Every time I listen to Steven Pinker I think that he would learn a lot with Nassim Taleb books.
We are talking about long-run trends of food insecurity. Russia's invasion of Ukraine will probably be (and hopefully) a short temporary turn in the wrong direction
The claims of fragility are unfounded though as natural gas supply isn't going anywhere and the use of natural gas in the process could be trivially (at great expense) replaced entirely by [nuclear powered] water electrolysis.
We also grossly overproduce calories, both as a policy decision for anti-fragility and for raising meat. Both of which leave a lot of slack before starvation levels kick in. At least in the US, other countries may be closer to the limit.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/life-expectancy/life-ex...
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data-visualization/mortality-trends...
You don't have to give a damn about anyone, but I'm friends and family with junkies and alcoholics, so I care. And even if you don't know any junkies or alcoholics and never will, can you not have sympathy for a person you've never met, even if some of their problems are to some degree their own fault?
I know alcoholics who were binge-drinking at the age of 13 because their parents were alcoholics too and encouraged it. I have cousins that often threw up when they were toddlers years old because their parents gave them too much to drink. If you were in these circumstances, how sure are you that you wouldn't end up a junkie or an alcoholic yourself?
for starters because they're also normal people. If you think there's no drug users or alcoholics even among all the people you know you'd be very surprised. It takes a lot of callousness to think that people who struggle with addiction or really any other thing aren't exactly what 'normal' people are like.
What I wonder about is when it became normal to put that much lack of empathy and compassion proudly on public display.
I give a damn about living in a society suffering from a surfeit of junkies and alcoholics. That affects me.
Try giving up your smartphone for whole one day, and then get back to us on "junkies". :)
Technology has certainly improved the standard of living of many many people over the last couple centuries, but there is no guarantee that it will continue to do so. Perhaps instead of a blind focus on “growing the pie”, at this point in history we should be asking ourselves “what pie?” and “did everyone get a slice?”
Edit: Updated “malnourished” to “food insecure”, my mistake for using the wrong terminology. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, there were 2.37 billion food insecure people in 2020, a number which has been steadily rising since 2014 with a larger jump since the start of the pandemic: https://www.fao.org/3/cb4474en/online/cb4474en.html