2019, Best Year Ever

As we close out 2019 perhaps we should resist the temptation to say "good riddance," since that remark will only make us seem uninformed about where matters actually stand in the world at the end of the second decade of the 21st century.

It's true that many social indicators in the U.S., such as the levels of drug abuse, loneliness, suicide, divorce, single motherhood, teenage pregnancy, mass murders, mental illness, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, Islamic fanaticism and terrorism, all make it seem as if our age is unprecedentedly bad. Yet New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof joins a host of experts when he writes that 2019 was in fact the best year human beings have ever experienced.

Here are a few excerpts from Kristof's column:

If you’re depressed by the state of the world, let me toss out an idea: In the long arc of human history, 2019 has been the best year ever. The bad things that you fret about are true. But it’s also true that since modern humans emerged about 200,000 years ago, 2019 was probably the year in which children were least likely to die, adults were least likely to be illiterate and people were least likely to suffer excruciating and disfiguring diseases.

Every single day in recent years, another 325,000 people got their first access to electricity. Each day, more than 200,000 got piped water for the first time. And some 650,000 went online for the first time, every single day.

Perhaps the greatest calamity for anyone is to lose a child. That used to be common: Historically, almost half of all humans died in childhood. As recently as 1950, 27% of all children still died by age 15. Now that figure has dropped to about 4%.

I fear that the news media and the humanitarian world focus so relentlessly on the bad news that we leave the public believing that every trend is going in the wrong direction. A majority of Americans say in polls that the share of the world population living in poverty is increasing — yet one of the trends of the last 50 years has been a huge reduction in global poverty.

As recently as 1981, 42% of the planet’s population endured “extreme poverty,” defined by the United Nations as living on less than about $2 a day. That portion has plunged to less than 10% of the world’s population now.

Every day for a decade, newspapers could have carried the headline “Another 170,000 Moved Out of Extreme Poverty Yesterday.” Or if one uses a higher threshold, the headline could have been: “The Number of People Living on More Than $10 a Day Increased by 245,000 Yesterday.”

Many of those moving up are still very poor, of course. But because they are less poor, they are less likely to remain illiterate or to starve: People often think that famine is routine, but the last famine recognized by the World Food Program struck just part of one state in South Sudan and lasted for only a few months in 2017.

Diseases like polio, leprosy, river blindness and elephantiasis are on the decline, and global efforts have turned the tide on AIDS. Half a century ago, a majority of the world’s people had always been illiterate; now we are approaching 90% adult literacy. There have been particularly large gains in girls’ education — and few forces change the world so much as education and the empowerment of women.

He concludes with this:

When I was born in 1959, a majority of the world’s population had always been illiterate and lived in extreme poverty. By the time I die, illiteracy and extreme poverty may be almost eliminated — and it’s difficult to imagine a greater triumph for humanity on our watch.

As someone who usually tends to see the glass as half-empty, however, I'm inclined to think that human beings will somehow botch it all up, but until then here are a few more impressive statistics from the Brookings Institute to brighten your New Year's day:

• In 1870 the average European life expectancy was 36 years. Globally, the figure was 30 years. Today, the numbers are 81 and 72 years respectively.
• In 1820 90% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty. Today it's only 10%.
• In 1800 43% of the world's children died before their fifth birthday. Today it's 4%.
• In 1816 only 0.87% of the world's people lived in a democratic society. Today it's 56%.
• In 1800 people living in France, at the time one of the world's richest countries, lived on 1846 calories per day. In Africa, the contemporary world's poorest continent, people now live on an average of 2624 calories per day.
• In 1800 88% of the world's population was illiterate. Today only 13% are illiterate.
• GDP per person has risen globally by 52% since 2001, while infant mortality dropped 38% worldwide.
• Since 2001 life expectancy around the world has risen 6% and people in sub-Saharan Africa are living a full decade longer than they did prior to 2001.
• At the same time hunger has declined 33% globally since 2001, and undernourishment has decreased 27%.

Despite all the negative indicators it's hard to dismiss these statistics. Perhaps Dickens could've been writing about the present era when he opened The Tale of Two Cities with the lapidary observation that the years about which he wrote - ironically, they were the years shortly before 1800 - was both the best of times and the worst of times.