To listen to some of our politicians, and much of the public, you’d think the world was on the brink of collapse. Donald Trump says the world is “a mess.” Two-thirds of Americans say their country is on the wrong track. Polls show most people think hunger and violence are rising and living standards plummeting.
In Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, Swedish economist Johan Norberg has written a corrective to all the doom and gloom.
There seems to be a lot of nostalgia for the past, but most of us wouldn’t be happy there. “The good old days were awful,” Norberg writes. By virtually every measure, including rates of life expectancy, malnutrition, poverty, violence and literacy, human beings are doing exponentially better today than ever before.
Consider life expectancy at birth, which has increased more than twice as much in the last century as it did in the previous 200,000 years. “A child born today is more likely to reach retirement age than his forebears were to live to their fifth birthday,” Norberg estimates.
It’s not just people in rich countries who are living longer; so are the poor. Diseases such as HIV/AIDS have ravaged some African countries. But even on that continent, life expectancy is now seven years higher than it was just before the epidemic started.
Evidence-based medicine, germ theory of disease, penicillin, vaccines, oral hydration therapy and sophisticated underground sanitation systems have all contributed to increases in the quantity and quality of life for billions of people. And when calamity strikes, governments are now much better at gathering information and coordinating responses, as was seen in the quick response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014 and 2015.
Advances in agricultural technology and farming techniques have refuted the worst Malthusian fears about the relationship between population and food supply. Better nutrition has allowed human beings not only to live longer, but also to work longer and harder, to think more deeply and creatively and thus to invent and innovate. “A hundred and fifty years ago it took twenty-five men all day to harvest and thresh a ton of grain,” Norberg notes. “With a modern combine harvester, a single person can do it in six minutes.”
For centuries, many people died early because they rarely bathed and lived too close to animals, whose waste infected water sources. Even today, a water-borne disease, diarrhea, is the leading cause of mortality among children under five years old. But water began getting much safer in the West as cities introduced filtering and chlorination and building sophisticated sewage systems. In 1980, less than a quarter of the world’s population had access to proper sanitation. By 2015, that share had nearly trebled, to 68 percent.
The poor will always be with us, but there are many fewer of them today than there used to be. In fact, today’s poor are better off materially than the rich were a century ago. World poverty has almost halved in just the last 20 years, mainly thanks to hundreds of million of Indians and Chinese being lifted out of poverty.
Things are far from perfect, of course. Seven hundred million people still live in extreme poverty and 70 percent of the world’s population lives without religious freedom. But by most measures, things are better — much better.
On education, about one in 10 people was literate 200 years ago; nearly nine in 10 are today. On freedom, about two-thirds of the world lives in countries that are deemed free or partly free. And on violence, we are living through perhaps the most peaceful era in history. Norberg quotes cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, who wrote a seminal book on violence and says the recent dramatic reduction in violence “may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history.”
So why are people so pessimistic about the state of the world? Sometimes the things that make life better can also make us feel worse about it.
It used to be that major events in one part of the world often never made the news elsewhere. Think of a natural disaster, an act of terrorism or police shooting. But today, “When something bad happens anywhere, two billion smartphones will … make sure that we find out, even if no reporters are on the scene,” Norberg writes.
The media deserve some of the blame for inundating us with bad news and blowing things out of proportion. Then again, the media are only catering to what they think the public wants: More doom, more gloom.
Norberg suggests that people follow their local news, which covers a smaller geographic area and has fewer negative stories to report, and thus often provides a more accurate picture of what’s happening.
My suggestion: Buy and read Norberg’s book, and try to appreciate the fact that you can.
Daniel Allott is deputy commentary editor for the Washington Examiner
