You know what? He's right. With the world being a bigger, more communicative place, it can sometimes seem like things are getting worse, but the truth is, it's getting better.
The bad stuff is more likely to make headlines, so it's easy to get a distorted picture of the world. "We haven't been nuked this year!" is not exciting news. It sure is nice, though.
The problem here is multi-fold. On the one hand you have the fundamental problem of comparing what did happen with what might have happened. There are too many possibilities and too much complexity in that problem to ever come up with an objective answer.
On the other hand, the news media is not about informing people it's about getting as many viewers as possible, so we hear a lot more about exceptional events than we do about ordinary developments. Unfortunately, the human psyche isn't well protected against hearing lots of exceptional news, so people develop quite distorted ideas about the world and events within it (and develop quite distorted risk models as well).
The danger of a distorted perception of reality and of excessive and unwarranted pessimism is that it can quite easily lead to devaluation and neglect of the very things that are in actuality making life better.
The ghost of Malthus will continue to haunt us, despite the constant invalidations of his premises. The world can sustain more people, with longer lifespans and higher standards of living.
Looking back, though, it's kind of surprising how many times we seem to have narrowly dodged the Malthusian bullet. Famine was coming... and then the Haber-Bosch ammonia synthesis process was invented. Famine was coming... and then new crops like dwarf wheat came along just in the nick of time. Most recently, we're seeing a remarkable leveling off of the world population, without needing any sort of coercive population controls.
Sometimes, the world really does work out surprisingly well. (This makes sense, of course. If the world was always worse than we expected, without any surprisingly good luck, we would just become more pessimistic until the world started pleasantly surprising us again. Still, hooray.)
Yup, quite remarkable. Remarkable that people are willing to dedicate vast amounts of efforts and resources toward projects which are hugely beneficial.
As ever, I will point out that Malthus was right. It's a deductive argument - unless people exercise restraint, horrible things will happen. We call this restraint the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition .
The transition is a weird phenomenon historically, and in the very long run, like Einstein's cosmological constant, Malthus's mistake (in being pessimistic that people will exercise restraint) may yet be vindicated.
It's not about restraint, Malthus believed people were beyond stupid, that they'd continue to make children in the face of a dwindling food supply. It makes sense to have a lot of children in a scenario where most of them will die of disease before adulthood, or if not, soon afterwards. But in a hunger scenario, having one extra child may mean they all starve, so it's not a good idea.
In a subsistence world, each child will become economically valuable within 12-14 years and soon after that they can support their parents. In this world, children are capital investments. (Since money-capital can't form due to theft or war, people-capital is the only thing that gets created).
We are seeing that as people pull themselves out of poverty (as they are allowed to accumulate capital), they have fewer children.
In fact, it's not certain that we have ever seen a true Malthusian collapse in our human history. Starvation, when it happens, usually has a political cause behind it.
> It's not about restraint, Malthus believed people were beyond stupid, that they'd continue to make children in the face of a dwindling food supply. It makes sense to have a lot of children in a scenario where most of them will die of disease before adulthood, or if not, soon afterwards. But in a hunger scenario, having one extra child may mean they all starve, so it's not a good idea.
Aw, good grief. Have you even read Malthus? His point is simple, that the food supply can increase substantially (in classical economics, through capital investments like clearing land for farming or constructing/repairing boats for fishing) while the population multiplies, and that people will continue to reproduce so long as their kids will at least enjoy the minimal standard of living.
Hunger scenario? Dwindling food supply? Kids as capital investments? Whatever.
Nothing like measured, well reasoned cheer to start the new year with!
But someone had to rain - a commenter points out a similar article Dave Griffith posted on usenet in 1997 which he reread and found the difference between '97 and now is actually rather depressing). I couldn't find the 97 usenet post he is referring to but that's a good thing anyway :)
Gregg Easterbrook proposes a thought experiment in The Progress Paradox, which went approximately like this: Would you agree to permanently trade places with a random person who lived X hundred years ago? Chances are: no you wouldn't.
See also pg's 2004 comment: "… try living for a year using only the resources available to the average Frankish nobleman in 800, and report back to us. (I'll be generous and not send you back to the stone age.)" http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html
Thank Christ for the near extinction of dracunculiasis, which while far from the worst plague afflicting the world is certainly one of (if not the) creepiest. Let's get onto river blindness and pulmonary leishmaniasis next K THX.
The iPhone 4 display is 960x640. In 2000, I was living large at 1024x768 or maybe 1154x864, but at the time I was a web designer and knew that I could only really count on 640x480, though 800x600 was possibly more common by then. My rather nice Sony Trinitron 15" monitor could display 1280x1024 but it looked like it was straining and I was afraid to run it that way for very long, and my 2D graphics performance took a noticable hit. But that was my desktop display. Given Charlie's history I would have a hard time thinking he didn't have 1024x768+ on a desktop but laptops were still often at 800x600, if memory serves.
It's at least a close thing. I can say the 3D performance on the iPhone at that resolution blows away what I could get in 2000, for what it is worth, though I can't guarantee it would blow away a state-of-the-art card. I've always been behind on that front.
Yeah, after my post I googled around a bit and found that, like you said, it's pretty-close to true. Hard-drives in 2000 were ~10GB (iPhone4 is 16 or 32GB). The screen-resolution part seemed the hardest to believe, but you're right: I remember designing web-pages with 800x600 in mind. This is really just staggering.
The best CPU in mid-2000 (x86 architecture) you could get was a PIII at about 1Ghz ... or else the Athlon at a similar clock speed, with higher memory bandwidth.
I look forward to the years beyond.