Turns out that the world has been quietly getting better for decades, and few of us have noticed.
Like most of us, I thought the world was getting worse or at best, staying the same, but our societies seem to be evolving toward a world where all humanity will eventually live at a high standard of living.
That reality was made clear to me after reading Factfulness by Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Hans Rosling, and Ola Rosling. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. It talks about two things: it uses publicly available data to show that things are getting better even if no one realizes it, and it tries to understand why we can’t seem to see that it’s happening.
It’s notable that people’s lives continue to improve (over the long term) even when humanity as a whole is not consciously moving toward that goal. Imagine what we could do if we made it a priority.
