“A huge amount of progress has taken place that a lot of people just don’t take into account, especially smart people who are attending to the real problems of the world,” says Ronald Bailey, Reason‘s science correspondent and the coauthor, with Marian Tupy of HumanProgress.org, of Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting.
For instance: In 1990, the World Bank estimated that about 1.9 billion people lived in “absolute poverty,” defined as surviving on the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $1.90 a day. By 2018, the number had dropped to 650 million, even as global population increased. If current trends continue, less than 5 percent of the planet’s population will be in absolute poverty by 2030.
Despite ongoing problems in the Amazon and elsewhere, forests are expanding on net across the planet. “If you look broadly across the entire globe,” says Bailey, “what you find is forests have expanded since the 1980s to an area that’s about the size of Alaska and Montana combined, basically 800,000 square miles of land.” And the world is getting safer, too, especially for poor people. “The chance of a person dying from a natural catastrophe—earthquake, flood, drought, storm, wildfire, landslide, or epidemic—has declined by nearly 99 percent since the 1920s and 1930s,” write Bailey and Tupy.
Other positive trends include continuing economic growth and rising living standards around the globe, far fewer food shortages and famines, a decline in the number of autocratic regimes, and a reduction in major armed conflicts.
Bailey tells Reason that this massive ongoing progress is largely ignored because politicians and the media have an interest in foregrounding bad news—and because human beings, at least in the past 200 years, tend to take progress for granted. He says that’s a mistake. Progress is the result of implementing better ideas for organizing society. “Basically,” he says, “the Enlightenment happened.” With that came the rise of representative government, property rights and markets, and especially the free speech and open inquiry that are essential for technological and social innovation.
Ten Global Trends functions as both a counter-argument to doomsayers and a warning to the complacent. Progress, says Bailey, doesn’t just happen. “What we’re trying to do with this book is to not let people take it for granted,” he says. “If we keep the same institutions that enabled this, then much more of it will happen in the future.”
Edited by Isaac Reese and John Osterhoudt. Graphics by Lex Villena and Reese. Feature Image by Villena.
Photos: Erik McGregor/Sipa USA/Newscom; Unknown/Heritage Art/Heritage Images AiWire/Newscom; Fernando Souza/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Fernando Souza/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Wayne Hutchinson Universal Images Group/Newscom; Andrew Woodley/Newscom; Caro/Trappe/Newscom
