"Everything Was Awful for a Very Long Time, . . .

. . . and then the industrial revolution happened."

In How big a deal was the Industrial Revolution?, I looked for measures (or proxy measures) of human well-being / empowerment for which we have “decent” scholarly estimates of the global average going back thousands of years. For reasons elaborated at some length in the full report, I ended up going with:

1. Physical health, as measured by life expectancy at birth.
2. Economic well-being, as measured by GDP per capita (PPP) and percent of people living in extreme poverty.
3. Energy capture, in kilocalories per person per day.
4. Technological empowerment, as measured by war-making capacity.
5. Political freedom to live the kind of life one wants to live, as measured by percent of people living in a democracy.

(I also especially wanted measures of subjective well-being and social well-being, and also of political freedom as measured by global rates of slavery, but these data aren’t available; see the report.)

Anyway, the punchline of the report is that when you chart these six measures over the past few millennia (data; zoomable), you get a chart like this (axes removed for space reasons):

Click to enlarge

(And yes, there’s still a sharp jump around 1800-1870 if you chart this on a log scale.1 )

Interestingly, this is not the impression of history I got from the world history books I read in school. Those books tended to go on at length about the transformative impact of the wheel or writing or money or cavalry, or the conquering of this society by that other society, or the rise of this or that religion, or the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire, or the Black Death, or the Protestant Reformation, or the Scientific Revolution.

But they could have ended each of those chapters by saying “Despite these developments, global human well-being remained roughly the same as it had been for millennia, by every measure we have access to.”3 And then when you got to the chapter on the industrial revolution, these books could’ve said: “Finally, for the first time in recorded history, the trajectory of human well-being changed completely, and this change dwarfed the magnitude of all previous fluctuations in human well-being.”

Historians missing the forest among the trees.

Keep this one around for the next time a liberal tries to drag you back to the pre-industrial era.

Stand On New York

The Washington Post has one of those Gee Whiz posts about, well you'll see:

If all the world’s people squished together, how much room would they take up?

If all the world’s people stood really close, how much room would they take up? You probably haven’t had the time or inclination to consider this question, which is why you should be grateful for Tim Urban of the blog Wait But Why. Urban chose to investigate this question in a recent post with lots of enlightening calculations and fun graphics.

Urban’s core assumption is that 10 humans can fit in a square meter. If you watch this video of nine journalists squeezing themselves into a square meter, you can see that while this would be cozy, it’s definitely possible. This especially true given that about a quarter of the world’s population is under 15.

At 10 people per square meter, that means we can fit 1,000 people in a 10-by-10-meter square. 54,000 people can fit in an American football field, and 26 million people – about the population of Scandinavia – can fit into one square mile, Urban writes. Central Park, which is 1.3 square miles or 3.4 square kilometers, could hold the population of Australia or Saudi Arabia. All 320 million Americans could huddle together into a square that is 3.5 miles or 5.7 kilometers on each side.

And what if we found a piece of land for everyone on Earth – all 7.3 billion of the world’s people? Urban calculates that we would need a square that is 27 km, or 16.8 miles, on each side – an area smaller than Bahrain and, yes, New York City.

Simple mathematical stuff, and amusing, if not particularly meaningful. But it staggers me that someone could write such an article without mentioning the classic SciFi novel "Stand on Zanzibar".

Stand on Zanzibar is a dystopian New Wave science fiction novel written by John Brunner and first published in 1968. The book won a Hugo Award for Best Novel at the 27th World Science Fiction Convention in 1969, as well as the 1969 BSFA Award and the 1973 Prix Tour-Apollo Award.

The primary engine of the novel's story is overpopulation and its projected consequences, and the title refers to an early twentieth-century claim that the world's population could fit onto the Isle of Wight – which has an area of 381 square kilometres (147 sq mi) – if they were all standing upright. Brunner remarked that the growing world population now required a larger island; the 3.5 billion people living in 1968 could stand together on the Isle of Man (area 572 square kilometres (221 sq mi)), while the 7 billion people who he (correctly) projected would be alive in 2010 would need to stand on Zanzibar (area 1,554 square kilometres (600 sq mi)). Throughout the book, the image of the entire human race standing shoulder-to-shoulder on a small island is a metaphor for a crowded world.

Christ, what an imagination I've got.