It’s easy to be pessimistic about life. Pessimism is safe and easy. And it’s all around us. It’s a well know fact that negative news gets attention — and sells more than just newspapers.
Doom and gloom didn’t just start with climate change. It appears that there has always been someone promoting it. In fact there are versions of Henny Penny — more commonly known in the United States as Chicken Little — that go back more than 25 centuries, according to Wikipedia.
Research from the University of California Davis that was published in Social Psychology and Personality Science found that as a society we’re the most pessimistic in our twenties (millenials). Then our optimism ascends as we reach our thirties and continues on upward into our forties and peaks when we’re in our fifties, and slowly declines after that.
Well I’m here today to tell you that it’s the best of times, and it’s predicted to get better.
In an article from USA Today, Jon Gabriel last week stated that “this past decade has been the best yet. Things are better than ever and should be better still in another 10 years.”
Here are some of the statistics he uses to back up his claim.
• Global poverty has plummeted from about 35% in 1990 to less than 10% today.
• Since 1990, child mortality has fallen by nearly 60% and life expectancy has soared worldwide. Famines, once a common scourge, are now nearly abolished, with less farmland producing vastly more crops.
• In the United States, CO2 emissions have declined by 12% since 2005.
• Global tree cover in the past 35 years has increased by 2.24 million square kilometers. That’s a forest the size of Texas and Alaska combined.
• Over the past 10 years, the number of U.S. troops deployed abroad has dropped by 42%.
• Unemployment in the United States has fallen from 9% to 3.6%, the lowest level in 50 years. For African Americans, Hispanics and people with disabilities, unemployment is the lowest ever recorded.
• Our GDP has risen by 40% over the past decade, with the median household income up 7%.
Gabriel is not the only one who has noticed these positive trends. Morgan Housel also points out the progress man has made in our lifetimes.
• In 1981 the auto fatality rate was 21.49 per 100,000 people. In 2018 it was 11.18. The decline means every hour of every day in 2019 almost four Americans who would have died in 1981 did not die.
• Cumulative inflation in the five years before 1981 was more than cumulative inflation in the 25 years before 2020..
• The homicide rate was just over 10 per 100,000 Americans in 1981. In 2018 it was 5. That decline means 16,000 fewer Americans were murdered last year than would have been had the rate not improved during most of our lifetimes.
• Average miles per gallon among all vehicles has increased from 14.9 in 1981 to 22.3 in 2017.
• Adjusted for inflation, median personal income has increased from $22,682 in 1981 to $33,706 in 2018. In most of our lifetimes the median worker has become almost 50% richer.
• In the ten years before 1981, 25,995 people died in commercial aviation accidents world wide. From 2009 to 2019 that number was 9,197. And passenger miles flown increased 4.7-fold from 1981 to 2019. So fatalities per passenger mile flown have declined more than 90%.
• The number of cigarettes smoked in the United States peaked in 1981 at 640 billion. By 2017 it was 249 billion and falling. That equates to 11,574 fewer cigarettes smoked every second.
• Heart-disease deaths have declined from over 400 per 100,000 Americans in 1981 to 168 per 100,000 by 2015. That decline means 754,000 fewer Americans die each year than would have had there been no improvement since 1981.
• In 1981 IBM sold its 5150 PC for $1,556, or $4,402 adjusted for inflation. Today the same amount of money can buy a Chromebook for every student in an average middle-school class.
• Age- and sex-adjusted dementia rates have declined 44% since the early 1980s. The decline means 5.2 million fewer Americans have dementia today relative to the rates seen 38 years ago – about the size of Los Angeles and Dallas combined.
Statistics don’t lie. We do live in the best of times and it’s only going to get better. The problem is bad news is instant. Progress can only be seen over time.
