It’s not all gloom and doom
Let’s pause for a nanosecond of silence to acknowledge the greatest gains in human well-being in the history of our species
he world is a mess, with billions of people locked in inescapable cycles of war, famine and poverty, with more children than ever perishing from hunger, disease and violence. That’s about the only thing Americans agree on; we’re polarised about all else. But several polls have found that about nine out of ten Americans believe that global poverty has worsened or stayed the same over the last 20 years. Fortunately, the one point Americans agree on is dead wrong. As world leaders gathered for the United Nations General Assembly in New York last week, all the evidence suggested that we were at an inflection point for the ages. The number of people living in extreme poverty ($1.90 or Dh6.98 per person per day) has tumbled by half in two decades and the number of small children dying has dropped by a similar proportion — that’s six million lives a year saved by vaccines, breast-feeding promotion, pneumonia medicine and diarrhoea treatments!
OK, you’re thinking that I’ve finally cracked up after spending too much time in desperate places. So a few data points:
As recently as 1981, when I was finishing college, 44 per cent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, according to the World Bank. Now the share is believed to be less than 10 per cent and falling. “This is the best story in the world today,” says Jim Yong Kim, the president of the World Bank.
For the entire history of the human species until the 1960s, a majority of adults were illiterate. Now 85 per cent of adults worldwide are literate and the share is rising.
Although inequality has risen in America, the global trend is more encouraging: Internationally, inequality is on the decline because of gains by the poor in places like China and India.
The UN aims to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030, and experts believe it is possible to get quite close. In short, on our watch, we have a decent chance of virtually wiping out ills that have plagued humanity for thousands of generations, from illiteracy to the most devastating kind of hand-to-mouth poverty.
Yet the public thinks the opposite, that poverty is getting worse. A poll released on Thursday by Motivaction, a Dutch firm, found that only 1 per cent of Americans surveyed realised that global extreme poverty had fallen by half over 20 years.
When I first made the acquaintance of the developing world, as a backpacking law student in the 1980s, the most gutwrenching aspect of poverty I encountered was ubiquitous blind beggars, robbed of dignity and any chance to be productive. This is much less common today, partly because humanitarian aid — despite real shortcomings — has made a profound difference in health. Vitamin A capsules costing 2 cents a dose have reduced blindness as well. Antibiotics have helped curb blinding trachoma. And a simple $25 surgery developed by a Nepalese ophthalmologist, Dr Sanduk Ruit, lets people suffering from cataracts see again.
Cynics scoff that if more children’s lives are saved, they will just grow up to have more babies and cause new famines and cycles of poverty. Not so! In fact, when parents are assured that their children will survive, they choose to have fewer of them. As girls are educated and contraception becomes available, birthrates tumble — just as they did in the West. Indian women now average just 2.4 births, Indonesian women 2.5 and Mexican women just 2.2.
So in a moment, we can return to urgent needs worldwide — from war to climate change to refugees. But first, let’s pause for a nanosecond of silence to acknowledge the greatest gains in human well-being in the history of our species — not to inspire complacency, but rather to spur our efforts to accelerate what may be the most important trend in the world today. Nicholas Kristof is an American journalist, author, op-ed columnist and a winner of two Pulitzer Prizes.
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