If 2025 was not the best year in human history it was still very good.

See In Which I Try Valiantly to Cheer You Up by Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times. Excerpts:

"While 2025 wasn’t the best year in human history, measured by child mortality, it was one of the five best years ever. Fewer than half as many children died in 2025 as in 2000."

"Until around 1970, a majority of adults had always been illiterate. Now we’re at 88 percent adult literacy, in part because of increasing numbers of girls going to school"

"roughly 30 percent fewer Americans will have died of overdoses in 2025 than in 2023" 

"A drug called lenacapavir is emerging as a more potent weapon to prevent H.I.V./AIDS; it can be taken by injection once every six months and virtually eliminates the risk of getting H.I.V."

"measured by child mortality, education, nutrition or women’s rights, we humans are probably in the best decade in the past 300,000 years"

Related posts:

Even This Year (2024) Is the Best Time Ever to Be Alive (2025) 

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)

Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2020) 

We are privileged to live in an age of medical miracles that increase human welfare (as the share of the world’s people living in extreme poverty has fallen) (2023) 

Buyer Beware: Star Ratings Actually Steer Us Away From the Best Shopping Deals

When reviewers consider prices while rating products, there’s a tendency to downgrade the highest-quality yet pricier items

By Christopher Mims of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"People are harsher critics of more expensive items."

"the high price tag alone drags down the rating." 

"The less we pay for an item, the more generous our assessment of it tends to be."

"Ying Zeng . . . assistant professor of marketing at the Leeds School of Business at University of Colorado, Boulder . . . says when we read reviews online, we succumb to what psychologists call “shallow thinking”—that is, we aren’t considering the biases of those who write online reviews."

Ben Donovan's [of Marketplace Pulse] "research suggests that Amazon’s algorithm bumps up cheaper items that are selling in higher volumes, as opposed to more expensive ones that sell more slowly."

"Our penchant for shopping on our phones is accelerating our impulse buying."

"Limited-time discounts and livestreaming sales also push us toward impulse purchases, says Zeng. Tactics like these trigger “System 1” thinking, she adds, the fast, emotional, intuitive thinking that usually handles everyday tasks, first described by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman."

"Slow down, take your time. Then the more deliberative System 2 thinking will kick in, where we consider more variables, including our own biases and those of others."

"Groceries and other items are purchased more automatically, while shoppers use AI chatbots and other new tools to go deeper when researching other, bigger-ticket items," says Adobe’s director of digital insights, Vivek Pandya.

Related post:

How Does Caffeine Shape the Way We Spend Money? (2023) 

Creative destruction and mysterious new types of occupations & professions

See You Say You’re a Knowledge Architect? Why Modern Careers Are So Hard to Explain: More Americans have jobs that didn’t exist a generation ago, and even well-known professions are changing by Callum Borchers of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"LinkedIn estimates one in five Americans has a job that didn’t exist in 2000. Many of the new titles aren’t exactly self-explanatory.

Knowledge architects don’t draw blueprints, conversation designers don’t foster dialogue between people, and orchestration engineers don’t work with musical instruments. 

What do these people do? Their jobs all involve work with artificial-intelligence models."

"Jobs are getting more niche, and the fruits of our labor more abstract."

"“Roles may get more specialized as companies continue to invest in AI,” says Dan Roth, LinkedIn’s editor in chief. “We’re already seeing new specialized leadership roles emerge, like workforce development manager and chief growth officer.”"

An "AI toxicology analyst . . . uses artificial intelligence to help assess threat levels after chemical spills and advises on cleanup efforts."

Related posts: 

Who wrote your potential love's online dating profile? (maybe they outsourced it to a professional who specializes in that) (2016)

New Profession Of "Wedding Hashtag Helper" Might Be An Example Of Creative Destruction At Work (2022)

Are dating coaches who help you with texting modern Cyrano de Bergeracs? (2023)

Do You Need a Fixer for Your Disney Vacation? Third-party companies tout advanced knowledge for private tours of complex amusement parks that can cost $1,000 and up (2023)

Parents Hire $4,000 Sorority Consultants to Help Daughters Dress and Impress During Rush (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2023)

Prompt engineers chat with generative-AI chatbots (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2023)

"Wedding content creators" curate the perfect social-media-ready images of the nuptials and celebration (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2023)

 

"Independent education consultants" help high school students and their parents navigate the competitive college-admissions process (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2024)

"Robot Wranglers" help lost and confused automatons (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2024)

Professional Bridesmaids (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2024)

 

Handbag authenticators (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2024)

 

App reviewers (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2025)

 

Video Clippers (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2025)  

 

Creative Destruction

See Creative Destruction by Richard Alm and W. Michael Cox. Excerpt:

"Joseph Schumpeter
(1883–1950) coined the seemingly paradoxical term “creative destruction,” and generations of economists have adopted it as a shorthand description of the free market’s messy way of delivering progress. In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), the Austrian economist wrote:

The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. (p. 83)

Although Schumpeter devoted a mere six-page chapter to “The Process of Creative Destruction,” in which he described capitalism as “the perennial gale of creative destruction,” it has become the centerpiece for modern thinking on how economies evolve."

But also see this link which suggests that the idea goes back even before Schumpeter to other scholars: Creative Destruction in Economics: Nietzsche, Sombart, Schumpeter by Hugo Reinert and Erik S. Reinert.

"Abstract

This paper argues that the idea of ‘creative destruction’ enters the social sciences by way of Friedrich Nietzsche. The term itself is first used by German economist Werner Sombart, who openly acknowledges the influence of Nietzsche on his own economic theory. The roots of creative destruction are traced back to Indian philosophy, from where the idea entered the German literary and philosophical tradition. Understanding the origins and evolution of this key concept in evolutionary economics helps clarifying the contrasts between today’s standard mainstream economics and the Schumpeterian and evolutionary alternative."  

The student bodies of selective universities end up including more students from the top 1% of the income distribution than would happen if the schools just admitted students purely by SAT scores

From Timothy Taylor. Excerpts:

"Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores"

"The high-income admissions advantage at Ivy-Plus colleges is driven by three factors: (i) preferences for children of alumni, (ii) weight placed on nonacademic credentials, and (iii) athletic recruitment." (these "three factors . . . are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with postcollege outcomes") 

"attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average flagship public college increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 50%"

Using only test scores "would increase the share of students attending Ivy-Plus colleges from the bottom 95% of the parental income distribution by 8.8 percentage points"

"when these selective schools tell potential applicants that they don’t just look at test scores, but instead use a variety of nonacademic criteria like being “well-rounded” or “authentic” for admissions, the actual result of their process is that applicants from families in the top 1% of the income distribution are admitted at a higher rate than others with the same test scores."

Related posts:

As more people choose to marry someone with a similar income, inequality increases (2020) 

The preference for partners of the same education has significantly increased for white individuals (2017)

"Among students in the bottom socioeconomic quartile, 15 percent had earned a bachelor’s degree within eight years of their expected high school graduation, compared with 22 percent in the second quartile, 37 percent in the third quartile, and 60 percent in the top quartile."