My new favorite book of all time

This is also true.

With relatively fixed technology, the human population tends to expand to the carrying capacity of the land.

Agriculture did not make life better. What it did is make that carrying capacity a LOT higher. At the cost of great increases in how much work was needed, risk of plague, and so on. This topic is covered in some detail in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel.

When, as in the 1200s, the climate moved to increase that carrying capacity, life improved. When, as in the 1300s, climate made life harder, we had mass famine after mass famine (and by coincidence, also the Black Death).

Technology has increased the carrying capacity many-fold. And also changed the incentives for large families. We can look back and laugh about how wrong Malthus was, and say that it is clear in hindsight that the English should have ignored his analysis and intervened in the Irish Potato Famine back in the 1800s. But his theories were grounded in the universal truth of what life had been like in agricultural societies for thousands of years.

I wish all of this was more widely understood.

I'm not confident enough to say that most think they do.

Consider global warming as an example. Almost no one I know who believes global warming to be a dire threat changes anything about their lifestyle in response. When I ask them about this they might say something about how it's really hard, people like Elon Musk will solve it, etc. Basically, it's not their responsibility. They often seem to want to get off this line of conversation as quickly as possible. And it's not that hard to do something. Eating less meat is easy. I commute by bike for other reasons already and I don't think doing this regularly would be a major problem for a large fraction of people in the US.

To continue on the global warming example, you will have people who will drive a hybrid or electric car today "for the environment", though these options are not carbon neutral at the moment (perhaps electric will be in the future). No major change to their lifestyle has been made. I can see how this is mostly about signaling, as many people do believe such things will make a difference right now, though I'm skeptical.

> I didn't say that at all. Moral facts can be (can only be) found by empirical observation. The observation of what PEOPLE ACTUALLY DO.

That renders the “moral” part meaningless. What is moral is what people ought to do, irrespective of what they actually do. Now, you can argue that morality is a null concept, and thus “morsl facts” is necessarily an empty set (and if you start with a premise of strict materialism, this conclusion is inevitable; there is only “is”, no “ought”), but you can't coherently argue that moral facts both exist and can be determined by empirical observation of behavior.

One could as easily interpret that the abolishment movements relation with the civil war has about as much validity as the relation between the first world war and the suffrage movement. I am not saying you are wrong, but that political writers tend to disregard facts and make interpretations that fits their views regardless if they are left or right, usually to the detriment of the truth.

> I have not seen the witch hunt described so simplistically

Out of all writing I have read, only two books that I recall described the witch hunts as complex causes rather than a simplistic prosecution of defenseless women. I see it so often in political texts I usually tick of a mental box when i see it.

When it comes to plundering, history don't seem to often show that its the most powerful in society that becomes victims. They can employ armies to defend themselves or buy enough influence to not become a target. Usually those that are targeted is those with resources to defend but that relies on social constructs for defense.

But to go back to the claim about liberal writers, I can recommend a book called Debt: The First 5000 Years. The author was involved with the occupy movement so not sure if that defines him as a liberal writer or not. What I found interesting in that book (outside of the overall focus on debt) is the description of bridge gifts, slavery and veils, each having a very different interpretation to common liberal views. Since the author is a professor of anthropology he also supports those interpretations with facts that usually missing when those subjects are being discussed in a historical perspective.

> Liberal writers tend to write history better than conservative ones.

It is very possible that liberal writers lie less and tend to be less intentional dishonest than conservative ones. Its a very different claim that liberal writers are usually right and conservative writers usually wrong.

> Peter Singer's concept of The Expanding Circle is relevant here.

That's a work I can support, definitely.

I don't mean to sound too cynical; it's easy to get caught up in presentism and forget that basic ideas like "what if racism is bad?" and "should we maybe stop doing torture?" are relatively recent.

My concern with Pinker is less that nothing has gotten better, and more that he seems overly rosy about the decline of violence (I worry we've largely displaced it and rendered it intermittent) and that he appears to frame moral progress as some kind of fundamental improvement in the moral nature of humans or society.

I'm much more inclined to Singer's argument, that we're the same semi-moral creatures we've always been, but have done steadily better at acknowledging the moral weight of groups other than our own.