The world has never been better but it feels like things are getting worse.
We see so much more bad stuff than previous generations because of our access to a limitless amount of information.
Don’t get me wrong — we have a lot of problems and always will. But things are much better than the headlines would have you believe.
For example, look at the share of the global population living in extreme poverty:
It’s in a massive drawdown (in a good way).
Most of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty until relatively recently. This is the kind of slow and steady progress you’ll never see on the news.
As we improve as a species, the goalposts of success can and will move.
Max Roser, the founder of Our World in Data, who published the poverty chart, recently penned an op-ed in The New York Times calling for a new measure of poverty.
Roser started by laying out how far we’ve come:
Until fairly recently the majority of humanity lived in what we would now consider extreme poverty. Just two centuries ago, about three-quarters of the world were extremely poor. In the words of the development researcher Michail Moatsos, who painstakingly produced this historical estimate, most people “could not afford a tiny space to live, food that would not induce malnutrition and some minimum heating capacity.” Hunger was widespread, and around the world, for much of human history about half of all children died before reaching adulthood. Today, that picture has changed dramatically. Entire nations have largely left the deep poverty of the past behind.
This is excellent news but here’s the follow up:
But poverty is not history. People around the world are still struggling to afford housing, heating, transport and healthy food for themselves and their families. To keep