I don't see how they could be better off than us in any of the following dimensions, or the ones you mention, and likely many more:

* Health/medical technology and access

* Abundance and variety of food

* Education

* Life expectancy

* Quality (in terms of health) of life

* Child mortality

Looking at life expectancy alone, I'd be surprised if their life expectancy was higher (is this what you had in mind? https://sc.edu/uofsc/announcements/2014/05_sharondewitte_bla...). Certainly some individuals would live longer lives than some individuals, but I wouldn't expect the life expectancy to be higher, nor would I expect the quality of health of that life to be better.

In some ways I could imagine they'd be better -- e.g., amount of land they could own. If you have some data or information about their life quality, I would be interested in seeing it.

Regarding Rawls' veil, I did say, and do think, that we should be ensuring that everyone gets brought along. For someone who isn't convinced about that, the veil may be a good thought experiment to help them along.

You're missing their point. They're not comparing those who survived the black death to us, but to the people who lived before the black death struck.

Similarly, the people who will survive the coming climate catastrophes may well live better lives than we do today, and thus some future Economist may well claim that it all turned out OK in the end. But that analysis ignores the billions of people whose lives will likely end because of global warming.

> But that analysis ignores the billions of people whose lives will likely end because of global warming.

...that number is not even remotely plausible. Where did you get billions from?

Example: 250,000 extra deaths estimated between 2030 and 2050. That means an extra 5 million deaths in that period (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-cha...).

Another: 83 million extra deaths by 2100, and I suspect that's under the more pessimistic scenario (https://www.forbes.com/sites/dishashetty/2021/07/30/climate-...)

Action on climate change is very slow, but happening. Climate change is not going to be even remotely as close to as bad as you appear to think it will be.

Those numbers are assuming only natural causes. Under current scenarios, there is basically a guarantee of a hot war between nuclear powers at least in South Asia.

Also, you're right, I did miss the point of the other person's post!

The black death is a bad analogy. At the time, population was at the upper limit that could be sustained with the technology of the time. If a farmer wanted a larger harvest, they would need to farm a larger area, denying its use to others, thus causing them to starve. Conversely, the large number of deaths directly increased the resources available to everyone else. It was a zero-sum game, with one person's loss being the other's gain, and vice versa.

We no longer live in that world. Assume climate change kills off 100 million people (more than any estimate I could find), i.e. slightly more than 1% of the current world population. The resulting increase in resources per capita would be less than a single year of global GDP growth. This is very much not zero-sum. If a farmer who used to till the fields by hand switches to using a tractor, they're feeding many more people than they harm with the tractor's greenhouse gas emissions.

100M deaths may make sense if we're ignoring the extreme likelihood of a third world war caused by climate. But given what we know of the history of resource depletions, and the fact that some of countries which will be first affected will be India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, which have minor skirmishes even today and two of which are armed with nuclear weapons, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that such a low number is going to prove anywhere near accurate.

> Assume climate change kills off 100 million people (more than any estimate I could find), i.e. slightly more than 1% of the current world population. The resulting increase in resources per capita would be less than a single year of global GDP growth.

I presume this is highly dependent on which 100M people are killed.

I was talking about the difference between (world resources)/(world population) and (world resources)/(world population - 100 million).

Of course if you personally kill a very rich person and take their stuff, that might be a life-changing event for you, but unlike during the black death, the average person's income is not significantly derived from dead people's stuff.