I have learned a lot in the past 5 years. I'm not sure if it's doubled my personal knowledge, and I'm not sure that even if that has taken place, it proves that human knowledge has doubled...
I've read about 125 books in the past 5 years, and some of them have been important. Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel (click here if you're shopping from the UK) may have been the most important of them.
This is partly because of the theses the author explores, well enough detailed elsewhere that I don't feel the need to regurgitate it here. But it is primarily because at the end of the book Diamond redefines what a historian needs to look at to write good history. And this is evidence of a doubling of knowledge.
My 30 seconds or so at university was spent studying anthropology, and the best part of anthropology was the freedom of the subject matter. Just about everything touched on anthropology (or is that vice-versa?), from biology to zoology. Advances in any one of the sciences extended the frontiers of anthropology. More recently, that seems to have been true of economics as well. But when Diamond told historians that good history required the same wide-ranging view of geology, geography, biology et al, he doubled the field--and maybe that doubled the knowledge of history in one blow. How liberating. Maybe those folks will start having more fun now.
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