Referring to the “criticism of these numbers” arguments: the only one that stands out to me as very serious is 5. From my reading history and historiography, the problem of quantifying changes among groups of people who mostly practice subsistence farming and do not have any records of birth, health, death, or productivity is notorious. It looks to me like it would be down to archaeological and anthropological data to determine what their lives were like, and then the comparison with the lives of people on $X/day could begin.
I wouldn’t go as far as calling the numbers bullshit, but wew lad do I expect the error bars to be huge on the early end of that chart. Time to go digging through those links to find out what they actually did!
Edit: yep, that’s the case. They took the extant work from historians using the archaeology/remains methods and combined them as well as they were able. I was interested to see that the highest-uncertainty parts aren’t so much the earlier periods as the periods where completely new products or radical product quality changes were introduced. So if we were to see the uncertainty, I expect it would start wider at the beginning and narrow as time went on, with spikes during stuff like the introduction of vaccines or factories.
Referring to the “criticism of these numbers” arguments: the only one that stands out to me as very serious is 5. From my reading history and historiography, the problem of quantifying changes among groups of people who mostly practice subsistence farming and do not have any records of birth, health, death, or productivity is notorious. It looks to me like it would be down to archaeological and anthropological data to determine what their lives were like, and then the comparison with the lives of people on $X/day could begin.
I wouldn’t go as far as calling the numbers bullshit, but wew lad do I expect the error bars to be huge on the early end of that chart. Time to go digging through those links to find out what they actually did!
Edit: yep, that’s the case. They took the extant work from historians using the archaeology/remains methods and combined them as well as they were able. I was interested to see that the highest-uncertainty parts aren’t so much the earlier periods as the periods where completely new products or radical product quality changes were introduced. So if we were to see the uncertainty, I expect it would start wider at the beginning and narrow as time went on, with spikes during stuff like the introduction of vaccines or factories.