The world is getting better!

Anyone glancing at a newspaper these days finds a litany of woes: war, crime, disease, terrorism, and environmental disasters, all sandwiched between predictions of the coming collapse of market capitalism and liberal democracy. U.S. politicians on both the right, such as President Donald Trump, and the left, such as Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, warn that the United States and the world are sliding toward calamity. Pessimism rules the day.

The world does indeed face challenges. Yet by almost any measure, life for most people has been getting better in almost every way. Levels of war and conflict are near historic lows. People are living longer and healthier lives and are better educated than ever before. Incomes for most families are higher than at any time in history. One billion people around the world have been lifted out of extreme poverty in the last two decades, and although income inequality has worsened within many Western countries, across the globe, income is more equal than it has been in centuries. Far fewer people than ever go hungry, and the world now grows more food than it needs. Women have more opportunities, democracy has expanded, and basic human rights are more widely respected than ever before. Electricity, automobiles, the Internet, modern medicines, and simple conveniences have made most people’s lives far easier than their great-grandparents could have imagined. And after centuries of being largely confined to the West, since the 1980s, such benefits have spread across the world—not just to China and India but also to Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Ghana, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Mozambique, Peru, South Africa, South Korea, and dozens of other countries.

Amid the prevailing pessimism, few people—especially in the West—are aware of the extent of this progress. That ignorance matters. For as three terrific recent books—Gregg Easterbrook’s It’s Better Than It Looks, Hans Rosling’s Factfulness, and Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now—make clear, continuing this progress is possible but not guaranteed; if people fail to appreciate the institutions and policies that have generated this success, citizens and policymakers are more likely to abandon them going forward. A full understanding of the unprecedented progress in human development is essential to ensuring that it continues.

ALWAYS LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE OF LIFE

Easterbrook, a writer for The Atlantic, focuses primarily on the United States, while also examining global patterns. He wants to explain why the country’s politics have gotten so gloomy at a time of such prosperity. In his view, Trump succeeded in 2016 in part because he convinced voters that their country was near collapse: its economy broken, its borders overrun by illegal immigrants, its cities rife with crime. That none of these things were true did not matter. Instead, these falsehoods won Trump accolades for “telling it like it is.” Easterbrook notes that Sanders played into some of the same sentiment by arguing that the country was getting worse for all but the wealthiest few.

Easterbrook attacks this pessimism by documenting a series of crises that past commentators predicted but that never happened: humanity has not starved, nor has it run out of energy; there are no runaway plagues; pollution has not made the world’s air unbreathable or its water undrinkable; and dictators have not taken over. Just the opposite has occurred. Technology, far from bringing annihilation, has made nearly every aspect of human life safer and easier. Violent crime in the United States has fallen by almost 30 percent since 1993. More Americans, especially minorities and women, have greater freedom than ever before. Air pollution in the United States has fallen sharply over the last 50 years: levels of lead are down by 99 percent, carbon monoxide is down by 77 percent, and smog is down by 33 percent. The share of the world’s population that is malnourished has fallen from 50 percent to 13 percent since the 1960s. Between World War II and 1990, there were an average of ten military coups each year; since then, there have been about three each year as democracies have replaced dictatorships.

Easterbrook recognizes that not all is well. The United States and other countries must contend with climate change, inequality, and other threats. But his core argument is that to tackle those problems, the world needs to recognize its successes and draw the right lessons about how they were achieved. He pushes back against those who confuse optimism with naiveté. “Optimism,” he believes, “is the conviction that problems can be solved if we all roll up our sleeves and get to work.” He devotes a full chapter to addressing climate change and another to overcoming inequality.

Easterbrook is clearly exasperated by popular myopia. He lays a large part of the blame on the media, where “if it bleeds, it leads,” and part of it on politicians who demonize their opponents, cast nearly everything as a failure, and hark back to an idealized past. Research centers and government agencies, he says, “lean towards doom predictions because they justify more funding.” Demographic changes add to the pessimism: Western societies are getting older, and Easterbrook argues that older people tend to be gloomier. And he asserts that part of it is simple human nature: “People want to believe the worst about society.”