With the DT presidency, the Los Angeles fires and Gaza, it is easy to get depressed. Nicolas Kristof in the Saturday New York Times commentary looks at the long haul and says that this is the best time to be alive. See these excerpts and then see the entire article.
For most of history, about half of newborns died as children. As recently as 1950, more than one-quarter did. In 2024, the best guess of United Nations statisticians is that an all-time low of 3.6 percent of children died before the age of 5, a bit lower than in 2023 (which set the previous record).
Likewise, consider extreme poverty, defined as having less than $2.15 per day, adjusted for inflation. Historically, most human beings lived in extreme poverty, but the share has been plummeting — and in 2024 reached a new low of about 8.5 percent of the world’s people.
The World Is a Mess, and It’s Still the Best Time to Be Alive
When I was a teenager, I wondered what it would have been like to have lived in the Roman Empire or in an Allied country during World War Two. Later I realized it would have probably been brutal just about everywhere before the 20th century.
When I was a teenager, I wondered what it would have been like to have lived in the Roman Empire or in an Allied country during World War Two. Later I realized it would have probably been brutal just about everywhere before the 20th century.
Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined presents the case that we had far more violence than in the past. Chapter 4 is especially good in showing that torture was the routine operating procedure just about everywhere. Human sacrifice, slavery imprisonment for debt, animal cruelty, wife beating, child abuse and capital punishment were normal.
Happy Martin Luther King Day,
Ed