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> but most individuals in the world were much worse off 200 years ago than they were 200 years before that

I am extremely suspicious of this claim, and would like to see some kind of proof.

Most people do not understand just how bad life as a low-productivity subsistence farmer was, and in 1600, that describes approximately everyone. Agricultural productivity steadily rose in the early modern period, and this resulted in a rise in the standard of living.

What is problematic about the poverty measure in the TFA is that it is based on monetary exchange.

In the past, a lot of value was not based on actually buying things in the market. People grew food, or exchanged things within families or communities via non-monetary measures. Today, almost all value is exchanged monetarily. The poverty graph, at least at the lower end, is to a great extent a replacement of that self/social value with monetary value.

While living standards for most have improved, the story for those of the bottom is not accurately portrayed by the poverty graph.

Do you think researchers who dedicate their lives to measuring poverty haven't thought about a problem you thought of in a few minutes?

> These poverty figures take into account non-monetary forms of income — for poor families today and in the past, this is important, as many of them are subsistence farmers who live largely from their own food production.

This dataset certainly does not do this adequately. This is a very active area of research, and it will take a long time before we converge to reasonable estimates of the past. Even today, countries routinely change their GDP figures after a few years because of how difficult such a thing is to to measure.

You should mentally put large error bars on these graphs. The fact that they don't come up with them already is concerning.

> most individuals in the world were much worse off 200 years ago than they were 200 years before that

Is there like a particular graph or chart that puts numbers on this?

You will not find such a thing. Economic progress before the Industrial Revolution was slow, but not zero. The further back you go the better the last 200 years look, and the impact of every major war and famine becomes less and less notable. TFA is not cherry picking.

Why do you assume that well being is the same as economic progress? Look, I like indoor plumbing as much as the next guy, but it isn't the only contributor to my well-being.

The primary driver of well being until very recently was agricultural yields.

It doesn't matter how nice your environment otherwise is, if your seed multiplication ratio is below 3, your life is hell.

Statistics and charts can't help you draw conclusions about global history before modernity because nobody was compiling data to either modern or common norms. Scholars familiar with a specific time and place can sometimes generate compelling estimates, but these estimates are usually only useful to looking at trends within the narrow region/time context of the scholar's specialty and not suitable for aggregating across the world or across time. There's no real way around that.

So you're left to more subjective assessments. If you haven't read much history or anthropology, or tried to reason about it, it's easy to assume the narrative of modernity being a triumph over 500,000 years of human desperation and decay. But if you have read history, especially the "small" history of personal lives, or read late-20th-century anthropology, or really thought about the necessities for a classical societies to have prevailed and thrived and grown for hundreds of years, or for tribal communities to carry on in stable tradition for millenia, you can't help but wonder why that narrative about modernity even had traction in the first place.

One explanation being that recent modernity is genuinely a mostly progressive advancement from less recent modernity, and so it's easy to assume that the trend carried back indefinitely. But that's an assumption with no charts or data too, so taking it as the default is itself arbitrary at best.

Even today where everyone is generating massive amounts of records detailing their lives a lot of the worst parts are kept hidden and will never be recorded in a newspaper, or a census, or even a social media post for historians to find. If anything people today tend to present misleading appearance of their lives and that was likely true in the past. Getting an accurate idea of people's struggles will always be difficult for historians.

This kind of approach is also what perpetuates myths like the idea that human lifespans used to average out at around 30 years old. This might have been true for medieval and early industrial Europe. But everywhere else in the world the average lifespan past the age of 5 was between 70-80 years old. People's non-industrial lives were not "nasty, brutish, and short" as the popular Western imagination holds it. It's the medieval peasant and the early industrial worker who's life was so short

By the medieval period, the vast majority of the world were peasants, and they did not live significantly better outside of Europe. Asia had significantly higher agricultural productivity, which made their lives more stable on average, but when famine did strike, it was far deadlier because foraging was less of an option.

If you’re going to ignore infant mortality (which seems dubious) then I think you should do it the same way on both sides of a comparison.

> But everywhere else in the world the average lifespan past the age of 5 was between 70-80 years old

Uh, no.

The life expectancy for those who lived past 15 during the Paleolithic was 39 years. For the Neolithic it was 28-33 years. It hardly matters where you look either. In the Americas, for instance an Aztec's life expectancy at 15 averaged just another 19 years. For Copán, those who had reached 15 lived on average another 29 years. In say, Japan during the Jomon period, someone who lived to 15 could expect to live another 32 years.

Accidents, disease, childbirth, famine and war killed a lot of people. While the average life expectancy is "skewed" because of high infant mortality, it was still brutishly short even when early childhood is excluded.

This is extremely outdated science that doesn't utilize archeological evidence well and makes a lot of assumptions.

The current emerging consensus is a constant of around 70 years of age. In fact, there is a remarkable similarity between the mortality profiles of various traditional peoples.

https://www.sapiens.org/biology/human-lifespan-history/

Here's a 2008 paper with some actual studies and hard numbers:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2625386/

The former post appears to cite a study of hunter gatherers in the 20th century.

The latter explicitly states that life expectancy at 15 has risen significantly over the last 600 years for women and used studies that exclude violent deaths for men and was limited to societies’ elite classes.

Just to be clear, citing Wikipedia's table (which appears to be your source), in the Paleolithic that's an additional 39 years after reaching age 15. Or in other words, average life expectancy, conditioned on having survived childhood, was 54 years.

And, as you note, that figure actually decreased in the Neolithic and Bronze/Iron Age. Early civilization was seemingly harder living for adults than was the Paleolithic era.

Maybe you’re right (I am missing references to data points supporting your claims).

Yet: you have to correct for total people on the planet. The total population has gone from 1 billion to 8 billion.

Integrating over all human beings you can be sure that the sum of “being better off” is much higher than 200 years ago.

Now we can endlessly debate what “better” is. I just think it’s totally fair to start at a point where population growth started to take off exponentially.

That's a bizarre take. Where was life stable or comfortable for regular people in 1824? At that time it was still common for people to literally starve to death due to crop failures.

You are imagining an idealized history which never existed (outside of many a few limited areas).

You may have misread something, as my comment is specifically making the point that 1824 was not some status quo start to modern history but actually a bleak minima resulting from the widespread and harsh negative impacts of early industrialization and colonialism.

The "take" is that the article is a bit deceptive in its claims because its measuring progress from a time that -- for much of the world -- was deeply unlike and worse of than times before it.

You may also think that that take is bizarre, but it's a different one than you seemed to have read and responded to.

Pick any earlier date, my point still applies.

One critical point in 1491, by Charles C Mann, is that pre-contact, American Indians generally had a better quality of life than Europeans.

Link to book: https://www.amazon.com/1491-Second-Revelations-Americas-Colu...

I'm not so sure about that. Studies of the bones of pre-Columbian Indians in America showed that they suffered from repeated famine. I read an article years ago that women would spend all day kneeling grinding corn, and it would ruin their joints. They also did not have horses to do the heavy work. And used slave labor.

I don't think we know enough about the pre-Columbian Indians to make a solid evaluation about their lifestyle. Even estimates of how many there were vary by an order of magnitude.

It is hard to know what things were like as, horses, smallpox (and other disease), firearms, and other general dry goods (cast iron pans) all worked there way across mostly ahead of Europeans (or with traders who were not concerned about keeping the type of records we want and if they did keep records it was to sell their activities to the public back home (public might just be kings) and so they had reasons to make up a story for people who couldn't verify the story (and who mostly cared that the gold was coming so a false story that helped sell those people were evil worth destroying was welcomed)

What we know about their lifestyle was for the most part how they lived after all the above arrived, but each is expected to create major culture changes.

I think that's a pretty low bar? It doesn't matter which you pick, they're both going to be much worse than life is now for most of us reading this.

It's not pre-contact, but The Cutting-Off Way seems like a good source on Native American warfare.

https://www.amazon.com/Cutting-Off-Way-Indigenous-Warfare-15...

> I think that's a pretty low bar? It doesn't matter which you pick, they're both going to be much worse than life is now for most of us reading this.

I don't think it takes away from what you're trying to say, but the irony of this paragraph is delicious given that "most of us reading this" are in the global 1% of today, if not higher, and in some astronomical percentile as measured against history. When used as the measure against whatever historical deprivation and insecurity there was, we make for a pretty low bar!

Yeah, I was just trying to make a very rough comparison. Maybe we could go back to the statistics on Our World In Data then? They are about global poverty and it does seem to be improving.

The Wikipedia summary of 1491 makes it sound like it's basically a book filled with fun facts about how American Indians societies were more complex than what most people give them credit for. It's not a serious analysis of whose lives were "better."

> The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city

I mean.. sure. But they were also an imperialist power that could grab what they wanted from neighboring nations, militarized like Sparta. They had such a great time because they made others work for them, not unlike the Romans or the Brits. Before automation the main way to get a better standard of living was to have slaves.