Life expectancy is up 50 years from 1000 years ago, childhood mortality is at its lowest point in history, education rates are at their highest, global poverty is at its lowest.

None of these are positive forces to you? What time period would you prefer?

The short average life expectancy of primitive humans is entirely an artifact of high childhood mortality and how averages work. If you lived past childhood you were likely to live until your 60's or 70's.

Primitive human lives were not hard and not short, the workweek for hunter/gatherers was less than half of ours. They were strongly biased towards highly egalitarian cultures.

Doesn't mean I'd necessarily prefer that time period to now, but I'm a white guy in a rich nation with a professional career and it's still not an obvious call. For the rest of the world they wouldn't have to think about it, they would hop in that time machine and head for a pre-agricultural era in a heartbeat.

The idea that blindly sprinting in the random direction of the latest discovery and calling it "progress" has not had any downsides is stupidity, as is the willful ignorance necessary to accept a cartoon version of pre-history created in 1651 based on extrapolating from experience in London, without any evidence or knowledge.

I am aware of this, but not sure why you think this negates the fact that life expectancy has increased. I would much prefer a drastically higher chance of living passed childhood. And if I somehow managed to live long enough to have children, I'd prefer that my children don't all die at birth, along with their mother. These desires have only been made possible in the last century or two

Of course you'd prefer to have the modern first world chances of surviving childhood and childbirth. If you had a choice between prehistorical lives for your surviving children or for them all to have the lives of a random child on earth today it's a harder choice. Making your base of comparison the middle ages is also the most skewed comparison possible.

That's not even counting the fact that we are supporting this technological infrastructure not only by reducing the quality of life from less powerful peoples but by massively borrowing quality of life from all future generations.

There have been some attempts to study hunter gatherers that existed in recent times:

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/life_history/aging_evolu...

The group there isn't necessarily going to be representative, but mortality for young adults was ~2% per year. In the US it is something like 0.1%.

Quants are not the only people entitled to have an opinion on this. While I mostly like the modern world it has lots of downsides too. Simplistic measures like life expectancy reduce the business of living to a handful of metrics and then pronounce things to be good or bad according to how those arbitrary criteria measure up.

That's great if you want to live in a world that's run like a factory where productivity is the highest social good. I don't. I would be fine with dying at 60 or even tomorrow, not because I don't want to live any more but because I've chosen to set my own goals about what sort of life and activity I find meaningful rather than simply maximizing some inherited utility criteria.

Long life would be nice, in general, but it's a fact that one's life might be arbitrarily cut short by some random accident. In your world being out at one extreme or the other of the probability distribution is statistically interesting but nothing more. Your value system lacks any criteria for determining the worth of life other than the most primitive feedback loop of maximizing whatever quantitative factors you've set yourself to measure.

I am friends with a few super-wealthy people, one who had access to great wealth through business and another who's a prominent aristocrat. When I say friends, I don't mean that we hang out to drink champagne, but that I'm privy to intimate details of their family/personal lives. Wealth does not inoculate you against crippling emotional problems.

http://dinghal.com/bibliotheek/The_Crisis_of_the_Modern_Worl...