The Best Year Ever

[Deleted Member 1643]

Favorite annual NYT column. Helps put things in perspective. Feel free to add yours.

Happy New Year!

This Has Been the Best Year Ever
For humanity over all, life just keeps getting better.

By Nicholas Kristof
Dec. 28, 2019, 2:30 p.m. ET

“If you were given the opportunity to choose the time you were born in, it’d be pretty risky to choose a time in any of the thousands of generations in the past,” noted Max Roser, an Oxford University economist who runs the Our World in Data website. “Almost everyone lived in poverty, hunger was widespread and famines common.”

“Three things are true at the same time,” he added. “The world is much better, the world is awful, the world can be much better.”

When I was born in 1959, a majority of the world’s population had always been illiterate and lived in extreme poverty. By the time I die, illiteracy and extreme poverty may be almost eliminated — and it’s difficult to imagine a greater triumph for humanity on our watch.

 

[Ramahs]

On that same note, I highly recommend giving this a read:

The Better Angels of our Nature, by Steven Pinker

"Believe it or not, today we may be living in the most peaceful moment in our species' existence. In his gripping and controversial new work, New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows that despite the ceaseless news about war, crime, and terrorism, violence has actually been in decline over long stretches of history. Exploding myths about humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious book continues Pinker's exploration of the essence of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly enlightened world."

Here's a talk from the author, on the subject of the book: