> 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?
Is there like a particular graph or chart that puts numbers on this?
It doesn't matter how nice your environment otherwise is, if your seed multiplication ratio is below 3, your life is hell.
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.