TallDave

"I see this in reverse: the chart of global GDP over centuries"

but that's just a modernist version of the weak anthropic principle

i.e. you only have a chart of rising per capita GDP for the past few centuries because in order to belong to a society that does things like produce charts of per capita GDP, you'd have to see rising per capita GDP in your recent past

progress was quite slow for at least tens of millennia until rather suddenly a number of contingent factors conspired to create the conditions for industrialization, most particularly new attitudes toward human slavery

but it's very easy to misread technological progress for commercial/social progress

why didn't Romans use spinning... (read more)

I realize this is a made-up scenario, but Westerners tend to assume it's irrational for those in poor countries to maximize their number of offspring. There's a number of factors (labor value tradeoffs, insurance against periods of inability to sustain sufficient income esp at end-of-life) that militate otherwise. Minus could result in a huge amounts of unintended disutility, particularly as populations age.

As pointed out above, the best option is to move the poor into situations where institutions are stronger, producing higher incomes. However, this is very difficult on any large scale. For instance, moving the entire population of Africa to Norway (ignoring space constraints) probably wouldn't increase overall... (read more)