to, say, all of Europe for comparison of population, land area, resources, and so forth.
It’s notable that part of the reason people are choosing to have fewer or no children nowadays is concern about leaving them with a world with a ruined environment (which would be less of a problem with fewer people generating pollution and extracting resources) where they have poor prospects of being able to afford their own homes (which would be less of a problem with fewer people generating less demand and thereby causing lower prices).
Assuming that trends continue (and for this trend to have sky-is-falling results like a global population of only a few million would require the trend to continue for about half a millenium) is what is basically an ecological system driven by equilibriating factors is like assuming that a fever patient will succumb to spontaneous human combustion.
Note that small geographic size would amplify the various network effects cited as an effect of large population; thus, the 40-50 million inhabitants of Britain, France, and Germany in 1890 should have been ahead of the 60ish-million inhabitants of the US if that were the key factor.
It’s notable that Great Britain had the problem during both world wars that its population exceeded the number that could be supported by agriculture in the land area of Great Britain. There is a point where population density it too great to be self-sustaining in that footprint.
Yeah, I’m not playing this game. If I make an obvious, uncontroversial statement like “men are taller than women,” then I don’t actually need to add an infinite number of caveats about how it’s not true for all individuals or all populations or how early hominid men were shorter than modern women or whatever. You can just assume the obvious, uncontroversial interpretation for whatever it is.