Quote:
Originally Posted by 5 south
When, in the history of mankind, was a better time to be alive than today?
This is unanswereable because we don't exist ex-everything that happened to make us what we are, so it wouldn't be us elsewhere in geography or time. And because social welfare functions can't exist.
Some improvements we currently enjoy are so massive and exceptional historically that's it's really hard to make a case for periods of time when they didn't exist to be "better" whatever that might actually mean.
So my answer would limit the possible answers at the very least to "when cheap reliable antibiotics are very easy to find", as there is no model i can think of where you can claim having half the kids die before they reach 5 years old (which is what happened basically everywhere without antibiotics) is worth it because of something else you get in exchange in society.
Similar arguments can be made for access to clean water, electricity and so on.
This said though, improvements weren't all pareto efficient by any mean. Most common example must be that something truly deeply horrible (and unprecedented in the history of humanity) is happening to ever-larger portions of society wrt obesity.
Is that enough to claim it was better when half the kids died before 5? for me clearly no. But we can't claim we are better on that very relevant dynamic.
And the lowest fertility in the history of humanity isn't exactly pleasant either.
We are also temporally very close to the worst man-made events in human history unlike what Pinker claims, ie it was only modernity that allowed the american civil war, ww1, ww2, the holodomor, concentration camps, the cambodian genocide, the cultural revolution and the like. To be fair, in the very few decades which just passed things on that regard improved significantly but we can't yet claim this is a result that's going to stay, rather than simply a waiting room for another ww3 worse than ww1&ww2 combined, or another communist genocide on an even larger scale than in the 20th century. We have thousands of nuclear weapons and hundreds of millions of communists around after all.
But modernity is also what prevents something like the black plague to kill a third of the population, and what made the "worst pandemic in a century" invisible in the graph of world population, so again, on aggregate it wins, but very very very far from pareto efficiency.
When you deviate too much from pareto efficiency (ie a lot of things you care about get better but some get truly deeply a lot worse), even if a rational weighting would presumably allow you to claim "all other periods in time are worse", you start entering utilitarianism and with it, the actual impossibility of being really able to make such claims, because utility isn't objective. There is no social welfare function nor it can be defined (see Arrow impossibility theorem) in any objective way.
Wrapping up it's not hard to see why some people are actually quite pessimist for current and near future prospects: if you start believing any of the potential global threats to wellbeing we do have elements of right now is actually apocalyptic, you are not going to give enough weight to current material conditions being pretty good because you can think that:
1) the world the way we experience it is going to end because of climate change
2) global society becomes a totalitan dictatorship because the evil globalists win
3) we annihilate every human being with full scale nuclear war
4) malignant AGI arises and deletes or enslaves us
5) et cetera
While different people will give the lulz to some of those options for various reasons, it's enough to think even one of them has a single digit probability to happen in the next 50 years to claim we are actually in a very bad spot in time, and it's our fault (notice how all 4 options are man-made).