"One of the misimpressions people have about the world is that it’s going to hell.
Perhaps that’s because humanity’s great triumph over the last half-century — huge reductions in poverty, disease and early death — goes largely unacknowledged. Just about the worst thing that can happen to anyone is to lose a child, and historically, almost half of children died before reaching adulthood. We happen to live in a transformational era in which 96 percent of the world’s children now survive until adulthood.
That arc is visible here in Sierra Leone, a country that remains heartbreakingly poor — yet where the risk of a child dying is less than half what it was 20 years ago."
"Deaths in pregnancy and childbirth have plunged 74 percent since 2000"
"Medical care for pregnant women and babies is mostly free now in Sierra Leone, as is contraception."
"Many people believe that global poverty is hopeless — 87 percent said in a 2016 survey that poverty had stayed the same or gotten worse over the previous two decades — while in fact the share of the world’s people living in extreme poverty has plunged from 38 percent in 1990 to about 8 percent now."
"We are privileged to live in an age of miracles. This is biblical: The blind see (cataract and trichiasis surgeries!); the lame walk (clubfoot correction!). Age-old maladies like leprosy, polio, fistula, Guinea worm and river blindness are receding, and this progress is as authentic as all the perils that make the headlines."
Related posts:
Why 2017 Was the Best Year in Human History (2018)
The World Is Getting Quietly, Relentlessly Better (2019)
The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it (2018)
How Much Has Life Expectancy Improved? (2018)
This Has Been the Best Year Ever (2019)
Some Good Economic News (2013)
2 comments:
Gosh.
Why wouldn’t the gloom and doom - we MUST have socialism NOW! - government supporting/paid for media even mention
this good stuff? Why wouldn’t extremely far-leftist college “professors” inform their indoctrinated hoards about this?
Any explanations?
You raise an important question and I don't think I have a good answer. Whatever the answer is, I think it would be at least partly based in psychology and sociology. Sometimes it seems to me that being negative is way to prove that you are an intellectual. And people tend to voice opinions that are what their "tribe" wants to hear. But that is just a guess.
At least the NY Times does print these articles by Kristof. He often writes articles like this (see my links under related posts)
You might find this post I did interesting. "Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism and Intellectuals"
Joseph Schumpeter, in 1942, said that capitalism would destroy itself by breeding a “new class: bureaucrats, intellectuals, professors, lawyers, journalists, all of them beneficiaries and, in fact, parasitical on them and yet, all of them opposed to the ethos of wealth production, of saving and of allocating resources to economic productivity.”
https://thedangerouseconomist.blogspot.com/2023/02/joseph-schumpeter-capitalism-and.html
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