Fatter, yes. But I think it might surprise you how toxic basic life was in the 1950s.
There was a time that this was a normal day in London - https://i.imgur.com/8jRGvYf.jpeg
And this, a normal day in LA - https://i.imgur.com/YlimuGS.jpg
There was a time that this was a normal day in London - https://i.imgur.com/8jRGvYf.jpeg
And this, a normal day in LA - https://i.imgur.com/YlimuGS.jpg
Instead of 'canary in the coal mine' dead crows near the oil plant.
edit: There isn't any heavy industry there, just cows, sheep, and grass, maybe some other agriculture, and peat. Has always been like that, and is almost unchanged now. Also no heavy traffic at all. Just the petrochemical plant. And a nuclear power plant. But that had no leaks.
It's like every single meaningful metrics are going down
Except somehow life expectancy is the highest ever (excluding a small spike down lately in USA).
Plus we took lead out of houses and gasoline, and smoking rates are down across the world... this should not be under-estimated.
The young generation right now is actually likely one of the healthiest comparatively (even with the increased obesity rates)
When 40%+ of your country's population is medically obese you have to start asking questions, this is nothing else than self sabotage and slow suicide. How do people come to the point of not caring about themselves to that extent, that alone should be a gigantic red flag, at least as big as climate change and dying biodiversity
I personally have no interest in living a long life in a dying world. Life expectancy discussions always make me think of: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Let...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strength_Through_Joy <- Not Zexy! Or is it?
Children and youth mortality <15 years old was at around 50%. [1]
It was norm back then to have kids with the assumption that you have to have twice as many kids as you need to help you with your work.
Child labor was norm, not exception. Ability to read was exception too.
Life expectancy at birth some hundreds years ago was around 30 to 40 years all across the world [0].
Currently, no country in the world has a lower life expectancy than the countries with the highest life expectancy in 1800 [0].
We eliminated basically all infectious diseases in the west and we are rapidly doing the same in the rest of the world.
COVID-19 during Smallpox would barely register to our ancestors (2% CFR vs. 30% CFR) [2].
Last decade extreme poverty was the lowest it ever was [3].
Around half of the world population lives today in democracy. [4]
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/smallpox