/ 31 August 2018

The world gets better every day

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Worldwide, 1.25-billion people have escaped from abject poverty in the 28 years from 1990 to the present. (Getty Images)

DEVELOPMENT

It’s easy to form the view that the modern world is coming apart. We are confronted by an onslaught of negativity — frightening headlines, alarming research findings and miserable ­statistics.

There are indeed many things on the planet that we should be greatly concerned about but fixating on horror stories means that we miss the bigger picture.

The United Nations focuses on three categories of development: social, economic and environmental. In each category, looking back over the past quarter-century, we have far more reason for cheer than fear. This period has been one of extraordinary progress.

Socially, the most important indicator is how long each of us lives. In 1990, average life expectancy was 65. By 2016, it had climbed to 72.5. We gained 7.5 years of life.

A pessimist suggests this means we have 7.5 more years to be sick but this is not the case. In 1990, we spent 13% of our life unwell, and that percentage has not increased. Even inequality is decreasing; the gap between life expectancy in poor and rich countries has narrowed.

In terms of economic development, one of the most important indicators is the percentage of people in poverty. Far fewer people now live in abject need. In 1990, 37% of all people were living in extreme poverty; today it’s less than one in 10. In just 28 years, more than 1.25-billion people have been lifted out of poverty — a miracle that receives far too little attention.

Looking at the environment, one of the biggest killers is indoor air pollution caused by poor people using dung and wood to cook and keep warm. In 1990, this caused more than 8% of deaths; now it’s 4.7%. That equates to more than 1.2-million fewer people dying from indoor air pollution each year, despite an increase in population.

There is a similar trend in many other environmental development statistics. Between 1990 and 2015, the percentage of the world practising open defecation halved to 15%. Access to improved water sources increased by 2.6-billion people in the same period to 91%. More than one-third of the world’s population gained access to improved water.

The improvements do not stop there: the world is more literate; child labour is dropping; we are living in one of the most peaceful times in history; and the majority of the world’s governments are democratic.

Max Roser of Oxford University has built a comprehensive website to explore data like these. He suggests that we could think about these quarter-century changes in terms of what happened over the past 24 hours. Seen this way, just in the past day, average life expectancy increased by 9.5 hours; 137 000 people escaped extreme poverty; and 305 000 got access to safer drinking water. The media could have told each of these stories every single day since 1990.

But good news is not as newsworthy as bad news. That is not just the media’s fault. The “news” that a bad thing is no longer happening doesn’t capture our imagination in the same way as a bad-news story. An intriguing 2014 study found that, even when participants stated that they wanted to read positive stories, their behaviour revealed a preference for negative content — a preference they didn’t even realise.

We should challenge ourselves to pay attention to the positive facts. When people are asked whether living conditions around the world will be better in 15 years, 35% believe they will be, and 29% think they will get worse — essentially a toss-up. But among people who understand that many things are already better than they were, 62% believe in progress. That share drops to just 17% among those who don’t know the facts. The belief that everything is getting worse paints a distorted picture of what we can do, and makes us more fearful.

Consider the scenario in which politicians and the media whip up fear of crime, even when statistics show national crime rates are low or falling. Attention and scarce resources can end up being devoted to solving the wrong problem; we get reduced civil liberties rather than more welfare-enhancing policies to improve preschools or health care.

[(Adek Berry/AFP)]

Getting the facts wrong can easily result in misguided, fear-based policies; a more balanced, fact-based recognition of what humanity has achieved enables us to focus our efforts on the areas where we can achieve the most good (often where we are already doing well). This will ensure that the future can be even brighter. — © Project Syndicate

Bjørn Lomborg is the director of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre and a visiting professor at the Copenhagen Business School