A Substantive "Happy New Year"

One of my pet peeves is the ubiquity of gloomy evaluations about the state of the world and its prospects for the future. This is because there is actually a great deal of evidence to the contrary that seems to be consistently overlooked.

For instance, there is the Human Security Report Project that collects data on global death by violence over time. Their primary finding is that the incidence of war and deaths from war has declined dramatically over the past few decades. In the project's intro to their latest (2013) report, they put it this way:

 During 2012—the most recent year for which there are data—the number of conflicts being waged around the world dropped sharply, from 37 to 32. High–intensity conflicts have declined by more than half since the end of the Cold War, while terrorism, genocide and homicide numbers are also down.

And this is not simply a recent phenomenon. According to a major 2011 study by Harvard University's Steven Pinker, violence of all kinds has been declining for thousands of years. Indeed Pinker claims that, "we may be living in the most peaceful era in our species' existence."

  (The full text 2013 report is available here, but you may find the summary in the press release more manageable.)

Of course, one of the key factors in this conclusion is that the HSR researchers look at the number of deaths per million people in the population, rather than absolute numbers of deaths. If one looks simply at the number of people killed, the 20th century was the bloodiest century in history. However, if one takes into account the changing size of the world's population, even the carnage of WWII is not unprecedented (and  in fact is dwarfed by some previous conflicts). So how one measures the key variable is important.

This is very much the case with global poverty. If you google global poverty, you will find a large number of sites providing data that paints a gloomy picture. However, you have to dig down a bit to find out that extreme poverty has, in fact, been significantly decreasing over the past few decades. According to the World Bank's Global Monitoring Report, from 1981 to 2011, the number of people living in extreme poverty (i.e., on less that $1.25 a day in 2005 dollars) dropped from 1.94 billion to 1.01 billion. As a percentage of the global population, the extreme poverty rate dropped from 43% to 15%. Indeed, if one digs deeper into their report to find their forecasts, one finds that the WB predicts that the number of extreme poor will drop to 696 million (or 9% of the population) in 2020 and 412 million (or 5% of the population) in 2030. So, while one might well say that there are too many people living in extreme poverty (even at the projected 2030 levels), one can hardly say that things aren't getting better, much less worse.

In August 2014, Matt Ridley, the self-styled Rational Optimist, wrote an article for The Times (UK not New York) that expounded on this theme. After noting all the extremely bad news then in the  headlines Ridley argues:

All true and all horrible. But the world is always full of atrocity, violence, death and debt. Are things really worse this year or are we journalists just reporting the clouds in every silver lining? Remember the media does not give a fair summary of what happens in the world. It tells you disproportionately about the things that go badly wrong. If it bleeds, it leads, as they say in newspapers. Good news is no news.

So let’s tot up instead what is going, and could go, right. Actually it is a pretty long list, just not a very newsworthy one. Compared with any time in the past half century, the world as a whole is today wealthier, healthier, happier, cleverer, cleaner, kinder, freer, safer, more peaceful and more equal.

He then goes on to provide data to support these claims (I'll leave you to review it on his blog). Ridley ends by noting that his upbeat predictions in his 2010 book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves have proven to be too cuatious as the world has bounced back from the Great Recession faster than he predicted. Yet he ends the article with a warning:

Be warned that being cheerful guarantees you will never be taken seriously. The philosopher John Stuart Mill said: “Not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.”

 Since I write this blog for my students, I guess the big take away is that your professor is not a member of that "large class of persons" and hope you won't be either.