Global Warming Was Worth It – And if we had to, we’d do it again
13 Dec 2014 Leave a comment
in climate change, development economics, environmental economics, global warming, growth disasters, growth miracles, history of economic thought, liberalism, population economics, technological progress Tags: capitalism and freedom, The Great Enrichment, The Great Escape, The Great Fact
Now, my conception (read: European) of progress and a better standard of living would place many advances above composting, organic farming, or even urban chicken coops.
- Higher incomes that allow people to make livings that afford them more than merely survival or avoiding starvation.
- A low poverty rate.
- High quality and diversity of employment opportunities. Rather than the choice of being a farmer or being a blacksmith, the average citizen should have an array of careers to choose from, and the ability to be industrious and take risks for profit.
- The availability of housing. On an average night in the United States, a country with a population of somewhere around 350 million, fewer than one million people are homeless.
- Consistent GDP growth.
- Access to quality health care.
- The availability of quality education. (I suppose we could quibble over the word “quality,” but certainly there is widespread free education availability.)
- High life expectancy. Worldwide life expectancy has more than doubled from 1750 to 2007.
- Low frequency of deadly disease.
- Affordable goods and services.
- Infrastructure that bolsters economic growth.
- Political stability.
- Air conditioning.
- Freedom from slavery, torture and discrimination.
- Freedom of movement, religion and thought.
- The presumption of innocence under the law.
- Equality under the law regardless of gender or race.
- The right to have a family – as large as one can support. Maybe even larger.
- The right to enjoy the fruits of labor without government – or anyone else – stealing it.
There’s much more, of course. If the “sustainability movement” had its way, many of these advances would be degraded.
And since Caradonna offered a few charts highlighting climate change and population growth (a bad thing), I too was assembling a number of graphs that could offer visual examples of the rise of positive developments since the Industrial Revolution. I also soon noticed that all of them looked virtually identical.
So below is what a graph encompassing nearly every one of my bullet points looks like:
Bill Gates on The Great Fact
12 Dec 2014 Leave a comment
in development economics, growth disasters, growth miracles, technological progress Tags: Bill Gates, capitalism and freedom, The Great Enrichment, The Great Fact
Is everything getting worse? Household technology adoption rates 1997-2010s
09 Dec 2014 Leave a comment
in politics - USA, technological progress Tags: technology diffusion, technology usage rates, The Great Enrichment, The Great Fact
HT: infodocket.com
Everyone is getting worse alert: unbelievable cellphone ad from the early 1990s
08 Dec 2014 Leave a comment
Good old days alert: drivetime music
05 Dec 2014 Leave a comment
in technological progress Tags: The Great Enrichment
Did which of the Great Enrichment and OSHA make the workplace safer?
01 Dec 2014 Leave a comment
in economics of regulation, entrepreneurship, health and safety, labour economics Tags: health and safety, labour economics, The Great Enrichment
Original source of graph: Viscusi, W. Kip, John M. Vernon, and Joseph E. Harrington, Jr. Economics of Regulation and Antitrust. 2nd ed. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1992, page 714.
HT: Art Diamond
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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