When the news is filled with bleak items, like:
it's easy to become pessimistic. Bear in mind that modern communications plus the tendency for bad news to get attention plus the size of the population can really distort perception. To put that another way,
56 million people die every year (!), but now you are able to hear about far more of them than ever before.
Let me make a push for optimism, or at least try to put some things in perspective. There are some reasons to be hopeful. Specifically, look
here, at a site called "Our World in Data", produced at Oxford University. These folks use actual numbers to point out that this is actually, in many ways, the best time in human history to be alive:
- The percentage of the world's population living in extreme poverty is at an all-time low (9.6%).
- The percentage of the population that is literate is at an all-time high (85%), as is the overall global education level.
- Child mortality is at an all-time low.
- The percentage of people enjoying at least some political freedom is at an all-time high.
That may not be much comfort to, say, an unemployed coal miner in West Virginia, or an underemployed former factory worker in Missouri, but it's better than the alternative. We face many challenges, and nothing is going to be easy or simple, but collectively we can do amazing things, like put
more computing power in your hand than existed in all of human history before 1950, set up a world-spanning communications network, feed 7B people,
detect colliding black holes billions of lightyears away by their ripples in spacetime,
etc. As long as we don't do
really stupid things, like make
nuclear threats over twitter based on idiots on the internet, we will get through this. It may not seem like it all the time, but compared to the past we live in an age of wonders.
