Nobody in 1945 could have predicted a world with more than 5 billion additional people that is also better fed than at any time in history—even as it keeps wasting an indefensibly high share of all the food it grows. Nor did anybody foresee a world that relegated a number of infectious diseases (most notably polio everywhere, and tuberculosis in affluent nations) to historical footnotes, but that cannot keep economic inequality from widening even in the richest countries; a world that is at once much cleaner and much healthier yet also more polluted in new ways (from plastic in the ocean to
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