My new favorite book of all time
Charles Kuralt has an old documentary about the shopping mall. He mourns outdoor shopping downtown, worries about progress, then eventually gives up and announces, "Well, this is the way we live now."<p>Uh, maybe. Kuralt didn't live to see Amazon.
<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-retail-debt/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-retail-debt/</a><p>Or if you prefer Randall Munroe, linear extrapolation can be risky.
<a href="https://www.xkcd.com/605/" rel="nofollow">https://www.xkcd.com/605/</a><p>Crime, housing prices, and population growth always go up... until they don't.<p>Mortality rates might be next to zag, who knows:
<a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/12/8/13875150/life-expectancy-us-dropped-first-time-decade" rel="nofollow">https://www.vox.com/2016/12/8/13875150/life-expectancy-us-dr...</a><p>I think Pinker's right. I hope he is. But it's hard to evaluate claims that extend so far beyond human lifespans. The empires in Persia bounced between progressive tolerance and tyrannical repression for stretches of over two hundred years. From Gobleki Tepe's perspective, our entire known history is a blip... too little data for any coherent long run analysis.