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[EviLore]

Opinion | This Has Been the Best Year Ever (Published 2019)

For humanity over all, life just keeps getting better.

www.nytimes.com

If you’re depressed by the state of the world, let me toss out an idea: In the long arc of human history, 2019 has been the best year ever.

The bad things that you fret about are true. But it’s also true that since modern humans emerged about 200,000 years ago, 2019 was probably the year in which children were least likely to die, adults were least likely to be illiterate and people were least likely to suffer excruciating and disfiguring diseases.

Every single day in recent years, another 325,000 people got their first access to electricity. Each day, more than 200,000 got piped water for the first time. And some 650,000 went online for the first time, every single day.

Perhaps the greatest calamity for anyone is to lose a child. That used to be common: Historically, almost half of all humans died in childhood. As recently as 1950, 27 percent of all children still died by age 15. Now that figure has dropped to about 4 percent.

“If you were given the opportunity to choose the time you were born in, it’d be pretty risky to choose a time in any of the thousands of generations in the past,” noted Max Roser, an Oxford University economist who runs the Our World in Data website. “Almost everyone lived in poverty, hunger was widespread and famines common.”

But … but … but President Trump! But climate change! War in Yemen! Starvation in Venezuela! Risk of nuclear war with North Korea. …

All those are important concerns, and that’s why I write about them regularly. Yet I fear that the news media and the humanitarian world focus so relentlessly on the bad news that we leave the public believing that every trend is going in the wrong direction. A majority of Americans say in polls that the share of the world population living in poverty is increasing — yet one of the trends of the last 50 years has been a huge reduction in global poverty.

As recently as 1981, 42 percent of the planet’s population endured “extreme poverty,” defined by the United Nations as living on less than about $2 a day. That portion has plunged to less than 10 percent of the world’s population now.

Every day for a decade, newspapers could have carried the headline “Another 170,000 Moved Out of Extreme Poverty Yesterday.” Or if one uses a higher threshold, the headline could have been: “The Number of People Living on More Than $10 a Day Increased by 245,000 Yesterday.”

Many of those moving up are still very poor, of course. But because they are less poor, they are less likely to remain illiterate or to starve: People often think that famine is routine, but the last famine recognized by the World Food Program struck just part of one state in South Sudan and lasted for only a few months in 2017.

Diseases like polio, leprosy, river blindness and elephantiasis are on the decline, and global efforts have turned the tide on AIDS. A half century ago, a majority of the world’s people had always been illiterate; now we are approaching 90 percent adult literacy. There have been particularly large gains in girls’ education — and few forces change the world so much as education and the empowerment of women.

You may feel uncomfortable reading this. It can seem tasteless, misleading or counterproductive to hail progress when there is still so much wrong with the world. I get that. In addition, the numbers are subject to debate and the 2019 figures are based on extrapolation. But I worry that deep pessimism about the state of the world is paralyzing rather than empowering; excessive pessimism can leave people feeling not just hopeless but also helpless.

Readers constantly tell me, for example, that if we save children’s lives, the result will be a population crisis that will cause new famines. They don’t realize that when parents are confident that their children will survive, and have access to birth control, they have fewer children. Bangladesh was once derided by Henry Kissinger as a “basket case,” yet now its economy grows much faster than America’s and Bangladeshi women average just 2.1 births (down from 6.9 in 1973).

Yes, it’s still appalling that a child dies somewhere in the world every six seconds — but consider that just a couple of decades ago, a child died every three seconds. Recognizing that progress is possible can be a spur to do more, and that’s why I write this annual reminder of gains against the common enemies of humanity.

Climate change remains a huge threat to our globe, as does compassion fatigue in the rich world, and it’s likely that we will miss a United Nations target of eliminating extreme poverty by 2030. Meanwhile, here in the United States, Trump presents a continuing challenge to our institutions, and millions of families have been left behind and are struggling. We should keep pressing on all these fronts (the last one concerns me enough that it’s the topic of my new book), but we’ll get a morale boost if we acknowledge the backdrop of hard-won improvement.

“We are some of the first people in history who have found ways to make progress against these problems,” says Roser, the economist. “We have changed the world. How awesome is it to be alive at a time like this?”

When I was born in 1959, a majority of the world’s population had always been illiterate and lived in extreme poverty. By the time I die, illiteracy and extreme poverty may be almost eliminated — and it’s difficult to imagine a greater triumph for humanity on our watch.

 

[GreyHorace]

Reports like these are always quite sobering for me whenever people (particularly newsmedia) moan about things being worse off than they were in the 'old days'. And I always go 'WHAT?!"

I mean, don't get me wrong. The world isn't perfect but I think it's in much better shape than what it was 100 years ago. Or even 50 years ago.

I suspect that a certain group of individuals like to fearmonger just for the sake of having something to control the conversation (or narrative).

 

[Wings 嫩翼翻せ]

Timely article. Resonating the above post, it helps those who are stuck in the news media loop of perpetual pessimism to take a gander at viewing human achievement in a global scale, and ones that land outside of politics.

 

[evolvaer]

Reminds me of Steven Pinker's work. Although Anand Giridharadas counters with the fact that the majority of humanity's improvement in these statistics are from poor working class in India and China. While the middle class in many western and already developed nations has been steadily shrinking.

So the ultra poor are doing better, but those of us who have enjoyed a comfortable middle class have diminished.

Its certainly a trade off, but not one which is necessary?

 

[Captain Zyrain]

Interesting to see US literacy go DOWN from 1980 to 2000.

 

[Mihos]

Good news doesn't get clicks.

 

[GreyHorace]

Good news doesn't get clicks.

Which is sad. I think we've been conditioned to look for bad news whenever we open our TVs, read the paper, etc. I think the constant bombardment of negativity does contribute to the view that the world is in dire straights when it really isn't. In recent years though I think news media has been more aggressive at doing this because of the rise of populist leaders like Trump and Boris Johnson.

It may be boring to read, but I'd like to see more of the good news reported. Provide a balance to all the bad,

 

[FoundressofNothing]

It is good to be reminded of the good and improving things in this world, so that you are not tempted to fall into a pit of despair.

But, like evolvaer says above, articles like this one don't highlight how living standards for the middle and working classes in the "developed world" (hate that term but what's better, I don't know) are on a downward slide. For example, life expectancy. Here is an example of an article that explains how the British people in the mid 19th century had less degenerative diseases than modern people.

Analysis of the mid-Victorian period in the U.K. reveals that life expectancy at age 5 was as good or better than exists today, and the incidence of degenerative disease was 10% of ours. Their levels of physical activity and hence calorific intakes were approximately twice ours. They had relatively little access to alcohol and tobacco; and due to their correspondingly high intake of fruits, whole grains, oily fish and vegetables, they consumed levels of micro- and phytonutrients at approximately ten times the levels considered normal today. This paper relates the nutritional status of the mid-Victorians to their freedom from degenerative disease

Also interesting to note that the country where the greatest gains have been made is one which is not capitalist.

 

[Madonis]

Yes, I do think humanity as a whole is in a much better place in 2019. Nevertheless, history is full of peaks and valleys. Progress isn't a permanent straight line. Nothing guarantees that setbacks won't come, sooner or later, in certain respects. Remember the fall of Rome or the decline of any other great empire, if you want a quick example.

A ton of basic quality of life stuff might be improving on paper and I'm happy about that...but in reality, the fact we're looking at the "average" outcome in many of these categories downplays that great numbers of people still live in terrible conditions. In other words, we need to consider the distribution of said progress. Who is benefiting the least and who is benefiting the most.

"Extreme" poverty being radically cut is a nice thing, absolutely, but "moderate" or regular poverty is still quite prevalent...and the gap behind the richest and the poorest is increasing in various regions.

Climate change is a complex problem that isn't going to solve itself through sheer willpower and blind trust in the inertia of progress. Neither will wealth inequality.

 

[EverydayBeast]

You have the relish the fact that things are still in humanities favor, 2020 will be a new year.

 

[MiyazakiHatesKojima]

Timely article. Resonating the above post, it helps those who are stuck in the news media loop of perpetual pessimism to take a gander at viewing human achievement in a global scale, and ones that land outside of politics.

This is why I genuinely despise the Clown Thread on GAF. It reinforces that loop of perpetual pessimism that does nothing but harm you in the long run and make you a complainer.

 

[Papa]

This is why I genuinely despise the Clown Thread on GAF. It reinforces that loop of perpetual pessimism that does nothing but harm you in the long run and make you a complainer.

But the regulars in clown thread are the opposite of the complaining types. They just enjoy pointing and laughing at the train wreck that is modern leftism.

 

[MiyazakiHatesKojima]

But the regulars in clown thread are the opposite of the complaining types. They just enjoy pointing and laughing at the train wreck that is modern leftism.

I disagree. They believe the world is going down the drain and I agree with them.