[throwaway295729]

This may be a bit reductive but the article is basically saying that the larger the population the quicker progress and innovation will occur. What’s unclear though is if this progress and innovation leads to greater human happiness and fulfillment. As we’ve seen lately, the opposite could also be true. With climate change on the horizon, we may have even reached peak human happiness sometime in the late 20th century

[Zababa]

Progress and innovation absolutely does lead to greater human happiness and fulfillment. As an example, absolute number of people living in extreme poverty started to sharply decline at the start of the 21st century: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extre....

[skulk]

That chart does abysmally little to support your claim, for a few reasons.

1) How many of those people in the green live on less than $5 a day? $1.90 per day is an absurd and arbitrary limit which feels cherry picked to make a Pinker-esque pleasing chart.

2) It hardly goes back in time. I'd like to know how happy hunter-gatherers were 20k years ago. Maybe I could go ask the North Sentinelese but I think building a time machine might be easier than getting a straight answer from them.