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Human history in the long run: It was mostly pretty bad
It was mostly pretty bad, but Happy 4th of July!
When I first read Derek Parfit’s “Reasons and Persons,” I viewed the “repugnant conclusion” thought-experiment about shifting society to one with a much larger population at considerably lower standards of living to be interesting but also a kind of weird hypothetical. In dramatic renderings of Medieval or quasi-Medieval settings, whether we’re talking “Game of Thrones” or the recent “The Last Duel” (which is really good and I wish more people had seen; check it out when it comes to streaming), the focus is almost always on members of the elite minority. A lot of the things we “know” — a steady pace of technological progress that is rapid enough to generate consistently rising living standards — actually comes from a surprisingly small and local sample of the broad sweep of human existence.
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