{"id":40303,"date":"2017-09-28T03:00:14","date_gmt":"2017-09-28T07:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=40303"},"modified":"2017-09-27T10:12:10","modified_gmt":"2017-09-27T14:12:10","slug":"a-very-different-kind-of-hockey-stick-everything-sucked-until-the-industrial-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/09\/28\/a-very-different-kind-of-hockey-stick-everything-sucked-until-the-industrial-revolution\/","title":{"rendered":"A very different kind of “hockey stick” – everything sucked until the industrial revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steve Kates<\/a> linked to this post at Luke Muehlhauser’s blog<\/a>, showing another graph with a hockey stick pattern, but it isn’t one of the IPCC’s misleading bits of propaganda:<\/p>\n

In How big a deal was the Industrial Revolution?<\/a>, I looked for measures (or proxy measures) of human well-being \/ empowerment for which we have \u201cdecent\u201d 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:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Physical health, as measured by life expectancy at birth<\/em>.<\/li>\n
  2. Economic well-being, as measured by GDP per capita (PPP) and percent of people living in extreme poverty<\/em>.<\/li>\n
  3. Energy capture<\/em>, in kilocalories per person per day.<\/li>\n
  4. Technological empowerment, as measured by war-making capacity<\/em>.<\/li>\n
  5. Political freedom to live the kind of life one wants to live, as measured by percent of people living in a democracy<\/em>.<\/li>\n
  6. (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\u2019t available; see the report.)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    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):<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/a>

    Click to embiggen<\/p><\/div>\n

    (And yes, there\u2019s still a sharp jump around 1800-1870 if you chart this on a log scale.)<\/p>\n

    Basically, if I help myself to the common (but certainly debatable) assumption that \u201cthe industrial revolution\u201d is the primary cause of the dramatic trajectory change in human welfare around 1800-1870, then my one-sentence summary of recorded human history is this:<\/p>\n

      \n

      Everything was awful for a very long time, and then the industrial revolution happened.<\/em>\n<\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Steve Kates linked to this post at Luke Muehlhauser’s blog, showing another graph with a hockey stick pattern, but it isn’t one of the IPCC’s misleading bits of propaganda: 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 \u201cdecent\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,7],"tags":[1166,91,315],"class_list":["post-40303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-history","tag-industrialrevolution","tag-poverty","tag-wealth"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-au3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40303"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40306,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40303\/revisions\/40306"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}