[antasvara]

This point is valid. However, lifestyle improvement rate is something that's slowing over time because of physical constraints.

For example, the vehicle mortality rate is 1.44 per 100 million miles driven. That's down 17% from 2000 (so 25 years ago). However, the change from 1975 to 2000 was 53%. That's because as we get closer to 0, it gets harder and harder to improve those rates. On this metric at least, I don't think another 25 years will result in a noticeable amount of improvement?

In the other direction, some things will become scarcer (and therefore cost more). Real estate is the obvious one; we can't create more land, and we keep having more people. Easily accessible drinking water is another; desalination is getting cheaper, but it's still way more expensive than pumping aquifer water.

And some improvements are necessarily 1 time things. You can get tropical fruits year round, but that's been widely available since the 80-90's from what I can tell. So come 20 years from now, what will people be able to buy in a grocery store that I can't buy right now?

[fl4regun]

The innovations aren't better versions of things we had in the past, they are more so unique new inventions. Plumbing is not electricity is not globalized food chains is not computers.

Also we don't need to make more land to have more people. We can make more habitable living space within the same amount of land area, especially in countries like canada and the USA where we dumped a bunch of low-density housing absolutely everywhere, we just choose not to do that.

[antasvara]

>The innovations aren't better versions of things we had in the past, they are more so unique new inventions. Plumbing is not electricity is not globalized food chains is not computers.

This is only sort of true. Plumbing is an improved version of a well pump, which is functionally (if not technically) an improvement over walking down to the river for a pot of water. Globalized food chains are mostly improvements on the supply chain we had (boats got faster, so things can travel from farther away places more quickly, refrigeration got added to existing modes of travel, etc.).

>Also we don't need to make more land to have more people. We can make more habitable living space within the same amount of land area, especially in countries like canada and the USA where we dumped a bunch of low-density housing absolutely everywhere, we just choose not to do that.

I didn't mean to imply that we can't increase housing density. But I think it's clear that having 2.3x more people than 1950 means that all else being equal, people will need to settle for less land. There's just more demand per square mile.

[SpicyLemonZest]

It's hard to anticipate. If you'd asked me 20 years ago "maybe they'll invent a better apple" would not have crossed my mind, but Cosmic Crisp came out in 2019, and now I routinely eat apples which look and taste better than anything I previously imagined. My parents tell me they had the same experience with meal prep kits and Thai food.

[antasvara]

True, but "a better apple" is unequivocally less impactful than "you no longer have to walk to the river any time you want to drink a glass of water."

I think it's easier to see if you think in 20 year increments. The difference between 1920 and 1940 is way larger than the difference between 2000 and 2020, and I don't think it's particularly close. Going from "antibiotics haven't been discovered" to "antibiotics become widely manufactured" in 1945 is a huge difference, just as one example.