Over the past week I had been tracking news across media in the hope of finding inspiration for that first heart warming story. I did not find anything. It seems things are particularly bad all across the world.
Except, that they are not.
In order to showcase that things have never been better for humanity, I have picked statistics from a TED talk by Steven Pinker 2 years back. Of course, the timescale is long term.
Life, health, sustenance, prosperity, peace, freedom, safety, knowledge, leisure, happiness. All of these things can be measured. If they have improved over time, that is progress
- Life : For most of human history, life expectancy at birth was around 30. Today, worldwide, it is more than 70, and in the developed parts of the world, more than 80.
- Poverty: 200 years ago, 90 percent of the world's population subsisted in extreme poverty. Today, fewer than 10 percent of people do.
- War: For most of human history, the powerful states and empires were pretty much always at war with each other, and peace was a mere interlude between wars. Today, they are never at war with each other. More recently, wars of all kinds have become fewer and less deadly. The annual rate of war has fallen from about 22 per hundred thousand per year in the early 1950s to 1.2 today.
- Democracy has suffered obvious setbacks in Venezuela, in Russia, in Turkey and is threatened by the rise of authoritarian populism in Eastern Europe and the United States. Yet the world has never been more democratic than it has been in the past decade, with two-thirds of the world's people living in democracies.
- Safety:
- Over the last century, we've become 96 percent less likely to be killed in a car crash,
- 88 percent less likely to be mowed down on the sidewalk,
- 99 percent less likely to die in a plane crash,
- 95 percent less likely to be killed on the job,
- 89 percent less likely to be killed by an act of God, such as a drought, flood, wildfire, storm, volcano, landslide, earthquake or meteor strike,
- 97 percent less likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning.
- Education: Before the 17th century, no more than 15 percent of Europeans could read or write. Europe and the United States achieved universal literacy by the middle of the 20th century, and the rest of the world is catching up. Today, more than 90 percent of the world's population under the age of 25 can read and write.
- Work hours: Westerners worked more than 60 hours per week. Today, they work fewer than 40. (Trying to find similar stats for developing countries, however the trajectory would be similar)
- Housework: Thanks to the universal penetration of running water and electricity in the developed world and the widespread adoption of washing machines, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, dishwashers, stoves and microwaves, the amount of our lives that we forfeit to housework has fallen from 60 hours a week to fewer than 15 hours a weeks
So, for all we see or hear in media, this is the best time to be alive as a human being!
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