Ways The World Is Getting Better

The best news from our world in data

1 Introduction

Most of the facts in this article have come from the excellent Our World in Data which provides helpful graphs summarizing key facts.

People are often depressed about the world. They are worried about having kids because they claim the world is going to quickly be vaporized by climate change (despite this opinion being believed by virtually no serious experts and being deeply insane—see here for the most thorough report on existential risks from climate change that concludes existential risks this century from climate change are below 1 in 1,000). Very few people seem to genuinely be optimistic about how the future is going. They seem to think we live in some hellish civilization—in the words of my mother in her school play “we all agree that everything is terrible and getting worse.

Our culture is pervaded by a near-universal gloominess. More than half of children think that humanity is doomed because of climate change. Serious concern about climate change has been overshadowed by a group of ill-informed activists who claim that climate change will end our species and that the solution is chucking tomato soup on the glass coverings encasing paintings.

Now, part of this is just signaling. If you talk about how amazing everything is, you seem callous and indifferent. Being depressed and gloomy about everything is the way you show you care, the way that you signal that you take seriously the worlds problems (even as you sit back and do nothing about them). Coincidentally, as I was writing this article, I came randomly came across, on Spotify, a song with the gloomy title “the kids are all dying,” with the lyrics:

How can you sing about love when the kids are all dying?
How can you sing about drugs? Politicians are lying
How can you sing about sex when the school is on lockdown, lockdown?
Now, baby, maybe we're next
Maybe we're next

I think this pessimism—ubiquitous as it is—is unjustified. When people are depressed about the state of the world, they’re much more miserable. If I seriously thought that I’d be dead in 30 years from sea levels that will rise until they swallowed up the entire continental United States, I’d enjoy life less. Crucially, I’d also work less hard to solve the world’s problems—as Steven Pinker notes:

And that leads to the greatest danger of all: that reasonable people will think, as a 2016 New York Times article put it, "These grim facts should lead any reasonable person to conclude that humanity is screwed." If humanity is screwed, why sacrifice anything to reduce potential risks? Why forgo the convenience of fossil fuels or exhort governments to rethink their nuclear weapons policies? Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die! A 2013 survey in four English-speaking countries showed that among the respondents who believe that our way of way of life will probably end in a century, a majority endorsed the statement, "The world's future looks grim so we have to focus on looking after ourselves and those we love."

If, rather than simply reading headlines, one looks at aggregate data measuring how well things are going the trend is clear: things are getting better. On almost every metric, to a rather shocking degree, the world is improving. Look below, for instance, at the graph of my subscribers over time:

How do people deny that there’s progress in such a world? It’s even gloomier if you take into account what the graph looked like even earlier. Or look especially at how much money I’m making from substacking over time:

Aside from the recent tragic period where my annual income hasn’t been going up much because I haven’t been paywalling much—the dark age, as many are calling it—things have been getting better. So not only are fewer children dying, more people are paying me money!

I will note one major exception to this rule though that might be enough to single-handedly reverse the general trend of progress, though it’s not something that many people get that depressed about or that gives people a reason not to have kids. Despite almost everything getting better on almost all metrics, this one fact might be enough by itself to reverse the general trend of progress. For animals, the current world is hell and it is getting worse. We lock up and routinely torture tens of billions of animals every year in excruciating conditions, and the numbers are going up.

Fortunately, it looks like perhaps the tide is starting to turn. The cost of producing lab grown meat (something we should obviously be doing) has been dropping dramatically over time. Once lab grown meat is cheaper and healthier than regular meat people are much likelier to be won over by the obvious moral appeals. The meat industry fears lab meat enough that it has made a concerted effort to ban it in various states.

Over time, we’ve grown more humane, more compassionate. Moral appeals combined with changing economic conditions brought about the end of slavery. The same conditions are likely to bring about the end of factory farming. As we get more technologically advanced, at first we do more evil things with the new technology, but eventually, we become able and willing to use the technology so that we don’t need to do evil.

Additionally, the main source of animal suffering in the world isn’t us: it’s nature. The overwhelming majority of animals—quadrillions of them—live horrifying, short, painful lives of intense suffering. Fortunately, wild animal populations are down roughly 73% since the advent of humans. Go team!

(No I’m not joking. I think wild animal suffering is the worst thing in the world by orders of magnitude. Extreme agony is a bad thing, and the fact that animals probably spend more time in a single day being eaten alive than humans spend being in love over the course of a thousand years is extremely serious. Most animals live extremely bad lives, and if your head weren’t so clouded by nature documentaries and the prettiness of nature, you’d see that too).

2 A cleaner world

Many of the biggest alarmists have the impression that the world is getting dirtier, that we’re producing record rates of CO2. It’s certainly true that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is at its highest level. But we’re making progress—per capita rates, which had been increasing for decades, have flatlined.

In wealthy nations, the news is even better. Much of the extra pollution comes from poor countries who have much stronger reason to burn dirty energy. In countries where we really can switch to clean energy, we’ve been doing so.

Not only is the world in many ways getting better environmentally, most of the ways climate change causes problems is that it will make things get better at a slower rate. Contrary to what you might read, natural disasters are getting less dangerous over time:

Pollution, which kills many times more people than climate change, is going down over time:

3 Life expectancy

For most of human history, life expectancy has been around 30. This means that in many human societies, I, despite my boyish charm, would be middle aged. Yet time, we’ve developed sanitation and better medicine. We’ve learned that it’s a bad idea to defecate near your food. As Our World In Data notes “In 1900, the average life expectancy of a newborn was 32 years. By 2021 this had more than doubled to 71 years.”

(The dip in 2021 was caused by the novel Coronavirus).

Despite constant claims that this is one of the worst times in human history, we’re literally living twice as long as the good old days—we’re richer, healthier, wealthier, and happier. Stop your complaining! The world is filled with problems, but that’s a reason to solve them, not to not have kids and mope! In every single country in the world—all of them—people were living longer in 1950 than 1800 and longer in 2012 than 1950.

4 Poverty

For most of human history, people lived in truly mind-boggling poverty—the kind we cannot imagine. As late as the 1800s, about 80% of people had about as much wealth as a person today would if they earned $2.15 per day. And that’s taking into account inflation. I want to be clear on what this means. It doesn’t just mean they were taking only 2 dollars home. It means they were as poor as a person today would be if they were only earning 2 dollars a day. Quoting Our World in Data once more:

Historian Michail Moatsos has recently produced a new global dataset that goes back two centuries. The chart shows his data. According to his research three-quarters of the world lived in extreme poverty in 1820. This means they "could not afford a tiny space to live, some minimum heating capacity, and food that would not induce malnutrition.”

They later produce the following chart, showing the flip from near universal prosperity into wealth:

If you are reading this article, you are almost certainly richer than nearly everyone who has ever lived. If you can afford food, a place to live, and heating, you have more wealth than nearly everyone in human history. The worst kind of poverty which was once the near-universal condition of the human race has been almost completely eradicated. This has occurred in every region, on every continent.

It isn’t just general poverty. One of the most tragic and acute effects of poverty is malnutrition. Only the very poor die of malnutrition. Children are especially vulnerable. But all the main causes of malnutrition have gotten better over time—as Our World in Data notes “Around 6.6 million deaths were linked to these risks in 1990. By 2021, this had fallen to around 2.4 million.”

5 Child mortality

The loss of a child is one of the worst things a person can experience. It totally warps and ruins a person’s life, making them never the same. It’s even worse for the child!

For much of human history, about half of children died during their first few years of life. Half of children never got to grow up. Child mortality went from being so common that most mothers experienced it to being very rare. The chart below illustrates the incredible progress we’ve made:

Even in more recent history, an increasingly large number of children are surviving to reach five. The death of a child is a tragedy of unimaginable proportions; how great is the gift of modernity, that in just a few decades, we’ve nearly cut this scourge in half, all across the world?

6 Conclusion

“I’m going to be the whole problem.”

—Random child in cute video.

The world is getting dramatically better on most metrics. Previously common killers are now rare; for most of human history, most people were as destitute as those that currently live in extreme poverty, who have shrunk to a diminishing and vanishing share of the population. Nature has foisted on us hellish conditions—poverty, starvation, famine, disease—and we have conquered them.

At the same time, we have made our own problems. The 20th century was the first in which nuclear annihilation became a live possibility. We’ve constructed vast, industrial scale torture chambers that lock tens of billions of animals in filthy, cramped, sheds and cages where they lie all day in extreme pain. Even smoking deaths have mostly flatlined:

Social media has made us increasingly lonely and divided; modern social life has gotten increasingly lonely for many people. Opioid deaths have mostly been increasing:

We lived in a world where around half of children died before their fifth birthday—where poverty and disease on a scale we cannot imagine were common. Yet while the world has gotten much better overall, now the problems are mostly of our own creation.