“Why do you know all this?” “Why don’t you know all this? This is the fundamental context of your life! I mean, you don’t even have to get into the big-picture stuff—life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, civil rights, way fewer people dying in dangerous jobs—I could spend the next week just listing all of the little everyday improvements we don’t even think about. If pleasure was a thing that could be measured, the available pleasure to the average person over all of history would basically be a flat line on a graph that then explodes upward right before you and I were born. In terms of
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