Steven Johnson’s new project: “A century ago, at the end of the Great Influenza, global life expectancy was in the mid 30s. In the US, it was 47. In places like India, it was in the mid 20s, significantly lower than the average lifespan in most hunter-gatherer societies. Average lifespans were so low in part because childhood was shockingly dangerous. Roughly a third of all children died before reaching adulthood. Today, just a hundred years later, in the middle of a global pandemic, global life expectancy is in the 70s. Childhood mortality worldwide has been reduced by a factor of 10. The doubling of human life expectancy should be understood as the single most important development of our era.”
On APIs: “Going down the API-First Ecosystem Rabbit Hole with Shopify, Stripe, Twilio, and more.”
