Perspective lets us appreciate what humanity can achieve.
A groaning lamentation is good for cable news ratings if not for the soul. The world, we’re told incessantly, is headed for hell in a handbasket. Pretty much everything is wrong.
So we were surprised to read the contrapuntal headline atop a recent column of Nicholas Kristoff of The New York Times: “Why 2017 Was the Best Year in Human History.” He opened with observations that ought to inform all of us, some of them drawn from a website that ought to be in every policy wonk’s list of favorites.
Kristoff wrote that in the year 2017:
“A smaller share of the world’s people were hungry, impoverished or illiterate than at any time before. A smaller proportion of children died than ever before. The proportion disfigured by leprosy, blinded by diseases like trachoma or suffering from other ailments also fell. … Every day, the number of people around the world living in extreme poverty (less than about $2 a day) goes down by 217,000, according to calculations by Max Roser, an Oxford University economist who runs a website called Our World in Data. Every day, 325,000 more people gain access to electricity. And 300,000 more gain access to clean drinking water.”
The point isn’t that current levels of human loss and suffering are acceptable or ever will become so. The point, rather, is that perspective lets us appreciate what humanity can achieve.
A visit to OurWorldInData.Org will jolt you from today’s news cycle to longer-term assessments. Neither Fox nor MSNBC would try to titillate hyperpartisan viewers with a screen crawl like “Income inequality in the United Kingdom over 700 years (1290-2010).” If you’re curious: Inequality was worse for several centuries, plummeted for a century until the 1970s, and since then has climbed such that “income growth at the very, very top of the income distribution has outstripped the strong growth of incomes across the rest of the distribution.”
The beauty of seeing this long-range evidence is that each of us then can deduce our takeaway: that widespread income growth has successfully reduced inequality, or that its recent rise disturbs us.
One seemingly neutral observation: the astonishing reduction in number of deaths from natural disasters worldwide. To see the loss of life charted for even a century — from a high of 3.71 million deaths in 1931, many of them in Chinese floods, versus 9,066 last year — is to be struck by the randomness of tragedy but also the comparatively low numbers of the past half-century.
January needn’t be bleak. But it does give us downtime to look beyond what’s in front of us — to inspect the stark decline of child mortality, the reduction of global deaths from war, the steady if insufficient spread of human rights.
So many problems vex this nation and world that the temptation to argue with any upbeat data is strong. That’s fine, provided all of us remember: No matter how grim the metrics, these are numbers that people committed to betterment can move.