"The World has Gone to Hell, fact not opinion."
Powerful words Jerry. Statistics show otherwise. Massive gains have been made in reducing extreme poverty, particularly in the last 50 years. Some countries that are now rich were poor just a few decades ago. Capitalism lifted nine hundred million Chinese out of poverty.
The education story is equally encouraging. Data shows that the share of the world population that is
literate over the last 2 centuries has gone from a tiny elite to a world where 8 out of 10 people can read and write.
Progress in health is equally astonishing. A key reason for our surprise? We don’t know how bad things used to be. In 1800, more than 40% of the world’s newborns died before the age of five. Now only a tiny fraction die before the age of five. How come? Modern medicine helped, particularly the discovery of germs, but even more important were improvements in housing, sanitation, and diet.
Freedom is notoriously hard to measure. In the 19th Century almost everyone lived in autocratically ruled countries. Today more than half the global population lives in a democracy. “The huge majority of those living in an autocracy, 4 out of 5 live in one autocratic country: China.”
World population was around 1 billion in the year 1800 and increased seven times since then. In one sense, this is a great achievement. Better health means that humans stopped dying at the rate of our ancestors. In effect, “humanity started to win the fight against death. Global life expectancy
doubled just over the last hundred years.”
In another sense, though, population growth increased demand for resources and aggravated humanity’s impact on the environment. But population growth isn’t unlimited. Once women realize that the chances of their children dying has declined substantially they adapt and chose to have fewer children. Population growth then comes to an end.
It’s ironic that in a world where knowledge and education are improving dramatically, there is widespread abysmal ignorance about the improving state of the world. “More than 9 out of 10 people do not think that the world is getting better.
The media does not tell us how the world is changing, it tells us where the world is going wrong. It tends to focus on single events particularly single events that have gone bad. The result is that most people are ignorant about how the state of the world has changed. In both the U.K. and the U.S. most people think that “the share of people living in extreme poverty has increased! Two thirds in the US even think the share in extreme poverty has almost doubled.
