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Historical criminologists, for example, agree that homicide plummeted after the Middle Ages, and it’s a commonplace among international-relations scholars that major wars tapered off after 1945. But they come as a surprise to most people in the wider world.17
Progress cannot always be monotonic because solutions to problems create new problems.18 But progress can resume when the new problems are solved in their turn.
By the way, the nonmonotonicity of social data provides an easy formula for news outlets to accentuate the negative. If you ignore all the years in which an indicator of some problem declines, and report every uptick (since, after all, it’s “news”), readers will come away with the impression that life is getting worse and worse even as it gets better and better.
disappearance. (The statement “x > y” is different from the statement “y = 0.”) Something can decrease a lot without vanishing altogether. That means that the level of violence today is completely irrelevant to the question of whether violence has declined over the course of history. The only way to answer that question is to compare the level of violence now with the level of violence in the past. And whenever you look at the level of violence in the past, you find a lot of it, even if it isn’t as fresh in memory as the morning’s headlines.
a type of violence has gone down, then some change in the social, cultural, or material milieu has caused it to go down. If the conditions persist, violence could remain low or decline even further; if they don’t, it won’t. That makes it important to find out what the causes are, so we can try to intensify them and apply them more widely to ensure that the decline of violence continues.
To declare what the future holds in an uncontrollable world, and without an explanation of why events unfold as they do, is not prediction but prophecy, and as David Deutsch observes, “The most important of all limitations on knowledge-creation is that we cannot prophesy: we cannot predict the content of ideas yet to be created, or their effects. This limitation is not only consistent with the unlimited growth of knowledge, it is entailed by it.”19
For now we should keep in mind that a positive trend suggests (but does not prove) that we have been doing something right, and that we should seek to identify what it is and do more of it.
The psychological literature confirms that people dread losses more than they look forward to gains, that they dwell on setbacks more than they savor good fortune, and that they are more stung by criticism than they are heartened by praise. (As a psycholinguist I am compelled to add that the English language has far more words for negative emotions than for positive ones.)23
One exception to the Negativity bias is found in autobiographical memory. Though we tend to remember bad events as well as we remember good ones, the negative coloring of the misfortunes fades with time, particularly the ones that happened to us.24 We are wired for nostalgia: in human memory, time heals most wounds.
“Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”
Intellectual culture should strive to counteract our cognitive biases, but all too often it reinforces them.
“Always predict the worst, and you’ll be hailed as a prophet,”
The financial writer Morgan Housel has observed that while pessimists sound like they’re trying to help you, optimists sound like they’re trying to sell you something.
Pessimism among the intelligentsia can also be a form of one-upmanship. A modern society is a league of political, industrial, financial, technological, military, and intellectual elites, all competing for prestige and influence, and with differing responsibilities for making the society run.
Pessimism, to be sure, has a bright side. The expanding circle of sympathy makes us concerned about harms that would have passed unnoticed in more callous times.
As we care about more of humanity, we’re apt to mistake the harms around us for signs of how low the world has sunk rather than how high our standards have risen.
And here is a shocker: The world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being. Here is a second shocker: Almost no one knows about it.
Information about human progress, though absent from major news outlets and intellectual forums, is easy enough to find.
“we approach death by one year for every year we age, but during the twentieth century, the average person approached death by just seven months for every year they aged.” Thrillingly, the gift of longevity is spreading to all of humankind, including the world’s poorest countries, and at a much faster pace than it did in the rich ones. “Life expectancy in Kenya increased by almost ten years between 2003 and 2013,”
“There is not a single country in the world where infant or child mortality today is not lower than it was in 1950.”8
For the world in 1990, the project estimated that 56.8 of the 64.5 years of life that an average person could be expected to live were years of healthy life. And at least in developed countries, where estimates are available for 2010 as well, we know that out of the 4.7 years of additional expected life we gained in those two decades, 3.8 were healthy years.14 Numbers like these show that people today live far more years in the pink of health than their ancestors lived altogether, healthy and infirm years combined.
Lacking the gift of prophecy, no one can say whether scientists will ever find a cure for mortality.
But whether it’s the scientists or the science that is ignored, the neglect of the discoveries that transformed life for the better is an indictment of our appreciation of the modern human condition.
Even diseases that are not obliterated are being decimated. Between 2000 and 2015, the number of deaths from malaria (which in the past killed half the people who had ever lived) fell by 60 percent. The World Health Organization has adopted a plan to reduce the rate by another 90 percent by 2030, and to eliminate it from thirty-five of the ninety-seven countries in which it is endemic today
But the most powerful contributor was science. “It is knowledge that is the key,” Deaton argues. “Income—although important both in and of itself and as a component of wellbeing . . .—is not the ultimate cause of wellbeing.”16 The fruits of science are not just high-tech pharmaceuticals such as vaccines, antibiotics, antiretrovirals, and deworming pills. They also comprise ideas—ideas that may be cheap to implement and obvious in retrospect, but which save millions of lives. Examples include boiling, filtering, or adding bleach to water; washing hands; giving iodine supplements to pregnant
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The historian Fernand Braudel has documented that premodern Europe suffered from famines every few decades.2 Desperate peasants would harvest grain before it was ripe, eat grass or human flesh, and pour into cities to beg. Even in good times, many would get the bulk of their calories from bread or gruel, and not many at that:
Though obesity surely is a public health problem, by the standards of history it’s a good problem to have.
But in recent times the world has been blessed with another remarkable and little-noticed advance: in spite of burgeoning numbers, the developing world is feeding itself.
Though 13 percent of people in the developing world being undernourished is far too much, it’s better than 35 percent, which was the level forty-five years earlier, or for that matter 50 percent, an estimate for the entire world in 1947
There is still hunger (including among the poor in developed countries), and there were famines in East Africa in 2011, the Sahel in 2012, and South Sudan in 2016, together with near-famines in Somalia, Nigeria, and Yemen. But they did not kill on the scale of the catastrophes that were regular occurrences in earlier centuries.
needs less than a third of the land it used to need to produce a given amount of food.23 Another way of stating the bounty is that between 1961 and 2009 the amount of land used to grow food increased by 12 percent, but the amount of food that was grown increased by 300 percent.24
Like all advances, the Green Revolution came under attack as soon as it began. High-tech agriculture, the critics said, consumes fossil fuels and groundwater, uses herbicides and pesticides, disrupts traditional subsistence agriculture, is biologically unnatural, and generates profits for corporations. Given that it saved a billion lives and helped consign major famines to the dustbin of history, this seems to me like a reasonable price to pay. More important, the price need not be with us forever. The beauty of scientific progress is that it never locks us into a technology but can develop
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opposition to transgenic crops has been perniciously effective in the part of the world that could most benefit from it. Sub-Saharan Africa has been cursed by nature with thin soil, capricious rainfall, and a paucity of harbors and navigable rivers, and it never developed an extensive network of roads, rails, or canals.32 Like all farmed land, its soils have been depleted, but unlike those in the rest of the world, Africa’s have not been replenished with synthetic fertilizer. Adoption of transgenic crops, both those already in use and ones customized for Africa, grown with other modern
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Once the secrets to growing food in abundance are unlocked and the infrastructure to move it around is in place, the decline of famine depends on the decline of poverty, war, and autocracy.
Economists speak of a “lump fallacy” or “physical fallacy” in which a finite amount of wealth has existed since the beginning of time, like a lode of gold, and people have been fighting over how to divide it up ever since.4 Among the brainchildren of the Enlightenment is the realization that wealth is created.5 It is created primarily by knowledge and cooperation: networks of people arrange matter into improbable but useful configurations and combine the fruits of their ingenuity and labor.
One was the development of institutions that lubricated the exchange of goods, services, and ideas—the dynamic singled out by Adam Smith as the generator of wealth.
The third innovation, after science and institutions, was a change in values: an endorsement of what the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey calls bourgeois virtue.12 Aristocratic, religious, and martial cultures have always looked down on commerce as tawdry and venal. But in 18th-century England and the Netherlands, commerce came to be seen as moral and uplifting.
Since 1995, 30 of the world’s 109 developing countries, including countries as diverse as Bangladesh, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Georgia, Mongolia, Mozambique, Panama, Rwanda, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam, have enjoyed economic growth rates that amount to a doubling of income every eighteen years. Another 40 countries have had rates that would double income every thirty-five years, which is comparable to the historical growth rate of the United States.17
Extreme poverty is being eradicated, and the world is becoming middle class.18
In two hundred years the rate of extreme poverty in the world has tanked from 90 percent to 10, with almost half that decline occurring in the last thirty-five years.
specify a world in which you would agree to be incarnated as a random citizen from behind a veil of ignorance as to that citizen’s circumstances.24 A world with a higher percentage of long-lived, healthy, well-fed, well-off people is a world in which one would prefer to play the lottery of birth. But by another reckoning, absolute numbers matter, too. Every additional long-lived, healthy, well-fed, well-off person is a sentient being capable of happiness, and the world is a better place for having more of them.
(Max Roser points out that if news outlets truly reported the changing state of the world, they could have run the headline NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN EXTREME POVERTY FELL BY 137,000 SINCE YESTERDAY every day for the last twenty-five years.) We live in a world not just with a smaller proportion of extremely poor people but with a smaller number of them, and with 6.6 billion people who are not extremely poor.
Though the numbers are dwindling in countries like India and Indonesia, they are increasing in the poorest of the poor countries, like Congo, Haiti, and Sudan, and the last pockets of poverty will be the hardest to eliminate.
For reasons we have seen, market economies can generate wealth prodigiously while totalitarian planned economies impose scarcity, stagnation, and often famine. Market economies, in addition to reaping the benefits of specialization and providing incentives for people to produce things that other people want, solve the problem of coordinating the efforts of hundreds of millions of people by using prices to propagate information about need and availability far and wide, a computational problem that no planner is brilliant enough to solve from a central bureau.33
A satellite photograph of Korea showing the capitalist South aglow in light and the Communist North a pit of darkness vividly illustrates the contrast in the wealth-generating capability between the two economic systems, holding geography, history, and culture constant.
Classical economics and common sense agree that a larger trading network should make everyone, on average, better off.
(Common sense is less likely to appreciate a corollary called comparative advantage, which predicts that, on average, everyone is better off when each country sells the goods and services that it can produce most efficiently even if the buyers could produce them still more efficiently themselves.)
Deaton notes, “Some argue that globalization is a neoliberal conspiracy designed to enrich a very few at the expense of many. If so, that conspiracy was a disastrous failure—or at least, it helped more than a billion people as an unintended consequence. If only unintended consequences always worked so favorably.”40
To be sure, the industrialization of the developing world, like the Industrial Revolution two centuries before it, has produced working conditions that are harsh by the standards of modern rich countries and have elicited bitter condemnation.
factory work in the 19th century offered women an escape from the traditional gender roles of farm and village life, and so was held by some men at the time “sufficient to damn to infamy the most worthy and virtuous girl.”
