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The book "the rational optimist" discusses how coal curbed deforestation, and oil wells replaced whale oil.

Of course now other forms of energy are becoming practical.

See also The Rational Optimist by Ridley, The Improving State of the World by Goklany, etc.

Nassim Taleb argued successfully against his previous "Better Angels"book

Some observations are quite surprising, for example using coal and then oil for energy replaced huge amounts of manual labor and might have eliminated slavery, deforestation and hunting whales for whale oil.

I'm not the OP, but Matt Ridley's book The Rational Optimist, just released a few days ago, has much more on this. Selection here:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB2000142405274870369180457525...

I hate to use cliches, but I think you can look at reality and argue it either way -- it's truly arbitrary, a "glass half-full" thing. I'd the nature of being able to argue it both ways only emphasizes the necessity of taking Kierkegaard's leap: the nature of the problem is truly about working with incomplete information.

1) The Millionaire Next Door
2) The Intelligent Investor (must read!)
3) How to Get Out of Debt, Stay Out of Debt, and Live Prosperously
4) Your Money or Your Life
5) I Will Teach You to Be Rich (relevant to you at your age)
6) Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes, and How to Correct Them (short and sweet)
7) The Rational Optimist (not specifically about personal finance but a great read about behavior)

Hope this helps, and if you ever want to discuss personal finance in more detail feel free to reach out, love helping!

In reality people know bits about small bits (think of every person involved in making a mouse back through all materials). And yet without coordination these folks all collaborated to make a mouse. I'm an optimist because people all over the world are making the world better. The rate at which it is happening is picking up, and in general benefiting more and more people. We use communication (including Amazon and Facebook), markets, social movements, regulation etc as feedback loops to find and improve.

The one thing I can guarantee is that there will keep being more to understand, and that as an individual you will keep understanding a smaller and smaller proportion of it.

I enjoy perpectives from Matt Ridley about this (eg The Rational Optimist book) and his Ted talk[2]. A nice tidbit is that King Louis XIV of France had about 500 people preparing meals for him each night. You can go to town and have the same, with far better food and service than he had. By historic standards, we live like royalty, all because we don't understand everything.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil

[2] https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex

This is a really important point.

I'm currently reading The Rational Optimist (http://www.amazon.com/The-Rational-Optimist-Prosperity-Evolv...) which is about technology, innovation, and economic progress throughout history and one of his major points is that economies progress when people become more reliant on one another so they can focus on their specialty (ex., hire someone to do laundry because your time is most valuable coding). Economies in which people are self-sufficient are by definition less productive and innovative because there's less money flowing around and people are spending less time on the things they are comparatively better at.

It's a slow start but a fantastic read (and a challenging one for a person who likes to be self-sufficient).

I remember reading Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist and it talked about trade. Basically it said with trust, trade is unlimited.

But what's been happening with computers and software is that trust been going downhill so quickly that many people don't install anything ever anymore. Privacy, dark patterns, monetization, form over function, qa by customer, and just a general lack of empathy, respect and common sense.

It's a shame.

Presents a compelling case for being optimistic that economic growth really will keep making the world continually better on average, and in particular explores the reasons why the contrary position is often so prevalent in the media, popular opinion etc.

Regardless of whether you agree with the thesis of the book per se it's a fascinating read which will definitely give you a lot of new perspective on debates on big topics - things that come up often on HN such as AI, climate change, international relations etc. I thoroughly recommend it.

Basically whale oil and trees were replaced by coal mining - which saved whales and trees! And if I recall the coal mining saved 5x the landmass area in trees cut down (not that that helped the british isles). And then oil saved lots of coal mine deaths and strip mining.

We just gotta keep going forward. I think it's unfortunate that modern safe nuclear hasn't gotten a place. I like that solar is getting a chance at development (helped via greedy power companies.. PG&E@48c/kwh).

and yes, plant trees.

And for fraud... in the US you can lose max $50 to a credit card fraud incident ($500 if you are really negligent) by law.

So I think americans enjoy protections not available in other parts of the world.

I actually think this makes good sense. It eliminates the need for people "to take things into their own hands", or be overly cautious, so spending is increased.

I think it was matt ridley's book the rational optimist (?) that said that trust correlates with trade.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870464860457562...

The online course 'Physics for Future Presidents' taught me a lot about how to evaluate energy sources. I would recommend it to anyone interested in learning the physics concepts behind many hotly debated areas, whom currently has little knowledge or exposure in this area.

That's quite a general statement for the discussion here, which you then use to make a specific conclusion about the human behavioral issue under discussion in this thread. Could you kindly fill out the reasoning steps you are implicitly following with more citations to research on each factual assertion you are relying on?

even though their standard of living is rising continually

This is generally correct. A popular book on the issue (I don't endorse ALL its conclusions, but I like its citation of many different reliable references) is The Rational Optimist.

http://www.rationaloptimist.com/

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rational_Optimist

Surprisingly, it benefits everyone to produce what they are best at and trade for the rest, even when you trade for something that you are better at producing (i.e you are even better at producing something else). Thus, people can optimize locally.

EDIT uh, article is by the same guy. Great book though he gets a bit rabid at the end. There's an especially striking story of skill loss in Tasmanian native Australians, due to being cut off from the mainland and having too small a population for the requisite collection intelligence to maintain those skills (doesn't prove it of course). Just now, I'm reminded of what someone said of MS: because millions of people use it, it's worth it to work on little details - so you can have a menu specialist. IIRC, collective intelligence isn't so much about how many people put their intelligence into it, but how many people need it (i.e. the market). The collectivity comes in in that other people similarly specialize in something else.

Please. What a joke.

Read the IPCC reports. They are projecting massive increases in the wealth and health of the whole world in all future emissions scenarios.

Some scenarios are just worse than others, but all are better than today.

The world has been improving for centuries. The idea that we need to "enjoy what time we have left" is absolutely insane. It's pseudo-science

Yes, human impacts on the environment cause problems. No, they aren't going to cause human extinction.

Read "Enlightenment Now" or "The Rational Optimist" for some perspective.

I can't understand this line of thinking.

Human civilization has been around for ~10,000 years, and in the past two centuries nearly every metric related to human well-being has improved (see The Rational Optimist or Enlightenment Now).

And this isn't coming at the expense of the natural world, which is better protected as the world gets more technologically advanced and wealthier (More From Less by Andrew McAfee and numerous other sources).

Why would all of this reverse so rapidly in the next 80 years?

The best rebuttal I've heard (to renewables generally, not PV specifically) is the second to last chapter of Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist: http://www.rationaloptimist.com/books/rational-optimist-how-...

(Sorry I can't link directly to the content, but so far as I know, it's not available online in either case.)

Quoted for truth. Reading the Federalist papers is one of the most enlightening things any resident of the United States can do to understand why America operates the way it operates.

I'm reading Matt Ridley's book The Rational Optimist right now to get a twenty-first century take on some of the same issues. It's plain enough that human beings in general have very limited rationality, but that doesn't make it plain that human beings should be generally constrained in their freedom by an elite few.

Here is a quick TED talk and a transcript of the opening to get you going.

http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex.htm...

"When I was a student here in Oxford in the 1970s, the future of the world was bleak. The population explosion was unstoppable. Global famine was inevitable. A cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was going to shorten our lives. The acid rain was falling on the forests. The desert was advancing by a mile or two a year. The oil was running out, and a nuclear winter would finish us off. None of those things happened, (Laughter) and astonishingly, if you look at what actually happened in my lifetime, the average per-capita income of the average person on the planet, in real terms, adjusted for inflation, has tripled. Lifespan is up by 30 percent in my lifetime. Child mortality is down by two-thirds. Per-capita food production is up by a third. And all this at a time when the population has doubled."

One interesting question posed was whether Ridley believed in Ray Kurzweil's singularity theory. He responded that he believed futurists are looking at the wrong area of technology as the center of advancement in the next 50 to 100 years. Just as futurists from previous eras predicted huge advancements in transportation (like flying cars), because transportation happened to be booming at the time, current futurists focus too much on communication, and assume it will continue to advance at the same rate. He predicts that advancement in communication will slow down in the future, to be replaced by another area, such as, for example, biotech.