Lifespan: The Revolutionary Science of Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

by David A. Sinclair

Oh, wait. That was 18 percent of people in Australia—which was the most optimistic of the Western nations included in the survey. In the United States, only 6 percent of people were similarly confident that things were getting better in our world. It’s important to note that the pollsters didn’t ask about whether respondents’ individual lives were getting better or worse. They asked about the world. And they asked people in some of the richest nations in the world.57 And sure, these are people who might have reason to think that their individual standards of living—supported until recently by economic benefits rooted in slavery and colonialism—have been falling a bit in recent years. These are also people, however, who have tremendous access to information about the world, and thus, quite frankly, they should know better. In much of the rest of the world, however, the future is not viewed in nearly such a dismal way. Not at all. In China, which holds about a fifth of the global population, some 80 percent of people polled in 2014 by Ipsos MORI, a UK research company, believed the lives of younger people will be better than their own. The same survey identified similarly significant levels of optimism in Brazil, Russia, India, and Turkey—all places where standards of living have been on the rise.58 And yes, this includes habits of increasing consumption, but it also includes lowering birth rates, falling rates of poverty, greater access to clean water and electricity, more ...

Comparison between perceived improvement in western/eastern countries